College and Career Readiness

Although the deadline for all students to achieve proficiency in math and reading has been lifted in most states by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers, 2014 test anxiety is high as ever. That’s because the 2014-15 school year is the first time 45 states and Washington, D.C. will be fully implementing the Common Core State Standards – including new tests that will be used as part of high-stakes accountability systems for schools and, in many cases, teachers and students. But when the time comes, will states stay the course? Practical concerns along with escalating political arguments already threaten the emerging system of common standards and assessments.

As I wrote previously, Alabama became the first state to exit the Common Core test consortia, opting instead to administer ACT-based assessments. By 2014, Alabama will likely not be alone in its choice. ACT is a well-established player that has spent decades building an organization with a reputation for providing valid, reliable assessments. Conversely, the state consortia are upstarts, attempting to build next-generation assessments and a precarious, multi-state structure to support and sustain the effort simultaneously. Naturally, states are left with many unanswered questions. How much will the new tests costs, and what are the technical requirements? Will the tests accurately reflect a student’s readiness? And will the assessments even be completed on time? In his smart take on the issue, Bellwether Education Partner’s Andy Smarick writes, the ACT “is the ‘Plan B’ that many states – concerned about the reliability and cost of the consortia-developed tests – have been looking for. It enables a state to remain committed to tough standards and rigorous assessments without putting all of their eggs in the basket of a fragile multi-state entity.”

But this kind of pragmatic concern isn’t the only threat to the common standards. While the Common Core is a state-led initiative (I repeat, the Common Core is a state-led initiative), the effort has been supported by private and corporate philanthropy and by the federal government. Specifically, the requirement to adopt the common standards to compete for Race to the Top funding is at the heart of increasingly polarized and politicized arguments against the Common Core. In their words, “Obamacore” amounts to a “nationalized curriculum” and “leftist indoctrination” that has been “forced on state governments” and “imposed on the children of this nation.”

Reasonable individuals easily dismiss most of these arguments. But reasonable arguments are often overshadowed, especially when national politicians and parties start getting involved. Just last week, the Republican National Committee adopted an anti-Common Core resolution, echoing these same divisive arguments.  And President Obama frequently touts that his administration “convinced almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards, all for about 1 percent of what we spend on education each year” – adding credibility to their claims.

The problem may be about to get worse. As noted in our Key Questions on the Obama Administration’s 2014 Education Budget Request, federal funding for the assessment consortia is set to expire before the tests are fully launched. To provide continued support, President Obama’s latest budget includes a $9 million competitive grant initiative that could finance some of their ongoing work. The other $380 million of the “Assessing Achievement” program would provide states with formula grants for their current assessment programs, although leftover funds could go toward Common Core implementation.

However, a significant change would occur in fiscal year 2015: Assessing Achievement formula funding would be available “only to States that have adopted college- and career-ready standards that are common to a significant number of States” (emphasis added). While Race to the Top included a similar requirement, that program was a competition, where states could opt-out. NCLB waivers also require states to adopt college- and career-ready standards, but they do not have to be common ones. The Assessing Achievement program would mark the first time federal formula funding – typically available to all states – required adoption of common standards. If enacted, this requirement will undoubtedly add fuel to the “Obamacore” fire. On the heels of the president’s budget request, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Ia) is calling for the federal government to eliminate all Department of Education funding that supports or prioritizes the Common Core – and he doesn’t even mention the Assessing Achievement program.

What can we make of these threats to the Common Core? To date, most of its political detractors have been contained outside of the mainstream and have had little success gaining traction or passing legislation to reverse Common Core adoption. Will the RNC resolution, Grassley’s letter, or potential changes in federal funding have a greater impact?

On the other hand, the pragmatic concerns about how the new standards and assessments will be implemented are just that – pragmatic. Few could fault Alabama’s decision to choose the ACT over PARCC and SmarterBalanced. All three of the developing testing systems could prove to be a great improvement over current assessments, measuring competencies better aligned to postsecondary work and providing more useful information to students, their teachers, parents, and policymakers.

The important difference between the practical and political critiques is that states deciding to use the ACT system are not necessarily backing away from their commitment to the Common Core altogether. Yes, the assessment consortia should do as much as possible to allay the concerns of wavering states. And yes, policymakers and stakeholders should closely monitor all of the emerging for-profit and non-profit ventures to ensure their assessments, curricula, textbooks, and other resources accurately reflect the new standards. But in the end, any damage done to the Common Core from these pragmatic objections to the consortia is far less severe than what would happen in the unlikely, but not out of the question, case that “Obamacore” goes mainstream. Common Core supporters would do well to distinguish between the two. 

Texas has joined Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and 46 other states (including Washington, D.C.) in seeking waivers from No Child Left Behind (NCLB). With Nebraska and Montana sitting out, Vermont and North Dakota withdrawing, and California flat-out rejected, the pool of non-waiver states continues to shrink. But despite jumping on the waiver bandwagon, Texas breaks the mold in many respects.

Although the Lone Star State’s refusal to adopt the Common Core is one important distinction from other waiver winners, this wasn’t the detail I was most keen to uncover in their formal request. Texas’ plan to implement their own college- and career-ready standards and assessments actually stood out as one of the stronger points of their waiver, and other non-Common Core states, like Virginia and Minnesota, have successfully applied. Rather, Texas had originally considered asking the Department of Education for leeway to redesign the federal Title I funding formula – a provision that would have gone well beyond the flexibility granted to other states and a demand that would have undoubtedly made Texas’ waiver dead on arrival. To their credit, Texas officials removed this request, bringing their final proposal much closer to what the Department is offering.

But does this mean Texas’ waiver will be a hit with the U.S. Department of Education? Not so fast. While the proposal has strong points – like working with higher education to gain buy-in for college- and career-ready standards and articulating a plan to pilot teacher evaluations and scale them statewide – Texas’ proposed system of school accountability and improvement is not among them. In fact, Texas’ waiver could significantly undermine efforts to hold schools accountable for the performance of individual student subgroups.

Texas’ request is complicated by the fact that its state accountability system, which has operated in parallel to NCLB, is undergoing a significant overhaul, with many provisions yet to be finalized. Because Texas would like to fit its existing system into the waiver requirements, the state simply excluded these half-baked provisions from its request. Therefore, Texas’ waiver omits critical details, including how student progress will be measured, what annual performance targets will be, how each component within accountability will be weighted, and how focus and priority schools will be selected. Further, the application doesn’t even include Texas’ proposed framework, burying the information in attachments and hyperlinks.

For those that do seek out the information, Texas’ new performance index leaves a lot to be desired. Similar to other states, Texas plans to use a combination of four indices for accountability: student achievement, student progress, achievement gap closure, and postsecondary readiness. But the state does not specify how the index would translate into specific interventions, i.e. focus and priority schools.

Even more worrisome is how student subgroups and academic subjects will be treated across the four indices. While some states created “super-subgroups,” Texas took a different approach: ignore subgroups altogether.  Within the student achievement index, only the all students group is considered, with proficiency rates combined further across all subject areas. Yet for measuring student progress, subjects are considered separately and all traditional subgroups count– with the exception of low-income students, who are only considered within the performance gap closure index. But the gap closure measures do not consider English Language Learners or special education students. Finally, within the postsecondary readiness index, only racial subgroups are considered on one measure (advanced proficiency rates), while all subgroups (except low-income students) are considered for graduation rates. Texas does not provide a rationale for picking and choosing which indices apply to which subgroups.

Texas could also be plagued by an issue that cropped up in other waivers: annual performance targets. Texas’ targets would be based on the goal of cracking the top ten states nationally on college and career readiness by 2020 – a novel approach worth considering. But it’s unclear how the state could judge itself against others to define the annual targets. Texas is not a Common Core state, and existing national measures, like the SAT or ACT, would only apply to high schools. If the proposed readiness index were used instead, the ranking would be based on Texas assessments, students graduating with advanced Texas diplomas, and graduation rates. Using these measures, Texas would be number one by default – no other state has similar data.

Given these issues, I am doubtful that the Department could approve Texas’ request in its current form. There are simply too many unanswered questions and missing details. That said, Texas’ request is strong enough in other areas to allow for productive negotiations with the Department. With additional assurances and information from the Lone Star State, along with some give and take, NCLB flexibility could reach deep in the heart of Texas by the 2013-2014 school year.

While many education advocates prepare for the looming sequester on March 1, the education policy news in D.C. wasn’t all bad this week. The nation is now on track – for the first time– to reach a 90 percent high school graduation rate by 2020, according to the fourth annual Building a Grad Nation report. Released at the Grad Nation Summit, hosted by America’s Promise Alliance, the report analyzes trends in the national graduation rate, which increased from 71.7 percent in 2001 to 78.2 percent in 2010, and celebrates the significant advances states have made.

States’ progress has accelerated since 2006, thanks in part to an outsized 2.7 percentage point increase in the graduation rate between 2009 and 2010. The recent gains are also largely due to improved graduation rates for Hispanic students (10.4 point gain) and for black students (6.9 point gain). Two states – Wisconsin and Vermont – have already hit the 90 percent mark, and eighteen more are on pace to meet it by 2020.

Notably, these gains come at a time when many states also increased high school requirements and when schools faced heightened accountability measures under No Child Left Behind. In 2012, nine states required students to pass end-of-course exams to graduate, compared to only two in 2002. Six more states required students to take end-of-course exams in 2012, but did not require a passing score. States are also continuing to raise the bar with adoption of the Common Core and other college- and career-ready standards.

Further, Grad Nation reports that over a million students are no longer attending dropout factories, compared to 2002, and the overall number of dropout factories fell by nearly 600 schools. Dropout factories are high schools where twelfth grade enrollment is 60 percent or less then ninth grade enrollment three years earlier. Again, the beneficiaries of this trend were mostly minority students: in 2002, almost half of America’s black students attended a dropout factory, but in 2011, only a quarter did so – a fifty percent decline.

While celebrating the achievements of the last decade, the report also cites the challenges that lie between today’s status quo and the 2020 goal. Over twenty states are not on pace to achieve a 90 percent graduation rate. More troubling, persistent achievement gaps remain. In 30 states, at least one-third of students with disabilities fail to graduate. The same is true for English Language Learners in 33 states, black students in 20 states, and Hispanic students in 16 states. In many cases, the proportion of students failing to graduate in these subgroups is much higher.

Another challenge lies within the data. The 78.2 percent mark was determined using the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR), rather than the 4-year Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate – the uniform methodology states and the federal government agreed to use in 2008. The Cohort Rate will enable a more consistent measure of graduation rates and allow states to more precisely identify schools and strategies that are preventing dropout. But there are technical questions about how to calculate the new rates. After the switch to the Cohort Rate in 2012, the difference between the old and new calculation methods was over five percentage points in nine states. Without a consistent measure, it is unclear how far and how fast states will need to improve to meet the 2020 goal.

Because of these lingering challenges, it is incredibly important for states and the federal government to remain vigilant in reporting accurate data and holding schools accountable for graduation rates, especially for at-risk students. As Ed Money Watch previously reported, many states have backtracked on commitments to graduation rate accountability in their waivers from No Child Left Behind – giving schools equal credit for students that take longer than four years to graduate, or counting GEDs and other non-diplomas. Further, many states are not holding schools accountable for – or even reporting – other measures that are critical early warning indicators of dropout, like chronic absenteeism.

With increased attention on students’ preparedness for college and careers after graduation, schools cannot forget about supporting students who are struggling just to finish their high school degree. To help, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced a new grant competition to place more AmeriCorps volunteers in the nation’s lowest-performing schools. While admirable, this is hardly a comprehensive solution. Federal and state lawmakers must do more and consider both goals – preventing dropout and increasing college and career readiness – equally when creating policies to measure and improve student achievement in our nation’s high schools.

On June 9, 1904, Harvard's president, Charles W. Eliot, wrote a letter to Charles Francis Adams Jr. A former railroad executive, Adams was a member of the college's Board of Overseers and, as a grandson of John Quincy Adams, a multigenerational Harvard legacy. The two men were quarreling over the question of raising tuition to ease a financial crisis. Wrote Eliot:

Yesterday, President Barack Obama reiterated his call from the State of the Union to provide universal pre-K to all children in America. But tucked in with his remarks was a pitch for another proposal from Tuesday's speech: to reward high schools that are preparing their students to be not only college-ready, but also career-ready. The competition would be aimed at high schools that have reimagined how they operate: partnering with colleges and businesses, focusing on emerging fields in science, technology, and engineering, and even offering students valuable industry credentials or an associate degree while they complete high school. The administration hopes this would challenge schools to provide real-world learning experiences in their curriculum, so that students attain the “skills today's employers are looking for to fill the jobs that are there right now and will be there in the future."

Unfortunately, the administration has offered no further details on the plan. Do they envision a Race to the Top-style competition? As Alyson Klein noted on PoliticsK-12, a competitive grant aimed at high school curriculum – not just the standards high schools teach, but also how they are taught – could meet stiff opposition from conservative lawmakers. And how much money is the Department seeking for this competition? Would funding be distributed directly to high schools and their higher education and industry partners, or through states?

To complicate the matter further, it is unclear if the president is even proposing anything new at all. Last April, the Department of Education released A Blueprint for Transforming Career and Technical Education, its plan for reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. The Blueprint included “within-state competitions” to distribute Perkins funds to consortia of secondary and postsecondary institutions, with a matching contribution from employers, rather than through the formula used today. The goal of these consortia competitions would be to encourage programs that are meeting regional labor-market needs. Sounds like a “challenge to redesign America's high schools,” right?

The related initiatives President Obama proposed in the State of the Union to promote skills leading to high-quality, high-wage jobs are all ideas he has introduced (with little success) before: a STEM Master Teacher Corps of 10,000 of America’s best teachers and an $8 billion Community College to Career Fund to bolster and improve job training in two-year higher education institutions. Maybe the competition to redesign high schools is old news too.

While it is promising that the administration is focusing on the oft-neglected “career” component of college and career readiness and looking to innovative models like early college high schools, it is hard to say how effective these proposals could be without more details. Unfortunately, the answers likely won’t be provided until the president releases his budget in March. Stay tuned to Ed Money Watch for the all the specifics then. 

It seems that the stakes in the college-ready war have been raised. Today, Education Week broke the news that Alabama was pulling out as a participant in both Common Core testing consortia, PARCC and SmarterBalanced. Previously on Ed Money Watch, I noted that Alabama was getting ahead of the curve by implementing more rigorous assessments to measure students’ postsecondary preparedness before the new Common Core tests were ready to be delivered in the 2014-15 school year. I still believe this is a practical move for states that want better indicators now that their students are college- and career-ready (even better would be to collect evidence of students’ readiness based on their post-high school outcomes, like college enrollment, credit accumulation, and remediation rates).

In Alabama’s case, the new testing system was aligned to ACT’s battery of assessments – EXPLORE, PLAN, and the ACT. But as today's news and the state’s pending waiver request shows, this system is anything but temporary. In fact, the waiver request does not include their participation in either consortia as evidence the state adopted college- and career-ready assessments. Instead, the state touts their new system based on the ACT framework and indicates this is the system that will be in place in 2014-15. The news isn’t really news at all.

It was easy to see it coming. ACT was originally slated to work with PARCC to help develop their assessments, but wiggled out of the contract with plans to develop their own linked system of college- and career-ready assessments from kindergarten through high school into postsecondary. As I warned in my earlier post, for states like Alabama and Kentucky using the ACT and other established measures of college readiness, “it could be even more challenging to transition to Common Core benchmarks now that these states have institutionalized the ACT benchmarks.”

There’s a lot to be said for using ACT as a college-ready measure. The ACT is already accepted as a measure of readiness by those who actually make that decision: higher education institutions. ACT scores are used in college admissions decisions, and the ACT COMPASS exam is commonly used to determine whether students require remediation. On the other hand, no college has guaranteed they will use the PARCC or SmarterBalanced assessments for these decisions. While many higher education leaders are supportive of the Common Core effort, they have not yet had to make the ultimate decision that their standards for college readiness are the same as those adopted by forty-six states through the Common Core effort.  

Is this a sign of things to come? I wouldn’t be surprised if other states decide to go the ACT-route rather than stick with the consortia. That said, Alabama is less of a bellwether state than Massachusetts, Florida, or California. Leaving the consortia is also different than abandoning the Common Core entirely. There are still common academic standards across forty-six states and two comparable, high-quality assessments in development. But given that states seem to be considering the ACT as a serious alternative, it will be critical for both consortia to demonstrate their comparability to ACT and highlight any advantages their assessments offer.

More important, the consortia and Common Core advocates must engage more seriously with higher education to ensure their work is not a wasted effort. If the new standards promise to truly reflect “the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers,” the only way to fulfill that promise is for mastery of the Common Core to be accepted as the definition of readiness by both secondary and postsecondary education. States’ public higher education systems control specific policies related to financial aid eligibility, admissions, credit-granting, dual enrollment, and remediation, among others, that will either promote or inhibit the Common Core. In order for authentic implementation of the Common Core to happen, the new standards and assessments must permeate not only K-12 policy, but also these policies at the postsecondary level.

What can you do with $45 million and three years? Well, if you’re the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, you can confirm, empirically, what educators have always known implicitly: great teaching matters, it can be measured, and it improves student learning.[1]

That was one of the many findings released last week in the final report from the MET Project (Measures of Effective Teaching). MET has generated buzz in education and popular media alike, so I won’t provide a full synopsis here. For a basic summary, check out the Washington Post or Huffington Post rundown; for more thoughtful commentary, turn to posts from Chad Aldeman, Andy Smarick, Rick Hess, Marty West, and National Journal Experts Blog. Instead, I want to call attention to two big takeaways from the MET Project.

What teacher evaluations measure is just as important as how they measure it.

Much has been made of the finding that classroom observations are the worst predictor of student learning, compared to state test scores and student surveys. Some have questioned whether observations are worth the significant time and personnel costs involved to do them well. Tim Daly of TNTP even claimed that MET shows “the way that most teachers have been evaluated forever is completely unreliable.”

It’s easy to jump to that conclusion: MET used proven, high-quality observation tools, and observers were trained and certified on their knowledge of them. This isn’t the case with many of the classroom observations used across the country.  Still, observations are a critical component of teacher evaluations, particularly for those in the early grades and in untested subjects. And using observations typically receives greater support from educators compared to test scores. Finally, MET’s research found that although classroom observations didn’t improve the predictive power of the evaluation measure, they did improve its reliability – or stability – from year to year. 

Test scores also don’t have the same diagnostic power as classroom observations: as Amanda Ripley put it, “test scores can reveal when kids are not learning; they can’t reveal why.” Observations can provide teachers with valuable, timely, and clear feedback on their practice. Given their complexity and the timing of state testing, value-added measures are far less teacher-friendly – not to mention, limited in scope. Surely, great teaching involves much more than improving student scores on multiple-choice tests in two subjects.

To this end, it’s laudable that MET’s researchers also used higher-order tests (the SAT 9 Open-Ended Reading Assessment and the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics) to measure student learning. In some states, these assessments are more similar to the Common Core assessments they will offer in 2014-15. Presumably, states should want teacher evaluations that not only function well with today’s tests, but also those of the future.

Still, the tests MET used only consider English Language Arts and math skills. If the ultimate goal of evaluations is to measure whether teachers create learning environments where students achieve a broader set of outcomes (say, the knowledge, skills, and attributes it takes to be college- and career-ready), then there is still a long way to go in developing these systems. In 2014, many states will be simultaneously implementing new teacher evaluations and the Common Core assessments. But the best evaluation systems today do a far better job identifying teachers that improve student learning via state test scores than teachers that improve college and career readiness. MET’s findings suggest that states should carefully consider whether their evaluation systems are measuring the teacher attributes needed to meet the Common Core’s objectives.

How teacher evaluations are used is just as important as what they measure.

Part of the demand for research like the MET Project comes from the push to use teacher evaluation systems to make human resources decisions. Hiring, retention, placement, compensation, and tenure can all be affected. Some of the push can be attributed directly to the Obama administration: developing and using teacher evaluation systems like the ones in the MET study for HR decisions was a major component of both Race to the Top and the No Child Left Behind waivers.

But there is still uncertainty surrounding teacher evaluation systems; the MET Project doesn’t provide a definitive roadmap or specific policies for states and districts looking to measure effective teaching. Many of its findings are ambiguous (with the exception that value-added measures must account for students’ prior test scores). The MET report is inconclusive when it comes to:

• whether student demographics should be included as a control in value-added models;
• precisely how to weight each component within a composite effectiveness measure: value-added data, student-perception surveys, and classroom observations;[2]
• whether measures like the Content Knowledge for Teaching (CKT) tests or subject-based classroom observation tools could be useful additions to composite measures of teacher quality; and
• who should observe teachers, how long these observations should last, and how many observations should occur each year.[3]

The teacher quality measures MET suggests are “better on virtually every dimension than the measures in use now.” But does that mean similar teacher evaluation systems should be used as the deciding factor for whether a teacher is fired? Or promoted? Or receives a pay increase?

Thorny questions, indeed. Yes, the new measures of effective teaching are promising, compared to most old-school teacher evaluation systems where nearly every teacher rated ‘satisfactory.’ But given MET’s lingering questions and inevitable measurement error in these measures of effectiveness, wouldn’t it make more sense to continue developing and refining teacher evaluation systems without rushing to use them for high-stakes decisions? Especially since most schools lack the capacity and resources to implement evaluations of the rigor and quality that the MET study used? States and districts should consider using the results from teacher evaluations in a more diagnostic manner: why not make these measures of effective teaching the first step in the process of providing professional development, determining who receives pay increases or tenure, and making decisions about hiring or firing – rather than the final step?

There is an abundance of free resources available to students and families to learn about the college-going process, but they haven’t been vetted or organized in a practical way. Over the next few months, Higher Ed Watch will be reviewing these resources to help students, families, guidance counselors, college access professionals, and others choose the ones that meet their unique needs. Read more about this initiative here. 

Welcome to a New Year and the commencement of financial aid season. The 2013-14 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is now available, and students and families are already logging on to complete the application. Since almost every college uses the FAFSA to determine aid eligibility and financial aid packages, millions of current and prospective students fill one out every year.  But due to the complexity of our federal financial aid system, the process for learning about and applying for financial aid can be intimidating and overwhelming. This year a new U.S. Department of Education web resource—studentaid.gov—provides students and families with clearer information about federal financial aid and the financial aid application process.

Angelica Gonzales marched through high school in Goth armor — black boots, chains and cargo pants — but undermined her pose of alienation with a place on the honor roll. She nicknamed herself after a metal band and vowed to become the first in her family to earn a college degree.

“I don’t want to work at Walmart” like her mother, she wrote to a school counselor.