The recent study comes as there has been increasing attention to diversifying the teaching force, which remains overwhelmingly white, even as the public school student body has become significantly less so.

“In fall 2014, the majority of public school students are now minority, but the teaching workforce is now 80 percent white,” said American University’s Constance Lindsay, one of the research authors. “And we’re actually seeing that the percentage of black teachers has been going down over time.”

Study looks back at Tennessee and North Carolina

To determine how exposure to a black teacher impacts black students, the researchers — including Lindsay, Seth Gershenson of American University, Cassandra Hart of the University of California Davis, and Nicholas Papageorge of Johns Hopkins University — used an extensive data set from the early 2000s in North Carolina.

They examine whether students attended a school and had a class with a black teacher in third, fourth, or fifth grade, and then link that to whether students dropped out of high school and if they said they intended to go to college. To confirm their results, the researchers also compare students to their sibling who did not have any black teachers. The idea is that this ensures that factors outside of school — like poverty or a student’s home life — are not driving the results.

By both methods, the data suggest that black teachers make a big difference. Access to just one cut dropout rates for black students by nearly a third and increased the likelihood of aspiring to college by 3 percentage points. The impacts were much larger for male students, and particularly those in poverty: Access to a black teacher for those students reduced their dropout rate from 18 percent to 12 percent.

Non-black (largely white) students don’t receive a noticeable benefit from having a black teacher, but they weren’t harmed either. Notably, black students did not seem to benefit much more from having more than one black teacher in grades 3-5 as compared to having just one — even a single teacher of the same race seemed to make a big difference.

The study also looks at another data set, this one in Tennessee in the late 1980s. Here, the researchers examined a well-known experiment called Project STAR that randomly placed students with teachers in first, second, and third grade in order to assess the impact of smaller class sizes on student achievement. Because the assignment was random, the data can also be used to see the impact of getting a black teacher versus a white one.

Once again, the effect for black students of having a black teacher is significant: those students were about 4 percentage points less likely to drop out of school and 4 percentage points more likely to take a college entrance exam, such as the SAT.

This suggests that the impacts are real and aren’t specific to North Carolina or grades three through five.

Anna Egalite, a researcher at North Carolina State University who has also found benefits of teacher diversity in her own research, reviewed the study at The 74’s request. She praised the paper — which has not gone through formal peer review — as “interesting” and said she did not “see any obvious biases or glaring issues with the research design.”

Still, she noted that how the researchers counted students in their data without information on whether they graduated could skew their results. The researchers “exclude 14,432 students for whom they are unsure of graduation status. I find these results a little concerning because if those students were truly graduates [it] seems like it would be accurately recorded.”

“If I was reviewing the paper, I’d ask for a lot more info about those kids,” Egalite wrote in an email.

“Her concern is valid,” Lindsay responded, “but we would say that the results for the low-income sample hold up [regardless].”

The North Carolina study looked at 106,370 black students beginning in the third grade.

Fewer suspensions, higher expectations

Why do black teachers seem to make such a big difference for black students? The latest study can’t say definitively, but other research suggests some reasons.

For instance, black teachers seem to view the behavior of black students as less disruptive than other teachers. (Or, alternatively, black students may actually behave differently in the classrooms of same-race teachers.) In turn, other work from Lindsay shows that black students — across elementary, middle, and high school — are less likely to be suspended or expelled by an African-American teacher.

“We find particularly consistent evidence that exposure to same-race teachers lowers office referrals for willful defiance across all grade levels [for black students], suggesting that teacher discretion plays a role in driving our results,” this study notes. A relative scarcity of black teachers may partially explain why black students face exclusionary discipline at much higher rates than other students.

Indeed, in this study, which also focuses on North Carolina, the authors note, “We see that in every [school district] across the state, Whites are more heavily concentrated in the teaching workforce than in the student body. By contrast, every [district] has a higher concentration of Black students than Black teachers.”

There is also evidence that African-American teachers have higher expectations for black students, particularly boys. As one recent study found, “Relative to teachers of the same race and sex as the student, other-race teachers were 12 percentage points less likely to expect black students to complete a four-year college degree.”

Other research has found that black students perform slightly better on standardized tests and are more likely to be referred to gifted and talented programs when paired with black teachers.

Diversity obstacles are many

Meanwhile, it’s not clear if policymakers have caught up to these findings. A 2015 analysis by the Shanker Institute found that the number of black teachers has dropped precipitously in nine major cities.

A study by the Brookings Institution found that at every stage in the process to become a teacher — from those entering training programs to teachers who voluntarily leave the profession — there are gaps that contribute to a lack of diversity.

In hiring, for instance, many districts acknowledge that they simply do not prioritize diversity and teachers of color have lower job satisfaction than white teachers, which might drive higher turnover rates.

The issue extends beyond teachers to include principals who are also largely white. A recent study found that a common exam required for becoming a principal did not predict who was effective on the job, but did disproportionately screen out non-white candidates. Research has directly linked principal diversity to teacher diversity.

Other research has shown that common teacher certification exams also block many prospective teachers of color and are only modestly related to effectiveness as a teacher. At least one state, New York, has tried to address this by eliminating one certification exam that minority test-takers failed at higher rates.

Lindsay believes such tests can exacerbate the problem.

“The [exams that states] are using to ‘raise the bar’ exhibit achievement gaps [for black and white test-takers],” she said. “The issue is that these tests are not [strongly] related to student achievement.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74.

It’s a common refrain in education that research isn’t used wisely, or at all, to inform policy. As states have to redesign their accountability systems under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the new federal K-12 law, policymakers have the opportunity anew to use evidence to help guide their decisions.

That was the topic of a panel at the Association for Education Finance and Policy conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. The discussion featured representatives from the Louisiana Department of Education, the Tennessee Department of Education, and a group of eight California districts — including Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco— known as CORE. (A member of the Rhode Island Department of Education was also present, but his comments were off the record, so he cannot be quoted.)

The trio discussed the benefits — and challenges — of using research to inform ESSA accountability design. A few important themes emerged.

A preference for ‘growth’ but political pushback

Like many states, Tennessee is wrestling with how to weigh students’ absolute achievement versus their growth when measuring their schools. Researchers generally say that the progress students make is preferable for isolating the impact of schools and holding them accountable.

That doesn’t mean that such a move is politically easy, noted Mary Batiwalla, the Tennessee Department of Education’s executive director of accountability.

“The lowest-achieving school could receive an ‘A’ under our [proposed] system — very low-achieving, but showing what we consider to be remarkable and life-changing growth,” she said. “It’s a tough conversation to have with folks because there is this very accepted notion that ‘If you say that school that is very low-performing is an A school, you are lying to parents.’ ”

In line with research, Batiwalla pointed to potential unintended consequences of judging schools by absolute performance or students’ raw standardized test scores.

“When we think about the downstream of impacts of labeling schools that are doing remarkable things for their students, even when those students start at very low places — [it’s] retention of high-quality teachers, recruitment,” she said.

A focus on growth may also lead to pushback from districts previously deemed high-performing. “Tennessee has decided we no longer want to reward simply having high absolute achievement,” Batiwalla said. “If you have students who come in at a certain level, the expectation is that you grow those students.”

“We haven’t released any of this modeling [of the new ratings] publicly, so I don’t think there’s been as big of an outlash as there might be if we were to actually release these lists,” she said. “There have been some case studies that we’ve provided that some of our higher-performing districts have been able to back into and say, ‘Hey, that C school, that’s me! Wait a second — get on the phone with the state legislator.’ ”

“We’ll see how this plays out,” she added.

Are schools ready for non-academic measures? California thinks so

California’s CORE districts have been among the pioneers in evaluating schools by measures that go beyond test scores and high school graduation rates. These include social-emotional or non-cognitive skills, such as motivation, focus, and confidence. States nationwide now have the opportunity to expand accountability systems along these same lines using the “fifth indicator” of performance under ESSA.

“We know these factors are incredibly important. The research tells us that, and so does our own felt experience,” said Noah Bookman, chief strategy officer for CORE, a coalition of some of California’s largest districts that joined forces to try to better measure and improve schools.

In addition to using chronic absenteeism and suspension rates for measurement, the districts have incorporated surveys that ask students various questions to gauge their “growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness.”

The practice has proved somewhat controversial. Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who developed the idea of “grit,” — passion and perseverance in reaching a goal — specifically criticized CORE in a New York Times op-ed.

“We’re nowhere near ready — and perhaps never will be — to use feedback on character as a metric for judging the effectiveness of teachers and schools,” she wrote. “We shouldn’t be rewarding or punishing schools for how students perform on these measures.”

The CORE districts don’t measure grit specifically, as they see it as falling under the self-management measure.

One issue Duckworth raised is “reference bias,” or the idea that students would judge themselves relative to their peers, not based on an absolute standard. This means that it’s possible that a school could improve all students’ skills, but surveys might not capture this as students don’t see themselves getting better compared with each other.

Indeed, one study, co-authored by Duckworth, showed that students in Boston charter schools made large gains on standardized tests and had high attendance rates but actually saw dips in their self-reported non-cognitive skills. The researchers posit that this is due to reference bias.

Duckworth also worries that attaching stakes to such measures will distort their accuracy, encouraging cheating and other forms of gaming.

Bookman of CORE says that the point isn’t to create a high-stakes system.

“Our philosophy [is] the data is used for good, supposed to help you get better — a flashlight, not a hammer,” he said.

One analysis of the California districts found that their measures of non-cognitive skills were correlated with schools’ achievement, attendance, and suspension rates, suggesting that they capture useful information.

“We’re still, to be candid, learning how that works. How do people respond to the information? Is it helpful? Is not helpful? Is it causing the perverse consequences we’re worried about? Do the data stand up over time?” Bookman said. “The only way we’ll find out how well they’re working in this kind of a context is to put them there and see how it works.”

School turnarounds are hard; who should lead them?

As evidenced by the disappointing recent study on the federal government’s $7 billion school turnaround plan, figuring out how to improve a struggling school is difficult — and research doesn’t provide definitive answers on this front. The panelists’ comments reflected this reality, particularly on the questions of whether states should take control of low-performing schools.

“State takeover in certain contexts looks very different and I think has struggled, where in other places it’s been very successful,” said Jessica Baghian, an assistant superintendent of the Louisiana Department of Education.

“Is the state the right entity to do turnaround work?” wondered Batiwalla of Tennessee. “Based on the research, we don’t have a lot of good evidence that we are doing this very well, and we have some evidence that in Shelby County specifically the district itself has had a lot of success [leading its own turnaround].”

Indeed, research on this question has come to mixed conclusions. In New Orleans, the state-driven expansion of charter schools and infusion of new resources post-Katrina has yielded large test-score improvements.

“I think part of the reason why New Orleans has been so successful is because we have a very strong [charter] authorizer in our state board who has made tough decisions and built real urgency around, ‘You have x amount of time to deliver, and if you don’t, we have higher-quality providers who can step in,’” Baghian said.

One study found that New Orleans’s closures of low-performing charter and district schools led to big gains for students.

But in Tennessee, as Batiwalla suggested, the state-run district has not produced any improvement in achievement, though a locally driven turnaround effort did. Still, Batiwalla noted, “The threat of state takeover perhaps energizes the district to respond in a way that leads to improvements.”

“We’ve got to get better at getting better,” she said. “It’s really, really hard work.”

Bookman of California was largely silent on the issue of specific interventions for struggling schools. Last year, The 74 reported that the state had not spelled out what would happen in those cases.

That has not changed, apparently.

A recent Los Angeles Times article describing California’s new dashboard of school ratings across a variety of measures noted, “It remains unclear how the dashboard will be used with regard to those schools that need help.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74.

Kiersten Franz has a bachelor’s degree in math, a master’s in education, and several years’ teaching experience under her belt — excellent qualifications, presumably, for becoming a New York City high school statistics teacher.

But her record wasn’t quite good enough to meet New York state’s stringent licensure requirements.

Because her training was out-of-state and in statistics, it didn’t conform to the strictures for required math courses set out by the New York State Education Department. Franz was forced to pay out-of-pocket to attend night courses in math at a local college to maintain her license. She said the classes didn’t help her much as a teacher and were at a far lower level than the classes she took in Pennsylvania to earn her master’s.

The process was draining, both financially and time-wise, as she was also teaching full time and had personal obligations: “I was about six months pregnant at the time … It was horrible.”

The difficulty in transferring teacher certification is not limited to New York — as Franz learned when she subsequently moved to California and had to navigate that state’s process. Some states, including New York, have recently moved to ease the process.

The issue of teacher licensure reciprocity usually doesn’t draw big headlines or much political engagement, but research evidence, surveys, and interviews suggest that teachers are often limited in their ability to move between states — often for little good reason and to the detriment of student achievement.

Want to teach in a different state? Good luck!

Franz’s story ends well but followed a winding road. A Los Angeles public school wanted to hire her but could do so only as a long-term substitute until her certification cleared, which happened only after three months of confusion about whether she had to apply online or with a physical copy. She even served as a volunteer at her new school while waiting weeks for her substitute’s license to go through.

Franz said that after arriving in California, she nearly had to take a job at a private school even though she wanted to work in public education. Substitute jobs don’t offer benefits, and Franz was only able to wait out the certification process because she was eligible for health insurance through her husband’s job. Otherwise, she said, she probably would have ended up at a private school that didn’t require certification. California seems to have a relatively straightforward path to reciprocity — but even then, the uncertainty and time almost cost her a job at a public school.

Other teachers are not so lucky. When Aimee Kocher moved to New York City after three years of teaching early-childhood education in Pennsylvania, she immediately started looking for jobs. She quickly found a school she thought was a great fit and a principal who wanted to hire her.

To get the job, however, she needed to be certified and to get licensed in New York — she was already certified in Pennsylvania. First, though, she needed to decipher which requirements applied to her and then pass a battery of expensive exams. The Pennsylvania certification test that she had successfully passed wasn’t the one used by New York.

Kocher said she initially submitted four separate certificate applications because she wasn’t sure which ones she would qualify for, and has since been granted two “initial conditional” certifications. To get them, she had to pass four separate tests, costing more than $500 in total. To obtain her “initial” license, Kocher will also have to pass an exam called the EdTPA, which costs an additional $300.

“That process [to get certified] was complicated and confusing and still is,” she said.

Kocher ended up working for a year at a charter school, which has more flexibility in hiring non-certified teachers.

“The job that I was excited for — that was very similar to the position that I had in Pennsylvania — I’m pretty sure I would have gotten that job, had I had my certification,” she said.

Currently Kocher — who has a bachelor’s in elementary education and 30 credits towards a master’s degree — works as an assistant teacher at a New York City private school, a job that does not require certification.

New York changed some of its certification rules last year, creating a simpler path for teachers like Kocher. Now an out-of-state teacher with three years of experience and acceptable evaluations can get licensed in New York without taking the state’s educator exams.

A state Education Department spokesman said in a statement that the state processes applications as quickly as possible with an eye toward attracting and retaining new teachers while making sure they are qualified.

“That’s why the Board of Regents acted last year to adopt new regulations that make it easier for qualified teachers from other states to obtain their certification here,” he said.

Meanwhile, teachers moving to Minnesota have found an especially Kafkaesque certification process waiting for them. Despite specific directives by the state legislature to make reciprocity easier, out-of-state teachers have found it nearly impossible to receive a license there without starting an entirely new training program.

As The 74 reported last year, Kirsten Rogers had 12 years’ experience teaching in Utah, but when she moved to Minnesota, she was granted only a two-year temporary license. To get a full credential, she would need to attend — and pay for — additional classes. Her story was not an outlier, and she and other teachers have filed a lawsuit against the state.

Since then, the legislative auditor’s office has issued a critical report of the state’s certification procedures: “The poorly defined terms, exceptions, and frequent changes in law make Minnesota’s teacher-licensure system complex and confusing.”

The state Board of Teaching was held in contempt of court for failing to follow a previous order making it easier for teachers moving to Minnesota to get certified. The lawsuit from out-of-state teachers continues to wind its way through the legal process, after an attempt to dismiss the suit was rejected by a state appeals court in August 2016.

Crossing the border complicated, confusing for teachers

It’s difficult to assess just how common the experiences of Kocher, Franz, and Rogers are. The National Council on Teacher Quality, a D.C.-based nonprofit, found that as of 2015, the vast majority of states had fairly strict requirements for certifying teachers from other states: They are usually required to take a licensure test, meet some other requirement (such as a review of college or graduate school transcripts or syllabi), or both.

A handful of states, including Arizona and Florida, issue certifications to out-of-state teachers with relatively few requirements. One state, Delaware, grants reciprocity based solely on evidence that a teacher was effective in his or her past position.

The National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification has compiled certification agreements between most states in the country. They are not reciprocity agreements but simply a collection of the (often obscure) requirements for moving teaching credentials from state to state.

Some of these rules seem reasonable in theory but in practice may serve as a strong deterrent to remaining in the profession. Many states, like New York, allow for easier reciprocity for teachers with three to five years’ experience — but this requirement may restrict entry since people are often most mobile earliest in their career.

Even when the process is not all that burdensome, it can be difficult to navigate, with state departments of education sometimes giving unclear or contradictory information. States have a dizzying array of certification types: initial, interim, emergency, professional, conditional, master, temporary, transitional, internship, supplementary. In many places, state websites are bewildering.

“We struggled with that,” said Chris Koch, the former state superintendent of Illinois, pointing to budget cuts. “It’s hard sometimes to talk to a person.”

Research shows that state borders can and do prevent teachers from switching schools across state lines.

One study looked at the Washington-Oregon state line and found that “even among school districts near the state border, almost three times as many teachers make a within-state move of 75 or more miles than make any cross-state move.”

The researchers note that this may be caused by licensure rules as well as the lack of pension portability and the benefits of maintaining seniority in the same state. The paper argues that such policies are harmful: “Barriers to mobility might exacerbate teacher shortages and increase attrition from the profession.”

Surveys of teachers also appear to confirm that the obstacles are real. Some 41 percent of former teachers who would consider returning to the profession cited “state certification reciprocity” as very or extremely important in their consideration, according to an analysis of federal data conducted by the Learning Policy Institute. That percentage is higher than in 2005, when about 35 percent of teachers gave that as a reason.

(Photo: Learning Policy Institute)

The survey allowed teachers to choose more than one factor as playing a major part in any decision to go back to the classroom, and reciprocity was not rated among the top four. On the other hand, it’s likely that the percentage would be much higher among former teachers who had since moved to another state.

Not good for students either

Certification rules seem to be a pain for teachers, but does that matter to students? It’s hard to prove, but the best evidence suggests so.

A recent study found that districts near state boundaries had lower student achievement compared with other districts not near a state border. The researchers looked at districts across the country, finding negative effects of being near the border between two states in both reading and math. Although they couldn’t definitively show why, the authors argue that restrictions on teachers moving between states, because of licensure and pension rules, likely weakens the talent pool and the effectiveness of those hired.

Cory Koedel, co-author of the study and an associate professor at the University of Missouri, said that the results are what would be expected from “basic economic theory.” He gives the simple example of two nearby high schools in different states. They each need exactly one science teacher, but one of the high schools has two science teachers and the other has none. Ideally, the second school would be able to hire the second teacher — everyone wins. The second school fills a vacancy, the teacher gets a job, and the first school is no worse off. But if certification policies prevent the teacher from moving easily, the second school is left without anyone to teach science.

Other research shows that students benefit when teachers are a good fit in their specific schools; licensure restrictions could make this less likely.

Koedel is confident that the negative effects of attending a school near a state border are real, but he notes that they are not especially large.

“The results are highly robust, but they are small,” he said.

Other professionals have easier paths

These cumbersome requirements appear relatively unique to teaching.

A report from Third Way — a centrist think tank that has generally backed education reform policies — argues that teachers have a particularly difficult-to-navigate route to get licensed, compared to other professionals, such as lawyers.

Twenty-five states have adopted a uniform bar exam that can be transferred across those states. Similarly, 25 states use a single license for nurses. All 50 states use the same certification exam for architects. Accountants have a uniform exam, and most states have adopted rules to make it easier for CPAs to work across state lines. Journalists don’t have licensure or certification rules and can freely move from state to state in their field.

Without a thorough review, it’s not clear if other professions encounter many of the same bureaucratic snafus that teachers seem to when moving between states. Moreover, there’s not strong evidence on whether other occupations’ reciprocity rules have successfully increased interstate mobility.

One study showed, surprisingly, that the Nurse Licensure Compact, which was designed to make practicing across state lines easier, produced “no evidence that the labor supply or mobility of nurses increases following the adoption of the [compact], even among the residents of counties bordering other [compact] states.” The paper did find suggestive evidence that younger nurses may be more likely to move between states because of the compact.

Still, it is clear that many other professions have more-streamlined paths across a number of states, and in some cases all states.

Shaky justification

So why do many states put in place such onerous requirements to become a teacher?

One explanation is both substantive and provincial. Koch, the former Illinois superintendent, said that interstate reciprocity should be easier but that, as head of Illinois schools, he wanted to ensure the quality of any out-of-state teachers.

“There were [teacher training] institutions in neighboring states that did a really poor job,” said Koch.

Kate Walsh, head of the National Council on Teacher Quality, argues that states should require out-of-state teachers to pass their licensure exams, since, in her view, it’s too easy to become a teacher in many places.

“We want to make sure that states test teachers who are coming from out of state, so they know their subject matter,” she said. “They often are coming from a state where the cut score on the test is too low or they use a really bad test.”

One problem with this view that there is only a modest relationship between someone’s ability to do well on a certification test and their performance in the classroom. Some have argued that this is because paper-and-pencil exams are inadequate, but even the EdTPA, a performance-based assessment, has limited value in assessing teachers’ contributions to student achievement, according to a recent study.

There is also evidence that onerous requirements for entry into the profession are particularly likely to drive away high-achieving college graduates and prospective teachers of color.

Transcript reviews — the process by which a state board examines a teacher’s transcript or even past class syllabi to determine if they meet certain standards — seem even less defensible. Studies have not consistently shown which types of teacher training are effective and which aren’t.

And in practice, the rules can border on the absurd — such as requiring statistics teacher Franz to take extra classes in geometry, because her statistics courses didn’t count.

One study does gives some credence to the notion that out-of-state teachers might be less effective. Specifically, research in North Carolina found that teachers trained out of state performed worse and had higher turnover than teachers from North Carolina–based programs. However, the difference in performance was very small. As the study put it, “There is a substantial overlap in the distributions of effectiveness across groups.”

(Photo: Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis)

The researchers caution against blanket limits on out-of-state teachers: “Blunt policy instruments, such as eliminating reciprocal certification, that may block many highly effective out-of-state prepared teachers and cause further teacher shortage concerns are not effective responses.”

Progress in some states, hope for a national solution

It’s hard to create an interest group around addressing teacher reciprocity; those affected are usually small in number, geographically dispersed, and not all that politically powerful. Minnesota’s system, which appeared in obvious violation of the state law, seems to be an exception, drawing significant media interest and a large enough band of prospective teachers.

National teachers unions have taken some steps to address the issue. Both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have backed the system of National Board Certification, an advanced credential, that in many places entitles out-of-state teachers to easy reciprocity. However, only a very small share of teachers are nationally board certified.

The AFT has also called for a bar exam–style test for teachers that would serve as a “universal assessment process for entry” into the profession. It does not appear that the NEA has taken a public stance for or against reciprocity. Neither union responded to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, state-level political interests can stand in the way. In Minnesota, for instance, the state teachers union and a coalition of colleges of education have opposed efforts to streamline the process for out-of-state teachers.

Still, there has been progress of late. “We’ve seen more states than ever that consider themselves full reciprocity states. Ten years ago you would never have states that say that,” Phillip Rogers, head of the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, told Education Week in 2015.

In 2016, a proposal, modeled after the Third Way report, was introduced in Congress to help unify processes across states, though the legislation hasn’t gone anywhere yet. However, a provision was included in the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal K-12 education law, allowing states to use federal money earmarked for increasing the ranks of high-quality teachers and principals to set up an interstate system of reciprocity of the sort envisioned by Third Way.

(Photo: Every Student Succeeds Act)

Still, Koch, the former Illinois superintendent, thinks a national fix is a long shot: “It won’t happen because of states’ sovereignty.”

Koch, though, now leads the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), which he sees as part of the solution. The group grants accreditation to teacher prep programs based on standards designed to ensure quality.

Koch thinks that reciprocity should be granted to any teacher who has graduated from a nationally accredited teacher training program. “If we do our job well at CAEP — and I think we can — coming from an accredited institution would mean that states can trust that any graduate from an accredited university would be able to do their job,” he said.

In some ways, reciprocity is perhaps a symptom of a larger problem: Since there is no widely agreed-upon definition of quality teaching — or how to measure it, how to prepare someone to teach, and how to ensure that a prospective teacher will be effective — it’s no surprise that 50 different states can’t agree either.

In the meantime, the rules will continue to confuse teachers and likely stop many from being in the classroom. Franz, who now teaches in California, said there’s no way she’ll go through the process all over.

“If I move back to New York, I probably won’t be teaching in a public school,” she said. “I can’t do it again.”

This story was published in partnership with The 74.

(Credit: Getty Images)

See previous interviews by The 74: Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, U.S. Senator and Education Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, University of Michigan economist Susan Dynarski, Harvard Education School Dean Jim Ryan. Full 74 Interview archive here.

As superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, John Deasy laid out an ambitious vision for improving schools. Today, his supporters say he succeeded in significantly improving student outcomes across the city, while his critics point to poor relationships with many of the district’s stakeholders and his botched plan to integrate iPads into Los Angeles classrooms. Deasy resigned under pressure in late 2014.

Now Deasy is back in the news, planning to launch a new program that he says will fix juvenile prisons in a way that both reduces recidivism and improves the life prospects of incarcerated youth.

I spoke with Deasy in depth last month about his vision for the program, how it might be implemented and whether it amounts to a form of privatized prisons.

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

The 74: Can you start by telling me about your new initiative — what you’re working on, what you’re hoping to accomplish?

John Deasy: In October, I am launching a new organization called New Day, New Year. This organization is going to design, build and launch a set of alternative juvenile prisons in the country: in Los Angeles County and Alameda County in California, and then hopefully in Oklahoma and in New York City. In short, what I want to do for the next 10 years is to be part of the rethinking of juvenile justice in this country — and specifically youth corrections.

Our youth will leave our experience drug- and substance-free; on track for graduation or enrolled in community college, depending on their age; resilient; and also employed.

The theory is, we want to reduce recidivism by 50 percent as compared to the local county recidivism rate. That’s the short answer.

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What immediately jumps to mind is that this is a sort of charter school for juvenile prisons. Do you see it along those lines?

We don’t at the moment have successful alternatives where you have dramatically lower recidivism for youth, and we want to create that opportunity. I don’t know if it’s charter-like, because I don’t think there’s such a rule or a vehicle.

What would the governance structure be, then? Is this under the traditional governance of publicly governed prisons? I’m asking because there are a lot of concerns about privately run prisons.

I have enormous concerns around privately run prisons, and abhorrent concerns around for-profit prisons. The governance structure is as it currently is, and we’re aiming to provide the current governance structure an alternative setting. Judges could sentence or re-sentence youth — obviously it’s a willing proposition — to New Day, New Year, and in turn we will abide by the guidelines of the state that we work in and produce dramatically different results. But it’s certainly not for-profit, and it’s not private.

So that would mean you would have to work within the existing structure and convince policymakers that they should invest in or work with you to create this new program, right?

You get to the heart of it almost instantly. Correct.

Have you started those conversations with folks? And what has the reaction been?

The reaction has been amazingly positive. We’re at the beginning of this — this is not January 2018 yet. I’m sure there’s a lot of stress and lots of hurdles to go through, but quite frankly it’s nothing compared to what the youth are going through, so I think we can get through it.

What specifically do you think you will do differently, and what makes you think you can be successful where others may have failed — or where the current system is failing?

I’ll give you a couple of answers as to what we believe we can do differently that would contribute to better outcomes:

One is scale and size. So these are not proposed to be large “industrial-sized” housing units; they’re small. The correctional campuses would be no more than 50 youth.

Two, the entire design is built into part of the theory of correction, which is to build healthy experiences for community engagement. Community being family community, your neighborhood, community of school, community of residential experience.

Another piece is employment — very important if you’re going to both break a cycle of poverty and break a cycle of resources that are illegitimate. Legitimate employment is an enormous component of this.

Another piece is a different take on exit. Our program is a program that would think about exit as, you just don’t leave and go on probation. You experience a period of transitional community housing that we also facilitate, so that the most vulnerable portions of the next six to eight months of a young person’s life after they exit is that you’re still in a deep connection with therapy — family counseling, individual counseling, monitoring like you would normally have during probation, but a guiding hand in the reintroduction and reconnection with public education. That tends not to go well at all. We want to be part of making sure it goes very well.

How do you see incarcerated youth participating in this program? Do you see this as something they affirmatively choose, as something a judge assigns … that just some are in this program and some are in the traditional program?

The ideal to me would be a combination of the first two. Yes, a judge offers this as a form of sentencing with the concurrence of the youth, so a young person opposed to this is probably not a young person that this program is designed to support. I don’t believe or expect that to be a problem, however. I expect just the opposite.

How do you plan to fund this?

When the organization is up and running, the state funds that come to incarcerated youth would come to this program. Facility-wise, it’s going to be privately fundraised. Facilities have to all meet the acceptable codes, and that involves fundraising, as well as supplemental services — the things we would do that are outside, probably along the lines of recreation and post-care support, we would have to fundraise for.

How far along are you in that process?

We’re in the process of fundraising right now.

What proportion of the necessary funds have you raised so far?

The thing I would say that has been very encouraging is the direct outreach, in saying “I want to support this program,” that’s come by existing organizations, by individuals — that’s been really wonderful.

Are you worried about stepping on the toes of people who have been working in this area much longer than you have?

Oh, not at all. I expect to learn from them, and I expect to be a partner. Sadly, there’s enough work to go around.

One of the criticisms of your tenure at LAUSD was that you had a lot of big ideas, but there were sometimes challenges in the nitty-gritty of implementing them. Do you think that criticism has any truth, and will it affect how you go about this new project?

I think people are free to — and do — criticize all the time. That’s the democracy that we live in. The thing that’s really good about that is you continue to grow as an adult and learn how you can always do things better. The growth from all of my 32 years of employment come to bear on this issue.

What specifically do you think you learned from your time at LAUSD that you would want to apply in this context?

Don’t take on small challenges; take on very big challenges. Youth are desperately counting on us. That would be one thing.

Second of all is an absolute belief in every single youth; there are no throwaway kids. I bring that belief absolutely to this.

On the management side, I would say staying big-scale is very important, so not solving every problem at once, and trying to be at peace that it won’t all be solved at once. On the other hand, I would also point to the fact that there were pretty staggering results while we there in the administration of LAUSD. Test scores were never higher; every single marker was never higher; suspensions were never lower. Pretty dramatic gains and closure of gaps occurred. Folks wanted to criticize — you can take that, if you can get those results.

There is a lot of interesting overlap in the debate about criminal justice and the debate about education policy. In criminal justicethere are concerns about privatization of prisons, and you hear that about privatization of schools. 

I agree. I’d want to draw a pretty bright line. Public charters are not private schools, and it’s not privatized.

Some people make the claim that they are.

I think that’s a self-serving claim. It’s just not a factual claim. I get the self-serving part of that. I want to be very, very clear: This has nothing to do with private prison or, God forbid, for-profit.

Another interesting parallel is that sometimes we hear that education reform is not addressing the root cause of poverty or low educational achievement. I think someone might say that about this initiative: that there’s a lot of discussion about reforming the criminal justice system and reducing incarceration. What you’re doing is trying to improve the context of incarceration and get better outcomes. But some might say that the root issue is that we’re overincarcerating our youth.

I believe we are. Absolutely. That’s why I spent so much time as a superintendent dramatically reducing suspensions, stopping ticketing, fundamentally not contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline. So it’s both sides of that.

When young people make very bad decisions and there are consequences for that, that should not mean they are ghost incarcerated for the rest of their lives, which is what happens with a lot of policies.

In the process of creating this program and scaling it, are you going to talk to incarcerated youth and ask them what they want changed and what their vision is for a juvenile justice system?

Absolutely, and I have done that fairly consistently over my life.

What have you heard from them?

A lot of things, but I can give you themes.

One is that “I don’t want people to be afraid of me the rest of my life. I don’t want to be isolated. I am a good person who made a mistake. Do I get a chance to start over again?” It’s fairly haunting, when you have things like a record and you have that pretty terrible experience.

Another thing you hear is, “I am actually smart, even though I may have done a stupid thing. I know how to do other things.” You also hear something else, which is, “I never really got a good education, didn’t know opportunities were in front of me, and had a set of life experiences that led me to a place of making some desperately bad decisions when I didn’t know there were alternatives.”

Mostly, people want to be cared for — and cared about.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org. 

(Photo: C-SPAN)

Democrats added a misleading reference to standardized tests to the party platform over the weekend, requiring they meet a reliability standard that doesn’t actually exist.

“[W]e believe that standardized tests must meet American Statistical Association standards for reliability and validity,” the amendment reads, saying this would “strike a better balance on testing, so that it informs, but does not drive, instruction.”

To most people this would seem like common sense; of course tests should follow statistical best practices and who could sound more authoritative on the controversial subject than the American Statistical Association.

But there’s a problem: The American Statistical Association (ASA) has never published guidelines pertaining to the reliability and validity of standardized tests.

“There are no such standards,” said Jill Talley, a spokesperson for the ASA.

The language referring to the imaginary ASA standards was adopted Saturday as an amendment by the Democratic platform committee meeting in Orlando, Fla., according to a C-SPAN video (transcribed by Democrats for Education Reform) and an American Federation of Teachers press release. AFT President Randi Weingarten advocated for the amendment, saying it would help make testing “more fulsome” and schools “places of joy for children again.” An AFT spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It was one of several changes to the platform pertaining to standardized tests and charter schools that have created a flurry of recent discussion: sharp criticism by some and cheers of support by others.

• Read more: Democrats rewrite education platform behind closed doors, abandon core party values

The draft platform on the Democratic National Convention (DNC) website and scheduled to be voted on during the July 25-28 convention in Philadelphia doesn’t yet reflect such amendments. DNC spokeswoman Dana Vickers Shelley would not comment on the apparently mistaken reference to ASA testing standards.

“At this point we’re not speaking on specific language because the document is being updated to reflect the amendments and changes approved by the platform committee,” she said.

While the ASA “standards for reliability and validity” pertaining to standardized testing are not real, the amendment may have been referring to a 2014 statement from the ASA  regarding value-added measures, a method for evaluating teachers based on their impact on student test scores. Teachers unions have generally fought tying student test scores to teacher performance.

The ASA urged caution in using value-added measures when evaluating teachers but did not specify validity or reliability standards for assessments.

In fact, Talley said, “The statement does not at all address the reliability or validity of standardized tests.”

It’s also possible that the amendment meant to refer to assessment standards jointly developed by the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education.

The Democratic platform amendment also states, “We oppose … the use of student test scores in teacher and principal evaluations, a practice which has been repeatedly rejected by researchers.” This would mark a sharp departure from the Obama administration which incentivized states to use test scores to evaluate teachers through its Race to the Top program and federal waivers from No Child Left Behind.

Catherine Brown of the Center For American Progress, a progressive think tank, said the amendments reflected growing concerns about over-testing. “This platform is one more piece of evidence that we need to move to better, fairer, and fewer tests,” she said.

But, she said, “The platform has no force of law or policy.”

Amendment #76 was offered by Chuck Pascal, a platform committee member from Pennsylvania, who, according to the C-SPAN video, said, “We should only be using standardized tests that are statistically valid. The current standardized testing for the most part only indicates that a student is in poverty.”

Neither Pascal nor Weingarten discussed what was meant by the “American Statistical Association standards for reliability and validity,” and no one asked.

The amendment passed unanimously.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org.

This is the last in a three-part series examining California’s approach to education data and school accountability. Part One surveyed how the state’s skepticism of test-based accountability starts at the top with Gov. Jerry Brown, who successfully took on the federal government; Part Two explored how the elimination of certain data systems has limited educational research in one of the country’s most consequential states.

California is hoping to redefine school accountability in the “California Way.”

While state officials are hard at work designing a system in line with the oversights demanded by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the new federal K-12 education law, they also want to remain true to the state’s ethos of de-emphasizing test scores and focusing on helping — rather than “punishing” — struggling schools.

“We have had now basically three years without a functioning accountability system and we’re approaching the moment when we actually have to put something in place,” said David Plank, a Stanford professor and executive director of the research group Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE).

A report released in May by a task force convened by the state superintendent lays out a series of metrics — beyond standardized test scores — for judging schools, but says little about what happens to the ones that persistently score poorly.

The system will also be crucial to the future of the state’s public schools, which grapple with limited funding and poor data systems that make it difficult to track areas where improvement is needed. California students post some of the lowest test scores in the country on federal exams and while, fairly wealthy, the state spends among the least on K-12 education.

As other states face similar tensions, California’s approach may point to the future of accountability across the country as one of ESSA’s pillars is devolving power from the federal government. The state appears on the verge of designing a system that moves beyond a narrow focus on math and reading test scores while including measures of equity, such as suspensions and expulsions, which fall disproportionately on special education students and those of color.

At the same time, it’s not clear that there’s the political will to give accountability any teeth — to intervene, and even, in some cases, sanction schools that are low-performing year after year by, for instance, labeling them as failing or dismissing staff.

Accountability but then what

The state must balance an array of competing interests in creating a new system for evaluating schools. California has to meet still-to-be-finalized federal guidelines under ESSA, while creating coherence between those new rules and its already-planned system for district-focused accountability.

Many want the state to continue to avoid a focus on test scores and accountability that imposes strict fixes; yet a number of advocates say California needs to intervene in schools that flounder year after year.

The plan is for school-based accountability to be underway in the 2017-18 school year — but many details need to be worked out before then.

Last month, the “accountability and continuous improvement” advisory task force, convened by state Superintendent Tom Torlakson, put out a list of metrics for judging schools, many of which were backed by the state Board of Education. The group was co-chaired by Eric Heins, head of the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, and Wes Smith, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators.

In interviews, several task force members praised the group’s recommendations and collaborative approach.

Samantha Tran, of the nonprofit Children Now, was one of them. She described the task force’s two main camps: the “traditional education community” and a “number of equity advocates.” In the former, she included administrators groups, teachers unions and school board associations, among others, and in the latter, she included herself and others concerned with ensuring measures of equality were included.

“We really pushed on each other in terms of (our) bottom line — what were key things that people wanted to make sure were reflected in the report, so at the end of the day, we could all sign on to it,” Tran said.

The task force agreed that schools should be judged on a variety of measures, including tests scores, rates of suspension/expulsion, chronic absenteeism, college and career readiness, and high school graduation rates.

But the report was much less clear on what interventions look like when schools are deemed low-performing. The task force’s explanatory graphic speaks to the complex nature of the undertaking and in some cases a lack of clarity.

“The idea that large proportions of schools would be held accountable was taken off the table pretty quickly,” said University of Southern California professor Morgan Polikoff, also a task force member. Polikoff said the focus was largely based on what measures to use, “not what would happen based on those measures.”

“In the first meeting…I said, ‘There’s a quite robust (research) literature that suggests that consequential accountability improves outcomes for kids,’ and that comment was not well received,” Polikoff said, referring to studies showing that No Child Left Behind and state accountability systems have had positive impacts on student achievement.

There is little discussion about what, if anything, will happen to struggling schools in the state report. It promises to “ensure significant, sustained, evidence-based interventions in priority … schools” through “mandatory … (technical assistance) and supports that build (local educational agency)/school capacity to sustain improvement over time” for schools “that need more comprehensive and intensive supports to make major improvements in performance and/or growth.”

What, precisely, a “significant, sustained, and evidence-based intervention” is remains unstated. There has been much talk of reducing “punitive” sanctions against schools — but one person’s interventions may be another’s punishment.

“The ‘what happens’ question has not been answered,” said Peter Birdsall, task force member and the executive director of the California County Superintendents.

ESSA requires intervention in certain schools — those in the bottom 5 percent statewide; high schools where fewer than two-in-three students graduate — and specifically that those steps be “evidence-based.” But it largely leaves it up to the states, like California, to decide what the steps are.

But in echoes of recent history, California’s vision of accountability may in some cases run headlong into Washington, D.C.’s approach. Proposed federal guidelines for ESSA say that schools must be assigned a single, summative performance rating. California’s task force recommendations — released prior to the federal rules — suggests a “dashboard” approach that gives schools scores across multiple dimensions but avoids assigning them an aggregate rating.

California’s lack of robust state data systems may also make implementing the accountability system challenging since it will rely on a variety of new measures that must be accurately collected and reported.

“That came up repeatedly in conversations, where folks were in essence saying, ‘We don’t really have the capacity or systems to do this now,’” said Polikoff, who hopes that putting multiple measures into the rating system will force the state to create the necessary data infrastructure.

Accountability applied with nuance

Even those pushing for state oversight and accountability with consequences say they don’t want to return to what some see as an overemphasis on test scores, which led to inflexible sanctions imposed on poorly performing schools.

“There’s a desire … to think about a continuum that really does start with support,” said Tran of Children Now. “Education is a human endeavor. The construct of we’re going to fire the principal and half the teachers — that may make sense in a certain school, but what if you just hired this phenomenal principal and things are starting to turn around, but there’s another dynamic that’s at play?

“You almost need a little bit more judgment to go in and still apply that pressure because that pressure is important,” she added, “but have a more nuanced response based on the context of the school and the district.”

John Affeldt, of the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates, has been critical of accountability aspects that are too focused on test scores and said the measures being discussed now in California move in the right direction. However, he said, “I’m not supportive of no accountability and no consequences. … If we’re going to do support and assistance, then let’s make sure it’s working.”

Putting in place any sort of sanctions for struggling schools may still face an uphill political battle, considering the long-standing opposition of Gov. Jerry Brown and politically powerful state teachers unions.

“I’m concerned. We are seeing progress in the conversation around creating a more meaningful accountability system. However, we need to know clearly what supports and interventions our students are going to receive,” said Ryan Smith of Education Trust – West, which advocates for the achievement of students of color and those living in poverty.

Others argue that sanctions for low-performing schools do more harm than good.

“I do think that schools that are so-called ‘low performing’ should get the carrot rather than stick approach,” said Joshua Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers, the smaller of the two statewide teachers unions. “I taught at an inner-city high school in Los Angeles for many, many years … and people at that school worked their tails off. … We needed additional resources; we didn’t need to be sanctioned.”

A California Teachers Association spokesperson said in an email that the union was “providing input” on accountability but declined to comment beyond that.

“It’s more important to get it right, than to do it fast,” Heins, the CTA president and task force co-chair, wrote in a letter to the state Board of Education.

Brown’s spokesperson directed a request for comment to the state school board, whose spokesperson then pointed back to Brown’s budget message this year, which said the state plans “to establish an accountability system that provides a more accurate picture of school performance and progress than the past system.”

Meanwhile, a bill laying out metrics for accountability recently passed the state Assembly and is now in the Senate. Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, the bill’s sponsor, said her proposal shares significant overlap with the task force recommendations, which Weber said relied partially on her bill. But both are needed, she said, suggesting that task force recommendations don’t always translate into real action.

“We feel very strongly that our bill still needs to exist, because we know how task forces go,” she said.

Even Weber’s bill though does not specify interventions for struggling schools.

Rewards vs. sanctions

Many in California believe that past accountability and intervention systems have not worked. Research on California school interventions is limited — perhaps because the data needed to study the state’s education system is hard to come by — but there is some evidence from which to draw.

It shows that intervention and accountability systems can make a difference — often for good, but sometimes for ill.

A specific assistance and intervention program for certain low-performing districts — led by California and mandated by No Child Left Behind — showed positive results as measured by math test scores; so did a 2009 federal school turnaround grant that awarded up to $2 million each to some of California’s lowest-performing schools. The initiative was particularly successful in schools that dismissed their principal and half the teaching staff.

A 2013 paper, though, found that achievement decreased in California schools that were sanctioned for not hitting targets for certain disadvantaged groups, such as students of color or low-income students.

But a national study found that racial achievement gaps shrunk in states like Mississippi and Oklahoma when more stringent accountability pressure was based on the performance of vulnerable student groups. In general, No Child Left Behind — and its state-level precursors — produced gains in student achievement but also led to unintended consequences, like cheating and teaching to the test.

One of the most thorough studies of accountability examined the impact of Texas’ approach, which sanctioned persistently struggling schools while rewarding high-performing ones. The research found students in schools facing pressure to avoid a low rating scored higher on standardized tests, and, most importantly, graduated college more frequently and earned more money as adults. However, in high-performing schools eligible for extra recognition, struggling students were less likely to graduate college and made less money at age 25.

Despite questions of its effectiveness, California’s task force recommendations seem to place a greater emphasis on rewarding and recognizing high-achieving schools rather than putting pressure on low-performing ones to improve.

“Every single draft (of the recommendations) that came out … I kept copying and pasting the same thing, which was, ‘I don’t know why we’re spending so much space on awards; I know of virtually no evidence that those help kids,’” said Polikoff.

A leap of faith

California is known for a lot of things: vibrant and beautiful cities, an innovative economy and a top-notch state university system.

But when it comes to its K-12 public schools, California has far less to brag about. Its students score among the worst in the country on federal fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading tests. Across states, California ranked 46th, only slightly better than Alabama and a bit worse than Mississippi, according to one careful analysis that adjusted for demographic differences, like student poverty and English proficiency.

The reasons are complex and difficult to pin down, but a 2007 report by some of the state’s top researchers identified three major issues: a complex, inequitable and inadequate school funding system; the difficulty in firing ineffective teachers, and a lack of infrastructure to collect and use data. A 2012 follow-up report said that many of these problems remained.

Since then, there has been significant progress on school funding equity: Gov. Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula is designed to drive more money to schools serving disadvantaged students, while also enhancing local flexibility to use that money. The amount of money though remains an issue, and there are numerous concerns that the new funding is not reaching the students it’s meant to help.

By all estimates, California had for years spent among the least per pupil of any state in the country: $7,348 in 2013 vs. New York’s $16,726, according to the most recent comparable data. Voters passed a tax increase raising billions to better fund education in 2012, which appears to have helped significantly but still has not completely closed the gap between California and other states. In April, a state appeals court rejected a lawsuit backed by the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates arguing the state was inadequately funding schools; an appeal was filed to the state Supreme Court earlier this month.

In other respects, the state has seemingly made less progress. The weak data infrastructure remains, though a renewed push to improve it has cropped up. The well-known Vergara lawsuit claiming it’s all but impossible to fire an ineffective tenured teacher has been appealed to the state Supreme Court, after being thrown out by the Court of Appeal in April.

Political transitions also loom. By 2019, term limits guarantee that a new governor and state superintendent will take office — considering how fundamentally Brown’s philosophy of local control and distaste for data has shaped California’s education policy, the next governor may make a big difference.

This comes amid the backdrop of the state’s efforts to redesign the accountability system, which still has numerous unanswered questions. What will happen to struggling schools? How will the state merge its district-focused accountability system with ESSA’s school-focused one? How aggressive a role will the federal government play? Will the state legislature step in?

For now, at least, California continues to tread its own path — one other states, newly empowered by the end of No Child Left Behind and the dawning of ESSA, may follow.

“There’s a quite radical move away from ‘test-and-punish’ to creating a culture of ‘continuous improvement’ and that is a leap of faith,” said Plank of the research group PACE. “We have no idea whether we can make this work or not.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74.

This is the second in a three-part series examining California’s approach to education data and school accountability. Part One looks at how the state’s skepticism of test-based accountability starts at the top with Gov. Jerry Brown, who successfully took on the federal government. Part Three will consider what the next era of accountability in California might look like under the new federal K-12 education law.

Everyone in California education policy circles knows it.

“Our governor has not been a fan of data,” said Ryan Smith, executive director of Education Trust-West, a civil rights and education group that generally backs tough school accountability standards.

Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California professor, echoed this sentiment, “California has an embarrassing relationship with educational data. … The governor has affirmatively stated that he doesn’t want to spend money on improving educational data systems.”

Indeed, it’s well understood in the education policy realm that California has bucked national trends by pausing school accountability and not requiring that teachers be evaluated by student test scores.

But what’s less discussed is how the removal of data systems in the state has made it hard for researchers to study California schools or for policymakers to understand and address educational challenges. Although it’s data for high-stakes accountability like teacher evaluation and school performance metrics that draws headlines, even data for low-stakes purposes, like academic research, is hard to come by in California.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s philosophy can be best summed up by a line in a 2011 message after vetoing a school accountability system: “Adding more speedometers to a broken car won’t turn it into a high-performance machine. … The current fashion is to collect endless quantitative data to populate ever-changing indicators of performance to distinguish the educational ‘good’ from the education ‘bad.’”

He’s also criticized the federal government’s $300 million Race to the Top program as having “a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.”

California hasn’t done away with data altogether — school level test scores are publicly reported and several large districts together known as CORE have worked to create more robust data systems — but several researchers and advocates say they can’t fully judge the education policies of the most populous state in the country because of a lack of accessible data.

• Read more: Anatomy of school success and failure: Inside CORE’s accountability system

It’s a strange position for a state synonymous with being in the vanguard.

“California is really behind compared to the rest of the nation when you think about data systems and the ability to use data to improve practice,” said Samantha Tran, of the nonprofit advocacy group Children Now.

Data becomes a four-letter word

The hostility to data runs deep. Since Brown became governor for the second time in 2011, an array of education data systems has met the death knell of his veto pen.

In his first year back in office, Brown blocked a years-in-the-making teacher data system, forcing California to return $6 million in federal money. The extensive database would have given the state the ability to link individual teachers to student growth, as well as monitor trends in the teacher workforce. Brown said thanks, but no thanks to the free federal money, and the system is now defunct.

“I see education as a local responsibility. The data is there and the superintendents and the teachers and the principals and the school boards should make use of it,” Brown said at the time, apparently ignoring the state school boards association, which said otherwise.

Now, five years after Brown’s veto, the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office says such a database is crucial as the state faces a potential teacher shortage. The lack of a statewide system means on this issue, “Many questions legislators have cannot, in turn, be answered well or at all,” the office found.

“When we are facing a massive teacher shortage, which has been reported in California, you would think we would want the data on teachers, longitudinally over time, available to researchers to help California understand what might be good policy options,” said USC professor Katharine Strunk.

Also disappearing was the California Postsecondary Education Commission, an independent agency for higher education policy planning, research and analysis that had existed since 1973. Brown line-item vetoed funding for the program in 2011, saying he wanted to reduce costs and consolidate systems; the move saved $1.9 million from a $129 billion budget.

In 2015, Brown also stopped a bill to create a similar agency, with supporters saying there was a lack of data about and coordination within California’s sprawling higher education system that educates more than 238,000 students and employs more than 190,000 faculty and staff.

Brown has fought efforts to track chronic absenteeism in the state’s public schools prompted by multiple reports from the state Attorney General Kamala Harris finding that truancy was a widespread problem. In 2014, Brown vetoed two bills to require additional tracking of absenteeism by local schools and the state.

“These are missed opportunities to help keep California’s youngest and most vulnerable students on track,” said Harris at the time. (State monitoring of chronic absenteeism finally started earlier this year after federal law began requiring it.)

One system that survived the governor’s cull is the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System — or CALPADS — though not for lack of trying on Brown’s part. Still, many say the database, which tracks a variety of student-level data including demographics and test scores, could be better.

“By statute, [CALPADs] comprises only the data that the federal government requires [California] to collect, so it’s not a comprehensive data system [and there are] a lot of weaknesses in it,” said David Plank, head of the research group Policy Analysis for California Education, or PACE.

In what might be the oddest instance of data skepticism, the California Department of Education, led by state Superintendent Tom Torlakson, deleted fifteen years’ worth of old test scores from an easily accessible part of its website just before the release of new Common Core-aligned assessment scores in August 2015.

A department spokesperson explained at the time that it was done “to avoid confusion because the two tests cannot be compared.” After a public uproar, the data was restored to the state website a few weeks later.

A request for comment from Brown’s office was directed to the state Board of Education. Julie White, the board’s director of the communications, wrote in an email, “Governor Brown’s comments about education data collection have been consistent over the years,” pointing to two veto messages from the governor.

“While well intentioned, the collection of data for the interests of faraway authorities would not get to the root of the issue — keeping kids in school and on track,” Brown wrote in 2014 when rejecting the bill to track truancy.

California: a data desert for researchers

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the state’s data purge is how difficult it has been for quantitative education researchers — those who use numbers to dissect the impacts of certain policies — to study the state.

In regards to Brown’s elimination of the teacher tracking database, Plank, of the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), said, “PACE works with a lot of academics, many of whom would love to have such a system.”

Speaking of the research community, Plank said, “We think we’ve got a lot to contribute here, but we don’t have the data. What we’ve found is that our academic colleagues are doing research in North Carolina or Florida or New York because they have data systems that work and we don’t.”

Plank said that a group of districts including Los Angeles and San Francisco with their own tracking systems have shared student-level test score data with researchers.

A 2012 report from the D.C.-based Data Quality Campaign found that California only met four of its 10 suggested “actions to ensure effective data use.”  Since 2012, California has refused to respond to the Campaign’s survey on how different states use data.

Strunk of USC said the state’s decision to go a year without publicly reported state tests made it difficult to examine the state’s education policies. “I had a lot of studies looking at interventions in different districts, especially L.A., and we wanted to see longer-term outcomes and we’re cut [off] at two or three years because we just don’t have [2013-14] data,” she said.

She said even getting the most recent data — the first year of the new Common Core-aligned tests from the 2014-15 school year — has proved challenging. “Many researchers have not been able to access those data from different districts and from the state.”

Robert Oakes, a spokesperson for the California Department of Education, (CDE), originally said in an email, “CDE doesn’t release student-level data for privacy reasons.” However, Plank said that it is common practice to share data with researchers while protecting student privacy and that many states do so.

Oakes later said the department did, in fact, share student-level data with certain researchers.

“The CDE has selectively entered into data-sharing agreements for Smarter Balanced results with highly qualified researchers from different institutions over the past two years. … The CDE is not funded to review research proposals and data requests and therefore only accommodates these requests as time permits or does so as part of an already established work assignment or project.”

When asked how CDE could provide the student-level data to some in light of the privacy concerns mentioned earlier, Oakes said, “Specific situations vary, of course, but in general CDE removes any personally identifiable data that could violate privacy protections.”

Oakes said the department does make efforts to support the use of data: “We have a pretty sophisticated bank of data available through DataQuest, and researchers can fill out specific applications if they want it mined at different levels. … We’re really big on data; we have a lot available.”

Strunk agreed the state has great information accessible at the school level but that the key for researchers is to be able to track individual students and teachers over time.

“To get the best estimates of the impact of an intervention on student achievement, you’d like to have as fine-grained data as possible,” she said.

For instance, Strunk described how she once attempted to estimate the rate of teacher turnover at different schools — but she wasn’t able to do so because the available data wasn’t detailed enough.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of the state education department, since some of the systems necessary were defunded. Strunk says that she’s worked with many state CDE staff members who are eager to help researchers but, on balance, “I’ve never found CDE to be particularly transparent or helpful in providing access to student-level data,” she said.

Like Plank, Strunk pointed out that those handful of states, such as North Carolina and New York, with strong data systems dominate the research scene.

“There is no [statewide] student-level data set available to researchers in California, at all,” she said.

It’s not just an academic point when dealing with a state as large, diverse and significant as California.

“There’s no reason to think that we can be able to apply what we learn from North Carolina to California,” said Strunk. “You can’t do much research on California.”

Polikoff of USC, said, “If you look at how many [research] publications there are that use student-level longitudinal data from California, there’s almost none.”

Michal Kurlaender, a professor at University of California, Davis, said she had been able to access some data by building strong working relationships with staff at the California Department of Education.

But, she said, “There is a lot of work being done and important research questions being explored in states that have rich, more easily accessible data systems … There hasn’t been enough [California] support to build rich data systems and to make them more publicly available for research purposes. … As a general rule, I do believe California is a tougher state for researchers to do work in because of the data accessibility issues.”

With growing calls for improved state data systems, but a popular governor who philosophically objects to quantifying education still in office, it’s unclear how long California’s data blackout will last. Regardless, it’s unlikely that the voice of researchers — and their desire for data — will be heard that loudly in Sacramento.

“The research community has no political clout,” Plank said.

This article was published in partnership with The 74.

This is the first in a three-part series examining California’s approach to education data and school accountability. Part Two explores how the elimination of certain data systems has limited educational research in one of the country’s most consequential states. Part Three will consider what the next era of accountability in California might look like under the new federal K–12 education law.

“Write your impression of a green leaf.”

This appeared on an exam that California Gov. Jerry Brown took as a student and it’s stuck with him ever since, he said in an interview with The Atlantic: “This is a very powerful question that has haunted me for 50 years, but you can’t put that on a standardized test.”

His point is that efforts to quantify education are doomed to fall short because of the inherent complexity, necessity of human judgment, and subjectivity of “correct” answers.

It’s a view that seems to have deeply shaped Brown’s ideology, and by extension California’s public schools, which serve over six million students in grades K-12. During his tenure, Brown has been one of the foremost critics of federally driven efforts to use data to improve education — and one of the most effective.

If Washington, D.C., went to one extreme, in focusing on test-driven accountability policies, as some argue, California has gone to the other: placing a lengthy pause on school accountability, devolving control to local districts, eliminating certain data systems, and declining to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores.

Challenging the wisdom of Washington, D.C.

Jerry Brown, a Democrat and son of a former California governor, was first elected to that office himself in 1974, serving two terms, but later failing in three runs for president and a campaign for U.S. Senate. By 1999, setting his ambitions lower, Brown had become Oakland’s mayor, and then in 2007, the state’s attorney general.

In 2010, he was elected governor once again and easily won re-election in 2014. Entering office in the wake of the economic downturn, Brown defied clear political labels, both cutting social spending and raising taxes to balance the budget, while maintaining solid approval ratings.  (Brown will not be able to run again in 2018 due to term limits.)

In 2009, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was solidifying his own agenda, one that encouraged states to expand data systems, connect student test scores to teacher evaluation, and turnaround long-struggling schools. But Brown, then attorney general, had other ideas. In a remarkable letter — notable for the sharp tone directed at a powerful federal official from his own party — he criticized Duncan’s proposed Race to the Top program:

“The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. … You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.”

Brown vs. Duncan; Duncan blinks

While the federal government, under Duncan and his boss, President Obama, has been a strong backer of using test scores to judge teachers and schools, California, under Brown, has moved sharply in the opposite direction.

In 2013, as California was implementing the Common Core, Brown signed a law suspending the state’s testing and school-rating system; the bill was backed by the state teachers unions and Tom Torlakson, the state schools superintendent. The new policy meant students would take field tests not designed to track their individual growth; in fact, data from the tests would not be shared publicly whatsoever. Duncan said this was a violation of federal law, and threatened to withhold funding, in a dispute that would last months.

Eventually Brown would win the game of chicken with Duncan, whose department caved, promising not to pull federal money, which would have meant cutting off over a billion dollars, largely to districts serving poor students, and from a state that carried huge weight in the Democratic party.

California extended the school rating moratorium in 2015 — meaning the Golden State has not had a comprehensive school rating or consequential accountability system for three years.

The state is now working to design a new system that will comply with the federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), adopted last year. This new procedure will not be ready until the 2017–18 school year, a California State Board of Education spokesperson said.

The state has also bucked national trends on teacher evaluations. Spurred by federal incentives, the vast majority of states require student test scores to be a part of teacher evaluations, as of last year¹. California was one of just five states that put no such condition on teacher performance ratings².

Meanwhile, a rogue group of several large districts in California promised to evaluate teachers based in part on student achievement and build more robust data systems. This led the federal government to award those California outliers a waiver from No Child Left Behind, a move opposed by Torlakson and the state teachers unions.

The state teachers unions have generally backed Brown’s approach on testing and accountability.

“We have a good relationship with the governor,” said Joshua Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers, the smaller of the two statewide teachers unions. “I think the governor is in step with us in terms of his view on the overuse of testing.”

The larger, 325,000-member California Teachers Association (CTA) has supported Brown’s gubernatorial campaigns, endorsing him in 2010 and 2014, and backing him with over $6 million in independent contributions in his 2010 election. A CTA spokesperson declined to comment.

But Brown is not easily categorized. Like Duncan, he has generally embraced charter schools, which in some ways epitomize his view of expanding local autonomy and innovation, but are viewed negatively by many teachers unions.

Brown started two of his own charter schools in Oakland, as mayor, even writing a commentary about them for the journal Education Next. As governor he vetoed a union-backed bill that would have been banned for-profit charter operators.

More equitable funding but absent transparency

While opposing Washington’s data-driven reforms, Brown also set about pushing his own proactive education agenda: reworking school funding so that districts had more flexibility over how money is spent, with extra resources going to higher-needs students.

That was the goal behind his Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, passed in 2013, which based school finance on students’ level of need and reduced restrictions on how state resources can be used. Brown also led the push for a successful state ballot initiative to raise education funding. (California has long lagged behind other states in spending per student, but has made progress in recent years under Brown.)

This was lauded by many, including some who have been critical of Brown’s approach to data.

“[LCFF] represented a massive equity investment — we were talking about actually making sure that the resources were generated [for] high-needs kids,” said Samantha Tran of Children Now, a nonprofit advocacy group in California.

But ensuring state money reaches and genuinely helps its intended target has proved challenging. A series of reports by groups that backed LCFF say it’s unclear how districts are spending state dollars and that the fiscal data hasn’t been transparent.

After complaints from advocates, the state recently ruled that the Los Angeles Unified School District had defied spending rules and would need to redirect hundreds of millions of dollars to its most disadvantaged students. It then granted the district a one-year reprieve.

“Districts are not fulfilling the transparency requirements of how they are increasing and improving services to high-needs students,” said John Affeldt, of the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates, which produced one of the studies.

(Read The 74’s Conor Williams on how California districts used money meant for needy kids on across-the-board teacher pay hikes and hiring assistant principals)

And the documents for spending, called Local Control and Accountability Plan or LCAPs, often run hundreds of pages, morphing into the very same bureaucratic, compliance-driven exercises that Brown said plagued top-down accountability systems.

“The plans just became really cumbersome, so it’s hard for anybody to understand; it’s not a transparent plan,” said Peter Birdsall, executive director of the California County Superintendents, whose members review districts’ LCAPs.

A request for comment from Brown’s office was directed to the state Board of Education. Julie White, the board’s director of the communications, wrote in an email that efforts are underway to revise the LCAP template in order to “maximize transparency and ease of use for stakeholders; simplify structure and language; provide clear instructions; and support efficient and effective local planning, reporting, and implementation processes.”

Birdsall said the challenges don’t overshadow the benefits of the new funding system: “Given the amount of time we’ve had to implement [LCFF]… I think it’s gone very well.”

Still others worry that the new system is too light on accountability “To me, the ‘A’ in ‘LCAP’ … is more or less fictitious,” said Morgan Polikoff, a USC professor and member of a recent state accountability task force.

The system is still in flux, as the state is developing the rubrics for judging whether districts have met their performance goals, while also designing a school-level accountability system to comply with ESSA, and trying to ensure the system as a whole is coherent.

Under current law, there is a mechanism for California to intervene in districts that fail to meet performance goals for certain student groups in three out of four consecutive years.

Such interventions would be at the discretion of the state superintendent and Board of Education and could not supersede union-negotiated contracts. The state rubrics for judging district-level progress will be finalized later this year, so it will still be several years before a district could face mandated state intervention.

California has also created a new agency called the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence to continuously “provide advice and assistance” to districts.

Brown says “busybodies”; other say “accountability”

In Brown’s telling, teachers and schools have been descended upon by an army of “little busybodies to run down the halls and chide the teachers,” he told CALmatters, dispatched from Sacramento or, worse, D.C.

Larry Ferlazzo, a high school teacher in Sacramento and popular education blogger, said “without a doubt” he agreed with that perspective.

“For too long and in too many places, decisions about education policy have been made without teachers being key players in that, and under Gov. Brown and Superintendent Torlakson, they’ve really changed that,” he said.

California has avoided the fierce backlash to the Common Core standards that many states faced. While New York, for instance, has seen opposition from teachers and high testing opt-out rates, California has experienced virtually no opt-out movement and solid support from teachers for Common Core. Hitting pause on school and teacher accountability likely had something to do with that.

As Louis Freedberg, executive director for the California news site EdSource, put it, “California can focus its energies and resources on trying to make sure the Common Core standards deliver on their promises, rather than trying to defend them against attacks from unhappy parents, teachers and lawmakers.”

But some say that the state has gone too long without a system for evaluating schools.

Marshall Tuck, who narrowly lost a 2014 race for state schools superintendent, said he agreed with the initial break on accountability during the transition to Common Core, but that moment had passed.

“This will be our third year where we’ll have no accountability system on the Common Core test … I think it’s too long a period of time,” said Tuck, who said he’ll “most likely” run for superintendent again in 2018.

Shirley Weber, a state assemblywoman from San Diego, said, “Every system needs to have ongoing accountability — there should never be a pause in accountability.”

Ryan Smith, head of Education Trust – West, a California-based education and civil rights group, said the state can’t wait much longer for a meaningful way to hold schools accountable.

“I understand that these things take time, but I think we have a hard time telling parents and community members that … there’s no accountability for three to five years. That is the span of a student going into middle school and graduating high school.”

Delmont and I recently discussed the past, present and possible future of integration; whether he’s optimistic or pessimistic about the prospect of undoing decades of segregation; the problem with neighborhood schools; the role charter schools play in the whole debate; and what specific steps he would recommend to integrate America’s classrooms.

The interview is lightly edited for clarity and length. (Updated April 25) 

Matt Barnum: Let me start by asking you to concisely explain the thesis of your book. Why did busing fail?

Matt Delmont: The thesis of the book is that busing failed because parents, politicians, judges, and the media privileged the perspective of white people over the constitutional rights of black students.

To expand on that, we have traditionally started the story by looking at Boston in the 1970s.  That’s a problem for a couple reasons. The story really starts two decades earlier. It starts in New York. If we understand the kind of resistance to busing, before busing was even being discussed as a meaningful integration strategy, we can understand that the resistance preceded court-ordered busing by over a decade. That forces us to re-evaluate what we mean when we say that busing failed. In fact, busing really wasn’t tried as a major strategy, but it engendered a tremendous amount of resistance. That’s what I was trying to capture in the book — the fact that people in many cases made up their mind about busing before the data was in on how it actually worked as a policy. 

You’re saying that busing failed as a political matter, but it didn’t fail as an educational matter?

Exactly. A lot of the scholarship that’s come out once they had a chance to study what was going on in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s — most of the case studies that came out of that showed busing and school integration actually had a positive impact on students of color and didn’t have a negative impact on the white students who were being integrated. But those studies received a fraction of the publicity that attacks on busing did. As an actual strategy it worked well in places that were willing to stick with it for a while or that were forced to stick with it for a while. But as a political matter, the issue lost the public relations campaign before it even got off the ground. Just a couple years after the Brown v. Board decision, white parents and politicians were already out in the streets lobbying against busing before there was even a pro-busing side of which to speak. As a political debate, it was almost doomed from the start, but as an educational matter the research that’s come out has shown that it actually succeeded in places that gave it a chance.

To my knowledge every empirical study has found that integration increases achievement among students of color. But you’re essentially saying that it was too late and the media didn’t care — they had moved on to something else to a large extent.

Exactly. I think it was very hard after Boston for the average American to look at busing with fresh eyes because they had already made up their mind about busing. By that point, there had already been almost two decades of protests that had received a lot of coverage in the media. Sometimes we like to think about these policy issues as being reasoned, rational debate. In this case, it just wasn’t the case. It was largely emotion-driven, it was largely driven by people who were against school desegregation, who had really powerful sound bytes, and really powerful ways of framing the debate. It’s that framing of the debate that ended up determining the issue more so than the empirical evidence.

You talk a little bit about busing being used as a code word or a euphemism. Can you explain that?

I think it’s partly how we talk about the history of race in the North and partly how people in the North resisted school desegregation. Whereas in the South the system of school segregation there was more explicit, in the North, it was always more subtle. They would talk about school zoning or they would talk about de facto segregation, that somehow was innocent, that just followed innocent housing policies or private choices. “Busing” flowed naturally out of that.

The first example I have in the book, of parents using that language of busing, is protests in 1957, where you have New York’s school board talking about sending a small number of black and Puerto Rican students from overcrowded schools in minority neighborhoods to predominantly white schools. It’s at that point that parents start marching with placards. I think one of them says, “Busing creates fussing.”

They start using that language of busing, but what they’re protesting is the idea of black and Puerto Rican students coming into formerly all-white schools. That’s what they’re upset about. They’re upset about students of color coming into their schools, but they don’t say that explicitly. They say ‘Busing is the problem’ even though, at that point, these are one- way busing programs. These white kids aren’t going to be bused anywhere.

It’s partly tactical on the part of the parents. They never would have said that they were racist, and they took to the language of busing as a way to make claims about what they did or did not want to happen in the same way that the language of ‘neighborhood schools’ comes out. It’s a way to talk about how you want schools to be structured without having to say we want those schools to be just for white kids and we don’t want to have black and Puerto Rican students in our schools.

I mean it’s obvious that busing is a euphemism because it couldn’t be that the means of transportation is the issue — lots of kids take buses to school every day and there aren’t protests about that!

Yeah, exactly. It’s also partly why I chose to use busing in quotes throughout the book. Busing created the modern American school system. It made it possible to consolidate high schools, it made it possible for kids to travel from small towns to bigger schools with more resources. And busing in the South was a privilege that was given to white families. You have these stories of white kids being bused past black kids who were walking to school. It only becomes an issue when it’s linked to school desegregation. Before that, busing is a benefit, it’s something that allows you to get to newer, better-resourced schools. But when it becomes linked to school desegregation, then it becomes this really powerful and hated word.

Do you think there are any analogous terms to busing in today’s education debate, where a code word is used to hide what people really mean?

I think the closest comparison is ‘neighborhood schools.’ That came out in the past and it’s still with us today. No one talked about neighborhood schools as being something to fight for until school desegregation. That language comes directly out of the school segregation debates. I think it’s still with us today because it’s powerful — it’s such a compelling statement and it fuels so many of the choices that people make with regards to where they choose to buy a home.

It continues to function as a code word because it obscures the fact that school zoning lines have always been political decisions. When we continue to talk about neighborhood schools as a primary thing that can’t be violated, it mistakes the fact that the school district lines were drawn to reflect the prerogatives of certain communities. Those choices can be made in different directions. If we prized school integration, we would draw the lines differently. When we retreat to the language of neighborhood schools, it’s about convenience and it’s about privilege for some set of parents and a lack of resources for another set of parents and students.

It seems like there’s this idea that the neighborhood lines were handed down from above or just came about through pure happenstance. Can you address that point and address what I think you are saying is a bogus distinction between de facto and de jure segregation?

Scholarship has shown in the last couple decades that the sense that residential segregation is innocent is a myth. We have data from across the 20th century talking about mortgage redlining, talking about discriminatory real estate policies. Both sets of governmental public action but also private market decisions created segregated neighborhoods and school districts that worsen that segregation by drawing zoning lines in ways that exacerbated the school segregation. In a number of these northern cases, when the schools were brought into court the judges found that they were guilty of intentional segregation — so it wasn’t that it was de facto. In Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, it was de jure.

The sense that white parents just happened to end up in white neighborhoods or that black parents just happened to end up in black neighborhoods or that Latino parents just happened to end up in Latino neighborhoods, it makes it easier to think that the kind of educational inequality that we have is OK. That it’s innocent or that nothing can be done about it, when, in fact, residential segregation is in many cases the root problem that structures school segregation. But then the schools in many cases made decisions that made that even worse. Our inability to reckon with that as a nation, and the legacies of that, makes it almost impossible to have a meaningful conversation about what other directions might be possible in terms of educational equality.

Some people talk about the problems with neighborhood schools and they’ll point to charter schools, and say charters tear down the barriers and get rid of the neighborhood lines and are therefore more amenable to integration. How do you think charter schools fit into the debate for good or for ill?

What my sense is from the scholarship I’m familiar with is that charter schools can be a cause for good or ill in this debate. They can be a cause for good if they make part of their mission to have integrated classrooms on the basis of race and socioeconomic status. They have the ability to restructure the traditional relationship between housing location and educational opportunity in a way that’s very different for traditional public schools to accomplish. It functions somewhat like magnet schools did when those first came about in the ’70s and ’80s. They can do good in that sense, but I think they have to make explicit the fact that they’re not just trying to move students away from a residential location but also trying to produce more beneficial student composition with regards to race and socioeconomic status. That has to be explicit as opposed to thinking it’s going to happen accidentally or without planning.

(Related The 74: Are charter schools a cause of — or a solution to — segregation?)

Is there any reason to think that integration is more politically palatable now than it was in the ’60s or ’70s?

Let me try to answer that in two ways. My pessimistic side would say no. We often see questions along the lines of ‘Why are schools still segregated this many decades after Brown v. Board?’ But I don’t think people have sat down to reckon with why that’s the case, that generations of parents, communities, and political officials have made choices to thwart school desegregation. To the extent that we haven’t reckoned with why school desegregation failed, I don’t think that there’s any more political will to have school integration now then there was in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, or in the 1950s. I don’t think people’s attitudes have changed that much.

The other way I’d answer it, the more optimistic way: I feel like people are talking about school integration a lot more in the last couple years. The public work that comes most to mind is Nikole Hannah-Jones’ piece in This American Life. I just feel like people are taking school integration seriously as a policy issue now in a way that they haven’t 10, 15 years ago. On my optimistic side, I like to think that if people recognized that the school zoning lines and school assignment decisions and school financing decisions were choices, and that if they want to have different outcomes, they can dedicate themselves to making different choices going forward.

(Related The 74: SXSWedu eyes a future where learning is everywhere, standards do matter, and integration counts)

I’m pessimistic in the sense that I don’t think the political will is any greater than it was in the past, but I’m optimistic in the sense that if people actually do recognize that the failure of school integration wasn’t inevitable, that they can do something different in the future.

I sometimes hear it said that schools are resegregating or resegregated. Were our schools ever really desegregated?

Usually when people are talking about that they’re pointing to schools, particularly in the South, that are resegregating. One of the tragic things is that there was some movement once the courts finally forced schools to integrate, particularly in the South, in the early ’70s and ’80s. The discussion of resegregation is often talking about how those southern schools have backtracked because the court is no longer supervising and they’re not required to do mandatory integration or that just because of demographic changes they’ve backtracked.

Do you think history textbooks have done a good job educating people about busing and school desegregation efforts?

Not really, and I take responsibility for that too as a historian.

One problem with how we teach it is that the term busing comes up in the context of Boston in the 1970s, and usually there it bookends, that it’s sort of the end of the civil rights era. Either you start with Brown v. Board or Little Rock and then Boston is the downfall of that effort. That’s a problem because that story, even just in Boston, starts at least two decades earlier. It leads us to focus on the idea of crisis in Boston or the idea that the plan was flawed from the start — as opposed to understanding that Boston had intentionally segregated its school system for decades, and that’s why the busing order was even put in place.

Everyone’s familiar with the resistance in South Boston and parents throwing rocks and bricks at the buses, but it shifts the conversation towards the anger within these white communities, as opposed to the rights of the black students. It’s almost as like Boston just becomes a story of white anger, as opposed to being about black students trying to get a better education and their parents fighting for them to get a better education.

It seems like the media at the time, and maybe even now, has also been complicit in the miseducation of people on this.

Absolutely. One of the threads that I try to run through the book, and what actually drew me to the book in the first place, was thinking about how the media covered these busing battles, both in Boston and earlier in other cities. What I was surprised to find was that if you look at the television footage or read the newspaper articles and editorials, the people who are against busing get much more favorable coverage than the civil rights activists do.

The traditional story we tell of television, news media, and civil rights is that the news media played a really proactive, progressive role in forcing the nation to confront Jim Crow segregation in the South. And that’s largely a true story. The news media did bring stories from Little Rock, Selma, and Montgomery to a national audience and really forced people to deal with those.

What most people don’t realize is that when they were trying to cover stories in New York or Chicago, these newspapers and television stations were much more timid with regard to how they presented civil rights movements within their own city. They were much more favorable in their coverage of white parents who were protesting against school desegregation.

Part of that, if I was going to understand why that’s the case, is because the language that the anti-busing activists used resonated really powerfully with the news media. The anti-busing activists were able to structure their protests in ways that looked a lot like civil rights protests from just a few years earlier: lots of women and children in the marches, lots of people turned out for daytime marches, clearly marked placards that made their case for what they were lobbying for. Essentially, the news media just broadcast those images in a very similar way as they broadcast the civil rights movement in the South a few years earlier.

The other thing is that for television particularly, it’s very complicated for them to try to make sense of these educational debates that were in some cases many decades in the making. They’d have reporters and camera crews fly in for a day at most, try to get up to speed on the issue, and then they were meant to put out a two- or three-minute news clip on it. What they ended up being drawn to were the protests. They weren’t on the ground long enough to understand the legal complexities or the zoning complexities — what they could understand was that there were some angry white parents who had signs that said they were against busing. That’s what ended up on the news. I think that’s why that side dominated so much of the media coverage of it — because it made for good television.

For a lot of the newspapers, there were amazing editorials in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune that are adamantly against school integration in their cities; there just wasn’t the same kind of sense of moral urgency with regards to educational inequality in the North as there was when these same newspaper reporters were traveling to the South and reporting on places like Little Rock.

Some argue, “What’s wrong with segregated schools as long as kids are learning?” I’m wondering what you make of that and whether you think integration is a means to an end or an end in and of itself or maybe both?

I’d say maybe both. The paramount issue has always been about resources. For the parents in the time period that I’m studying, they were never interested strictly in having black kids sit next to white kids in the classroom, but they were interested in making sure that their kids went to schools that had the same kind of resources that they saw in white schools. That continues to be a paramount issue.

The scholarship I’m familiar with on what it means to have students of different socioeconomic backgrounds in the same classrooms is that it’s beneficial to students from low-income backgrounds without being detrimental to students from middle-class or upper-class backgrounds. A lot of that tracks along the lines of race as well. Even if you had complete resource equality, it still has positive benefits to have racial and socioeconomic integration within the classroom. I also think it has civil benefits — there’s something about having a sense of people’s welfare, their educational lives and futures linked in a way that’s beneficial for us as a nation.

Should the focus be on racial or socioeconomic integration or both, as a policy matter?

I would advocate for both. I know that the Century Foundation has gotten some good publicity for its recent reports on socioeconomic integration and I’m not hostile to it being a lead issue, because I think it’s pragmatic given the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Parents Involved Supreme Court case. What struck me about that particular report was I think they found that about 90 or 100 school districts have tried different voluntary measures — out of something like 13,000 school districts in the country. I think they always have to be linked. If we understand the resistance these policies have faced in the past, I don’t think there’s anyway to do an end run around people’s resistance to sending their kids to school with either students of color or low-income students. To get past 100 school districts to 500 or 1,000 or 5,000 school districts requires you to confront the legacies of why these policies have been undermined in the past and try to make a more forceful case for why they still matter.

Do you have an opinion about what integration strategies should be used today? Do you think busing should make a comeback or does your research suggest that there needs to be a different approach to be successful politically?

In terms of pragmatic/realistic strategies, I think the sort of voluntary socioeconomic plans that the Century Foundation highlighted have merit. The upside of voluntary programs obviously is that there is much more community buy-in for making them work. The downside is that I don’t think there is a huge amount of political will across the country to adopt voluntary school integration plans. The less politically realistic options are similar today to what they were in the 1960-80s (redraw school zoning lines, merge school districts, increase funding for magnet schools, school pairing, etc.). I don’t know the contemporary ed policy/planning literature as well as the history, but I imagine there are a few dozen good strategies that could be used if communities have the will and are willing to commit to them long enough to see them work.

Overall, I hope the takeaway from my research is that people will reckon with the reasons why schools are still segregated this many decades after Brown. I hope that if people recognize that school segregation was not accidental they may make different choices today, which might include a return to busing.

Elsewhere in the news this month, segregation’s devastating effects and busing’s legacy: Two of the Pulitzer Prizes awarded last week dealt directly with issues Delmont raises in “Why Busing Failed.” Boston Globe columnist Farah Stockman won for a series of columns looking at the reverberations and effects on education of that city’s ugly busing battle. Tampa Bay Times reporters were recognized for their investigation into how resegregating five neighborhood elementary schools in a mostly black section of Pinellas County, Florida destroyed their academic quality and doomed their students to failure.

See previous 74 interviews: Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, former Newark superintendent Cami Anderson, former L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson.

This story was published in partnership with The74Million.org

The overall score decreases were quite small — roughly two points in math and a single point in reading — but continued a trend of lackluster 12th-grade performance on the national test. The change in the 2015 results registered as statistically different in math compared to two years ago, but not in reading.

Researchers cautioned against reading too much into such minor shifts.

“A one point move … is not significant in the real world,” Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Monday.

Still the latest results paint a sobering picture of educational progress. Just 37 percent of students were prepared for college-level coursework in each subject, according to the test. Only 3 percent of students in reading and 6 percent in math were deemed “advanced,” a rigorous bar.

Results dropped the most for students who were already struggling. Those at the 10th percentile fell six points in reading and four points in math. Students in the top 90th percentile saw their scores go up two points in reading but drop one point in math.

“The 12th-grade NAEP results confirm the need to move swiftly to ensure that all students have access to high-quality programs that prepare them for success in higher education and the workforce,” said Massachusetts Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester in a statement. “Too many 12th-graders are unprepared for the world after high school.”

Breaking out the 12th-grade scores by race since 2005 show some small differences in trends among groups, as well as yawning and largely stagnant achievement gaps. A bright spot: Hispanic students made the biggest gains during that time, going up six points in math and four points in reading.

The NAEP is a long-running, low-stakes exam administered by the federal government to a nationally representative sample of students in grades 4, 8, and 12 to gauge educational progress over time.

The latest 12th-grade results follow similarly disappointing news on fourth- and eighth-grade exams released last year, showing scores had dropped. But unlike the fourth- and eighth-grade scores, which have generally been climbing, particularly in math, since the 1990s with the exception of last year, the overall 12th-grade results have barely moved over the past decade even as the high school graduation rate reached an all-time high of 82 percent in 2013-14.

Twelfth-grade reading scores in 2015 were just a point higher than in 2005, while math scores went up two points since then. In reading, the average score is five points lower than in 1992. (Comparable data that far back is not available in math due to a change in the test.)

“The fourth-grade gains since the ’90s have been much larger than the eighth-grade gains, and the eighth-grade gains have been larger than the 12th-grade gains — and the 12th-graders have basically been flat,” said Loveless.

Popular hypotheses for this include the idea that 12th-graders may be overloaded with tests and simply don’t take the exam seriously since it has no stakes attached. Others have suggested that the increased graduation rates have led to more struggling students staying in school, driving down scores.

Matt Chingos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has studied the phenomenon said he hasn’t found convincing evidence for any of the explanations: “The disappointing answer is we don’t know.”

Critics of policies pushed by the Obama administration and many state policymakers — such as adopting the Common Core, revamping teacher evaluation and expanding charter schools — may seize on the latest NAEP results, but researchers warn against using national test scores to judge specific policies, a practice sometimes called “misNAEPery.”

“The long and the short of it is that any stories that come out in the weeks after NAEP scores are released should be, at best, tentative and hypothesis-generating (as opposed to definitive and causal effect-claiming),” University of Southern California professor Morgan Polikoff wrote in a October 2015 blog post entitled “Friends don’t let friends misuse NAEP data.”

Footnotes:

1. There are actually two NAEP tests: the “long-term trends” assessment and the main NAEP test. The latest results come from the main NAEP.

This story was published in partnership with The74Million.org.

In Los Angeles, a leaked draft of a plan to dramatically expand charter school access in America’s second-largest school district has become a lightning rod development for advocates of traditional public schools.

The war of words intensified last week at the Huffington Post when American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten attacked LA charter expansion as “part of a coordinated national effort to decimate public schooling by rigging the system against neighborhood public schools and the students they serve.” Arguing that charter schools had a mixed track record, Weingarten said “a well-regarded Stanford University study found that charter school students were doing only slightly better in reading than students in traditional public schools, but at the same time doing slightly worse in math.”

A prominent critique of Weingarten’s essay (and her use of data) came from Macke Raymond, co-author of that same well-regarded Stanford study. Raymond took strong exception to Weingarten’s interpretation of her findings.

But for those in LA, these debates involving national figures may ultimately be less helpful than a discussion about research that focuses specifically on the performance of existing charter schools in the city. It’s these numbers that add more light than heat to the debate — at least on the West Coast.

And that research shows LA elementary and middle charter schools, which currently work with a more advantaged population of students, achieving notably higher test score growth than district schools.

So as Los Angeles wrestles with the vision of the Broad Foundation to increase the number of city charter schools, let’s take a closer look at three detailed studies of the Los Angeles charter sector:

1. Stanford: On average, LA charter schools outperform traditional public schools.

Raymond’s Stanford-based organization, CREDO, finds that overall students in Los Angeles charter schools make greater gains on standardized tests in both math and reading than students at district schools.

CREDO, which has produced the most widely cited charter studies, estimates that 48 percent of Los Angeles charters outperform the district average in reading, while 39 percent score about the same and 13 percent do worse. In math, 44 percent of charters outscore the traditional public school average, 34 percent do about the same and 22 percent do worse.

Source: CREDO

While some of the gains are modest, Los Angeles charters appear to be particularly effective in their middle school math results and for students who enrolled for multiple years. Poor Hispanic students attending charter schools did especially well, while the impact for black, white and Asian students was small.

The study used scores between 2010–2012 and showed smaller gains for charter schools in the last year of data.

Source: CREDO

The researchers make estimates by comparing charter school students to “virtual twins” — students who look similar on paper — enrolled in district schools. The method is a serious attempt to make apples-to-apples comparisons, but it’s been criticized because it’s not clear that the study can account for what researchers call “unobservable” differences between charter vs. district students, such as levels of parent involvement.1 This is a longstanding challenge in education research, though one review found that CREDO’s methods lined up with other credible approaches.

2. Berkeley: Charter middle schools produce significant achievement gains.

Another major study on Los Angeles charter schools from the University of California, Berkeley, found that between 2007 and 2011, charter elementary and middle schools were producing larger achievement gains than district schools. No differences were found at the high school level. (This contrasts with an earlier study by the same researchers between 2002 and 2008 showing that charters weren’t doing any better than the district.)

Results were particularly positive in middle school math for students who switched from a traditional public school to a charter school. The magnitude of the effects in the Berkeley study were generally in the same ballpark as the CREDO study.

Source: University of California Berkeley

Charter critics still seized on the research because it provided evidence for what many had long argued: that charters were serving a more-advantaged population of students than district schools.

The study found that charter students generally had higher baseline test scores and were somewhat less likely to be economically disadvantaged or have limited English proficiency. This was particularly so for a relatively small group of “affiliated charters,” which are unionized, district-run schools that operate with some degree of autonomy.

Source: University of California Berkeley

Study co-author Bruce Fuller said, “We are not suggesting that charter schools unfairly cherry-pick stronger students or highly committed families. However, parents with more savvy or time seem more likely to seek out stronger schools.”

Still, the larger achievement gains are not likely because charter students came from families with more money and stronger English skills, for example, since the researchers made extensive efforts to control for such differences.

The California Charter Schools Association was critical of the study for lumping in affiliated charters — which it calls “charter schools in name only” — with other independent, autonomous charter schools.

The group also raised concerns about the finding that charters serve students with higher baseline test scores since the report relied on tests conducted at the end of second grade. That means, the group argued, that one reason elementary charter school students have higher test scores is because they attended a charter that helped boost their achievement in early grades.

In an email, Fuller acknowledged that this concern — that charter school second-graders had higher test scores because the schools themselves are better not because they started school further along than their district peers — “could be true” but said that the differences in performance were fairly large and so not likely explained by the charters’ effectiveness.

3. UCLA: Students at high-performing charters more likely to score better on tests, stay in school.

Lastly, a small University of California, Los Angeles study found that students who attended high-performing charter high schools had higher test scores, were more likely to stay in school and less likely to engage in high-risk behavior including binge drinking, drug use (other than marijuana) and unprotected sex. However, the research only focused on three charter high schools — out of 20 in the city at the time — deemed high performing, so the results can’t be generalized to other charter high schools.

Research alone is not going to quiet the controversy over charter expansion in LA, but elected officials, educators, parents and other stakeholders don’t have to look much beyond their own backyard if they want relevant data to inform that debate.

Disclosure: Raymond’s research group, The 74 and LA School Report have received funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Footnotes:

1. Another concern about the study is that the authors aren’t able to find virtual twins — i.e. “matches” — for all charter school students, meaning some simply aren’t included in the study. For Los Angeles, 93 percent of students had matches. To the extent that the achievement effects for the remaining seven percent vary from the rest, the results may be biased.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org

(Photo credit: Getty Images)

The passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act and the waning of the Obama administration bring to a close federal efforts to improve teacher evaluation — a practice once widely derided for its infrequent and pro forma observations, inflated ratings and lack of consequences.

Today most states combine different measures, including classroom observations and student test data, to produce a rating that describes effectiveness. But problems with the system persist.

Research by Matt Kraft of Brown University and Allison Gilmour of Vanderbilt University confirm other evidence that in most of the country new teacher evaluation systems still rate the vast majority of teachers effective — even though uniformly high ratings in the past were part of the impetus for creating new systems.

Based on this study, the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess declared “all that time, money and passion” dedicated to teacher evaluation “haven’t delivered much.” The Shanker Institute’s Matt Di Carlo also pointed out that evaluation systems can’t be judged primarily on how many low-performing teachers they identify.

(More: The War Over Evaluating Teachers — Where It Went Wrong and How It Went Right)

Another report, “Beyond Ratings,” by Kaylan Connelly and Melissa Tooley of the New America Foundation, argues that evaluation systems need to better calibrated to enhance professional growth and development. A paper from the Aspen Institute lays out a 10-lesson “roadmap for improvement” on teacher evaluation.

Meanwhile, Georgetown University’s Thomas Toch has taken to The Washington Monthly, Education Next and The Atlantic to defend the Obama administration’s accomplishments. Toch argues that “state and local studies, teacher surveys and other evidence reveals that many of the new [teacher evaluation] systems have been much more beneficial than the union narrative would suggest.”

So, with the political fight moving to the states, what can we learn from the research debate? Here are five key lessons policymakers should consider as we head into (another) brave new world of teacher evaluation.

1) Determine why so many teachers get high ratings — and address the root causes.

Kraft and Gilmour’s study not only documents the high marks teachers in many states are earning but also asks principals in one district why they tend to grade teachers on a generous curve. What they find is revealing: Principals say they are worried about finding better teachers to replace low-performers, don’t like telling teachers they’re not doing well, fear that a low rating will damage a teacher’s morale, lack time to remediate and are daunted by difficult-to-navigate teacher dismissal processes.

The new wave of evaluation systems don’t seem to have addressed these concerns sufficiently. If districts want better-differentiated teacher ratings — important for targeting professional development and making smart personnel decisions — they need to confer with principals to ensure new programs are useful to the school leaders who will be implementing them.

2) Don’t use test scores to evaluate every teacher in every grade and subject.

Under Obama, states were strongly incentivized by the federal government to use test scores in teacher evaluation; the vast majority of states now do.

The problem with this approach was that while every state tests students in grades 3 through 8 in reading and math, there were few standardized assessments in other grades and subjects. Consequently, new tests — of generally unknown reliability or validity — materialized around the country for rating physical education, social studies and first-grade teachers, among others. In some areas teacher ratings have been based on school averages or on test scores in subjects the teacher didn’t teach — prompting confusion, outrage and multiple lawsuits.

Using test scores for all teachers was poor policy and proved to be even worse politics for reformers — it exacerbated the anti-testing backlash and contributed to the rollback of federal power in new education law. That, in turn, has led many state policymakers to try to reduce or remove student growth from teacher evaluation systems.

There is a simple solution to the problem of overtesting and unfair attribution of test score: Evaluate teachers by test scores only if there is a valid test to do so — one that rigorously isolates a teacher’s impact on student growth. Hastily creating new assessments is usually unwise.

3) Take the professional growth aspect of teacher evaluation seriously — systematize it.

The New America report says, “For the most part, states have prioritized getting evaluation systems up and running and are only beginning to think about using them to promote ongoing teacher learning and growth.”

The research has not yet clearly identified how to use teacher evaluation systems as a tool for improving teacher practice. However, there is encouraging new evidence that when highly rated teachers work with poorer performers the latter group improves.

Another study found that Chicago’s teacher evaluation pilot, which provided extensive training for principals to revamp how they observed teachers, had a positive impact on student achievement in its first year (but not in its second when it expanded but received less budgetary and central office support for school leaders).

While there’s still a lot we need to learn, it’s clear that states and districts should create systems to help struggling teachers improve, provide support and training for evaluators, and not expect to get this done on the cheap.

4) Don’t rely on models that leave no room for principal discretion.

Most states have systems that assign a fixed value to each part of the evaluation.¹ For example, 50 percent might be based on principal observations, 35 percent on student test scores and 15 percent on student surveys. Sum the separate scores and out pops a rating.

It’s not obvious that this is the best way to do things. It constrains the principal’s judgment and discretion: she may believe a component of the evaluation to be misleading, for instance, but can do nothing to adjust it.

Some may argue that a mechanical model provides needed principal-proofing, but there is research suggesting that principals typically make smart personnel decisions. Given their accountability for school performance, it’s worth experimenting with less rigid systems that engender rather than diminish principal autonomy.

5) Pay attention to how evaluation affects the teacher labor market.

Many pundits suggest that tougher accountability and evaluation systems have contributed to what some see as a nationwide teacher shortage. There is zero empirical evidence to support this claim, to my knowledge.

However, it is certainly possible that recent evaluation systems have made teaching less appealing in some circumstances — high-poverty schools, for instance, which already often struggle to recruit and retain teachers in part because of poor working conditions. Teachers in these schools are generally at greater risk of being identified as low-performing, and potentially fired, under new evaluation systems. Making the teaching profession riskier, in perception or reality, may make it less appealing.

Some lessons may be drawn from Washington, D.C., which has been among the most aggressive in identifying and dismissing struggling teachers in disadvantaged schools. Researchers have found that the district has been able to replace poor performers with better ones, perhaps in part because of high salaries differentiated by performance and school population. D.C. public schools have also developed performance screens when hiring that seem to be helpful in determining who will be effective in the classroom.

Districts with aggressive evaluation systems that generate more teacher dismissals should pay particular attention to this issue, and ought to consider pairing evaluation reform with higher salaries or other efforts to make the job more appealing.

Footnotes:

1. A handful of states use a ‘’matrix’’ model in which scores on two dimensions are combined to create a summative rating. This is essentially a cruder version of a percentage-based system.

This story was published in partnership with The74million.org.

(Photo credit: Getty Images)

School security officers outnumber counselors in four out of the 10 largest public school districts in the country — including three of the top five — according to data obtained by The 74.

New York City, Chicago, Miami-Dade County and Houston schools all employ more security staff than counselors. New York City, Chicago and Miami-Dade are all among the nation’s five biggest school districts.

Not one of the top 10 districts, where counselors may be particularly beneficial for low-income students, meets the American School Counselor Association’s recommendation of one counselor for every 250 students — most weren’t even close. The nearest to the standard was Hawaii with 274 students for every counselor.

Los Angeles Unified, which has the largest school police department in the nation for K-12 schools, has less than one security staffer for each 1,000 students and one counselor for every 824 students.

“To give a ratio of our total police force numbers can be misleading,” said Steven Zipperman, LA Unified’s chief of police. “We have a 24/7 police protection” that goes beyond school yards and school hours to include detectives and officers assigned to asset protection and specialized units.

The 74’s analysis comes as the debate over school safety, classroom violence and the school-to-prison pipeline continues to dominate national headlines and inform federal policy.

“I’m not surprised, but it still concerns me really deeply,” Dennis Parker, director of the ACLU’s racial justice programs, said of the officer-to-counselor ratios. “It reflects an approach to school discipline and school safety that is ultimately counterproductive.”

The ACLU has called attention to federal data showing that public schools disproportionately discipline students of color — especially black males — and disabled students. Students subjected to harsh discipline are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.

The school-to-prison pipeline “has nothing to do with police officers being on campus,” Zipperman said. What’s needed is “understanding the reasons why we’re there. In most cases our officers are there to be part of a team, to coach, mentor and keep [students] safe. Our job is not to arrest them but to keep them safe and keep intruders out.”

Zipperman said LA Unified’s force, which includes 400 sworn police officers of all ranks, has not increased since the 2012-13 and 2013-14 school years, when officers were added to catch up with the last district build-out of bond-funded new schools.

His officers patrol all district high schools, numbering about 90, and about a third of all middle schools. Independent charters are not included unless they are co-located with district schools or contract with LA Unified. The four charter high schools that contract with LA Unified police are Palisades Charter, El Camino Real Charter, Granada Hills Charter and Birmingham Community Charter.

“I don’t know if there is a correlation right now between police officers and restorative justice,” a new district discipline policy, Zipperman said. But he pointed to the district’s “very successful” diversion program, begun in 2014. “Many who would have gotten a citation are now in the diversion program,” he said, adding, “We have done a lot of collaborating with [social justice programs] to get to the root of problems,” including the Community Rights Campaign and Dignity in Schools Campaign.

(More at LA School Report: Restorative justice program drastically lowers days lost to suspensions in LAUSD)

Counselor Cory Notestine works in Colorado Springs School District 11 and was named school counselor of the year by the American School Counselor Association for 2015-16. “I do find it alarming that we would have more resource officers in [some] schools than we would have school counselors,” he said.

Mike Petrilli of the conservative Fordham Institute, who has generally been skeptical of efforts to limit tough discipline, said, “We’ve got to be really careful about drawing conclusions from these data. [But] I certainly think that these data raise an important question, that they demand further investigation.”

School counselors’ roles vary depending on where they work, but often focus on helping students deal with academic, behavior, and social issues. High school counselors play a key role in helping students get into college.

School security can range from uniformed personnel employed by the district to maintain school safety to armed police officers who can make arrests. Los Angeles Unified has its own police force, as does Houston. Other districts, like Hawaii, have no police presence in its schools, employing only safety personnel.

SCHOOL CLIMATE CHANGE

New York City and Hawaii have high numbers of both security staff and counselors; while Houston and Los Angeles have low numbers of both. New York City added 250 counselors in the last two years and is planning to add more, according to the Department of Education.

“Our goal is to provide a safe, respectful and supportive environment for students to thrive academically and socially. We are working across city agencies, including NYPD and FDNY, to ensure the safety and security of students and staff,” Toya Holness, a DOE spokesperson, said of New York’s security-to-counselors ratio.

The recent public debate in New York City has veered between safety concerns and criticism of harsh discipline, with three reports in the past two weeks of students bringing guns to school and a related battle ensuing over whether city charter schools suspend students too freely. Charter schools are public schools but their enrollment numbers were not used in The 74’s calculation of staff per pupil because they are independently run, including hiring their own staff¹. In some instances, such as when they are in the same building, charters and traditional public schools can share security.

(More at The 74: Confronting too many cops in the classroom)

The national average of school counselors per students as of 2013-14 was about 2 counselors per 1,000 students and six of the top 10 districts — New York City, Chicago, Clark County, Miami-Dade, Hillsborough County and Hawaii — did beat that.

A spokesperson for the Houston Independent School District, where it seems a student is more likely to encounter a cop in the hallway than a counselor, said the district is committed to making sure “every child has access to counseling services.” That could be through a school-based counselor or the district’s partnerships with Texas Children’s Hospital and the Memorial Hermann healthcare network. The district also pointed out that while the school system’s police department are Houston ISD’s “law enforcement agency, they’re also taking on the role of mentoring and supporting students.”

Miami-Dade employs more than six security staffers for every 1,000 students, though about 40 percent are part time. New York City employs more than five security personnel for every 1,000 students and Chicago over four.

Nevada’s Clark County has the most counselors per security staff at a ratio of 4-to-1, while Miami-Dade has the lowest, at about 0.4 counselors for each security personnel.

There was significant variation from district to district for both sets of numbers, but it was much wider for security staff than counselors. That suggests districts have a good deal of discretion when deciding how much they want to spend attempting to maintain order, prevent crimes or respond to in-school incidents.

David Osher, a vice president of the American Institute of Research has studied issues that affect what’s called “school climate,” a broad term that encompasses everything from how safe a school feels to how well students relate to the adults to how high teachers set expectations for learning. He said he found it “troubling” that districts might employ more security staff than counselors. Osher emphasized that what matters isn’t necessarily the titles that different adults in schools have, but whether they played a positive role in strengthening school climate.

The records requested by The 74 did not include social workers or psychologists, who may also help students who are struggling academically or emotionally.

However, in Chicago, New York, and Houston, three districts that provided the number of social workers, even adding them in did not alter the big picture. Each still employed more security staff than school counselors and social workers combined.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT: SECURITY VS. COUNSELORS 

There has been increased attention in recent years to the idea that schools contribute to over-incarceration, particularly among students of color. Viral videos of police officers assaulting students in schools has brought anger and outrage over cops using excessive force in classrooms.

“I don’t think schools are an oasis from the racial problems that affect the rest of society,” said Parker of the ACLU.

Students of color make up the majority of all 10 of the largest school districts. Federal data show that black students in particular are significantly more likely to receive harsh discipline, including out-of-school suspension and expulsion, particularly from white teachers. National data also reveal that schools with high proportions of students of color are significantly more likely to have security personnel.

Parker said that adding security to schools has led to some normal school infractions, like dress code violations, being handled by law enforcement rather than school staff. That can result in a student being arrested and having to appear in court.

Many school security officers receive minimal or inadequate training, particularly in dealing with special education students. As previously reported by The 74, the majority of states have no specific laws mandating that officers deployed to classrooms receive special training in dealing with children.

(More at The 74: Why so many school cops are unprepared for the classroom)

Parker argues that investing in reactive methods over proactive ones is a mistake.

“If there were more emphasis on preventing problems rather than dealing with them when they happen, schools would ultimately be safer and students performance would be better,” he said.

One study found that even after controlling for poverty levels, schools with more resource officers had higher arrest rates for the subjective offense of “disorderly conduct.” However, the same study showed that arrest rates for assault and weapons charges actually dropped with security staff present.

Many districts across the country — including New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago — are working to reduce punitive discipline in schools, including suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, fearing that those punishments contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Critics have argued that such efforts can make schools less safe and learning more challenging. But it’s not clear that there is any evidence, beyond anecdotes, to support these claims. Little, if any rigorous research, links an increase in school security to improvements in school climate. It’s difficult to know what value security staff bring to schools and what the appropriate level of staffing might be.

Some see their role as vital to protecting order in schools. In a March 2015 article in the Houston Chronicle examining how many times school police used force on students, the head of the teachers union said district police were “critical in protecting classroom teachers from violent attacks by students.”

“There are situations, especially in high school, where the use of force becomes necessary,” said Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. “What we find with Houston ISD officers is generally they can reason with the kids. If they use force, they’ve been pushed.”

Meanwhile, research has generally found that school counselors have a positive effect on students, including increased achievement, and decreased discipline incidents, particularly for low-income students of color.

Notestine, the school counselor of the year, said, “The benefit of school counselors is that they’re at the front lines of identifying student issues, whether that be a behavioral issue, an academic issue, or even social emotional issues around mental health.”

Counselors may be particularly valuable in large urban districts — like the top 10 — where the enrollment is heavily low income, and the need may be greater. A lack of counselors may leave students struggling, without professional support, to deal with out-of-school challenges that affect learning or to navigate complex and unfamiliar college admissions processes.

Osher agreed with the ACLU’s Parker that schools should emphasize strategies to avert discipline issues rather than those that deal with them after the fact.

“The best way of preventing violence … is by creating an environment that is rich in supports for students,” he said. “Counselors play a really important role in that.”

Disclosure: In reporter Matt Barnum’s previous job at Educators for Excellence — New York, he worked with teachers to advocate for less punitive discipline practices in New York City schools.

BY THE NUMBERS

Note: Enrollment numbers do not include students who attend charter schools, except Houston where charter school enrollment could not be broken out.

Los Angeles Unified School District
Counselors: 658 counselors (Source: spokesperson)
Security: 526, including 400 sworn police officers and 126 non-sworn school safety officers³ (Source: spokesperson)
Students: 542,433 (Source: spokesperson)

New York City Department of Education
Counselors: 2,850, including 2,742 full-time and 108 part-time (Source: publicly available)
Social workers: 1,193, including 1,170 full time and 23 part time (Source: publicly available)
Security: 5,200, including 5,000 school safety agents and 200 uniformed NYPD police officers (Source: publicly available ²)
Students: 984,130 (Source: publicly available)

Chicago Public Schools
Counselors: 733 school counselors (Source: publicly available)
Security: 1,416 security staff (Source: publicly available)
Social workers: 323 school social workers (Source: publicly available)
Students: 336,138 (Source: publicly available)

Clark County (Nevada) School District
Counselors: 659 counselors, including 207 elementary school counselors, 150 middle school counselors, and 302 high school counselors (Source: spokesperson)
Security: 163 police officers (Source: spokesperson)
Students: 320,400 (Source: publicly available)

Miami-Dade (Florida) County Public Schools
Counselors: 743 counselors, including 663 full time and 80 part time (Source: public records request)
Security: 1,839, including 189 police officers, 920 full-time security monitors/specialists, and 730 part-time security monitors/specialists (Source: public records request)
Students: 290,902⁴ (Source: publicly available)

Broward County (Florida) Public Schools
Counselors: 409 counselors (Source: spokesperson)
Security: 125, including 109 school resource officers and 16 sworn police officers (Source: spokesperson)
Students: 225,554 (Source: publicly available)

Houston Independent School District
Counselors: 167 counselors (Source: spokesperson)
Social workers: 32 social workers (Source: spokesperson)
Security staff: 250, including 210 classified police officers and 40 security guards (Source: spokesperson)
Students: 215,157 (Source: publicly available)

Hillsborough County (Florida) Public Schools
Counselors: 445 counselors (Source: public records request)
Security staff: 220, including 29 Tampa Police Department Officers, 68 Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Officers, and 123 armed school security (Source: public records request)
Students: 194,317 (Source: spokesperson)

Orange County (Florida) Public Schools
Counselors: 336 counselors (Source: public records request)
Security staff: 118, including five police and 113 school resource officers (Source: public records request)
Students: 187,254 (Source: publicly available)

Hawaii Public Schools
Counselors: 621 counselors (Source: spokesperson)
Security staff: 287, including 275 school security attendants and 12 school safety and security officers (Source: spokesperson)
Students: 169,987 (Source: publicly available)

About the data

The data come with a number of important caveats, and should be interpreted carefully.

Districts may have different standards for what counts as security staff. The 74 requested records showing the number of police officers and school resource officers or school safety agents⁵. Districts may also have different proportions of part-time staff, which are generally not broken out in these data. In Miami-Dade, for instance, about 40 percent of personnel were part time.

In some districts, like New York City, school-based security are part of the New York City Police Department; other districts have both police and school safety staff. The numbers reported here are the total of police officers and security staff.

The data was collected over the course of several months, in late 2015 and early 2016, so it’s possible that some of the numbers have changed slightly since they were received. This also applies to student enrollment data that was used to calculate the number of staff per student. It is unlikely, though, that any of the data has changed dramatically.

Footnotes:

1. Charter school enrollment could not be broken out for Houston. (return to story)

2. This estimate is based the New York City Police Department’s website which states that there are “over 5,000 school safety agents and more than 200 uniformed police officers” in the city’s public schools. Efforts by The 74 to obtain precise numbers have not been successful to date. Spokespeople for the city Department of Education and New York City Police Department said they were not able to provide that information. A response to a public records request directed at the Department of Education stated that since security staff were employed by the police department, it could not provide the number of security staff in schools. A January public records request to the New York City Police Department has not been filled. The most recent response, dated February 18, stated, “Before a determination can be rendered further review is necessary to assess the applicability of exemptions.” (return to story)

3. 34 civilian support staff to the security office were not included in this count. (return to story)

4. This number was calculated by subtracting the district’s charter school enrollment (58,966) from the district’s total enrollment (349,868). (return to story)

5. Different districts often have different names to refer to school-based security staff. (return to story)

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org. 

As educators from around the state head to Long Beach next week for the 23rd annual California Charter Schools Conference, California is holding steady in its friendliness to charter schools, says a January report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), a pro-charter advocacy group that releases an annual study of state-level policies.

The survey ranked 43 charter laws — the 42 states that allow charter schools plus the District of Columbia — in regards to how successfully they encourage charter expansion, autonomy and accountability. As has been the case in recent years, California ranked near the top of the list.

Five takeaways — and one important caveat — from the report on the state of California’s charter schools:

1. California has held steady, remaining slightly above average in its friendliness to charter schools.

NAPCS ranks California’s charter laws as 15th friendliest in the nation. This represents a slight decline from 2015 when the state was ranked 11th, but the report is quick to point out that the slide came from other states gaining ground, not because California’s laws have become less supportive of charters.

2. One in 12 students in California attend charter schools.

About 8 percent of California students now attend charter schools — above the national mark of 5.8 percent. As of the 2014-2015 school year, the state has nearly 1,200 charter schools operating today, by far the most in the country — though this statistic is mostly a reflection of California’s large population.

3. California has a cap on charter schools, but it’s not restricting growth.

NAPCS opposes state caps on the number of charter schools, and thus gives full points to states with no such limitations. California gets substantial credit, however, because although it does have a cap, charters still have “ample room to grow.” Specifically, California began with a charter cap of 250 in 1998, but by statute the ceiling increases by 100 schools each year. The current limit is 1,950 charter schools; there are just under 1,200 schools operating in California presently. The number of charters is California has more than quadrupled since 1999.

4. California gets extra points for allowing virtual charters — but that might not be a good thing.

NAPCS awards points to states that allow a “variety” of charter schools, including start-ups, conversions — in which a district school is turned over to a charter operator — and online schools, in which students receive some or all of their instruction via computer.

But according to a recent study, online charter schools do much worse than traditional public schools, and California’s virtual schools are no exception (the results were particularly bad for student achievement in reading). According to data from 2009-2010, about one in five California charters were virtual schools.

5. California does not require charter teachers to participate in collective bargaining agreements.

NAPCS credits states for not requiring that charter school teachers be unionized and participate in collective bargaining. In 2009-2010, only about 15% of California charter schools were unionized. Recent controversy has erupted as L.A.’s Alliance College-Ready Public Schools chain has aggressively fought efforts to unionize its teaching staff. Research has found that when some California charter schools unionized, student achievement was largely unaffected.

Caveat: These rankings don’t seem to say anything about student achievement.

One important thing to remember about the NAPCS rankings: Just because a state scores well (or poorly) doesn’t say much about the quality of the state’s charter sector, as measured by student achievement. There just doesn’t seem to be a correlation between the two.

For instance, Rhode Island received poor marks from NAPCS, but its charters perform extremely well relative to traditional public schools, according to one study. On the other hand, Indiana was ranked No. 1 as having the best laws in the nation, but charter schools there only slightly outperform district schools.

California charter schools, despite getting relatively strong ratings from NAPCS, perform slightly better in reading and slightly worse in math than traditional public schools.

Earlier research suggests that “permissibility” in charter law — how easy it is to get a charter started and authorized — is negatively related to student achievement. On the other hand, charter autonomy — the degree to which existing charters are free from certain regulations — is positively associated with achievement.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org. 

The researchers — Joseph Robinson-Cimpian of the University of Illinois and Karen Thompson of Oregon State — examined the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) where California’s English-language proficiency exam became more difficult in 2007, making it harder for students who were considered English learners to be “reclassified” as fluent. The change meant that on average students spent more time considered English learners and receiving the support services associated with that status. The state made the test more vigorous in response to educators’ concerns that students learning English were being reclassified too soon.

The authors found that high school students who narrowly passed the old test and stopped receiving the language services — such as courses specifically designed for students learning English with teachers certified to support English learners — had lower test scores over time and were less likely to graduate, compared with those who narrowly failed the test and thus retained those services.

But when the new policy was enacted — that is, when it became harder to pass the English proficiency exam — these effects disappeared; there were no differences in outcomes for students who just hit or just missed the cut-off. The authors say that this suggests LAUSD’s new policy is preferable because it means students are less likely to stop receiving language support services before they are ready.

“From a policy perspective, the findings suggest that although reclassification can have adverse effects on students, policymakers can realign criteria to ensure more successful transitions,” the authors stated. This means that efforts to shorten the time that students learning English receive support services — for instance, a 1998 voter-passed referendum in California — should be approached with caution.

In an interview, study author Robinson-Cimpian said the he wouldn’t generalize the results beyond LAUSD, but said schools and districts should not remove English learner status before it’s clear students are ready. This might mean making it more challenging to pass the language proficiency test, as California did.

No impact on lower grades

Interestingly, the more difficult exam didn’t impact elementary or middle school students’ performance. That may be because formal classification statuses did not really affect how students were taught in the classroom, according to the authors. In most cases students remain in the same class, taught by the same teacher, even after they’re deemed proficient in English.

In comparison, high school students’ classification in some cases determines which courses they take.

“In high school [English learners] are often tracked into a variety of separate courses, including both [English-language development] courses and [English learner] only courses,” the authors wrote. This might explain why, in high school, the timing of when students changed statuses made a significant difference.

In a statement, Kathy Hayes and Hilda Maldonado of LAUSD’s Multilingual and Multicultural Education Department, said they weren’t surprised by the results of the study. “We fully support the idea that assessment, curricula and services provided to English learners be in alignment,” they said.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org.