Ford-supported research on “New Regionalism”

My colleagues Profs. Kara Finnigan, Jennifer Jellison Holme, and Sarah Diem, received a grant from the Ford Foundation between 2011 and 2013 to lead a study of selected inter-district school transfer policies, as well as one regional plan in Omaha, Nebraska.  I wanted to draw attention to some of the papers they have written, both conceptual and empirical.

Much has already been written about the growing inter-district school segregation, which now accounts for the majority of school segregation in the United States – it was estimated at 67% of all white-non-white segregation in 2009 (by Kori Stroub and Meredith Richards in2013 in the American Educational ResearchJournal) -- and the challenges it presents for equality of educational opportunity.   What this new work does is apply contemporary scholarship about metropolitan and regional governance to that of K-12 education policy.  They don’t shrink away at all from describing what the obstacles have been and will be; at the same time, they challenge us to think about what could encourage more metro-wide agreements.

In an article in Educational Policy, titled “Regional Educational Policy Analysis: Rochester, Omaha, and Minneapolis’ Inter-District Arrangements”, colleagues Myron Orfield, Tom Luce, Allison Mattheis, and Nadine Hylton, compare inter-district transfer plans in Rochester, Minneapolis, and Omaha.  They draw comparisons among the governance-related, financial, and political considerations.  On regional councils, such as those in Omaha and Minneapolis, representation is an issue that is constantly disputed and negotiated: a one-district, one-vote structure can leave large city school districts feeling “out-voiced,” for instance (as in Minneapolis), or the “advisory only” role of local superintendents can leave them resenting their perceived token involvement (as in Omaha).  Many educators and parents also voice concern that participating suburban districts participate in high levels of student and family selectivity, contributing to what they allege is a drain of talent from the urban core.

In another piece in Teachers College Record, Holme and Finnigan pose two questions:  What types of structures could serve as potential vehicles for cross-metro collaboration by school districts to address the problems of fragmentation? and How can regional cooperation between school districts be incentivized?  On the second question, they write (see p. 24):

One potential strategy, pushed by Orfield (2002), is to appeal to self-interest, helping school district officials (particularly in the urban core and inner-ring suburbs) to realize the ways in which their district is harmed by fragmentation and the benefits that they would accrue in greater regional cooperation (Orfield, 2002). Another potential strategy is the provision of incentives to encourage the cooperation and involvement of suburban school districts (see e.g., Wells et al., 2009). One possible source for incentives could be the federal government, which is currently using an incentive-based approach to stimulating educational reform in states and districts through the Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation programs. The federal government may also consider providing some exemptions to—or special provisions in— federal accountability requirements as an incentive for greater cooperation to improve cross-district diversity.

As a matter of fact, President Obama’s proposed 2015 budget contains a new Race to the Top initiative for “Equity and Opportunity” for school districts, which could partly be used “to identify and carry out strategies that help break up and mitigate the effects of concentrated poverty.”  It’s very encouraging to see the federal government incentivizing equity, especially given that the federal courts have greatly inhibited districts’ use of race-based assignment plans, while school district and municipal fragmentation continues, especially in the South.  I hope that if and when the feds move forward, they will consider some of the lessons of Finnigan, Holme and Diem’s Ford grant, and fund a few metropolitan or regional demonstration projects and evaluations.

References:

Finnigan, K. S., Holme, J. J., Orfield, M., Luce, T., Diem, S., Mattheis, A., & Hylton, N. D. (2014).  Regional Educational Policy Analysis: Rochester, Omaha, and Minneapolis’ Inter-District Arrangements. Educational Policy, published online January 30, 2014.

Holme, J., Finnigan, K. S., (2013).  School Diversity, School District Fragmentation and Metropolitan Policy.  Teachers College Record, 115(11), 1-29.

Stroub, K. J., & Richards, M. P. (2013).  From Resegregation to Reintegration: Trends in the Racial/Ethnic Segregation of Metropolitan Public Schools, 1993-2009.  American Educational Research Journal, 50(3), 497-531.


By: Elizabeth DeBray

Philanthropies and Intermediary Organizations in Denver, Colorado: Incentivist-Oriented Advocacy Coalitions

Note: This blog is adapted from paper presented by our research team at the 2014 AERA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. This research is funded by the William T. Grant Foundation’s program on Understanding the Acquisition, Interpretation, and Use of Research Evidence in Policy and Practice. The Principal Investigators of this project are Drs. Elizabeth DeBray, Chris Lubienski, and Janelle Scott. Please contact Priya La Londe with any questions.

Philanthropies and Intermediary Organizations in Denver, Colorado: Incentivist-Oriented Advocacy Coalitions

Philanthropist involvement in education policy has contributed to the emergence of a dynamic sector of intermediary organizations (IOs). These IOs broker the production and use of research evidence targeted at government and education policymakers. We frame this relationship between foundations and intermediary organizations by drawing on the analogy of a hub and spoke structure, whereby parts of a wheel work together to move an incentivist policy agenda forward. Philanthropists see their investments in IOs as a way to realize more promising and effective educational interventions whose “profit” is understood to be a scaling up of reforms they favor. Foundations exercise investment in the following ways:

·         provide the financial backing for many charter management organizations;

·         place system and district leaders in positions of authority;

·         scale organizations to expand across multiple school districts;

·         actively promote the successes of their investments to policymakers in an effort to convince them that such reforms and reformers are also worth public support and alterations in public policy;

·         and help to support local, state, and national coalitions.

        Drawing on data from a larger study of research use and dissemination, we examined the role of foundations in Denver, Colorado, a key site for incentivist reforms including teacher pay-for-performance and charter schools. To analyze how foundations support new networks of IOs to channel the production and consumption of research, we drew upon the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999) as well as Local Intermediary Networks (DeBray et al., 2014), a relatively new and important dimension of the “supply side” of research in support of incentivist reforms. Since 2011, we have reviewed a range of documents and conducted 35 interviews in Denver with policymakers, representatives from over 25 intermediary organizations, researchers, and journalists.

Proliferation of Incentivist Reforms in Denver Public Schools

          Denver Public Schools (DPS), a school system that is diverse across several markers, adopted school choice and teacher pay-for-performance early on. Forty of the 161 public schools in Denver were created as charters and magnet schools. The 2005 Denver Plan accompanied a voter initiative approving salary increases for teachers that included merit pay, raising over $25 million from taxpayers. With support from the Janus Foundation’s Education Alliance, the program Denver Plan has expanded. ProComp allows teacher to earn and lose salary increases based on improvements and declines in student performance as well as earn raises based on commitment to teaching in hard-to-staff schools, knowledge and skill development, and student growth. Drawing on support from teachers unions and the Board of Education, philanthropists played a key role in the implementation of these reforms. Since ProComp was implemented, incentivist reforms goals remain important to DPS visionaries. Still though, despite alignment with many of the Obama Administration’s priorities for educational reform, Colorado was unsuccessful in its application for the RttT program.

Findings: Denver foundations invest in and proliferate incentivist reforms through translation of research, targeted partnerships with policymakers, and funding preferred IO agendas

Local philanthropies have catalyzed much of the recent policy movement in Denver, and intermediary groups have responded to funding possibilities and to meet the needs of marshaling research evidence in support of the agendas the philanthropies are promoting. Denver had been relatively free of the adversarial politics that characterize such reforms in other cities, and the local philanthropies saw themselves as building bridges across political constituencies, including reform organizations and teachers unions. Intermediary organizations are increasingly creating a more acrimonious policy climate as they embrace a politics of opposition to advance their agendas. Several smaller philanthropies have indicated ambivalence toward the incentivist reforms they fund, yet they lend support in their goal to be seen as “players” in the philanthropic and policy worlds, with direction from the policy agendas of larger, national foundations (e.g. Gates Foundation) and federal reforms (e.g. Building Charter Schools Quality) that fund reforms in their cities. Denver philanthropies have positioned themselves as visible champions of ProComp and charter management organizations. Foundations invested in these reforms in two ways: 1) Advocating through selective dissemination and translation of research to a targeted audience of policymakers; and 2) Funding preferred agendas practices that lead to reform proliferation. The Daniels, Piton, and Donnell-Kay Foundations provide most of the funding. Furthermore, the Denver Public Schools and Denver Classroom Teacher Association worked with the private sector actors to form a unique coalition in their convergence on ProComp1 and ProComp2, the teacher pay-for-performance programs implemented in Denver.

Foundations as Private Policymakers?

Our analysis suggests that foundations “outsource” the “work” of research production and advocacy to intermediary groups. Working in ideologically defined coalitions, while perhaps intending to preserve the credibility of philanthropies, those operating within interstices may instead lead to a more divisive rather than monolithic policy environment. Foundations are therefore not just funders—they are also investors and private policy makers. They view their financial support as an investment in realizing the adoption and implementation of incentivist reforms. In this sense, we argue that foundations are the “hub” that moves the “spokes” in a local IO coalition. In Denver, we see the importance of foundations for the production of evidence, the communication of evidence to policymakers, and the overall support to IOs to scale their organizations. Without this hub of funding and alignment around the importance of incentivist reforms, it is unlikely that such reforms would have moved forward at the size and scope that we witness in Denver and within the Colorado legislature.

Further Reading

DeBray, E., Scott, J., Lubienski, C., & Jabbar, H. (2014). Intermediary organizations in charter school policy coalitions: Evidence from New Orleans. (30%)  Educational Policy 28(2), pp. 175-206. 

Gonring, P., Teske, P., & Jupp, B. (2007). Pay-for-Performance Teacher Compensation: An Inside View of Denver's ProComp Plan. Harvard Education Press.

Lubienski, C., Scott, J., & DeBray, E. (2011). The rise of intermediary organiza- tions in knowledge production, advocacy, and educational policy (ID No. 16487). Teachers College Record. Available from http://www.tcrecord.org

Sabatier, P., & Jenkins-Smith, H. (1999). The advocacy coalition framework: An assessment.  In P. Sabatier (Ed.), Theories of the policy process (pp. 117-166). Boulder, CO: Westview.

Scott, J., & Jabbar, H. (2013). Money and measures: Foundations as knowledge brokers. In D. Anagnostopoulos, S. Rutledge & R. Jacobsen (Eds.), The infrastructure of accountability: Mapping data use and its consequences across the American education system (pp. 75-92). Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Scott, J., & Jabbar, H. (2014). The Hub and the Spokes: Foundations, Intermediary Organizations, Incentivist Reforms, and the Politics of Research Evidence. Educational Policy, 28(3), pp. 233-257. doi:10.1177/0895904813515327

Wiley, E. W., Spindler, E., & Subert, A. (2010). Denver ProComp: An Outcomes Evaluation of Denver's Alternative Teacher Compensation System. Denver Public Schools.

Wohlstetter, P., Smith, J., Farrell, C., Hentschke, G., & Hirman, J. (2011). How funding shapes

         the growth of charter management organizations: Is the tail wagging the dog?

         Journal of Education Finance. 37(2), pp. 150-174.

By: Priya La Londe

Needed: New Strands of Research in Higher Education Finance and Public Policy

Forum Fellow Jennifer Delaney discusses the need for new strands of research in Higher Education. See the AERA Division J blog article here.

Presentation: Pathways to Education: An Integrated Approach to Helping At-Risk High School Students

The Center for Business and Public Policy presents:

Phil Oreopoulos, Professor of Economics, University of Toronto

“Pathways to Education: An Integrated Approach to Helping At-Risk High School Students.”

Tuesday, April 15 at 2:00-3:20 pm

Room 3007 Business Instructional Facility

The Ongoing Debate on Public and Private School Effectiveness: Vouchers, Representative Samples, Fundamentalism and Wal-Mart

To no one’s surprise, the market-oriented EducationNext, “a journal of opinion and research,” does not like the findings outlined in the recent book, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, which I wrote with Prof. Sarah Theule Lubienski. After all, the two large, nationally representative datasets we analyzed do not lend support to that publication’s agenda of school privatization. While I wouldn’t normally respond to reviews, the misconceptions and errors advanced by EdNext and subsequent blog postings deserve some scrutiny. In particular, as I show below, bloggers at the University of Arkansas and the conservative National Review Online have used the EdNext review as an opportunity to make claims that are simply wrong.

Writing in EdNext, Patrick Wolf, the 21^st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at Arkansas, and principal investigator of the School Choice Demonstration Project, offers a serious but flawed reading of our book. Wolf questions — but is unable to disprove — our findings. He notes that “researchers have routinely found that similar students do at least as well and, at times, better academically in private schools than in public schools,” which is not exactly true, and depends on a misrepresentation of research literature to which he himself has contributed. But even if it were true, past assumptions are certainly not a sufficient reason to preempt further research; for instance, researchers also have routinely believed that DNA was some unimportant molecule and saturated fat is bad, but new findings have caused us to question such received wisdom. For example, strangely enough, Wolf goes on to cite other independent research that, in fact, undercuts what he claims.

Perhaps most importantly, in his zeal to disprove that public schools could have any advantage over private schools, Wolf ignores a main focus of the book: why instruction in public schools now seems to give students an unexpected edge when it comes to mathematics performance, and what these findings say about the benefits and dangers of school autonomy.

Overall, Wolf points to “problems” that he actually does not show to be problems, offers no evidence that the other approaches he suggests would change the findings at all, and finds no errors in the book. While he raises several issues that — although it might not be apparent from his review — we have already discussed extensively in the book, I respond here to a few of Wolf’s statements, either because his claims require scrutiny, or because they have been taken up by bloggers associated with Wolf in their advocacy around school vouchers in misrepresenting the data, methods and findings.

Are voucher studies relevant?

The main shortcoming of Wolf and the bloggers’ efforts to refute our findings is that, for evidence, they simply point to evaluations of voucher programs, usually ones that they have conducted. As we have noted before, even if we accept the validity of their studies, these evaluations of local voucher programs simply do not address the issue at hand — the larger question of achievement in different types of schools. They are purporting to measure the impact of vouchers in what are actually small, non-representative samples of public and private schools. We are drawing from large, nationally representative datasets. Their studies are actually program evaluations in local contexts, and do not address the larger question of the relative effectiveness of U.S. public and private schools, despite what they claim. Wolf studies the effects of vouchers on students who are attempting to leave a specific public school for a private school that appears more desirable on some measure, whether it be peer demographics, instructional quality, or the use of uniforms. One cannot generalize to all public and private schools from such studies. Thus, it is simply silly to claim — as does a blog post from the libertarian Cato Institute — that “private schools beat public schools” based on those studies, especially when they provide absolutely no evidence that this is generally true.

Why focus on achievement tests?

Another concern, or irony, is the claim that we have a “narrow definition of school performance.” This is interesting because my co-author and I have research interests that are not really focused on testing outcomes, unlike many market-oriented school reform advocates such as, say, Wolf and his colleagues, who have made great efforts to prove that one type of school outscores another, or to disprove research that questions that agenda (see this summary). As we have said before, we embrace many other goals for schools. Our book’s treatment of student achievement data simply reflects the fact that such measures have been elevated by these market-oriented reformers, but actually do not support their claims. Also, it is important to note that, after years of trying to prove that voucher programs and private schools are leading to higher test scores, and getting less than compelling results on those measures, market-oriented school reformers have recently been emphasizing other outcomes, such as graduation and college attendance rates. While I am happy to see them now embrace other goals for schools, their effort to move the goalposts represent Plan B for market advocates.

What about reading?

Wolf finds it “curious and frustrating” that we would focus on mathematics and not reading achievement (and the bloggers suggest that we didn’t report reading results because they didn’t match our “story”). But there is actually widespread agreement that math achievement is the best measure of school performance, as Wolf’s mentor has noted: “Math tests are thought to be especially good indicators of school effectiveness, because math, unlike reading and language skills, is learned mainly in school.” Thus, although some other research has indeed found smaller public school outcomes in reading than in math, that tells us less about school impacts, since it reflects the fact that children in private schools tend to get greater advantages in reading from home — being read to, being exposed to a larger vocabulary, etc. — while home advantages are less pronounced in math, making that subject a better measure of school effects.

The other reason that we did not analyze reading achievement is because we did not set out to study or prove whether one type of school is better, but were initially focused on analyses of math teaching and learning when these public/private results first emerged. Neither of us has any special interest or training in reading issues, and — perhaps unlike some other researchers — we do not need to weigh in on topics for which we have no particular expertise.

Test over-alignment?

Where Wolf really misses the mark is in his concern that we use “tests that align more closely with public school than with private school curricula.” This claim almost comes across as a suggestion of some kind of conspiracy on our part to use only measures that arrive at a particular finding. Yet these NAEP and ECLS-K tests have been used by Wolf and his colleagues with no such prior complaint. Indeed, these are federal datasets whose construction and administration is overseen by bi-partisan panels of experts, including professionals in testing and assessment, curriculum and learning, US Governors, state superintendents, teachers, businesspeople, and parents, as well as representation from the private school sector. One school choice advocate (at that time) called NAEP the “gold standard” because “the federal program tries to align its performance standards with international education standards.” These tests are constructed by experts to measure the most important content for students in today’s world, not to align with curriculum in one type of school or another.

Nevertheless, Wolf’s criticism that public schools are doing a better job in the areas measured by these tests misses the fact that this is not a weakness of our study but instead one of our major findings: that private schools are less willing to adopt current curricular standards and more likely to employ unqualified teachers who use dated instructional practices. And, as the data show, students in private schools are more likely to sit in rows, do worksheets, and see math as memorization. These factors point to the dangers of deregulation and autonomy that people like Wolf champion. As we discuss in the book, this reflects the fact that public schools have more often embraced reform models based on professional understandings of how children most effectively learn mathematics rather than the market models in many private schools that endorse many parents’ preferences for back-to-basics, and outdated methods of teaching mathematics. Wolf’s criticism is akin to saying that scores are not a good measure of football teams because, now that the sport has evolved away from the traditional 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust-based ground game, teams that have a good passing game score more often.

Bias?

Wolf claims that our demographic controls are inappropriate and potentially biased against private schools, echoing an earlier critique made by his mentor — a critique which we have already discussed at great length in the book and elsewhere, and have shown to be lacking. In fact, we were very aware of issues of potential bias and were extremely cautious in our approach, taking widely accepted measures to deal with those issues. In particular, Wolf suggests that reporting of students with special needs and student eligibility for subsidized lunch are inappropriate indicators, even though they have also been used by Wolf. Yet, as we explain in the book, and Wolf declines to mention, if biased at all, our estimates are most likely biased in favor of private and independent (charter) schools, since the available data do not account for the fact that families in those schools have demonstrated particular interest in their children’s education. That is, although we use the available demographic variables to compare students and families across the two sectors, we cannot account for the unmeasured factors that cause one family to invest in private or independent schooling, as compared with a demographically identical family that sends their child to the local public school. The fact that private school parents invest time and money in their children’s schooling suggests that private school students tend to have hidden advantages at home that cannot be observed through typical demographic data. This is a significant bias that we are unable to account for — one in favor of private schools — which is why recent findings in favor of public schools are so surprising and why policymakers and researchers should want to know why these findings have emerged, as opposed to trying to explain them away.

Sectors and vouchers (revisited)?

Finally, Wolf criticizes our focus on the academic gains of students who stay within public or private sector schools. That was a conscious decision on our part to discern the impacts of those different types of schools. Again, Wolf provides no evidence that an alternative approach would change the results. In fact, as we note in the book, other independent researchers (by “independent,” I mean those who don’t describe themselves as Jedi warriors for school privatization, or point to the advocacy “work” they still need to do in promoting school choice) analyzing these same data in different ways have reached conclusions similar to ours. Moreover, Wolf ends his review with a defense of vouchers, saying that our book “has nothing to say empirically about private school voucher programs,” and thus that our findings do not “undermine the case for private school vouchers.” This is a logical fallacy. Voucher programs are based on the presumption that private schools are more effective. When two large-scale nationally representative studies undercut that claim and illuminate drawbacks of private school instruction, there are serious implications for the agendas of voucher advocates.

Wolf is a respectable researcher, although he has, to my knowledge, little if any experience with the overall question of public and private school achievement (but instead continues to conflate evaluations of local voucher programs with this larger question of public and private school effects), not to mention the data and methods involved. Overall, Wolf raises concerns with what is really a pretty standard treatment of two different and respected datasets, but shows no errors in our federally funded analysis, and provides no evidence that alternative approaches he suggests would change the outcomes at all.

Jay Greene’s blog

Despite the shortcomings of Wolf’s assessment, he at least takes a serious approach to the question. However, his review was then taken up by bloggers like Wolf’s department head at the University of Arkansas. Just for context, the Department of Education Reform at Arkansas, led by Jay Greene, was seeded by a multi-million dollar gift from the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Wal-Mart heirs, which persistently promotes private and market models for public education. This is an extremely unusual “gift” to a university, and one can guess what the Waltons expected for their investment. The Waltons also fund the organization that runs EdNext, which is managed by a voucher proponent approvingly described by Senator Lamar Alexander as “the leading advocate of school choice,” and who sees himself as part of “a small band of Jedi attackers” on this issue, fighting “the unified might of Death Star forces led by Darth Vader.” We discuss the questionable credibility of this group in the book (which Wolf declines to disclose in his review) in the context of how such foundations and their sponsored academics advocate for particular education policies in ways that are similar to the faux research apparatus being used to deny the science around climate change.

Greene basically summarizes Wolf’s measured but faulty review of our book, but then goes on to embellish in ways that are misleading and simply inaccurate. For instance, Wolf correctly notes that we use students’ eligibility for free-reduced lunch to help account for SES, but also acknowledges that we include all available measures of students’ home resources, and use those to supplement lunch-eligibility data (as we described in detail). However, in Greene’s telling, we simply used eligibility for subsidized lunch alone, which would indeed create problems regarding missing data and could bias the results against private schools. Greene misrepresents both our book and his colleague.

Greene also recklessly accuses us of burying data: “reading, graduation rates, college attendance, incomes, etc… don’t fit their story so they ignore those measures.” Actually, if he had read the book on which he was commenting, Greene would have seen that (1) income was used; (2) we spell out our reasons for focusing on math and not reading as noted above; and (3) there were no measures in the two national datasets used for “graduation rates, college attendance rates” — simply opening the book would show any reader that the datasets covered earlier grades, and did not include measures pertaining to high school graduation and college. One might think that the Waltons would want some accuracy for their money, unless, of course, the sole purpose of an effort such as Greene’s is simply to muddy the waters, not unlike the efforts of some deep-pocketed climate change deniers.

Greene then writes, “But the Lubienski’s (sic) don’t like randomized experiments.” This, again, is simply false. Randomized trials, as in medical trials, can be a wonderful tool for helping researchers understand the impacts of interventions. However, as we have noted before, there can also be serious limitations to randomization in understanding social phenomenon, including attrition, and, with Greene et al., typically a failure or refusal to account for school-level demographic effects. And Greene points to local voucher programs to explain away larger public-private patterns just like climate-change deniers point to local weather to overlook larger climate patterns. Just as many market advocates have a fundamentalist-like faith in choice and competition in schooling (again, as we discuss in the book), Greene et al. appear to have a similar faith in randomization — that it can explain all, and that anyone raising questions about its potential shortcomings represents a challenge that must be attacked, rather than understood.

Persistent errors, claims of a “problem” where none are demonstrated, loyal reference to an irrelevant set of studies as if they were revealed scriptures — all this suggests a fundamentalist faith in a belief system more than an interest in finding what works and why, as well as some desperation when that faith is challenged by evidence. Despite all this commotion, it may be useful to know that, in some ways, I don’t really care if one type of school will “beat” another type. As noted in our book, our own children attend public schools due to convenience, not any principle on our part, for the same reasons they have attended Catholic and Christian schools (state-funded in Ireland) in the past. But, regardless of anyone’s preexisting prejudice (or lack thereof) on this issue, we need to be wary of organizations that clamber for legitimacy while they work to arrange evidence to align with the agendas of their special interest funders. Still, we apparently struck quite a nerve, at least as indicated by all these futile attacks on our findings as these advocates continue to try to arrange evidence in support of their agenda.

by Chris Lubienski