Unequal protection

Unequal protection

Source: The Economist 

In the first of three pieces on race-based preferences around the world, we look at America’s pending Supreme Court decisions on diversity at universities

Making history in 1964 Ms Fisher has her day in court

WILLIAM POWERS is the president of the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin). Lino Graglia holds an endowed chair at its law school. Both have kindly demeanours, impressive records and that crucial perk of academic success, offices with great views: Mr Powers looks out over the heart of the university’s campus, Mr Graglia at its football stadium.

They also hold strong and opposing opinions on whether admissions to their state-run university ought to take account of race. Mr Powers believes that using “race as one factor in an overall holistic view of the candidate” helps the university build a diverse campus, an achievement which has “an educational value for all of our students”. Mr Graglia thinks “lower[ing] standards to admit members of preferred groups” is “a bad idea”.

Related topics

• Michigan
• Colleges and universities
• College Admissions
• Political policy
• Domestic policy

America has a number of policies and practices designed to increase the presence of minorities in various areas of life from which they have historically been excluded. But the role of such affirmative action in university admissions has garnered the most attention. Schools and universities provided many of America’s desegregation battlegrounds. And gaining entry to America’s elite universities is difficult; the perception, right or wrong, that race can in some circumstances trump merit strikes many as unjust, not least because universities play a large role in social mobility.

The Supreme Court is about to weigh in on the matter. In March it agreed to hear a case that could determine whether a state may ban affirmative action in university admissions on the basis of a referendum. In 2006 a majority of Michigan’s voters approved such a measure, but last November a federal appellate court ruled that the measure violates the equal-protection clause of the constitution, which requires states to treat all citizens equally, by preventing affirmative-action supporters from pressing their case to individual universities. And the court will soon rule on a suit brought against UT-Austin by Abigail Fisher, a white woman who was not admitted to the university.

Non-discrimination discrimination

Ms Fisher contends that by rejecting her at the same time as it accepted minority candidates with less impressive academic records UT-Austin violated the equal-protection clause. The university contends that the state’s “compelling interest” in having a diverse student body justifies taking race, among many other factors, into account when judging applications.

In a 2003 ruling, Grutter v Bollinger, the Supreme Court recognised that such an interest existed. But in her majority opinion Sandra Day O’Connor said that the court expected the use of racial preferences to further that interest would, within 25 years, no longer be necessary. Since John Roberts became chief justice in 2005 the court has grown increasingly sceptical of race-conscious laws. In a 2007 opinion Justice Roberts wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

If Ms Fisher wins, universities may find their ability to practise affirmative action curtailed or gone. A decision in favour of the state of Michigan in the other case would have a similar effect. Voters have banned affirmative action at universities in at least eight states, and they could do so in more.

Richard Sander, the author, with Stuart Taylor, of a book-length study of affirmative action’s effects entitled “Mismatch”, estimates that an end to the policy will affect between 20% and 25% of American universities which between them account for around 30% of America’s roughly 20m university students. That ending would not be out of step with the national mood, as those state-level bans imply. Many see a world that has outgrown affirmative action. Legally codified racism is a distant memory. In the nation’s two biggest states whites are no longer a majority; this will be true in the nation as a whole within a few decades. Before the 1960s, when the foundations of affirmative action were first laid down, most blacks were poor, few served in public office and almost none were to be found flourishing at the nation’s top universities, corporations, law firms and banks. None of that is true today.

The Civil Rights Act that Lyndon Johnson signed in 1964 proscribed discrimination on grounds of race. It also explicitly stated that none of its provisions required employers “to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group”. But American law and policy soon began moving in a different direction. In 1968 the Department of Labour required contractors to have “goals and timetables” for increasing minority representation. In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled that the act forbade “not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.”

A slew of affirmative-action programmes aimed at correcting that discrimination-in-operation followed. They were intended to boost minority employment and remedy systemic discrimination in hiring and admissions: both worthy endeavours. But because race-based affirmative action is a blunt and gameable instrument, it often helps successful or well-connected applicants rather than truly needy ones.

Diverse opinions

Real progress was made during the era of affirmative action. A 1998 study conducted by William Bowen and Derek Bok (former presidents of Princeton and Harvard) found that in 1960 5.4% of blacks between the ages of 25 and 29 had graduated from college; by 1995 that share had jumped to 15.4%. Blacks went from barely 1% of law students in 1960 and 2.2% of medical students in 1964 to 7.5% and 8.1% by 1995. They almost doubled their representation among the nation’s doctors and almost tripled it among America’s engineers and lawyers.

But that was not all due to affirmative action. Thomas Sowell, an economist, points out that black education levels began rising, and poverty levels falling, as blacks started to move out of the South in the 1940s and 1950s. And even if Mr Bowen and Mr Bok are correct, and affirmative action did greatly benefit blacks in the first couple of generations after segregation, it does not follow that it should remain in place today, when most blacks at university are from middle- or upper-class families and many are recent immigrants never touched by pre-1960s discrimination.

Making history in 1964

Hence the shift in goals from remedying racial injustice to fostering diversity: hence the insistence of university administrators that race is just part of an “overall holistic view” of each candidate. Not everyone believes them. During oral arguments in Ms Fisher’s case Sonia Sotomayor, a justice who has acknowledged that she benefited from affirmative action in her early career, said that the UT-Austin’s programme “sounds awfully like a quota to me”.

Such diversity programmes tend to benefit black and Hispanic applicants; unfortunately, they tend to penalise both whites and Asians. Ron Unz, a software developer and magazine publisher, examined Asian-American enrolment numbers at elite colleges in a 2012 article poignantly titled “The Myth of American Meritocracy”. He found that the proportion of Asian-Americans at Harvard rose from around 5% in the early 1980s to more than 20% by 1993. After that, however, the proportion started to decrease, even as the numbers of college-age Asian-Americans rose. Mr Unz found similar patterns at other Ivy League universities. At the California Institute of Technology, by contrast, a first-rate university with race-neutral admissions, Asian-American enrolment rose.

In 1997 Thomas Espenshade of Princeton analysed the scores on SATs, a widely used test for college admissions, that different races needed in order to get into private universities. He found that Asian-Americans’ SAT scores had to exceed those of whites by 140 points out of 1,600, those of Hispanics by 270 points and those of blacks by 450 points. A study by Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, found that black students with average grades and test scores were almost three times more likely than Asians with similarly average qualifications to get into medical school.

Given this, it is unsurprising that in the decade after voters in California barred race-conscious university admissions, Asian-Americans entered the state’s elite colleges in far greater numbers. The share of Asian-Americans at UC Berkeley rose by nearly ten percentage points, from 37.3% in 1995 to 46.6% in 2005. The number of blacks and Hispanics enrolled fell, particularly at the flagship schools, Berkeley and UCLA.

What was more surprising was that in the entering class of 2000 a record number of black students graduated on time. Mr Sander and Mr Taylor argue that previously low black graduation rates were a result of the mismatch which occurs when a student granted preferential admission winds up at an institution for which he is not academically suited. He begins at a marked relative disadvantage and falls behind quickly. His grades get lower and lower and in the worst cases he loses confidence and fails to graduate.

Mr Sander and Mr Taylor attribute a host of bad outcomes to mismatch. For example, more black than white high-school seniors aspire to science and engineering careers, but once in college twice as many black students as white abandon those challenging fields. Black law students fail the bar exam at four times the rate of whites. Some worry that if the Supreme Court forbids race-conscious admissions, blacks and Hispanics will, in effect, be shut out of elite institutions. Mr Sander and Mr Taylor argue that though a ban might lower the number of blacks at top-tier law schools, it would be likely to increase the number of black lawyers in practice by boosting their rates of graduating and passing the bar exam.

That would not solve the diversity issue that UT-Austin puts at the heart of its case. The issue is not just a fetish of lefty academics. Lewis Powell in 1978 and Justice O’Connor in 2003—both nominated to the Supreme Court by Republican presidents—recognised diversity as a “compelling state interest”. Dozens of large corporations—including Dow Chemical, Halliburton, Shell and Walmart—have filed a brief in support of UT-Austin, noting that they have “found through practical experience that a workforce trained in a diverse environment is critical to their business success.” A joint brief filed by counsels to several government departments said that the “Department of Defence has concluded that a highly qualified and broadly diverse officer corps is essential to military readiness.” A paper by Barbara Wolfe and Jason Fletcher of the University of Wisconsin and Yale School of Medicine has found that there is a positive link between attending a university with greater student-body diversity and higher earnings and family income.

But universities can ensure diversity without race-based affirmative action. After a 1996 ban on race-conscious-admissions by a Texas court (later abrogated by Grutter) public universities in Texas began automatically admitting students who had graduated in the top 10% of their high-school classes. By 2004 the percentage of black and Hispanic students enrolled equalled or exceeded the share before the ban, largely because of America’s lamentable residential segregation. (Ms Fisher’s suit concerns the race-conscious process for allocating spaces reserved for those who graduate from high school beneath the top decile, as she did.)

Ms Fisher has her day in court

Universities are by and large pretty bad at enrolling poor students, but there are signs of improvement. Some now use a range of demographic data to target financial aid, outreach and, when needed, small preferences to those they feel need it most. Admissions staff need to understand that the constrained lives of poor students—with summer jobs rather than flashy unpaid internships, or with the care of younger siblings squeezing out after-school activities—can lead to less obviously interesting applications than those of richer students.

The mismatch effect could still apply, but Mr Taylor and Mr Sander argue that it need not. Universities can improve their recruiting efforts to find talented low-income students. They can provide intensive summer programmes for students from shaky academic backgrounds. They can free up more spaces for deserving poor students by removing preferences awarded to the children of alumni. Administrators may find it harder and costlier to sort through such socioeconomic data rather than just looking at which race box an applicant has ticked. But they should do so.

Though it has shown itself to be sceptical of race-conscious policies, the Roberts court may not deliver a broad judgment against affirmative action even if it finds for Ms Fisher. It may prefer to use the Michigan case to confirm the right of voters to ban the policy instead. If its ruling in either case helps bring America’s experiment with well-intentioned discrimination in universities to a close, though, it will not be because the country has entered, as many said when Barack Obama was first elected, a “post racial” period. It has not. Blacks and Hispanics still lag behind whites in income and education levels, and still exceed whites in incarceration rates. But one set of injustices does not excuse another.

Absent Peers in Elementary Years: The Negative Classroom Effects of Unexcused Absences on Standardized Testing Outcomes

by Michael A. Gottfried — 2011

Background/Context: This article addresses the classroom contextual effects of absences on student achievement. Previous research on peer effects has predominantly focused on peer socioeconomic status or classroom academic ability and its effects on classmates. However, the field has been limited by not discerning the individual-level academic effects of being in classrooms with absent peers.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of the Study: The purpose of this study is to determine the peer effects of absent students in urban elementary school classrooms.

Population/Participants/Subjects: The data set is longitudinal and comprises entire populations of five elementary school cohorts within the School District of Philadelphia, for a total of 33,420 student observations. Individual student records were linked to teacher and classroom data and to census block neighborhood information.

Research Design: To examine the educational effects of absent peers, this study employed an empirical specification of the education production function. The dependent variables were Stanford Achievement Test Ninth Edition (SAT9) reading and math scores.

Findings: Models differentiated between unexcused and total absence measures and indicated that the peer effect of absences was driven by negative effects associated with classroom rates of unexcused absences rather with rates of total absences. These findings were obtained after controlling for student, neighborhood, teacher, and classroom characteristics.

Conclusions/Recommendations: Not only are absences detrimental to the absentee, but they also have a pervasive effect on the achievement of other students in the classroom.

Since the dissemination of the Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966), economists, sociologists, education researchers, and policy makers have been assessing the relationship between classroom peer effects and educational outcomes. The basic premise is that stronger peers can produce better academic outcomes for their classmates. In the analyses of classroom composition, the research has focused predominantly on peer effects relating to socioeconomic status (SES) (Caldas & Bankson, 1997; Link & Mulligan, 1991; Willms, 1986) and classroom academic ability (Henderson, Mieszkowski, & Sauvageau, 1978, Summers & Wolfe, 1977; Zimmer & Toma, 2000). Nonetheless, even conditional on these characteristics, there remain other channels through which students can affect other students.

One uncharted line of research on the educational effects of peers is the relationship between classroom absences and student-level performance. The importance of this peer effect arises because research has thus far shown that being absent from school is detrimental to learning and academic achievement, and an increase in absences will exacerbate educational and sociological risk factors in concurrent and future years (Dryfoos, 1990; Finn, 1993; Lehr, Hansen, Sinclair, & Christenson, 2003; Stouthamer-Loeber & Loeber, 1988). As for individual test performance, absent students receive fewer hours of instruction and consequently are likely to perform more poorly on exams (Chen & Stevenson, 1995; Connell, Spencer, & Aber, 1994; Finn, 1993). In addition, when present in the classroom, highly absent students may feel a greater sense of alienation from their classmates, teachers, and schools and may thus disrupt classroom instruction through their negative interactions and social disengagement (Ekstrom, Goertz, Pollack, & Rock, 1986; Finn, 1989; Johnson, 2005; Newmann, 1981).

Hence, the peer effect of individual student absences can arise from both academic and behavioral sources. Academically, if absent students receive fewer hours of instruction and their in-school learning time decreases, then on their return, they often require remedial instruction (Monk & Ibrahim, 1984). If teachers respond to educational needs of absent students by allocating regular class time, then nonabsent students may be adversely affected because classroom instruction is slowed. Increasingly large numbers of absences in the classroom would suggest larger portions of instruction dedicated to remediation, thereby further slowing educational advancement for other students in the room. Similarly, if absences generate negative behavioral outcomes, such as school disengagement or alienation, and if these behaviors in turn produce further problems in school (Finn, 1989), then absent students can generate noninstructional (i.e., behavioral) disruptions on return to the classroom (Reid, 1983), which can also slow the learning process for nonabsent peers. That is, teachers must devote their instructional resources elsewhere rather than to teaching.

Lazear (2001) theorized about this phenomenon by proposing that education in the classroom can be classified as a public good, in which congestion effects exist on the teacher’s instructional time. As such, negative effects on learning are generated when one student’s actions impede the learning of other classmates. According to this notion, an absent student who disrupts regular instruction on return to school utilizes teaching time in ways that nonabsent students may not find useful. In essence, absent students produce both an individual effect by decreasing their own learning from having missed school, and a peer effect by slowing instruction and reducing the educational outcomes for others in the class.

Given the individual and classroom risk factors associated with being absent, this article empirically considers the classroom peer effects of students with unexcused absences. Although some studies have evaluated the relationship between student-level absences on individual-level achievement, and others have assessed school-level effects of absences on educational outcomes, the literature has been limited on discerning the effects of classroom-level absences on student-level achievement. That is, the extant body of research has not fully considered the classroom effect of absent peers on student-level test performance.

This study contributes to the literature on attendance by evaluating the classroom contextual effects of absences on individual student achievement. Because this study has been afforded multilevel data of elementary school students in the School District of Philadelphia from 1995 to 2001, it is possible to link students to classrooms, teachers, and schools, as well as other covariates, such as demographic information and neighborhoods. Therefore, having comprehensive multilevel and longitudinal data of elementary school students in a large urban district allows for the designation of student absences, identification of classroom peers, and subsequent construction of individual and classroom peer metrics of absences for every student’s schooling experience.

Furthermore, the field has predominantly focused on measures of total absences. However, absences can be defined in two ways—excused and unexcused. As such, students may be exposed to peers with high levels of excused absences, though absences by these students may not signal academic, family, or social disengagement or other problems. On the other hand, a classroom may contain students with high levels of unexcused absences, which may arise from delinquency or school disengagement and not for the same reasons as excused absences (Hess, Lynon, Corsino, & Wells, 1989; Rumberger, 1995).

The difficulty in relying on the current empirical literature is that most studies have not differentiated between unexcused absences and total absences. As a consequence, the findings from these studies may potentially contain confounding issues resulting from not parsing out the effects of absence behavior deemed unexcused (by the teacher and school) from other factors of absences (i.e., a general metric of absences does not differentiate between a high-performing student with the flu, and a student with behavior or disengagement issues). To avoid these problems, this article draws distinctions between total absences and unexcused absences in constructing measures of student- and classroom-level covariates as a way to discern individual and peer effects of missing school in general from those resulting from unexcused absence behavior.

Finally, the research on absences has predominantly focused on the educational outcomes of high school students. The effects of absences on elementary school performance are lacking in the research on attendance, and empirically, studying peer effects of absent students in elementary schools allows for two advantages. The first is that unlike high school students in large urban school districts like Philadelphia, elementary school students are generally contained within the same classroom throughout the school day and academic year. As a result, studying elementary classrooms allows for a more clear-cut identification of peers with whom other students interact. This effect is too confounded in empirical studies on high school students, who move classrooms throughout the school day with the start of each new period. Thus, because classroom peers potentially alternate five to six times per day, the peer effects for high school students (and some middle school students) are difficult to identify and are potentially diluted. There is a second advantage that is particularly germane to this sample: By identifying significant factors in the schooling experiences of urban elementary youth, it is possible to develop policy and support interventions for at-risk students early in school, before chronically absent students enter into secondary education, where their risk of dropout or postgraduation misbehaviors becomes exacerbated (Alexander, Entwisle, & Horsey, 1997; Barrington & Hendricks, 1989; Lehr et al., 2003).

EMPIRICAL LITERATURE ON ABSENCES

Given that the purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship between absent peers and academic attainment, the relevant literature focuses empirically on the relationship between absences as a predictor and educational performance as an outcome. In early research, Summers and Wolfe (1977) implemented a student-level economic model of achievement to derive a relationship between unexcused absences and sixth-grade standardized test performance in the School District of Philadelphia during the 1970–1971 school year. Their cross-sectional results suggested a negative effect of unexcused absences on student achievement, which was heightened for low-SES students. However, their work did not evaluate the classroom peer effects of students with unexcused absences on individual test performance.

Among other hypotheses in their assessment of student absences, Monk and Ibrahim (1984) examined the peer effects of highly absent students. In particular, the authors evaluated the relationship between absences and achievement by utilizing a data set of 227 ninth graders in one middle school in upstate New York. The results suggested negative individual- and classroom-level effects on standardized ninth-grade test performance resulting from an increase in absences both for students and their peers. Although Monk and Ibrahim relied on a small sample of a single grade in one school within a homogenous school district, this early study laid the foundation for further empirical research in two capacities. First, in evaluating achievement, the authors did not distinguish between effects of total absences and unexcused absences. Therefore, additional research could parse out the effects of unexcused absences from overall absences of classroom peers on student testing performance. Second, rather than assessing the effects of absences on multiple grades, their analysis only relied on ninth-grade students. Thus, there is a need to evaluate the effects of absences at other school levels, such as early elementary years.

Several longitudinal studies have examined how attendance patterns in early years of schooling can predict future dropout rates (Alexander et al., 1997; Barrington & Hendricks, 1989; Hess et al., 1989). Rumberger (1995) identified student- and institution-level factors that significantly relate to dropout in middle school. The results suggested that the classification of students as having moderate or high absence patterns significantly predicted the probability of dropout. Odds ratios, which can be used as measures of effect sizes when both independent and dependent variables are binary, suggested odds of 2.03 (p < .01) for dropout related to moderate absenteeism and odds of 5.10 (p < .01) for students with high rates of absenteeism.

Other empirical studies have used metrics of current attendance or absences to evaluate contemporaneous educational outcomes. Neild and Balfanz (2006) utilized a cross-section of students in the 1999–2000 academic year and employed logistic regressions to predict the risk factors of nonpromotion from 9th to 10th grade. Among other results, they reported that for each additional percentage point increase in eighth-grade attendance, the odds of repeating ninth grade decreased by 5%. The odds ratio for this result was reported as .96 (p < .001). Although that paper focused on high school achievement, the work nonetheless provided insight into how student-level attendance and absence information is directly related to student-level performance.

Balfanz and Byrnes (2006) evaluated comprehensive school reform models aimed at closing the math achievement gap in urban middle schools. Among the span of covariates predicting math improvement was attendance, with results indicating a 20% difference in the probability of higher math performance for students with 60% attendance rates versus those who attended every day. Like Neild and Balfanz (2006), attendance was measured for each student, though no distinction was made between total absences and unexcused absences, nor was there an evaluation of classroom peer effects.

Other studies have evaluated the school-level contextual effects of elementary school attendance on standardized test performance, thereby providing initial insight into educational effects of absent peers. Assessing Louisiana public elementary schools, Caldas (1993) studied the effects of school attendance rates, among other covariates, on a composite index of test scores. The results indicted that a one standard deviation increase in average daily school attendance was associated with a .10 (p < .001) standard deviation increase in student-level test performance. This indicated that from within the context of the school environment, average daily student attendance was a positive and significant factor in predicting same-year academic performance for inner-city students. Similarly, Roby (2004) concluded that, based on the analysis of educational outcomes in Ohio, there were statistically significant correlation coefficients (specifically, Pearson’s r) between measures of school-level attendance and student achievement in fourth, sixth, ninth, and twelfth grades. Specifically, the correlation coefficients were .57, .54, .78, and .55 for each grade, respectively. These two studies have employed measures of attendance at the aggregated school level rather than for individual students or classrooms. Doing so has facilitated the opportunity for further in-depth student- and classroom-level analyses into the peer effects of the attendance–achievement relationship.

Within the framework of this body of empirical literature—in examining how missing or attending school can impact a range of academic outcomes—this study investigates individual- and peer-level effects of absences on annual student standardized testing performance, holding constant other predictors of academic achievement. To truly capture this relationship requires the use of empirical methods based on a large-scale individual-level data set in which students, teachers, and classrooms can be identified and in which absence measures can be parsed out for each student and peer group.

The complete research study, click here.

Schools Evaluate Whether to Privatize Support Services

Decisions about whether to contract out support services or keep them in-house are influenced by many factors

By Sean Cavanagh

School districts face constant pressure to provide reliable support services in areas like transportation, student meals, and janitorial work — and do it as cheaply as possible. That leaves them with a decision to make: Should they use their own employees to perform those duties, or hire outside contractors who may be able to do the job for less?

In some cases, districts find that they can reduce expenses, especially in salary and benefits, or secure specialized services that would be hard to provide in-house, by seeking bids and selecting private companies to do the work.

In other circumstances, districts may find that outside businesses' costs are too high, and that their ability to provide the exact services needed are lacking, so they choose to have the work done by the people already on the payroll.

At the same time, many districts are among the largest employers in their communities, and few school officials are eager to lay off workers they know, even in the name of reducing costs.Districts' decisions about whether to contract out services or keep them in-house are influenced by myriad and often competing factors. School leaders want to cut expenses, while protecting money going to classroom instruction, and the pressure to trim cost was particularly strong during the Great Recession, from which states and districts only recently have begun to emerge.

"Every district wants to be a good employer and make sure that their employees are treated well," said James M. Hohman, the assistant director of fiscal policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Midland, Mich., think tank that advocates free-market policies. The center sees contracting out for services, when that work can be performed effectively, as an "established way" for districts to save money, he said.

Embracing a Private Option

District: Lake Orion Community School District, a 7,600-student system north of Detroit

Context: The district has struggled financially as the local economy has sagged; the tax base has dropped significantly from seven years ago. The district, which has a $79 million general fund, had an operating deficit in fiscal 2011 of $1.8 million, said John Fitzgerald, an assistant superintendent.

Decision: The school board put out a request for proposals for a three-year contract to take over custodial services. Five bidders submitted proposals, including the union representing the workers, AFSCME, which offered concessions, including a reduction in wages. DM Burr, based in Flint, Mich., won the contract. Its bid was not the lowest, but the school board regarded the company as "the best fit," Mr. Fitzgerald said.

Outcome: About 50 district employees lost their jobs. Those workers were offered severance packages and were invited to apply for jobs with the outside contractor, at a lower salary; some were rehired. The district expects to save more than $3.5 million on salaries, benefits, and other costs over the course of a three-year contract. The district has been "very satisfied" with the services provided by the company, Mr. Fitzgerald said.

Perspective: While district leaders struggled with the decision to contract out services, they ultimately believed it was the right one. "It's something we had to do," Mr. Fitzgerald said. The district was determined to avoid cuts that undermined instruction, he said. "Protect the classroom, protect your teaching philosophy," he said. "And then streamline everywhere else."

District: Kent City Community School District, a 1,400-student system north of Grand Rapids, Mich.

Context: The district, with a $12 million general fund, has been forced to make repeated budget cuts over the years, laying off staff and privatizing services. The school system has made especially large cuts over the past four or five years, including layoffs of employees.

Decision: The school board voted two years ago to end its contract for food service with a private company, Chartwells School Dining Services, reasoning that the school system could save money by cutting off the fees it was paying and bringing those services in-house.

Outcome: The district expects to at least break even or turn a profit this year, said Superintendent Mike Weiler. It uses the same number of employees — 15 to 17 — and it has not increased the prices of meals. Some of the savings have come from the district’s having more flexibility in purchasing than it had through the private company, the superintendent said.

Perspective: The decision to move services back in-house amounts to a "small victory" in driving down costs, Mr. Weiler said. "It shows it can be done.When you take the for-profit motive out, that’s probably 80 percent" of where savings come from, he said.

But unions representing support-service workers view many efforts to privatize services with skepticism.

"Privatization moves quality control away from the parents of the children these services are intended to support," said Ruby J. Newbold, an American Federation of Teachers vice president, in a statement toEducation Week, when asked about districts' decisions to contract out services. She is also the president of the Detroit Association of Educational Office Employees.

Estimates of cost savings through privatization are often exaggerated, Ms. Newbold argued. "Today's privatization bargain," she said, "quickly becomes tomorrow's increasingly costly contract that features less control and oversight."

National data on districts' contracting out for support services are limited, and the information that does exist offers a mixed picture.

A survey of state education departments, conducted in 2007 by the Mackinac Center, found that 13 percent of public school districts taking part in the federal National School Lunch Program contract meal services out to private companies, though the portion of systems doing so in each state varies enormously.

About 10 percent of districts said they outsourced custodial or maintenance services during the 2011-12 school year, according to a survey by the American Association of School Administrators, based in Alexandria, Va. The association also found that a greater number of districts, about 20 percent, said they were considering taking that step in 2012-13.

In Michigan, 61 percent of the state's 549 school districts reported they had privatized one or more support services, a number that has increased steadily from 31 percent a decade earlier, according to a Mackinac Center report released this year. The increases in contracting out were pushed along by changes in state policy from the 1990s to today that have made it easier for districts to privatize certain services, Mr. Hohman said.

Those policies included a 2011 law signed by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, that offered districts financial incentives to obtain competitive bids on noninstructional services.

Even so, the decision to privatize services can be an agonizing one, as was the case in the Lake Orion Community School District, a 7,600-student system north of Detroit, where the school board voted last year to contract its custodial services out to a private company.

Felicia Hicks, a field staff representative for Council 25, the Michigan affiliate of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which represented the district custodial workers, argued that the district's estimates of savings from privatization were overstated, because a contractor could not match the breadth of services provided by the public employees at a lower cost. The decision was not based on realistic "dollar for dollar" and "work for work" comparisons, she argued. "It was a totally misguided decision," she said.The district has seen its tax base shrink by roughly one-third over the past six years or so, with job losses in the auto industry and other businesses, and it has been forced to cut spending, said John Fitzgerald, the system's assistant superintendent for business and finance.

About 50 custodial workers — many of whom handled multiple duties as "jacks of all trades" — lost their jobs, though they were invited to reapply with the private company, said Mr. Fitzgerald.

"It was probably the most dramatic decision the board had made in decades," Mr. Fitzgerald said of going with a private contract. "It was an extremely stressful time. ... These are all people we see every day. These are people the board members are seeing at the grocery store, at the movie theater."

Coverage of entrepreneurship and innovation in education and school design is supported in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Life After Vouchers

What Happens to Students Who Leave Private Schools for the Traditional Public Sector?

1. Deven Carlson
   1. University of Oklahoma
2. Joshua M. Cowen
   1. University of Kentucky
3. David J. Fleming
   1. Furman University

Abstract

Few school choice evaluations consider students who leave such programs, and fewer still consider the effects of leaving these programs as policy-relevant outcomes. Using a representative sample of students from the citywide voucher program in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we analyze more than 1,000 students who leave the program during a 4-year period. We show that low-performing voucher students tend to move from the voucher sector into lower performing and less effective public schools than the typical public school student attends, whereas high-performing students transfer to better public schools. In general, transferring students realize substantial achievement gains after moving to the public sector; these results are robust to multiple analytical approaches. This evidence has important implications for school choice policy and research.

On Misrepresenting (Gates) MET to Advance State Policy Agendas

Data and thoughts on public and private school funding in the U.S.

In my previous  post I chastised state officials for their blatant mischaracterization of metrics to be employed in teacher evaluation. This raised (in twitter conversation) the issue of the frequent misrepresentation of findings from the Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching Project (or MET). Policymakers frequently invoke the Gates MET findings as providing broad based support for however they might choose to use, whatever measures they might choose to use (such as growth percentiles).

Here is one example in a recent article from NJ Spotlight (John Mooney) regarding proposed teacher evaluation regulations in New Jersey:

New academic paper: One of the most outspoken critics has been Bruce Baker, a professor and researcher at Rutgers’ Graduate School of Education. He and two other researchers recently published a paper questioning the practice, titled “The Legal Consequences of Mandating High Stakes Decisions Based on Low Quality Information: Teacher Evaluation in the Race-to-the-Top Era.” It outlines the teacher evaluation systems being adopted nationwide and questions the use of SGP, specifically, saying the percentile measures is not designed to gauge teacher effectiveness and “thus have no place” in determining especially a teacher’s job fate.

The state’s response: The Christie administration cites its own research to back up its plans, the most favored being the recent Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project funded by the Gates Foundation, which tracked 3,000 teachers over three years and found that student achievement measures in general are a critical component in determining a teacher’s effectiveness.

I asked colleague Morgan Polikoff of the University of Southern California for his comments. Note that Morgan and I aren’t entirely on the same page on the usefulness of even the best possible versions of teacher effect (on test score gain) measures… but we’re not that far apart either.  It’s my impression that Morgan believes that better estimated measures can be more valuable – more valuable than I perhaps think they can be in policy decision making. My perspective is presented here (and Morgan is free to provide his).  My skepticism in part arises from my perception that there is neither interest among or incentive for state policymakers to actually develop better measures (as evidenced in my previous post). And that I’m not sure some of the major issues can ever be resolved.

That aside, here are Morgan Polikoff’s comments regarding misrepresentation of the Gates MET findings – in particular, as applied to states adopting student growth percentile measures:

As a member of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project research team, I was asked by Bruce to pen a response to the state’s use of MET to support its choice of student growth percentiles (SGPs) for teacher evaluations. Speaking on my behalf only (and not on behalf of the larger research team), I can say that the MET project says nothing at all about the use of SGPs. The growth measures used in the MET project were, in fact, based on value-added models (VAMs) (http://www.metproject.org/downloads/MET_Gathering_Feedback_Research_Paper.pdf). The MET project’s VAMs, unlike student growth percentiles, included an extensive list of student covariates, such as demographics, free/reduced-price lunch, English language learner, and special education status.

Extrapolating from these results and inferring that the same applies to SGPs is not an appropriate use of the available evidence. The MET results cannot speak to the differences between SGP and VAM measures, but there is both conceptual and empirical evidence that VAM measures that control for student background characteristics are more conceptually and empirically appropriate (link to your paper and to Cory Koedel’s AEFP paper). For instance, SGP models are likely to result in teachers teaching the most disadvantaged students being rated the poorest (cite Cory’s paper). This may result in all kinds of negative unintended consequences, such as teachers avoiding teaching these kinds of students.

In short, state policymakers should consider all of the available evidence on SGPs vs. VAMs, and they should not rely on MET to make arguments about measures that were not studied in that work.

Morgan

Citations:

Baker, B.D., Oluwole, J., Green, P.C. III (2013) The legal consequences of mandating high stakes decisions based on low quality information: Teacher evaluation in the race-to-the-top era. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 21(5). This article is part of EPAA/AAPE’s Special Issue On Value-Added: What America’s Policymakers Need to Know and Understand, Guest Edited by Dr. Audrey Amrein-Beardsley and Assistant Editors Dr. Clarin Collins, Dr. Sarah Polasky, and Ed Sloat. Retrieved [date], fromhttp://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1298

Ehlert, M., Koedel, C., Parsons, E., & Podgursky, M. (2012). Selecting Growth Measures for School and Teacher Evaluations. http://ideas.repec.org/p/umc/wpaper/1210.html

How to Foster Collaboration and Team Spirit

 By MindShift

Flickr: woodleywonderworks

By Thom Markham

Once they get to the working world, most students, in almost any job, will collaborate as a member of a team. And every student needs to be prepared for that environment — partly for employment opportunity, but mainly because the deeply embedded mental model of learning and creating as an individual process is obsolete. Collaboration has become the chief way in which things are done. Powerful collaboration is driven by incisive communication—and out of that process come the very best expressions of innovation, creativity, and critical inquiry.

But collaboration doesn’t necessarily come naturally to students. High-performance collaboration requires training and the development of key personal skills. For teachers, two initial steps will help foster this process. First, reframe the conversation by using the terminology of teams rather than group work. Think of your favorite sports team and now call them a group. Feel the difference? Teams focus on accountability and commitment; they form for a purpose and operate through norms and shared expectations.

Second, import and adapt the high-performance principles common in the work world to teams in the classroom. This requires time, good coaching skills, a relentless focus on the quality of interaction between students, and a set of team tools, including contracts, rubrics, and exercise. But the payoff is noticeable. Once students form teams over an extended period and begin to collaborate well, they learn more, get better at teaching others, produce more powerful products, and enjoy the process. Here are 10 principles that can help you design high performance teams.

• Examine individual strengths within collaborative context. Teams form through an intentional process. One starting point is to have members begin by sharing their individual strengths. Who will need help on certain aspects of the task ahead? Use simple tools, such as a basic Myers-Briggs test, to have students individually assess themselves. Have them share results using respectful communication. In this early phase, always debrief the process. Were we fair? Straightforward? Inclusive? Are we on the way to becoming a team? The goal is not to judge differences, but open up the discussion so students make room for everyone to participate.

• Speak the language of commitment and character. Groups fail because members don’t pull their weight, aren’t accountable, and don’t really collaborate at all. Have a thorough discussion about the meaning of teamwork. What do students see in their sports experience that translates? Have them grapple with the question: How will we, as a team and individually, hold ourselves accountable for deadlines, shared products, and overall quality?

• Set the rules. In the adult world, full participation in the team is the expectation (although not always the reality.) Students, however, need support for learning to be a good team member. After a thorough preview of who we are as a team, have members agree on norms or a contract, define their roles, and design specific remedies for situations in which members do not live up to agreements. For students who seem incapable of participating in a team, you might have to make special arrangements. But this should be the exception, not the norm.

• Prepare teams to fall apart. The old formula for ‘forming, storming, norming, and performing’ is a great comfort to anyone working in a team or on a project—because it is a constant. Teams may start off feeling inspired and unified; by week two, personalities emerge, agreements get broken, and—suddenly—everything’s off. Prepare your teams for the process; help them notice when productivity is breaking down. Reserve time in the teaching schedule for teams to sort out differences, regroup, reassess, and renorm.

• See conflict as opportunity. No one likes conflict, but this is the exact point when students in teams learn the ways of non-judgment and conflict resolution they will need in the future. Teach the language of constructive feedback and the golden rule of good listening: Are you listening—or just waiting to respond? Often, you can head off issues by having teams practice this at the beginning of a project.

• Stress design and prototype thinking. After teams become cohesive, the focus turns to work quality. First, make sure teams understand why they are a team. Their goal is to mind-meld themselves into a high-functioning set of individuals focused on creating and crafting the best product they can. Allow time for brainstorming. Encourage failure as a step to eventual success. Give them time to mull, share, and redo. Make sure every idea goes through the filter of feedback.

• Schedule critical thinking. A very powerful training tool is to use protocols, such as a critical friends protocol, visible thinking routines, or other tools for inquiry, to encourage and teach focused communication that uses the vocabulary and terms of the discipline. Early in the team process, teach them to respond to ideas with a “I like…I wonder…I suggest” approach. Once they have the basics, mix and match. Break the teams into pairs to come up with an idea, then pair-share. Have teams present ideas to each other, then debrief. Keep it in motion and, as they proceed, expect teams to get better at questioning and constructive feedback.

• Reward innovation. Teams are designed to produce top quality work, but often they exceed that standard. The team process is inherently creative—and they very well might deliver a product that earns an ‘A” but goes beyond the requirements of the assignment. In our standardized system, we desperately need a way to recognize and acknowledge out-of-the-box thinking. Use individual and team assessment rubrics that contain a breakthrough column. This is a blank column that rewards innovation and invites inspiration.

• Use online collaborative tools. Collaboration and invention have moved online, but the same high performance standards are in effect. Teams should be able to show rich interactions, critical inquiry, and clear communication in their online collaboration. They should hold each other accountable. In this case, teachers need to be part of collaborative teams by being online as much as students. No more hiding behind statements like, “I don’t know much about Edmodo, but my students are really good at it.”

• Reflect and move on. Before teams disperse, close the circle of learning. Allow a class period to debrief and reflect on the experience. Reinforce high level collaboration by using a formal debrief process. What did we learn? How did we function as a team? What gaps were there? What did we learn individually and collectively? How was the quality of our work, and how do we improve it?

Thom Markham is a psychologist, school redesign consultant, and the author of the Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for inquiry and innovation for K-12 educators. To download the tools mentioned in the blog, go to the PBL tools page on the website, www.thommarkham.com. 

What Did the Billionaires Know about Cheating in D.C. Schools, and When Did They Know It?

by John Thompson

John Merrow has found "the smoking gun," or the confidential memo warning Michelle Rhee of the extent of cheating that may have occurred in Washington, D.C. schools in response to her draconian "reforms." He summarizes the evidence of an inexcusable failure to investigate the cheating and recalls the lesson of Watergate that the cover-up is often worse than the original crime. Merrow concludes with the question, "What did Michelle know, and when did she know it?"

Merrow's report leads to the more important question of "What did the billionaires know and when did they know it?" After all, corporate "reformers" have continued to support Rhee's test-driven "reforms" and her attacks on the teaching profession. What will they do now that there is proof that Rhee and her successors turned a blind eye to cheating?

A cornerstone of Rhee's reign was her IMPACT evaluation system that used test scores to fire hundreds of teachers. That experiment was funded, in part, with $65 million from the Broad Foundation, the Arnold Foundation, the Robertson Foundation, and the Walton Foundation. Funding was contingent on the continuity of leadership within D.C. schools, as well as meeting "student achievement outcomes detailed in the 'Predicted Gains' document" of 2010. So, what did the foundations know about circumstantial evidence of cheating, and when did they know about the highly respected reporter's search for that the "long-buried" memo of 2009 presenting evidence that test scores in 70 schools may have been inflated by cheating?

Merrow has reported on D.C. schools since 2007. It has been nearly six years since Rhee told him, "If there are rules standing in the way of that, I will question those rules." What did the billionaires know and when did they know that Rhee finished her statement with "I will bend those rules."

Merrow's scoop about Rhee's disinterest in investigating the possible cheating by 191 teachers and by principals she hired is the headline of the day. His worst revelations, however, were about other abuses that also have long been suspected. He tells of Associate Superintendent Francisco Millet's meetings with principals and the pressure they placed on principals to raise test scores. Merrow then quotes Millet, "Everybody felt this urgency to improve test scores, and there was no focus on instruction. The entire focus was on improving test scores."

What did the billionaires know about the charge, "There came a point in time where we almost abandoned teaching. After Christmas, there was nothing but test prep?" When did they know that Merrow's reporting team, "saw hours and hours of drill on basic concepts?" They "heard parental complaints like this one: 'There's no attention to the actual depth of instruction going on in the classroom.'" The reporters saw "the quick-fix solutions of choosing to work intensively with kids who you knew could boost their test scores if they just got a few extra hours of instruction on particular glitches in their own test results."

There is a bigger reason why we need to know what the billionaires knew about reports in the 2011 reports in USA Today and the Washington Post about the refusal of Rhee's people to investigate credible charges of cheating and of complaints about such educational malpractice. After her resignation as D.C. chancellor, Rhee announced that her new organization, Students First, would raise a billion dollars to promote her agenda. She would not name donors, but billionaire Eli Broad said that he "expect[ed] to be a major contributor." Since then, Rhee has been a major force in promoting test-driven accountability across the nation.

That brings us to the key question of when the billionaires knew the fact that Merrow reported, which is, "Sadly, D.C.'s schools are worse by almost every conceivable measure." Do they know that students, especially poor children with learning deficits, need stability? What do they know about the effects of the revolving door of teachers and principals that Rhee created? What do they know about the reliable NAEP test and when did they finally know that student performance progress slowed under Rhee, as the achievement gap grew? Do they know why the most revealing metric is the 8th grade NAEP reading score? When did they know that it dropped by two points for black students during D.C.'s "reform years?"

Now that the billionaires can't avoid the sordid truth about Rhee, will the accountability hawks hold her accountable? Now that they can't avoid the facts presented by Merrow, will they take an interest in the social science which explains how and why cheating was one, but only one, negative result of Rhee's "reign of error?" After spending such enormous amounts of money promoting bubble-in accountability, will the billionaires do some homework on what it really takes to improve schools?

Or, will we soon be asking what the billionaires knew about their contribution to wrecking public schools? And, when did they know that the result of their efforts -- and Rhee's efforts -- could be privatization?