The post Absenteeism Mires Recovery from Pandemic Learning Losses appeared first on Education Next.

In his new book, Beyond Standards, USC associate professor Morgan Polikoff contends that the impact of the standards movement in public education has been undermined by local educators’ failure to deliver consistent, high-quality curriculum in the nation’s classrooms. FutureEd Editorial Director Phyllis W. Jordan spoke with Polikoff, a FutureEd senior fellow, about the standards movement and how to achieve the movement’s goal of educating many more students to higher levels.

Phyllis Jordan: You start out your book declaring that the standards movement is a failure. Why do you think it failed?

Morgan Polikoff: Standards have failed to raise achievement because they haven’t been implemented. And why have standards not been implemented? First, we’re asking teachers to become experts in reading and interpreting standards, going out and identifying curriculum materials to align with those standards, and then implementing those materials in the classroom. And almost on its face, this isn’t a way that you could get standards to be implemented in any kind of consistent way. You’ve got 3 million teachers doing this laborious work of trying to interpret the standards, which are oftentimes quite confusing.

Teachers oftentimes get little or no guidance on curriculum materials from either the state or from their district. There’s very little expectation that they even use those materials. The goal of the standards movement is really to get consistent implementation. But obviously, that’s not going to happen when you’ve got millions of teachers with relatively little support and relatively little guidance going out and making these decisions independently. It’s not a path to consistent implementation of anything.

I was struck by a figure you had in your book about how many teachers are taking materials off the internet to use in their classrooms and how they’re shaping their own curricula.

Teachers in the U.S. supplement a lot. Teachers go to Google, teachers go to Pinterest. We know this. And I don’t think you can or should say to teachers, “You can’t supplement.” But we can think about ways to encourage teachers to supplement productively, in ways that support the core curriculum rather than potentially undermine it. We’ve all seen these stories, there’s one a week, about some horrifying lesson that some teacher implemented, and it’s some terribly offensive thing about slavery or something like that. And they’re invariably not from the core textbook but from some supplemental material website or even passed on from a colleague. That shouldn’t be happening.

Why is this happening?

If you talk to teachers about why they supplement, by far the most important reason is for engaging students and probably the second most important reason is for students to practice skills, especially in math. That tells me that their core materials are falling short. Their core materials, they feel, are not sufficiently engaging to their students. And that might be because they’re not culturally appropriate for their students or relevant to the kinds of students they serve, but it might be their core materials also don’t have what they feel is sufficient practice for students to develop the important procedural knowledge that they really need to get the more conceptual stuff.

What can district or state leadership do to avoid this?

What we’ve found is that you really need a clear and coherent vision. The district has to believe that core materials are important, has to build teacher buy-in for those core materials through including them in the selection process and hearing teachers’ voices when they say this is or isn’t working.

Simply put, you need clear expectations about how much teachers are going to use the materials. That doesn’t mean a script, but it does mean it’s not just, “Here’s the book and I don’t care if you use it.”

Beyond the inconsistency across the ranks of teachers, you point to the inconsistency across school districts.

Right. The people who came up with the idea of standards were right that decentralization and lack of clear guidance and lack of structural supports were major problems in American education. But then, they didn’t really try to fix that problem. We still have the 13,000 school districts, we still have, in most states, very little guidance for what kinds of materials school districts should adopt. And we still have in most districts relatively little guidance for what teachers should be doing.

Local control is part of the problem?

This decentralization issue is really at the heart of many of our challenges in education right now. The pandemic is the most recent example of the challenges of decentralization and the ways in which our sort of fealty to local control ends up burdening local actors, teachers and school district leaders and leading to sort of widely varying and idiosyncratic policy decisions that may not be in the best interests of kids.

We get results that are all over the map and results that, frankly, almost always disproportionately harm the most disadvantaged students. It also contributes very dramatically to these equity issues that we’re all so focused on right now. We need to have some serious discussions about what degree of local control is right, what the proper role is for state versus local actors—in particular for state departments of education, which is where I think most of the action should be. And the pandemic should really make us take another look at local control.

That seems like a heavy lift in the current political environment. How would you accomplish that?

There are models of states that are really trying to push on this issue. And these are not progressive lefty states. In fact, they’re states across the political spectrum—from Louisiana to Rhode Island. They’re recognizing that the state has a very important role to play in ensuring that all children have access to high-quality curricular materials.

It’s about creating clear incentives or maybe even requirements for districts to choose from among a small set of materials, and then supporting those districts and the teachers in those districts to understand and implement those materials by providing high-quality professional development or identifying providers who can deliver that professional development, and by ensuring that schools and districts are also using quality, aligned interim assessments.

What are Louisiana and Rhode Island doing that other states aren’t?

They’re creating strong incentives for districts to adopt high quality materials. They make it easier for districts to buy books that are well rated (in Louisiana they call this “Tier 1”). They identify professional development providers who are approved for those core materials. And they provide professional learning at the state level to representatives from each school or district on those core materials.

When Louisiana couldn’t find the core materials it wanted, it actually created materials. The Louisiana Guidebooks are now used by, I believe, over three quarters of districts in Louisiana. And the great thing about creating this kind of open resource is that it can be made locally relevant. And it can evolve over time. They’re actually on version 3.0 of the guidebooks. And each time they do it, they update it based on feedback from local school districts. I’m not saying I would want necessarily 50 states to go out and create 50 different core curricula, but Louisiana demonstrates that it can be done.

[Read More: Strengthening Standards, Teaching, and Testing in a Deep Red State]

Another example is New York with its Engage New York curriculum created almost a decade ago. It demonstrates that when you create a good quality core curriculum, especially in this sort of common standards era where state standards differences are relatively modest, it can actually have huge national impact. Because Engage New York is one of the most widely used set of curriculum materials nationally, even though New York is very much a local-control state and tries to stay out of what school districts are using there.

Can states force this on local districts, or is it going to have to be voluntary, given the politics of local control?

Absolutely, states can force this if they want. States are the primary funder of schools. They are the ones that are constitutionally responsible for the provision of education. Now, the politics of it are such that in most states you actually couldn’t really force. But I think that it’s well within the rights of states to say, “We expect all public school districts that rely on state dollars, the dollars that come from taxpayers, to use high quality core materials. Period.”

It’s not necessarily a red state or a blue state thing. It can be done in ways that school district leaders appreciate, that teachers appreciate, that clearly increases educational opportunity. It’s about state leaders figuring out what will work in their state, given the particular political context. Access to high-quality curriculum materials is an important equity issue.

Could states dedicate some of the Covid relief money they’re receiving to the development of high-quality core curricula?

Absolutely. And it doesn’t have to be just core subjects. Everyone is very concerned about social-emotional learning and student mental health. States should be involved in creating quality materials for those things. In California, we’’ve got 1,100 school districts. You don’t want to leave it up to 1,100 superintendents to figure out what’s the best material for social-emotional learning coming out of the pandemic. The state is very well positioned to bring together experts to identify existing materials or create new ones, and then to strongly encourage and support districts to adopt those materials.

I think the district leaders would actually appreciate having that kind of guidance and not having to make yet another decision.

Do you see any hope for a national set of standards, ala the Common Core? Did the experience with the Common Core show that’s not going to happen?

I used to have strong feelings about at what level standards should be written, and I felt that that was national. I don’t know that’s necessary at this point; states are recognizing that this is an important lever and buying into it. Do I think that the federal Department of Education should be requiring or even recommending any particular curriculum materials? Probably not. I do think that the Education Department could invest in research to help support states and districts and teachers in this effort. That’s probably the best role for the department to play.

This interview originally appeared at FutureEd.

The post Local Control Is Part of the Problem, a New Book About Education Contends appeared first on Education Next.

In his seven years as Louisiana’s state superintendent of schools, John White has introduced new academic standards, new curricula and, now, new ways to measure student success. It’s an ambitious attempt to bring school reform to the classroom, and a campaign fraught with challenges. FutureEd talked to White about the work and the lessons he’s learned about scaling instructional reform, finding the right balance between state and local control, and the value of building standardized reading tests based on what students have studied in English, social studies and other subjects.

The Common Core has been unpopular in deep red states like Louisiana yet you have set about revamping your curriculum and instruction to align with the Common Core. How have you fended off your critics?

I should say first that polling on the substance of academic standards that are comparable across state lines is actually pretty good. So I don’t accept that the idea itself is wildly unpopular. I understand that certain brands and taglines in political environments incite anxiety, but that’s really not always the same thing as substantive objection.

Insofar as the new standards were simply standards that are comparable across state lines when properly explained and when properly delivered, my experience is that the teachers and parents have been supportive.

What does that look like in Louisiana?

The notion of standards-based reform was really that it would inspire a more coherent set of academic pillars for our country’s school system. And that included the preparation of teachers in accordance with higher standards, the design and implementation of curriculum, the ongoing support of teachers, and ultimately then, accountability systems and measurement systems, including tests, that reflected those standards.

It was never meant to be simply an accountability element. It was meant to inspire action. And those other three legs of the stool—preparation, curriculum, and ongoing support—we’ve tried to make available at scale, across district lines.

How have you scaled new standards and stronger instruction statewide? That’s a tough task.

We have effected important changes in the standards across subject areas—in the way teachers are prepared, in the materials they teach, and in the way they measure student learning. But change in the daily habits, strategies, and approaches—the methods—of thousands and thousands of teachers, there are a lot of forces influencing those methods. Even now, even with strong curriculum and regular preparation supporting the curriculum, for example, we see some old instructional habits hanging out. Implementation can be messy, especially across the scale and fragmentation of an entire state. What’s important is to have a way of learning where the instructional potholes are and to address them.

What does success look like for you?

There’s a lot of evidence of teachers in Louisiana increasingly selecting curriculums and texts and organizing their lessons with high-quality instructional materials in ways that embody the standards. We’ve seen initial success in those areas. But those things are just indicators of positive movement toward a much longer-term goal, a more opportunity-rich life.

You touched on curriculum. Teachers often push back when the feel that curriculum is too prescribed.

Louisiana teachers have been very involved in creating [the state’s new] curriculum. That said, there’s always going to be a tension between coherence and autonomy in any matter of public policy and any matter of academic work at scale. A good curriculum is coherent in that it embodies the standards that it is meant to. And it is aligned with assessments that measure whether or not students have learned the material or the skills they’ve been taught. At the same time, a good curriculum doesn’t micromanage the minute-to-minute actions of teachers; it challenges them to think.

So I don’t accept the false dichotomy between coherence and autonomy. It’s important to acknowledge there’s a tension between them, and it’s important to have curricula that are coherent but that also challenge teachers to think. I do think teachers are concerned about curriculum being overly-prescribed. But at the same time, teachers do appreciate consistency across the legs of the academic stool and across classrooms and across schools and across districts. Teachers know that a curricular free-for-all, which is too often what has been the case in this country, is not helpful to them, is not helpful to their students.

Louisiana is one of the first states to take advantage of the U.S. Education Department’s innovative assessment pilot allowing more flexibility in standardized testing. Can you describe what you all are doing?

One of the foundational premises of our curriculum in middle and high school English is that knowledge is an essential component of reading comprehension. And yet, standardized tests of reading skills measure them as if knowledge is not an essential component, and that reading skills are instead generic, irrespective of whatever knowledge of books or the world a student has, when that’s simply not true.

Therefore, we have started the process of creating an assessment that is embedded within a curriculum, so that when students take reading tests, they know the social studies knowledge and the English language arts texts that will be on the tests because they’ve studied them throughout the curriculum. Our hope is that the new assessments will create an incentive for teachers to focus on the meaning of texts, to focus on building background knowledge rather than specific skills like summarizing or finding the main idea of a text, which really do not have a strong basis in evidence of assisting students in learning to read.

E.D. Hirsch would be proud. Do the new reading tests align with your Common Core-based curriculum?

The test embodies the curriculum, and the curriculum embodies state standards. At the same time, districts will have a choice as to which form of the test to take and thus as to which texts to read. There is not a mandate from the state as to which texts the district is choosing. The district has options as to which units and which texts within the curriculum they want to be tested on.

What a great way to focus schools on rigorous subject-matter knowledge. Is this real-time testing versus end-of-the-year accountability?

We will be administering it three times over the course of the year at times when units in the curriculum have concluded. The tests will be an authentic outgrowth of students’ experience with the curriculum.

For the purposes of accountability, will you look at the three tests together, will you average the scores, or is it cumulative?

The relative weighting of that is something that we’re piloting. The law gives us many years to pilot it, so that the relative weighting is going to be a matter of some discussion. At the end of the year, we’ll be piloting an open-ended question and asking students to draw on their knowledge of several texts and of the social studies and other world and cultural knowledge they’ve built.

Joel Rose of New Classrooms argues that ESSA’s requirement that students be tested on grade-level material is counterproductive, because many students lack “predecessor skills” required to do well on grade-level tests and because the grade-level tests discourage teachers from focusing on those skills students should have mastered in earlier grades. What’s your thinking?

The principle that assessment should embody what we want teachers and students to focus on is spot-on. And I think in a number of ways the accountability system that the federal law requires needs to evolve over time. For example, the federal law in a sense requires us to focus less on the primary grades and more on upper elementary grades which from my perspective does not make a lot of sense. It requires us to focus on four-year cohort graduations perhaps to the exclusion of other ways of measuring success and life trajectory.

What’s important is that we have an open conversation about the long-term future of measurement and accountability and that we be ahead of the game when the next federal authorization comes.

Do you think states weren’t ready for the latest iteration of the federal K-12 law?

If there is one criticism I would have of the policy environment and perhaps even the policymaking community and the research community related to the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, it is that when there was a call put out for other measures or new ways of thinking about measuring success, there were very few answers. That’s a problem, not because the accountability systems are wrong-headed, but because they need to evolve.

Many, including U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are now pressing for more local control in education. Where do you come down?

At any given moment in history in our system, there are times where a more robust central presence is needed and there are times when it has exhausted its utility. It’s no secret that over the last 35 years there has been a movement toward a much more centralized role. But I think it is fair to say that absent a strong local response [in the wake of ESSA], all of that energy at the federal and state levels will not end up manifesting itself.

So should we simply surrender all regulatory authority at the federal and state level and create a system entirely based on a consumer-driven model? That seems imprudent. At the same time, some of the things the secretary has said about the system needing to accommodate the will of parents are also quite accurate.

How do you try to achieve that balance at the Louisiana Department of Education? What role does your state play and what power do you give to the locals?

At its best, the state creates coherent frameworks within which locals develop solutions. And this has to be the way that central entities think about their roles going forward. Trying to get into the daily micromanaging of schools from state capitals that are hundreds of miles away makes no sense, just as it makes no sense for states to have no view at all as to what happens in classrooms.

So we create frameworks for coherent action—for local entities making decisions about resource allocation, about their own standards for selecting curricula, for evaluating educators, for prioritizing everything from childcare to industry pathways. And that’s going to look very different in rural Western Louisiana on the Texas border and in the 9th Ward of New Orleans. Therefore, our framework has to be flexible in a way that is both inspiring and ambitious for local actors.

What has that work cost and where did the money come from?

The word “cost” can mean a lot of things. But if we’re talking dollars and cents, our system will be more efficient and more productive as a result of coherent academic policies. And we have moved toward a more coherent policy framework amidst flat federal and state revenue, and amidst really significant cuts to state government’s operating funding. So in the simplest way of defining cost, we’re not spending more real revenue per student than we were when we started in this direction.

You said at a recent conference that your most difficult discussions were not with unions or school boards but with textbook publishers. Why is that?

I think the reform community has been generally very slow to recognize that the private sector has for many generations exercised significant influence over the classroom. Meaning, while reformists have been arguing about collective bargaining agreements and school board governance and state takeovers, publishers of formative assessments, curriculum providers, and professional development companies have been very, very powerful influences over teachers’ day to day lives. And when you really, really get into the mature stages of implementation, you have to address that, both the good and the bad of what private service providers are selling to school systems.

Are textbook publishers reluctant to change as you try to shift your curriculum?

One piece of good news is there are many more actors in the publishing space today than there were prior to the development of standards that are comparable across state lines. And that’s a good thing because that’s what that effort largely was designed to produce: a more transparent marketplace in which small businesses could get involved. I think that the vast majority of publishers today are on board.

I’ve sometimes been critical of the industry because I think there have been some half-hearted efforts to align to state standards. There were often times cosmetic changes made. And occasionally—I think rarely but occasionally—there were even efforts to wait out what were very difficult politics rather than getting involved and trying to help get teachers the tools they need. But that’s not really reflective of the industry broadly, and publishers by and large are stepping up.

So what advice would you give at this juncture to other states who want to ratchet up their curriculum and instructional systems?

I say all of this acknowledging that Louisiana has a long ways to go, in many respects, and has much to learn from others. But the first advice I would give is that you have to take on what is important in the classroom. And as I said earlier, our take has been that you can talk all you want about assessments and the accountability ratings systems, but it really means quite little unless it is undergirded by strong standards, strong curriculum, strong systems of preparation, strong systems of ongoing professional learning.

To a certain extent, teachers are hearing conflicting messages. They’re prepared on one system. They are given curricula on another system. Their formative assessments speak another language. And their ongoing professional development providers speak something wholly different. Of course, that’s going to be very frustrating. So my advice is to understand the multiple voices that are speaking to teachers. And to the degree that they’re contradictory and counterproductive, try to reconcile them.

— Phyllis W. Jordan

Phyllis W. Jordan is FutureEd’s editorial director.

This piece originally appeared on the FutureEd website. FutureEd is an independent, solution-oriented think tank at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Follow on Twitter at @futureedGU

The post Strengthening Standards, Teaching and Tests in a Deep Red State appeared first on Education Next.

As many as 8 million U.S. public school students struggle academically simply because they miss too much school. Recognizing this, 36 states and the District of Columbia have begun holding schools accountable for chronic student absenteeism under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

That leaves school and district leaders scrambling for proven practices to keep students coming to school every day. One smart, simple, and inexpensive strategy is using “nudges,” an approach that aims to alert parents and caregivers when attendance becomes problematic.

Todd Rogers, a Harvard University researcher, describes nudges as “unobtrusive interventions to promote desired behavior.” That means there’s no mandate to do anything and no penalty assigned—just a reminder enhanced, in some cases, with a little personal information. Richard Thaler, the University of Chicago professor who won the 2017 Nobel prize in economics for his work on nudge theory, framed it like this in his 2008 book on the concept: “Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”

Nudges have been effective at getting voters to the polls and getting homeowners to reduce energy usage. And they seem to work for improving school attendance, especially when schools tell parents how many absences their students have accrued.

This approach works, in part, because many parents are clueless about how many days their children have missed. When Rogers and his team surveyed families, parents estimated that their children had missed about nine days of schools in the previous year. In fact, they had all missed at least 17.8 days, right at the 18-day threshold for chronic absenteeism. Most didn’t think their child had missed any more time than other students.

Eighteen days may sound like a lot, but it’s just two days a month in a school year, and that can add up pretty quickly. Parents also tend to fixate on unexcused absences, without considering the lost instructional time that comes when a child is sick or out of school for a family occasion.

Working in Philadelphia, Rogers and Avi Feller sent five postcards to the families of more than 40,300 high-risk students throughout the 2014-15 school year. One group received a message about the value of good attendance. A second set received a card telling them how many days their children had missed so far. And a third set got a breakdown of how their children’s attendance compared to that of classmates.

The researchers found the third approach, comparing classmates, was most effective: It reduced total absences by 6 percent and the share of student who were chronically absent by 11 percent, when compared to similar students not involved in the study. Postcards providing just the number of absences were almost as effective. To be sure, the nudges didn’t result in huge gains. A control group who received no postcards missed an average of 17 days, compared to 15.9 days for those receiving the classroom comparisons.

But attendance did improve, the intervention worked in both elementary and secondary schools, and it’s cheap and eminently scalable. Rogers and Feller estimate that the mailers cost $6 for every day of added attendance. They compare that to a mentoring experimenting in Chicago, which they estimated at $500 for every added day.

In West Virginia, a pair of researchers used a different, and highly successful, median for the message: texting. Targeting 22 middle and high schools, Peter Bergman and Eric Chen of Teachers College, Columbia University, connected school information systems with teachers’ electronic grade books. They then send weekly alerts detailing any missed assignments and absences—for each class, not just whole-day absences. If a student had a grade below 70, parents received a monthly update. Researchers estimate that every family in the study was contacted an average 52 times over the year.

The results: Course failures dropped by 38 percent and class attendance increased by 17 percent among the students whose families got the texts, compared to similar students. Researchers didn’t see much impact on standardized test scores but found improvements on classroom tests and exams.

In Pittsburgh, researchers connected with families of younger students with a more personal approach to texting. It resulted in a more personal response. The pilot program, led by Kenneth Smythe-Leistico and Lindsay C. Page,focused on 45 students in two kindergarten classes at a school. Working with an AmeriCorps worker, they prepared a text for every week. Some texts focused on the value of attendance. Some mentioned resources available. And some reached out to parents when a child was absent.

The kindergarten classrooms, which in previous years reported that more than 30 percent of children were chronically absent, saw that rate fall to 13 percent. Rather than a control group, Smythe-Leistico and Page used a synthetically constructed comparison school, which had a chronic absenteeism rate of 24 percent.

Over the school year, Pittsburgh’s pilot program morphed into something entirely different. Parents started responding to the weekly texts with requests for help. One mother needed ideas for soothing her little boy’s anxiety about going to school. Home visits and extra attention in the classroom helped solve that problem. Another had just been evicted and didn’t know how to get her daughter to school. The AmeriCorps worker connected her to community agencies, which not only found the family temporary shelter but arranged for transportation to school. That kindergartner didn’t miss a day during the difficult transition.

“I would place the work we did in Pittsburgh somewhere between ‘nudge’ work and outright support,” Smythe-Leistico said in an email.

Pittsburgh’s experience underscores the point that nudges, alone, can never be enough to solve a school’s chronic absenteeism problem. Gentle reminders can do little to change attendance patterns for a student with serious asthma or one living in a homeless shelter. They aren’t going to fix behavioral or mental health problems leading to suspensions. Those students are going to need more intensive approaches, like mentoring or wrap-around services. But nudges can help take care of some of the easier cases, leaving school officials more time and energy to focus on getting the students with the most challenges to show up every day.

— Phyllis Jordan

Phyllis W. Jordan is FutureEd’s editorial director.

This piece originally appeared on the FutureEd website. FutureEd is an independent, solution-oriented think tank at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Follow on Twitter at @futureedGU

The post Nudging Students and Families to Better Attendance appeared first on Education Next.

The Philadelphia School District’s decision in 2012 to end suspensions for minor infractions provided fertile ground for the research team of Matthew Steinberg at the University of Pennsylvania and Johanna Lacoe at Mathematica Policy Research. Their findings have proved a Rorschach test, with both sides of the fraught debate on school discipline drawing conclusions from their work. FutureEd chatted with Steinberg about the academic impact on both suspended students and their peers.

Critics and supporters of discipline reform has drawn on your research to make their own arguments. What do you think is the most important lesson we should take from your work?

First, suspending students for non-violent classroom misconduct does not benefit either the suspended students or their peers. Second, we should not expect changes in student behavior simply by removing consequences for student misconduct, such as limiting the use of suspensions. Indeed, district-level policy reforms designed to reduce the use of suspensions should be coupled with intensive school-level supports for schools struggling with the most with student misconduct.

Doing so will help address the underlying behavior that produces suspensions, providing necessary resources for school leaders and teachers to help improve the behavioral climate in these schools.

Did you find evidence linking student suspensions to weaker academic performance?

Our study finds that out-of-school suspensions have a negative effect on student achievement for students suspended for any infraction, including for non-violent or what we call classroom disorder infractions. These included using profanity or general classroom disruption. We also find that the effect on achievement is concentrated in the academic year of the suspension. We find no evidence that a suspension in the prior school year has any adverse consequence for the academic achievement of suspended students in the current year.

How do you measure that impact?

We looked at two outcomes. We looked at achievement, and then we looked at student absences or attendance. What we find specifically is suspensions for any reason are tied to lower scores in math and English language arts tests and that the negative effect increases with each additional day of suspension. The impact varies depending on the age of the student.

What about attendance?

We find some evidence that suspension has a negative effect on school attendance, particularly for younger students, grades 3 through 5. But we’re not talking about many missed days. We also find that students suspended for classroom disorder infractions are significantly more likely to receive a suspension in the subsequent school year.

You also look at how the suspensions impact peers in the classroom.

What we find is that for students in grades where there are more serious misconduct coupled with a higher rate of suspension, student achievement is lower. What we also find is that there is no strong evidence that exposure to low-level, classroom-disorder misconduct has any association with peer achievement. This again suggests that a policy where we suspend, at high rates, kids for low-level misconduct is not defensible.

How is your study different from past research?

The literature goes back 15, 20 years already, where researchers have looked at the association between receiving an out-of-school suspension and student achievement. That research has compared students in the same school who did and did not receive suspensions, and the achievement consequences. What we were able to do was compare students’ achievement to their records in other years when they weren’t as likely to be suspended.

While we find significant adverse effects on student achievement, the magnitude of this effect is substantially smaller than what has been found in prior research and suggests that student-level factors that are typically unobserved by researchers—such as student motivation, ability, etc.—are correlated with both the likelihood a student receives a suspension and a student’s academic achievement.

How can you tell that the suspensions are causing weaker performance versus the weaker performers are acting out and being suspended?

The direction of causality as you’ve identified it is always an important issue that researchers must address. What we’re doing is relying on a comparison of achievement changes within the same students. We’re basically asking, for the same student who received a suspension in one year and not in another year, how did his/her achievement differ?

You could imagine that, on average, students who receive suspensions are much lower-performing (which is what we find in Philadelphia and has been found elsewhere) than students who do not receive suspensions. But the question is, have we accounted for all the factors that may be related to both receiving a suspension and a student’s achievement trajectory so that we can isolate the effect of just receiving the suspension? And we believe we have.

We also then rely on the change in Philadelphia’s district-wide discipline policy reform beginning of the 2012-13 school year.

Let’s imagine a student misbehaved in the 2011-12 school year. That was the year before the reform. Then the student misbehaved in the same way, let’s say, using profanity in the classroom, in the 2012-13 year. The only thing that would change is that in the 12-13 year, the probability that this student would get suspended for profanity should go down.

In Philadelphia, did the discipline reform stop schools from suspending students for classroom disorder infractions?

In the 2011-12 school year, 25 percent of all suspension in Philadelphia were for either classroom disruption or the use of profanity, In the 2012-13 year, after the reform, the percentage of suspensions due to these infractions went down to 15 percent, and then 2013-14, they went down to 12 percent. So while some schools eliminated suspensions for these two forms of low-level, non-violent conduct, many schools in Philadelphia either did not comply or, in some cases, actually increased the use of these suspensions.

Why was that happening?

The schools that were not complying were, as one might expect, the schools that served the most academically and the most economically disadvantaged kids in Philadelphia.

These schools were probably overwhelmed. Just saying you’re not going to suspend these kids doesn’t make the conduct go away. You need to have an alternative. But the district did not provide any support or resources to address the underlying student behavioral issue that were leading to the high rates of suspension.

That seem like an important part of this work.

That is the part of the policy conversation that is typically ignored. Instead of focusing on whether or not we should institute a consequence for student misbehavior, we also need to address the underlying issues. Johanna and I argue that in light of the fact that suspension caused negative consequences for student achievement, we need to also think about what we can do to improve students’ behavior before it reaches the point of schools having to suspend them.

How would you suggest doing that?

One approach that comes to mind is called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support. It’s typically a school-wide intervention, and there’s experimental evidence that shows that those types of interventions do, in fact, improve student behavior. There are fewer suspensions. And as a result, schools tend to be safer.

Did this reform reduce the racial disparity we see in suspensions in Philadelphia and elsewhere?

Unfortunately, we find some worsening in the racial suspension or discipline gaps following the introduction of Philadelphia’s 2012 reform. The evidence suggests that while there was a modest decline in the use of suspensions for classroom disorder infractions among Black and Hispanic students by the end of the first year of the policy compared to White students, we actually find a commensurate increase in suspension days for more serious offenses.

As a result, on balance, we find a slight increase of about 0.08 days per student, or about 8 additional days of suspension for every 100, for Black students relative to White students.

That’s discouraging. How did that happen?

This evidence suggests the possibility—though, again, we don’t have direct evidence—that some schools may have re-labeled student misconduct among Black and Hispanic students from classroom disorder infractions to more serious infractions so that they could actually use suspensions as a behavioral consequence.

Is the school district aware of this? Are officials there doing anything about it?

We’ve presented this evidence to the district. And the district has initiated a number of interventions at the school level, and a local foundation is working with them on school climate and safety issues.

Ultimately, in Philadephia and elsewhere, the policy conversation should focus both on efforts to reduce the use of exclusionary discipline practices, particularly for the least severe forms of student misconduct, and to couple these efforts with the provision of intensive resources and training at the school level to assist school leaders and teachers to both implement district reforms and to improve the school climate by addressing student misconduct.

— Phyllis Jordan

Phyllis W. Jordan is FutureEd’s editorial director.

This piece originally appeared on the FutureEd website. FutureEd is an independent, solution-oriented think tank at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Follow on Twitter at @futureedGU

The post How School Suspensions Affect Student Achievement appeared first on Education Next.

Research tells us that disadvantaged students tend to be exposed to lower-quality teachers than their peers. We also know that these students are less likely to take upper level math courses in high school. Is there a connection? Dan Goldhaber and his research partners bring together these two threads of research in a new working paper released at the CALDER Research Conference in Washington, D.C. We sat down with Goldhaber to talk about his new paper, the politics of teacher evaluation, and the value of value-added.

This is an ambitious piece of research, bringing together these two strands of study. Let’s break it down a bit. Did you find that disadvantaged kids have lower quality teachers?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that quality is a little bit in the eyes of the beholder. So I always say quality “as measured by….”

And what do you measure it by?

Mostly based on “value added,” a statistical measure of the contribution the teachers make to student achievement on standardized tests. But we also see inequity in the distribution of teachers when considering teacher experience. And other research we’ve done has replicated the disparities using teacher licensure test performance. In some quarters, there is doubt about value added, so the fact that we see inequity based on other measures as well should convince readers that our value-added findings are accurate.

And is “disadvantaged” a measure of student income?

We use two different measures. One is under-represented minority status: African American, or Hispanic, or Native American/American Indian. The other is students receiving free or reduced-price lunches.

Why are disadvantaged kids stuck with the lower-quality teachers?

There’s a fair bit of research showing that schools serving disadvantaged students have more difficulty with staffing. We know, for instance, that they receive fewer (and less credentialed) applicants. And, there’s also evidence that higher-quality teachers are more likely to leave the schools serving lots of disadvantaged students. That likely happens because these schools are more difficult to teach in, and because the teacher labor market tends to treat all teaching jobs, at least within districts, as if they are the same.

Moreover, collective bargaining agreements often give more experienced teachers explicit advantages in attaining positions in a district when they open up. This also increases the likelihood that disadvantaged students have less experienced teachers, because more experienced teachers are more likely to move to more advantaged schools.

Your research then makes the connection between these lower-quality teachers in 4^th to 8^th grade and less student success in later years. How do you measure this?

We’re looking at the teachers that students have in 4^th through 8^th grade and two different measures: end of the 8^th-grade test score and at the number of advanced math courses students take in high school.

And the definition of advanced?

Pre-calculus and above.

And what did you find?

We found lots of different things. One highlight that had nothing to do with teachers was that a lot of the gap we see in end of 8^th-grade test scores and high school course taking between advantaged and disadvantaged students can be explained by a student’s 3^rd-grade test. And while that’s not a real surprise, it’s still a little shocking when you see it, because it means that a lot of where kids end up is already kind of baked in by the 3^rd grade. I think it suggests that if we are to make a real dent in achievement gaps, we need to be better about addressing inequity that exists early on, or become far more aggressive in interventions between 3^rd grade and 8^th grade.

But teachers played a role, too.

Yes. We found very consistent evidence that the value-added scores for teachers predict 8^th-grade test scores. That’s something we know from other research. More novel is the finding that value added is also a strong predictor of later advanced course-taking. And here even early grade teachers appear to matter.

How do you isolate value-added effects from other factors? As you said, the 3^rd-grade baseline predicts later success, and all sorts of issues affect disadvantaged students.

There are two parts to the question. You have to ask is the value-added measure a good measure of a teacher’s actual contribution to students? You do that through statistical procedure where you’re basically taking the kids who show up at a teacher’s doorstep and getting all the information that you can about them: their incoming tests, their poverty level, demographics, identification for special needs, etc., and trying to statistically factor those things out so that you are left with a clear picture of what teachers are contributing to student learning gains. My read on the literature is that value added actually does a pretty good job of identifying the contribution that teachers are making.

And then for our research, we have to both have a good measure of value added and ensure that when we’re using that measure, we are doing a good job of also accounting for other things that might be going on during a child’s schooling that might also affect 8^th-grade tests and high school outcomes. I think that there’s room to be worried about whether we are actually capturing everything. That’s why in the paper, especially with regards to the high school course outcomes, we’re being careful about using causal terms and instead say things like, “The teacher distribution predicts, or is associated with, these high-school outcomes.”

Given what you found, what are the implications for educators and policymakers?

School systems and states certainly need to recognize that one teaching job is not necessarily the same as another teaching job, teaching in disadvantaged settings, in particular, is likely to be more challenging. Hence, they need to provide appropriate incentives to teachers if we want to address inequities. It’s pretty much that simple.

Some places are doing that. The District of Columbia has bonuses for working in impoverished, underachieving schools.

D.C. is a huge success story. Some places are recognizing the fact that a teaching job is not totally generic, that jobs differ from one another. That is unusual. It would be good if more places actually built in incentives.

Is this something school boards should be doing?

Sure, but providing incentives may be something that you need to do above the school district level given the difficulties of local politics. When I served on a school board, we knew when we moved a teacher from one school to another, we had a pretty good sense of whether that was going to cause an uproar. And it’s much more likely—not a great surprise—but much more likely that if you move a favored teacher from an advantaged school, that you are going to hear a lot from parents. You also worry about what that might mean in the next election. So there’s a lot about the way that the system works that works against disadvantaged kids having equal access to effective teachers.

So you’re talking about individual teachers making the difference?

Yes, our paper is just one more piece of evidence that you need to focus on individual educators to move the needle in schools. Indeed, everything we’ve learned about schooling over the last decade and half suggests the import of individual teachers. Unfortunately, as a country, we’ve learned the wrong lesson from Race to the Top and teacher evaluation reforms. There’s been a real backing off of a focus on individual teachers, but largely for political reasons because of the huge pushback against evaluation reforms. The empirical evidence continues to suggest we need to focus on individual teachers, their performance, and how to improve it.

You mentioned the politics of this. The whole value-added thing is so fraught, especially when it’s connected to teacher pay. How do you overcome that?

It makes sense to use value added at least as a diagnostic tool. But we should also recognize that it’s not the be all and end all. For example, I don’t think it makes sense to have a teacher’s performance evaluation solely based on value added, nor do I believe that happens anywhere, despite what you might hear. Unless you are willing to say we shouldn’t be doing any evaluation at all, then we have to acknowledge that any measure that we use is going to have some problems. And that’s just life.

Read more CALDER working papers here.

— Phyllis W. Jordan

Phyllis W. Jordan is FutureEd’s editorial director.

This piece originally appeared on the FutureEd website. FutureEd is an independent, solution-oriented think tank at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Follow on Twitter at @futureedGU

The post The Teaching Gap’s Troubling Consequences appeared first on Education Next.

Last week’s sobering report from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) found that fully a third of the city’s 2017 graduates earned a diploma despite racking up more than 30 school days worth of unexcused absences (which should have triggered failing grades under the District of Columbia Public Schools’ policies) or earning credits through bogus makeup work.

That’s a big problem (and certainly not one unique to Washington). But the bulk of the city’s school reforms over the past decade have focused elsewhere, on building a pre-kindergarten system, creating new curriculum materials and instructional strategies and, above all, improving teacher quality—work that’s largely unrelated to high school attendance. Nor, contrary to recent commentary, have these reforms been in place for a decade. The city’s new curriculum wasn’t fully implemented until 2014-15, and an ambitious new initiative that has teachers working together in teams to strengthen their instruction is in only its second year.

But the reforms launched under then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee and greatly expanded by her successor, Kaya Henderson, have already produced meaningful improvements. Most significantly, they have transformed teaching in Washington from a low-status occupation marked by weak standards and factory-like work rules into a performance-based profession that provides recognition, responsibility, support, and significant compensation, with some starting salaries now as high as $75,000 and top pay climbing from $87,000 to $134,000 (and higher in the city’s year-round schools).

No longer are the school system’s strongest teachers leaving in droves for charter schools and the suburbs. In 2015-16, more than 37 percent of DCPS’s teaching force was rated “highly effective,” and the school district lost only 6 percent of that top talent. In contrast, nearly half of the district’s “minimally effective” teachers departed voluntarily. Researchers have found that replacements for low-rated teachers have produced four or five months’ worth of additional student learning in math and nearly as much in reading over three school years. Leaders of the city’s best charter schools say they’re now struggling to compete for talent.

These and other improvements have changed the academic trajectory of many of the city’s younger students. Since 2007, the proportion of D.C. students scoring proficient or above on the rigorous and independent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) more than doubled in fourth grade reading and more than tripled in fourth grade math, bringing Washington up to the middle of the pack of urban school districts at that grade level, while the city’s black students largely closed gaps with African American students nationwide.

Enrollment, meanwhile, has risen in recent years, after four decades of decline, and more affluent families are putting their students in the city’s public schools, a sign of growing confidence in a DCPS education. While critics charge that the shifting demographics account for the rising test scores, no less than three analyses suggest that’s not the case, that the gains transcend demographics.

These improvements represent the beginning of a long climb to academic credibility. The city’s many impoverished African American and Hispanic students continue to lag far behind their white counterparts, who typically live in much more affluent families. But the trends are positive.

The poverty that envelops so many of Washington’s students of color is an important part of the recent graduation controversy. The graduation policy violations are concentrated in the neighborhood high schools serving the city’s most disadvantaged communities. Many of these students arrive without the math or reading skills they need to complete high-school level work. Those with the most ability and agency often leave for other schools.

Take Ballou High School, ground zero for the diploma controversy. Nearly half of high school students in the city’s Ward 8, which Ballou serves, attend charter schools. Another 10 percent are in the city’s selective high schools. These are choices that expand opportunities for the students, but they leave Ballou as effectively a school of last resort for those who don’t leave or who are forced to return after struggling academically or behaviorally elsewhere.

The reforms that have ratcheted up achievement in Washington’s lower grades should bring stronger students to the city’s high schools in the coming years. And Henderson did make academic improvements in the city’s high schools before she departed, adding foreign languages, advanced placement courses, and electives (though in 2016, only 17 students in eight of DCPS’ nine neighborhood high schools managed to pass at least one AP test).

But these steps to increase rigor are clearly not enough. Instead of watered-down “credit recovery” courses, DCPS should follow Chicago Public Schools and give students extra reading and math every day, beginning in the ninth grade. Students who learn they’re hopelessly behind when they arrive in high school are more likely to give up and not show up. In Chicago, a daily double dose of algebra led to higher graduation and college enrollment rates. Baltimore and other districts are increasingly deploying data systems that share with schools their absenteeism rates and information to track the courses students need to graduate.

Long a patronage-plagued and largely dysfunctional bureaucracy, the DCPS central office has attracted substantial talent in recent years. But the OSSE report details multiple failings in the school system’s high school office, from faulty communications to lax oversight. Many teachers, for instance, told OSSE that they didn’t know whether student absences were excused or unexcused absences (only unexcused absences count against graduation).

They also told OSSE investigators that principals pressured them to pass chronically absent students. That’s an oversight problem. DCPS teachers are not evaluated on graduation rates, but principals can base a small portion of their teacher ratings on the number of students passing courses, and a few have. Chancellor Antwan Wilson recently removed that element from the teacher evaluation process.

Principals, on the other hand, are eligible for bonuses of up to $30,000 a year, based in part on their schools’ graduation rates. OSSE found that no principals benefitted from performance bonuses due to graduation policy violations in 2016-17, but cautioned that DCPS needs to be watchful.

It is perfectly appropriate to hold high school leaders accountable for graduation rates and reward them for doing a good job—as long as their goals are reasonable. But as DCPS learned early in the Rhee era, when it entrusted schools to administer high stakes tests to their own students, incentive systems need strong oversight. The DCPS high school division failed badly on this front: Wilson placed a principal on leave earlier this month after discovering his staff changed attendance records 4,000 times—something that certainly would have shown up if someone was paying closer attention. The public charter school board reviews and certifies graduates in the city’s charter sector; DCPS should do the same.

In some ways, this should be the easiest problem to fix. Clear instruction to principals, combined with careful auditing, should ensure that no student graduates with 30 unexcused absences or with bogus make-up courses. But the underlying issues that lead D.C. and so many school districts to this point are far more intractable: students arriving at high school without the skills they need and missing so much school they never catch up.

These issues affect students living in poverty far more than their peers. Starting in kindergarten, these students arrive unprepared for the work they need to do. Illness, housing instability and family crises keep these students from attending school regularly or engaging in the work there. We need to double down on efforts to address the debilitating impact of poverty on the city’s students. It’s a daunting task. But there are plenty of promising avenues to pursue.

Mentoring programs, weekly teacher-students advisories, home visits by teachers and counselors have made a difference by increasing students’ sense of connection to schooling. There’s ample research showing that discipline problems decline and attendance rises in schools where students sense they’re valued. Even text messages to absent students and families saying they are missed helps on this front, as do courses designed around student contributions to classroom discussions. In the earlier grades, engaging parents is key.

Schools should work far more closely with health care providers and social service agencies than they do. They track chronic absenteeism, for example, but rarely connect the data to other agencies’ information on homelessness, chronic asthma, and other major contributors. Bridging such data divides would signal to teachers and principals that students are struggling outside of school and promote collaboration to address students’ problems. Nor is chronic absenteeism just a high school problem in Washington’s impoverished neighborhoods; even many elementary students are absent for weeks, putting them on a path to failure.

In D.C., officials also need to level the playing field for the city’s neighborhood high schools. The growing number of charter high schools are providing students more educational options (some of them stronger than others). But they can, and often do, recruit students selectively, decline to admit students mid-year (after they get their enrollment-based city funding in early October), and counsel students out who struggle academically or behaviorally.

That leaves Ballou and other neighborhood schools in the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods with tougher jobs and fewer resources. The city needs to change its school funding formula to incentivize charters to admit more students and keep them, and to compensate neighborhood schools that must admit students throughout the school year.

Nonetheless, the city’s traditional elementary and middle schools are improving. Selective high schools School Without Walls and Banneker are oversubscribed, as is Wilson, the neighborhood high school in affluent Ward 3. As the scandal at Ballou makes clear, the local high schools in the city’s impoverished neighborhoods are the last frontier of school reform in the District. Hopefully, Chancellor Wilson will take the recent revelations as a call to action. DCPS’ reputation as a rising urban school system depends on it.

— Thomas Toch and Phyllis Jordan

Thomas Toch is the director of FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, where Phyllis Jordan is the editorial director.

The post Graduation Scandal Shouldn’t Overshadow Successful DCPS Reforms  appeared first on Education Next.

With the Senate poised to approve a bill that would repeal Obamacare and restructure Medicaid, schools superintendents are writing their congressional delegation to let them know that the health care decisions made on Capitol Hill could well have a profound impact on schools and their most vulnerable students.

“A school’s primary responsibility is to provide students with a high-quality education, but children cannot learn to their fullest potential with unmet health needs,” the Colorado Association of School Executives wrote to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet.

How will the bill impact schools? The most obvious answer is financial. By now we know that Congress is not content to simply repeal the health care plan then-President Barack Obama pushed through seven years ago. The Republican Senate bill follows the House’s lead and change the way all Medicaid funding is distributed, effectively cutting the federal contribution by more than $800 billion over the next decade. Add in proposed cuts in President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2018 budget, and that the cuts could reach $1.4 trillion.

Given that half the recipients of Medicaid are children, students would suffer and so would schools. Altogether more than a third of U.S. children rely on the federal-state partnership for their health coverage—from early screenings and immunizations to treatment for asthma and other chronic conditions. Half the babies born here are covered by Medicaid, which insures children in families below the poverty line.

The bill crafted by House leaders and backed by President Donald Trump would gut health coverage for these children. Amendments offered some protection to elderly and disabled Medicaid recipients, but not to children and families.

By imposing per-capita caps on federal spending, the bill would cut federal Medicaid contributions and dump more health care costs onto state and local governments. That would  leave less money for other priorities, such as education.

Already 35 states provided less overall education funding per pupil in the 2014-15 school year than they did in 2008-09. Medicaid cuts would add to the stress on local governments, which would either have to cut school budgets, layoff teachers or raise taxes.  A recent Urban Institute report estimated that states would have to increase spending by $370 billion in the next decade–or cut current enrollment and services.

Beyond the overall budget, Medicaid pays $4 billion to $5 billion a year directly to schools. This is a tiny fraction of the program’s spending but provides critical support for the personnel and equipment needed to serve students with disabilities and, in some instances, to pay for school nurses and counselors.

Without these dollars, school districts could have to dip into general education funds to meet federal mandates to provide special education services. A national survey by AASA found 68 percent of superintendents use Medicaid reimbursement to pay direct salaries for professionals who provide services to students. These include occupational and speech therapists as well as aides for special ed students. About 45 percent of school leaders use Medicaid to expand mental- and physical-health services in their districts.

Recognizing this more than 50 education organizations released a letter emphasizing the unintended consequences of health care cuts.

The most profound impact of such cuts to health coverage would be a decline in student achievement. Research shows us that students eligible Medicaid are more likely to graduate from high school and complete college than students without access to health care.

A big factor in that is regular school attendance. Illness is still the No. 1 reason that students miss school, and too many absences contribute to weaker social-emotional skills in kindergarten, poorer reading skills in third grade and higher dropout rates. Attendance also factors into state funding formulas and, in many places, is considered an accountability metric for school success.

Medicaid also plays a big role in identifying students who might struggle in school and providing the treatment they need to succeed. The EPSDT child-centered benefits package screens and treats young children for hearing and vision problems, developmental delays and disabilities such as autism that can affect learning.

Medicaid caps could turn EPSDT into an option that states choose not to provide. That could end up costing local districts more money or leaving children with undiagnosed and untreated learning issues. And it could thwart early education initiatives aimed at getting all children ready for kindergarten and broader efforts to ensure every child masters reading by the end of third grade.

Put simply, Medicaid insulates disadvantaged children from some of the adverse experiences that keep them from succeeding in school. Families are less likely to struggle financially and go bankrupt when they have health coverage. Children are more likely to have access to preventive health care, good nutrition and medication to control health problems.

All of those benefits add up to stronger, healthier students—boosting both school achievement and economic prosperity. Cutting Medicaid would have impacts far beyond the health care system.

— Phyllis W. Jordan

Phyllis W. Jordan is FutureEd’s editorial director.

This piece originally appeared on the FutureEd website. FutureEd is an independent, solution-oriented think tank at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Follow on Twitter at @futureedGU

The post What’s at Stake for Schools in the Health Care Bill? appeared first on Education Next.

If you look at the accountability systems states are developing to meet federal requirements, you’ll see a growing number are using chronic absenteeism as a metric. Education Week calls it “super popular.”

It makes sense. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to have a non-academic measure, and absenteeism is an easy one to use. Every school collects attendance data, and teachers have been taking the roll since the one-room schoolhouse.

Beyond that, chronic absenteeism—a measure of both excused and unexcused absences—can be a window into what’s wrong and what’s right with a school. It can reflect an engaged student body and a positive school climate. Or it can signal serious health and safety concerns in a community.

But a decade ago, no one beyond a few wonky researchers ever used the term chronic absenteeism or knew what it was. How did it become a thing?

As it happens, I know a bit about this. In 2009, after leaving journalism for the world of nonprofit communications, I worked with a woman named Hedy Chang.

Hedy had made a big splash a year earlier co-authoring a study showing that one in 10 kindergarten and first grade students misses nearly a month of school every year. Now a foundation was giving her money to turn her research into a movement.

I was a little confused at first. “Is this about truancy?” I asked. No, Hedy explained, truancy counts only unexcused absences and often brings a punitive response. Plus, it tends to happen more in high school.

Chronic absence starts as early as kids start school and includes days missed to illness, family vacations and other excuses. Regardless of the reason for missing school, the absences add up to lower reading scores and weaker social skills in the early grades. Ten percent of the school year—or about 18 days—seems to be a tipping point.

At about the same time, Johns Hopkins University researcher Robert Balfanz and the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research were finding that chronic absenteeism in middle and high school was a leading indicator that students would drop out. The metric became part of early warning systems in many states.

Still, not many school districts or states paid attention to the figure. Instead, they were focused on truancy rates and average daily attendance, essentially how many students show up on a typical day.

Hedy’s goal for her newly formed nonprofit, Attendance Works, was to convert educators to tracking chronic absence, too. Attendance averages could easily mask a deeper problem.

Think of it like this: If you had 100 students in a school and five absences every day, you’d have a 95 percent average daily attendance rate. Reasonable, right—95 is an A. But over 180 school days, you would have 900 absences. Is that 100 kids missing exactly nine days each? How about 45 kids missing 20 days? Or 20 kids missing 45 days? None of these extremes would be likely, but one analysis found that schools with the same 95 percent rate had between 6 and 17 percent of their students listed as chronically absent. Until they looked at the numbers, the schools didn’t know the scope of the problem.

Looking at absenteeism that way also offers clues to why students are missing school. If absences are concentrated among students from one neighborhood, perhaps it’s a transportation or community safety issue. If it’s one classroom, maybe it’s a problem with the teacher or a class bully. Poverty is often a factor, especially in the early grades.

In Baltimore, social workers spent a summer visiting the homes of every K-2 student who missed 40 or more days the previous year. In a third of the cases, the children had uncontrolled asthma. In Providence, an elementary school found that many of the chronically absent students had parents working graveyard shifts.

With a lively website, research reports and a relentless travel schedule, Hedy and her team at Attendance Works preached the value of tracking chronic absence and addressing its root causes. They worked with several national organizations to start Attendance Awareness Month (September) to hammer home the importance of attendance.

It helped that the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, which focuses on reading by third grade, encouraged the nearly 200 communities it works with to track the metric. One of those places, New Britain, Conn., saw literacy rates improve as schools cut kindergarten chronic absenteeism in half. Another, Grand Rapids, Mich., reduced absences significantly with a positive campaign encouraging parents and students to “Strive for Five” or fewer missed days.

This ability to move the numbers encouraged more districts to work on attendance. Mayors, school superintendents and local philanthropies got on board. Teachers and social workers, business leaders and doctors all played a part. The issue defied politics: Who’s opposed to kids attending school regularly?

States and state advocacy groups began doing their own analyses: Many had put attendance information into the longitudinal databases required by the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB), so they could run numbers showing the connection between absenteeism and test scores. When the U.S. Education Department began granting waivers.to NCLB, several states—including Hawaii, New Jersey and Oregon—built chronic absence into their accountability systems.

Then the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) decided to add a measure of chronic absenteeism—defined as the proportion of students missing 15 or more school days—in its 2013-14 Civil Rights Data Collection. After that, the White House My Brother’s Keeper initiative adopted the “Success Mentors” strategy pioneered in New York City to reducing absenteeism among young men of color.

Finally, the release of the 2013-14 OCR data in June 2016 provided a wealth of information—and considerable media coverage—showing 6.8 million students nationwide could be chronically absent. Now everyone was paying attention to a metric that no one had heard of a decade earlier.

In some ways, the push for tracking chronic absenteeism benefitted from timing, given the increased emphasis on education data and the ESSA’s commitment to going beyond test scores to measure school success.

But it also shows the value of building support for an idea locally, getting buy-in from stakeholders and experimenting at the state level before making a move nationally. In a time of gridlock in Washington, this might just be the right model to pursue.

— Phyllis W. Jordan

Phyllis W. Jordan is FutureEd’s editorial director. This piece originally appeared on the  FutureEd website.  FutureEd is an independent, solution-oriented think tank at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Follow on Twitter at @futureedGU

The post How Did Chronic Absenteeism Become a Thing? appeared first on Education Next.

I caught up with Martin West at the Association for Education Policy and Finance conference in Washington, D.C., last week, where he shared his thoughts on school choice, Title I portability and the fiscal year 2018 budget proposal that President Donald Trump has advanced.

Donald Trump’s preliminary budget proposes deep cuts for education but includes new money, about $1.4 billion, for both charter schools and private school choice. How do you think that money would be best spent?

I think they’re wise to put some increased funding in the charter schools program, $126 million. Over the past several years, the federal government has begun providing money directly to high-performing charter management organizations, those that can document strong results, to replicate their models or to expand existing schools to serve additional grades. I think that’s proven to be a good use of federal dollars. So the department will be able to do more of that, in addition to continuing to make grants to states to create new charter schools from scratch.

What about private school choice?

The Trump administration’s budget also puts forward an idea of using $250 million for private school choice. It doesn’t say much about what that would look like, but I’d hope that what they would do is to concentrate that money in particular cities interested in adopting a policy that would allow families more choice of schools, including the option to attend a private school. So these would be places that are willing and interested in experimenting with that approach to providing families with choice and are not doing just because the federal government is requiring it. I would hope it would be a small number of places, so that money would be concentrated and we could actually learn about what happens; $250 million spread evenly like peanut butter across the country is not going to accomplish very much.

What do you think of the proposal in the budget to put $1 billion in Title I money that would follow students, opening the door for what’s known as Title I portability?

The language in the budget proposal says it would be an increase of $1 billion in Title I to encourage states and districts to adopt student-based funding systems where money, including state, local and federal funds, follows the child to the school that they attend within the public sector.

That language is a bit confusing, because Title I is a formula grant program where districts receive fixed allocations based on the number of poor students they serve, as well as the overall funding levels in the state. Title I is not a competitive grant program, but when the proposal uses the language of “encouraging” states and districts it sounds more like a competitive grant program. So I think we have to get more clarity in the coming days and week about what exactly this proposal means.

Could this be connected to the school funding pilot within the Every Student Success Act?

There is a provision within ESSA known as the weighted student funding pilot that allows up to 50 districts to apply for permission to adopt weighted student funding systems or student-based budgeting where dollars do follow the child to whatever school they attend.

Traditionally one of the barriers to the adoption of those types of systems by school districts has been the lack of the ability to include federal dollars, which need to be allocated to schools by the rules of the different formula streams. And so, the idea here is that this pilot program was designed to encourage some districts to model out a new approach to administering federal aid. It sounds to me as if the administration wants to encourage more districts to participate in that pilot, to take it seriously.

Another approach to school choice has been tax credits. There’s some talk of that being included in the administration’s tax reform bill. Do you think that’s a good approach?

I think the question is whether it’s a politically feasible approach, which is why the administration is interested in it. Changes to the tax code can be made via the reconciliation process, and this would avoid an up or down vote on it as a stand-alone proposal and the possibility of a Senate filibuster. I think the interest at the federal level in using the tax code as a way of doing something major in the way of school choice is as much a political as a policy-based preference.

That being said, the approach of using the tax code to encourage donations to organizations that grant scholarships to low-income students is one that’s been used successfully at the state level. The question for us as researchers is, does it make sense to pursue this same approach at the federal level.

I think there are some serious design questions that they would have to address if they move forward with this at the federal level.

For example?

For example, what would the overall number of tax credits that could be awarded be? If you have no cap, you could, in theory, preside over the greatest federalization of education finance in the history of the United States, because the federal government would be the one taking in less revenue as a result of offering these tax credits. It would be the states and local governments that would not be spending to educate as many children in public schools.

That’s right. You would essentially be putting more federal money toward education, rather than less.

At the state and local level, these programs tend to be money savers because the average scholarship amount students receive is often considerably less than what is spent on them in total state and local spending in public schools. If you offer the credit at the federal level, that dynamic changes.

So without a cap, this would really be a dramatic change. If you add a cap, say the $20 billion figure that President Trump has said he wants to devote to school choice, then you have to figure out how to allocate the available dollars under that cap to different states, and you have to figure out a way to do it that is predictable from one year to the next, such that there aren’t huge fluctuations that would cause the programs to ebb and flow dramatically.

One of the things school choice programs need is certainty about market conditions, so that new schools can open with an expectation that there will be demand for their seats. You’re not going to see that if there’s uncertainty from one year to the next.

OMB Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters the Trump budget would zero out afterschool programs because there is no evidence these programs work. There are several studies that show positive results for these programs, even though 21^st Century Learning Centers programs that the federal government funds haven’t raised student achievement. At the same time, Trump’s budget supports private school choice, where the evidence is decidedly mixed. As a researcher who has advocated for evidence-based solutions how do you square that decision?

When it comes to the research both on afterschool programs and on school choice, we don’t always have answers to all of the questions we want in order to inform policy. In the case of afterschool programs, as you mentioned, the official evaluation of the federally funded 21^st Century afterschool program didn’t show effects on students’ academic outcomes, at least. That doesn’t mean that afterschooling can’t be an effective way of trying to benefit students not only academically but more so in other ways. But what we don’t know is how best to award federal dollars to get that to happen.

In the case of private school choice, you’re right that there’s a mixed track record, though I would say mostly positive if you look at the full body of evidence about what happens when you allow a student to move from a public school to a private school using a voucher. Recently we’ve seen some negative finding on that question that are beginning to raise some doubts.

Does that give you pause?

It does. But, regardless of those recent patterns, that question—what happens when a student uses a voucher to move from a public to a private school—is only a very small part of what we want to know to decide about the merits of private school choice.

At least as important is what effects the injection of more competition would have on the overall quality of opportunities available to all students. It could be that competition would drive higher levels of performance and benefit students in ways that are not evident when you just study what happens immediately when students move from a public to an existing private school. It could also be the case that the adoption of a private school choice program would lead to higher levels of segregation, higher levels of inequity, and resources being drained from public schools.

We haven’t had the opportunity to study those questions in the United States when it comes to a private school choice program operating at scale, at least until very recently, when you had statewide programs adopted in Indiana and Louisiana.

I think a good case could be made that it is worth trying to experiment with new ways of trying to provide opportunities to families, to do so in a way that allows them to be subjected to rigorous evaluation. It wouldn’t be right to characterize the administration’s interest in school choice as flying in the face of what we know.

— Phyllis W. Jordan

This post originally appeared on the website of FutureEd, an independent, solution-oriented think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Phyllis W. Jordan is FutureEd’s editorial director. Martin West is a member of the research advisory board at FutureEd and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

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