Arne Duncan spoke at Harvard's Ed School on Monday, and he gave a speech that I thought had some very good points (and I'm not a huge Arne Duncan fan). His speech--Fighting the Wrong Educational Battles--argued that some of our either-or thinking about education is counter productive. He highlighted two areas: First, he rejected those who argue that poverty/income is the sole determinant of educational outcomes, and therefore work on school reform is pointless without poverty reform. I don't disagree that poverty is a major cause of educational inequality in this country, but I agree with Arne that those facts are no reason not to work tirelessly to improve schools. Changing U.S. school funding and poverty alleviation policy would be great. Until that happens, let's work together to make the best schools we can.Second, he argued that the teacher evaluation debate shouldn't be about "should it be all test scores or not" but that both extreme positions are mostly silly. Testing has huge problems, but test data can be helpful in answering the complex question of who is a good teacher and how can we help all teachers get better (see my post about evaluation in Singapore for insights from that country). And our talent development for teachers is pretty much a disaster in the U.S.--we cerify all teachers as satisfactory when we know lots aren't, and we don't provide much in the way of meaningful professional development--, so it is relatively hard to do worse than the status quo (though Tennessee certainly seems to be making the effort).
So I think Arne's right on both of those counts. Those are indeed dumb debates. Lets make schools better and alleviate poverty. Lets make teacher evaluation better and have vigorous debates over the role that test data should play, but let's not throw out test data entirely.
So in a speech devoted to encouraging better debate, I thought this shot was bizarre and misguided:
But in fact the response of some in the U.S. education establishment to schools that produce dramatic gains in student learning has been much more critical, even dismissive.
That curious visitor would be puzzled by those who respond to successful no-excuses schools by making excuses for why they don't really matter.
Of course, no one should object to understanding the limitations and strengths of this new research on gap-closing schools. But the skeptics of successful schools have jumped from critique to critique, none of which have found much confirmation in rigorous research.
Name names Arne. Who are these unfair, critique jumping skeptics? I think the critics of no-excuses schools have held several very consistent positions about these schools:
1) They are test prep factories, and we have dumb tests. The no-excuses charters were born in a very particular policy context that rewards schools only for progress in improving standardized test scores in reading comprehension and math. Public schools have evolved to meet all kinds of civic and educative functions-- the new charters don't necessarily have the same educational commitments (some do, but not all). Many of these no-excuses schools are designed from the ground up to optimize test preparation. Kay Merseth's study of charter schools documents the tendency towards this kind of instruction. If we had great tests, this might not be so bad, but we don't. So I think there are legitimate grounds for discussion about whether or not optimizing standardized test scores constitutes a good education.
2) They don't teach all students. Part of the way that charter schools optimize test scores is by restricting entry through selection mechanisms and counseling out students who they don't want to keep. Some of this is unavoidable--you need to get into a charter through a lottery, and a lottery is a selection mechanism. But charters do take advantage of the opportunity to counsel out/expel/remove some students, and these most difficult of students are the kids the public schools have an obligation to retain and educate. There is some interesting evidence that the KIPP schools do a good job of selecting students that look very similar to their peers in public schools, but it's not clear that all charter schools do the same. And it also isn't clear to me that having similar demographics constitutes taking the same group of students. A very small handful of students in school occupy the bulk of the time and energy of the system to deal with (as beautifully articulated by math teacher Ryan Gann here). Forcing these kids back into public schools won't change the demographic distribution, but makes life much easier for charters.
3) They rely on unsustainable human resource investments. Many charters are staffed by people who devote their whole waking lives to schools. Good on them, but people should have families, hobbies, lives, etc. We don't have enough of monks to staff the entire U.S. public education system.
4) They get more funding than other schools. Thank you hedge fund magnates. There are all kinds of ways, from building funds to funding for tutors to free consulting support, that charters get more money per student than their peers.
5) On the whole, charters don't outperform regular schools, and we don't close bad charters: The distribution of high performing "no-excuses" schools isn't that different from the distribution of good urban public schools. Arguably we have a lot of money and policy attention going to an intervention that produces outstanding results at about the same rate as the current system. Moreover, we can't seem to get rid of the crappy charter schools, even though the whole point is that their "charters" should be revoked if the schools are lousy. (To be fair, charter advocates tear their hair out about this even more than charter critics).
Not all of these critiques argue that charter schools are bad.Maybe not all of these critiques are right. But these critiques have been unwavering and they rest on reasonable empirical evidence and have not, in my mind, been rigorously, irrefutably disproved. Maybe Arne is attacking some other group of unfair no-excuses critics, but since he didn't say who they were, we don't know.
Here's my main point: this was a cheap swipe in an otherwise good speech. If Arne's goal is to raise the caliber of the debate, I'm not sure that a sweeping accusation of unnamed no-excuses critics as unfair and inconsistent is the best way to meet that objective.