Where Do Testing and Accountability Go From Here?

My Bellwether colleagues Alex Spurrier, Jenn Schiess, Andy Rotherham, and I released a set of briefs today looking at the past, present, and future of standards-based reform. Those include:

  1. In The Historical Roots and Theory of Change of Modern School Accountability, we review the history and logic behind standards-based reform to recall the foundational goals and rationale for the main strategic levers reformers were trying to pull.
  2. In The Impact of Standards-Based Accountability, we assess the strengths and weaknesses of the ways in which standards-based reform has been operationalized in policy and practice and begin to identify what should be retained and what should evolve.
  3. In Assessment and Accountability in the Wake of COVID-19, we explore what accountability may mean in a global pandemic, as challenges of equity in our education systems are exacerbated and the need to rapidly assess and address those challenges is urgent.

A forthcoming webinar will further explore these topics.

Join us on Monday July 20th for a conversation with Jeb Bush, John B. King, Jr., and Carissa Moffat Miller about how we should measure the impact of education systems on students, particular students of color and low-income students, even as COVID-19 changes schooling dramatically. Register and learn more here.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

In a Normal Recession, Education Is One of the Biggest Losers

Will college students be more or less likely to pursue a career in teaching in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic? I can think of arguments either way, and it’s far too early to know for sure, but past recessions have pushed students away from teaching. Here’s my takeaway from a 2015 paper looking at how college students react to economic cycles:

The paper looks at the college majors of students who turned age 20 between 1960 and 2011. Then, it linked the students’ decisions with data on macroeconomic trends to examine how business cycles affect student choices. Of the 38 majors included in the study, education was the biggest loser. When recessions hit, both men and women were less likely to want to become teachers and instead turned to fields like accounting and engineering. In number terms, the researchers estimate that, “each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate…decreases the share of women choosing Early and Elementary Education by a little more than 6 percent.” (For men it was even higher.)

It’s possible that this time will be different. For one, the health implications of the novel coronavirus may force college students to make a different calculation than normal. Or, the suddenness of this recession may affect how quickly students can react or alter their prior plans. But from the financial aspect alone, we should expect fewer students to pursue teaching over the next few years than would have otherwise.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

 

Asking Online Panels About Online Access Is A Thing And A Blueprint For Schools, Plus Shavar Jeffries, Values V. Empiricism, Tresha Ward Talks To School Leaders – Distanced Of Course! More…

There is some interesting stuff in this new NEA poll of parents, but it’s an online poll and they asked parents about how much access to technology is an issue for them. Good news! Just 6 percent said it was.It’s an online poll…c’mon…Across the country millions of kids are not being served because of issues with device access, internet access, or both. We have to do better…

Here’s some student voice via The Times:

Talking out of turn. Destroying classroom materials. Disrespecting teachers. Blurting out answers during tests. Students pushing, kicking, hitting one another and even rolling on the ground. This is what happens in my school every single day.

You may think I’m joking, but I swear I’m not.

Based on my peers’ behavior, you might guess that I’m in second or fourth grade. But I’m actually about to enter high school in New York City, and, during my three years of middle school, these sorts of disruptions occurred repeatedly in any given 42-minute class period.

That’s why I’m in favor of the distance learning the New York City school system instituted when the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Emmeline Zhao and I sat down with Shavar Jeffries to talk about coronavirus and education politics and the federal response. He also shares his backstory. Video and text.

Bellwether’s Tresha Ward talks to school leaders about coronavirus response in a series of videos:

In the May Education Leadership Dan Willingham and I take a look at education’s research problem. Does our pre-Covid lede, augmented with a parenthetical, hold up?

Most people know the basic story of handwashing in medicine: Infections in medical facilities were a seemingly intractable problem until, starting in the 19th century, iconoclastic doctors used data to show that washing hands (and instruments) reduced infections and saved lives. Yet whether from stubbornness, politics among practitioners, or genuine disbelief that washing made a difference, there was plenty of resistance before basic steps to prevent infections took hold. Today, however, routine steps to prevent infection are commonplace. For instance, when you visit a doctor’s office or emergency room, you’ll see sanitizer by the door (even more so now in the midst of the coronavirus crisis).

In education, though, we still don’t “wash our hands.” Instead, we too often alternatively ignore, belittle, or weaponize scientific findings relevant to education, depending on personal or institutional preferences. We don’t, in the education sector, do enough to support a culture or politics that prizes empiricism and learning—including learning about which education practices work best and what empirical data indicates about which practices are most effective.

If you are into things like threshold of certainty and the tension between values and science, you might like it.

Via an education task force AEI put together here’s a blueprint for reopening schools – not a template but a set of issues to think about.

Are Kids Super Spreaders? The Evidence So Far Says No

I highly recommend this short piece from Emily Oster. She looks at what we know so far about whether kids are likely to catch and transmit COVID-19. We already have good evidence that kids are less likely to get sick and die from the virus than older adults.

But does that mean kids just aren’t getting sick, or are they asymptomatic carriers of the virus? Oster suggests the evidence so far is tilting toward the former:

However, in practice it seems that infection among kids is simply very unlikely.  It’s not that they are infected and don’t know it, it seems like they are just not infected very often.  And when they are, it may be that the mild symptoms limit their viral spreading….

What does this mean for policy, and for families? Opening schools and day cares and camps (PLEASE!!!) is still very complicated since these all involve congregations of adults. But on the plus side, these results indicate that in those contexts they suggest our primary concern should be adult-to-adult transmission, which may be easier to limit.

Read the full thing here.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

How Will COVID-19 Affect the Teacher Labor Market?

In a new column at The 74, Lauren Dachille and I offer five predictions, and four suggestions, for school districts struggling with hiring uncertainty in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We write:

Ultimately, while this crisis presents many challenges for districts, it may also provide an opportunity. Those places that are able to adapt to the changing teacher labor market now can have a lasting positive impact on student learning in years to come.

Read our predictions and suggestions in the full piece.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

Bellwether Covid-19 Response Webinar

Yesterday Bellwether hosted a webinar with with four pivotal sector leaders — Dan Domenech, American Association of School Administrators; Eva Moskowitz, Success Academy Charter Schools; Nina Rees, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; and Sonja Santelises, Baltimore City Public Schools,.

They shared challenges, lessons and successes, and discussed what’s next. If you missed you can watch or listen here, closed captioning available.

More via this Ahead of the Heard post. 

Bellwether & Covid-19

A few resources from Bellwether to share.

On Thursday we have a webinar featuring Dan Domenech of AASA, Nina Rees of NACPS, and Eva Moskowitz and Sonja Santelises for on-the-ground district and charter perspectives. Pre-registration required. And it is filling up so don’t delay if you want to join.

Today we released this toolkit for school and non-profit leaders.

And (like everyone else it seems) we have a resource page with a lot of free resources.

Here are a few looks at various issues. I think school districts and charters should consider providing instruction this summer. Hailly Korman thinks there are some empathy lessons bound up in what’s happening. And at our blog Ahead of the Heard you will find a variety of resources on organizational and educational issues that the sector is facing.

Competency-Based Instruction, Now More Than Ever

My wife and I are privileged in lots of ways. We have books around the house, Wi-Fi, multiple connected devices, and a printer. We have flexible jobs that allow for remote work. We have a steady income and health care benefits.

Still, as the parents of two elementary-age kids in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown, we were thrown into this new homeschooling experiment abruptly, as of 11:41pm on Thursday, March 12th. Two weeks later, the governor of Virginia closed schools for the rest of the year. We’re now starting week four.

Our school district has given us little more than links to the state’s grade-level standards plus some old YouTube videos. They are supposedly going to start mailing out instructional packets next week (this week is technically Spring Break from the district’s perspective.) That feels lackadaisical and insufficient, especially compared to some of the more organized responses I’ve seen elsewhere.

While I’m bitter about how little our district is doing, I want to be clear this is about district policy. My kids’ teachers have signaled that they’d like to do more but they’re being prevented from doing so.

To fill the void, my wife and I created one of those daily schedules going around social media, and we’ve been giving the kids workbooks, other printouts we find online, plus some “educational” videos like Bill Nye The Science Guy and the Mo Willems Lunch Doodles.

While there are more resources out there, particularly for online instruction, we are not anxious to plop our kids in front of a device or ask them to join Zoom meetings all day. Our priority has been keeping the kids safe and healthy, with structure and any educational benefits as secondary. Still, for my kids at least, they’re running ahead on the things they like and stagnating on things they don’t like. My second-grader, for instance, is doing fourth- or fifth-grade level work on some things while struggling with grade-level content in other areas. 

If this type of dispersion is happening among individual students, I can only imagine what it will look like at the classroom- or school-level. How will teachers handle these challenges? What systems and supports will districts put in place to identify student competencies and tailor their instruction accordingly? Will they assess students in the fall to know where they’re strong and identify areas where they need more support?

I continue to suspect that districts are mostly just trying to get through this. They’re hoping planning to re-open as normal in the fall. But if my family’s experience is any indication, we’re going to need something different. If anything, this experiment has made me much more interested in competency-based instruction, however that might be delivered.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

The COVID-19 Learning Loss

I’ve been thinking lately about this Paul von Hippel piece  for Education Next on summer learning loss. After looking closely at the data, he does not find evidence for the idea of a “summer learning loss” that particularly hinders low-income students. 

While perhaps not as compelling, von Hippel writes that there is one finding that continues to stand up:

There is one result that replicates consistently across every test that I’ve ever looked at. It’s so obvious that it’s easy to overlook, but it’s still important: nearly all children, no matter how advantaged, learn much more slowly during summer vacations than they do during the school years. That means that every summer offers children who are behind a chance to catch up. In other words, even if gaps don’t grow much during summer vacations, summer vacations still offer a chance to shrink them.

What does this mean for the extended break remote learning experiment being forced on us by COVID-19? My fear is that most education leaders will be content to take a breather this summer in the hopes that everything can resume as normal in the fall.

I think that would be a mistake on two levels. First, from a logistical standpoint, schools and districts should be preparing now for a potential second wave of outbreaks. Those outbreaks may not be as intense or as widespread, but school and district leaders have no way of knowing how bad it might be in their particular communities, and whether the coronavirus will again force them to close schools for extended periods of time. Regardless, given what we know, it would be irresponsible to blindly assume everything will be back to normal for the 2020-21 school year.

And second are the equity implications. Regardless of exactly how large the COVID-19 learning slide is going to be, there’s no question that students are losing precious learning time that will affect them for the rest of their lives. Education leaders should be thinking NOW about how they will make that up. Will they extend the current school year into the summer? Will they start the next school year early, or extend it somehow? Districts should be starting that planning process now.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman