It probably would have taken this guy 981 words to explain school accountability under the waivers, too.
By Mac LeBuhn, Policy Analyst and Charles Barone, Policy Director
As you’ve hopefully already seen, Anne Hyslop of the New America Foundation (NAF) released a new report on the very worthy topic of the impact of the ESEA waiver program on school accountability systems in states. The report, “It’s All Relative,” can be found here.
(A brief primer for those unfamiliar with the ESEA waivers: under the program, the federal government provides additional flexibility from several parts of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in return for promises of policy changes from the states. In and of themselves, these waivers are complex things and their impact is, to put it charitably, opaque. Reports like this one are badly needed in the waiver space.)
A few initial reactions to the report:
States are pursuing a surprising variety of policy approaches for school accountability. Among the findings in the report, few stand out more than the degree of difference in the types of schools states identified as Focus and Priority Schools. Intuitively, one might envision Focus and Priority Schools as the lowest-performing 15 percent of schools designated in need of improvement under NCLB. That would be mistaken. While some states are labeling these lowest-performing schools—often those designated for Restructuring under NCLB—as Priority and Focus Schools, other states are selecting from a broader range of schools not designated at all under the AYP system.
More than before, our states are functioning as laboratories of democracy, with many different iterations of accountability operating across the country. As the authors of “The New State Achievement Gap” suggested in an Education Sector report released earlier this year, states with greater gains on the NAEP are often using waivers to implement more aggressive interventions for low-performing schools than those with weaker gains on the test. To the extent possible, researchers should attempt to seek out to what degree the differences in state accountability programs are producing the differences in achievement trends between states.
That fewer schools are designated for interventions under the waivers was part of the theory of action. Another great contribution from this paper is it quantifies trends that analysts have been able to describe only in general terms so far. Many knew already that fewer schools would be designated for interventions under waivers, but we can now describe it statistically. For instance, the report indicates that Nevada identified nearly 90 percent fewer schools for interventions under waivers than it did under the NCLB accountability system.
There’s a natural tendency among some to turn facts like this into a criticism: barely 15 percent of schools that were receiving interventions under NCLB are still receiving additional attention today! Consider the following tweet:
It is important to remember that the waiver program was designed explicitly to move away from the broad interventions prescribed under NCLB. Suggesting that some schools ‘may’ have escaped interventions under the waivers is misleading: that was the intention of those who created the program in the first place.
To put it differently, it is not an unforeseen flaw of the waiver program that some schools receiving interventions before the waivers did not receive interventions subsequently. It’s a design feature. The waiver program deliberately allowed states to focus their interventions on fewer schools, premised on the notion that fewer schools receiving interventions will permit the state to intervene more effectively. NCLB, in theory, subjected any school failing to meet expectations to increasing interventions, no matter how many schools were caught up. But the fact is few of the interventions undertaken under NCLB were very intense. Thus, at the time they were launched, waivers offered the possibility of fewer schools undergoing the types of intensive change needed to truly turn them around.
Those who take the statistics like the decline in interventions in Nevada as a criticism of the waiver program are not acknowledging the theory of action that motivates the shift towards Focus and Priority Schools. (To be clear, Hyslop acknowledges the different theories of action, though many of the articles reporting the paper seemed to adopt this critical tone.)
But it’s just a theory of action. The report ably expresses why so many stakeholders are frustrated with the silence the Department of Education has had on the impact of the waiver program. There is an open question in education policy today: is an NCLB-style system that mandates interventions to any and all schools failing to meet a certain standard more or less effective than a waiver-style system that directs interventions to a certain portion of schools? This is an empirical question that we may be able to resolve through school data—data that has been next to impossible to come by thus far.
Without data on changes in school performance following the changes in accountability, policymakers and advocates do not have much more than ideology to lean on when arguing for or against a relative accountability system like those created under the waivers. That’s why we at DFER joined a coalition of other organizations in a letter that called for additional data on the accountability systems.
After all, we have an opinion on what should be included in federal school accountability systems and what, potentially, should be excluded. While acknowledging the reasons that exist for relative school accountability, is there a compelling reason why 85 percent of schools in, say, Alabama should not be required to pursue additional interventions when only one in five of its eighth graders are proficient in math and one in four are proficient in reading as measured by the 2013 NAEP? The relative intervention approach may be ideal for some states, but it’s absolutely Panglossian in terms of where students are with regard to proficiency standards in many other states.
This report provides valuable new data on a critical area in education policy—and demonstrates how much more information we still need.
Charles Barone has more than 25 years of experience in education service, research, policy, and advocacy. Prior to joining Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) full-time in January of 2009, Barone worked for five years as an independent consultant on education policy and advocacy. His clients, in addition to DFER, included the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the Education Trust, The Education Sector, and the National Academy of Sciences. Read more here.
Mac LeBuhn is a policy analyst at Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Before joining DFER, Mac was a fourth grade teacher at Rocketship Si Se Puede, a charter school in San Jose, CA. He became interested in education policy through internships at the offices of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston.