Comment by Douglas Carnine and Hans Meeder
[Can Title I Attain Its Goal?]
George Farkas and L. Shane Hall provide an excellent historical analysis of Title I, identify many important variables such as added time for instruction, express the need to use research-based practices, and make three pointed recommendations: (1) reduce displacement and redirect services to the lowest performers, (2) redirect the programs to grades one to three, and (3) build a coherent program. Their paper also captures the greatest challenge to their recommendations and others: "The problem with teacher training is that it is not very good and there is too little of it." The dilemma is in recommending that more or less of things be done that may or may not be working in the first place. Consequently, a good starting point might be to know what is being done and what effects it might have, as difficult, complicated, and expensive as it might be.
Accountability is needed in education funding to ensure that federal dollars contribute to student learning and are not wasted or, worse yet, used to fund practices that hinder children's learning. For example, a robust accountability system would allow for a comparison of the relative merits of schoolwide programs versus concentrated grants on pullouts.
But lessons learned from good management practice reveal that setting up the right accountability system is difficult. If accountability is to be productive, it must measure the right things, report accurate results, and create consequences that reward or discourage certain educational behaviors. Finally, for accountability to be fair, it must be linked with tangible reforms that give greater control and flexibility to those who are being held accountable. For example, a sound accountability system could give information about the success of targeting resources in kindergarten or grades one through three, allowing local districts to make better decisions about allocations of resources.
Children need to master subject content and skills to apply their knowledge. Teachers need to master content and effective pedagogy. However, it is not particularly useful or realistic to envision federal officials establishing academic achievement benchmarks or goals for children within a particular state or overtly controlling teacher professional development. [End Page 109]
Not only would that raise serious objections about federal intrusion, but based on evidence, it is not necessary. States such as North Carolina and Texas are seeing achievement gains among their students because they are building an education accountability system that is understandable and engendering public pressure for high achievement for all children. It is a work in progress. For example, Texas has decided to align teacher professional development for early reading instruction with its content standards and is beginning to address the knowledge and pedagogy gaps that have been identified in the teaching work force.
The question is whether federal legislation is going to move to an accountability-based model where districts and schools have the authority and the responsibility to meet state and local accountability goals. This fundamental question hearkens to Paul T. Hill's comments about how much policymakers should tweak federal legislation. Should policymakers advocate for their preferred practice (for example, ranging from contracting out for services to adding new categorical programs) or should they support strong accountability legislation that allows states, districts, and schools the flexibility to select practices on their own?
The way to change the culture of education is to make accountability work. Spasmodic tweaks will not be effective. For example, research-based practices are of little interest outside of the context of accountability. If a culture is built around process and bureaucracy, no need exists to go through the pain of change entailed in adopting unfamiliar, research-based practices.
Accountability for Student Learning
The content of what children should learn (for example, reading, math, social studies, and science) is appropriately defined by the individual states. Effective state assessments are aligned to these content standards and measure student achievement against these standards. The current Title I already requires participating states to establish such content standards and assessment systems.
But for creating effective educational accountability, deciding on good content standards and assessing students by those standards is not enough. The reporting system must create local understanding and local pressure for real improvement, which requires testing every grade, every [End Page 110] year. How can all the teachers in an elementary school be held accountable if testing occurs only for fourth or fifth graders?
Creating an effective school report card is an important foundation for the accountability structure. The following components of an effective school report card should be explicitly required of states as part of Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) participation.
An effective school report card must report student achievement data that are disaggregated by gender, race, and ethnicity; English proficiency; migrant status; disability; and economic disadvantage. If data are averaged for all students within a school, accountability for all students from all backgrounds is compromised. The only way to make progress in closing the achievement gap between disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged students is to know what the gap looks like.
The school report card should also provide information about the "value-added" by the school. That is, what is the average gain that students make, and how large were the gains of students with various demographic characteristics? This value-added factor (or gain score) gets at the fundamental question about a school's effectiveness: How much did the school add to a child's education, and how much is simply attributable to family background and other environmental factors?
The school report card system should provide comparative information about school performance among all schools in the state. The system should associate schools that have similar student populations and allow citizens to know how well students in these similar schools performed.
And most important, the report should make explicit the achievement level of the best of the similar schools. Having access to this information helps all parents and students from all types of schools. It helps students and parents in low-income schools know how well the best-achieving similar schools are performing. For example, a parent looking at such a report card might ask, "If students at the Wesley Elementary School in Houston are 98 percent school-lunch eligible and are achieving a pass rate of over 80 percent on the Texas reading and math assessments, why are students in my child's similar school only passing at a 50 percent level?" This type of reporting also holds affluent schools to the same kind of accountability, as they are compared with the highest achieving schools in their peer group.
To further safeguard the accountability for the federal dollars spent by the states, the state tests given to students must meet commonly accepted scientific standards: [End Page 111]
--Be fair.
--Be valid.
--Be reliable.
--Be aligned with the specific content of the state standards.
--Be administered to all students, even if that requires a version in Spanish or another language. (Federal law already calls for including students with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) in special education in the testing unless the IEP specifically excludes the students. Many students with IEPs who take the state test are eligible for accommodations.)
Within twelve months of the enactment of the new ESEA, each state should have its assessments technically reviewed by an external team of experts, identified in consultation with national professional organizations for assessment. The state would respond to this review and plan actions (if any) that will be taken to strengthen the state assessment.
Accountability for Quality Teaching
To ensure quality teaching, teachers should master their subject matter and keep abreast of changes in pedagogy.
Current requirements under the Eisenhower professional development program eloquently describe what sustained, intensive professional development should look like. The problem is that little professional development at the local level looks like what is described in the law, and almost no one knows what the law says.
To promote professional development that will reach the Eisenhower ideals, an accountability system needs to be established. Federal professional development funds should be tied to improving teacher knowledge in content areas--so teachers are assessed as to how well they know the content that they will be required to teach their students. These content tests should be developed by each state, specifically aligned to the state's learning standards, reported to the public, and meet the commonly accepted scientific standards, which would be a formal review for technical quality.
Education faces a difficult challenge in the area of pedagogy because of a lack of rigorous research and a lack of attention to research findings. The only pedagogy area in which the research has been synthesized in a systematic fashion is beginning reading (for example, the National Research Council's report Preventing Reading Difficulty in Young Children). [End Page 112] For three years, federal professional development should be limited to pedagogy training for research-based reading instruction. As pedagogy for other academic disciplines is synthesized, federal professional development funds could be applied to those disciplines as well.
Any noncertified teacher who is seeking to gain a credential must now take courses in pedagogy. In cases where school employees are using federal professional development funds to earn credit toward a full certification, this limitation on pedagogy training should not apply. Furthermore, this limitation on pedagogy should not apply to state or local funds for teacher professional development.
Federal professional development funds could still be available for improving the content expertise of teachers in important subjects such as math, science, and social studies. Teachers must be experts in the subjects that they teach. But professional development in pedagogy should be limited to the subject areas in which reliable research has been effectively synthesized and distributed within the field.
Accountability--The Federal Role
Can federal policy be crafted so it encourages or rewards states that are making significant progress in raising student achievement? Relying on state assessments in isolation is not sufficient. At least one common measure must exist to determine if disadvantaged students in different states are making reasonable gains with the use of federal dollars.
To safeguard against differences among state tests, all states should be encouraged to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This test samples a broad cross-section of students within a state so not every student would need to take the test. The NAEP scores would provide a crude metric by which citizens, educators, and leaders could judge the relative achievement of the students in their state.
An incentive system could be developed for states that participate in NAEP. The incentive system would reward states that achieve high levels of progress according to their relative NAEP scores. For example, 50 percent of new program funding increases (for Title I, Education Technology, Title VI block grant, and so on) would be allocated according to current rules for student population and poverty data. The remaining 50 percent of new dollars would be allocated to states on a ranking system [End Page 113] that weighs each state's relative progress in raising achievement of each group of students in the state on the NAEP assessments.
States making high rates of progress on NAEP would receive a significantly larger portion of these incentive funds. States making no progress or with dropping scores would receive no incentive funds. Every state would be guaranteed to continue receiving its current allocation of funds, even if it does not participate in NAEP.
More specifically, incentive funding for Title I would go to states based only on the rate of progress disadvantaged students in the state are making. Incentive funds linked to other programs could be based on a mix of progress for all students and for disadvantaged students, depending on how funding is already targeted. Teacher professional development funds could likewise be allocated to states based on their relative rates of student achievement gains. Teacher quality is clearly linked to student achievement. This initiative would support that linkage and reward effective professional development.
States that are already reaching high levels of achievement will eventually begin to top out at a high level. For these states, additional options besides their share of the incentive funds must be offered. This is where the concept of "Straight A's" or super-flexibility has merit. If a state shows consistently high rates of achievement and rates of growth in achievement, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, why not allow those states to negotiate a flexible, data-driven arrangement whereby it receives all of its share of K-12 education funding in a flexible grant? If the state makes continued gains for all students, based on objective NAEP data, the negotiated arrangement would continue. If student achievement slips significantly, the state would be required to return to the typical arrangement for receiving ESEA funding.
Local Capacity for Research-Based Decisionmaking
A final issue that must be addressed is the role of local decisionmaking. For historical and political reasons, Americans have chosen not to pursue the option of establishing a centralized, national curriculum for learning. They have depended on local decisionmaking. Unfortunately, the quality of decisionmaking has been lacking in many places.
It is lacking for two primary reasons. First, no uniform market demand or public accountability exists for good decisionmaking and high student [End Page 114] achievement. Until recent decades, the economy did not demand high levels of education for all students, and education systems were designed to give only a basic education to all students. Only students who were clearly "college material" needed to learn at higher levels, and such students usually self-selected into the college prep track. Because the economy did not demand high achievement for a large majority of students, the public system responded in kind.
As market demands have shifted for more highly educated students, public systems have not been particularly responsive. In part, they have been isolated from direct accountability for results. Indications that education is substandard usually do not appear until the student has been out of school for a few years.
But to simply assume that free-market forces will improve education is not supported by observing the existing private education marketplace. Many profitable yet low-achieving private schools have adopted the same whole language approach to reading that is widely criticized in public schools. The market has not weeded out these schools, because many parents find the "child-centered, discovery learning" philosophy that they offer appealing. It may be disastrous for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, but in today's private education marketplace, it fares well. Similarly, in higher education, private and public colleges of education seem to have been equal in their support of whole language.
Second, quality research to inform educational decisions is lacking. Because there has not been a high economic or public demand for effective education, a dearth of federal investment has been made in high-quality research on teaching and learning that can give local decisionmakers reliable knowledge. Educators are receptive to change, because they generally want the best for children; but because of a serious knowledge gap and a romanticized tradition of learning coming from colleges of education, schools are regularly swayed by the promises of the newest reform movement.
Some policymakers say confidently, "We've always known what works, but educators just don't care because there are no market forces in education." That is not entirely true. Until the recent investment in research by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), it was not known why many children could not grasp phonics instruction. The research also determined that some children need explicit instruction in how to break apart the sounds of words before they [End Page 115] receive instruction in the sounds and blending of letters. This research knowledge gap and observed failure of some students to grasp phonics was part of the reason that the whole language movement was an attractive option to many teachers.
Now more sophisticated research provides the knowledge to help children learn to read who were falling through the gaps of traditional phonics. In addition, research funded by the U.S. Office of Special Education programs has found that many children who had been thought to be incapable of learning to read could in fact learn to read. The weight of research on reading is forcing all educators to pay attention and question their leanings toward the constructivist, discovery learning philosophy of education. Research does matter.
To implement accountability and responsibility throughout public education, the need to build capacity for high-quality decisionmaking at every level must be taken seriously. Access to research-based information and implementation assistance must be readily available to parents, classroom teachers, building principals, citizen school boards and district leaders, and state officials.
Reforms of ESEA and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement must:
--Engage federal panels (supervised by NICHD and the Department of Education) in ongoing reviews and syntheses of high-quality research on teaching and learning. These reviews must give higher weight to scientifically rigorous research, and the findings must be compiled in language that is usable by classroom teachers and school leaders. The National Reading Panel has already established clear rules of evidence and is an extraordinary model for how this review process can work across a variety of academic disciplines.
--Invest in high-quality research on teaching and learning, with a strong emphasis on large-scale testing and evaluation about math, science, instruction for non-English speakers, and classroom management. This research should be regularly reviewed and synthesized.
--Expand and improve the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program, which helps schools purchase implementation assistance for whole school reforms from organizations that have expertise in reaching high levels of student achievement.
--Create a program, similar to the CSRD, that provides funding to school districts to purchase implementation assistance to help institutionalize [End Page 116] effective decisionmaking practices and methods for moving research into practice.
Conclusion
Accountability does need to be strengthened in this authorization of the ESEA. But an important choice must be made about how to strengthen that accountability. Federal control could be increased through more directives and funding penalties for poor performance. That sounds appealing in the short term, given the lackadaisical progress that many schools and districts are making. But, based on experience, this approach has very little prospect for long-term gains. Federal requirements are effective at ensuring minimum compliance, not at energizing high-quality results.
Instead, states and localities could establish effective accountability systems that will energize local understanding and demand for high achievement. Federal resources could be used to strengthen the capacity for local decisionmaking using high-quality research findings. States that help students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, make significant achievement gains could be rewarded. And greater flexibility and autonomy could be made available for states and districts that prove their ability to raise student achievement.
This flexible mix of local accountability and federal incentives provides the greatest promise for helping all America's children experience educational excellence.
