OPINION | False choices: The economic argument against market-driven education reform

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After experimenting with market-based, competitive education initiatives for 20 years with little statewide education improvement, it’s time Minnesota returns to what works best: proper education investment and supporting our students and teachers.Download full report (pdf) View online at ScribdMinnesota is home to the nation’s oldest charter school law and has also implemented school choice initiatives, such as open enrollment. This simulated market experience has not supported the idea that increased competition drives improvement.Minnesota’s national test scores in math have increased by less than seven percent since the introduction of a competitive system 20 years ago, and reading scores increased by less than one percent during the same time frame.The main problem, among many, is that school systems cannot function as free markets if we want to achieve universal post-secondary readiness. Free markets produce efficiency, not equity for all. Efficiency helps maximize profit, but what about students that aren’t profitable to educate?Using the rules of economics, and assuming we must achieve universal post-secondary readiness, MN2020’s latest report, False Choices: Market-Driven Education Reform Doesn’t Work, demonstrates why free market thinking in education comes at a high price for students, parents and teachers.As a result of competition-based thinking, many schools have focused on teaching-to-tests and advertising instead of broad based cognitive development that will provide students with the necessary skills to be successful in a 21st century workforce.In moving Minnesota back toward a proven educational path, our latest report makes the following recommendations:There is a place in education for efficiency, incentives, and innovation; however, policymakers must stop trying to achieve these competitive goals with a false, market-based approach.Schools must adapt to achieve universal post-secondary readiness by focusing on initiatives that enhance teachers’ professional development and provide comprehensive teacher assessment and feedback.Instead of using a false market-mentality as political cover to systematically defund schools, we must invest in education for the 21st century, using some of that investment to develop a comprehensive and fair teacher evaluation metric.Charter schools have a place in the public education system as partners, not competitors, with traditional schools. Continue Reading

Graph of the day: How’s Minnesota doing?

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Having made it through a busy holiday season spending time with infographics, regression analyses, and those weird spreadsheet cousins from Ohio, the Graph of the Day is back!

Today we check in with how Minnesota is doing on employment relative to the past several years.

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The data we deserve — evaluating education and achievement

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As Minnesota waits to hear if Washington will give it a waiver from the failed No Child Left Behind initiative, and while congressional conservatives vie with the President over what will replace NCLB, one thing is certain: we are going to keep talking about test results. As these discussions—laced with terms like “accountability” and “data-driven instruction”—go on, it behooves us to consider how we’re using the various assessments available to us.In particular, we need to figure out what, exactly, it is we want all this data for. Today we’ll look at a few different reasons for collecting data, as well as for the right kind of assessment to collect that data.Reason 1: Knowing How Our Education System Is WorkingWhat We Want to Do:It makes sense to have a way of showing the general public what their tax dollars are producing by way of educational results. As such, it makes sense to gather data on the overall system. The tricky part is getting that sense of performance without corrupting the measurements we’re using to gauge it.The Data We Need:The Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) could partially serve this purpose if they weren’t linked to school-specific consequences. Continue Reading

OPINION | The three stages of education reform

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During my reading and writing about education (not to mention my living of it as a teacher), I have developed a hypothesis about the progression of a person or community’s interest in improving education. The hypothesis revolves around what I’ve called, very creatively, the Three Stages of Education Reform.Stage 1 – The System is FineThis is the default stage for many communities. It’s one that’s very comfortable, especially in places like Minnesota where we can be proud of our schools’ historical record of achievement. Someone with a pure Stage 1 mindset attributes reports of failing students to poverty, culture, family, or other areas, but they don’t look to public policy to address the problem.The danger of a Stage 1 mindset is that systemic social problems like the achievement gap or declining global competitiveness are ignored or denied. This is not acceptable. Continue Reading

Quality over quantity

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MinnPost’s Beth Hawkins has a good article up on some recent efforts to replicate effective charter school practices. While some “effective practices” warrant further investigation to determine their true effectiveness, the effort to build quality instead of quantity is welcome.

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Two days’ graphs: Not so mobile

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“If you don’t have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself!” So spoke Herman Cain during his brief bubble of frontrunnerdom in the presidential primary. He was giving voice to a myth favored by conservatives who would like nothing better than to write off every social ill as a personal failing.

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OPINION | The achievement gap is a middle class issue

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A recent study (PDF) by Sean Reardon of Stanford University finds that the achievement gap between the upper and middle classes is bigger than the gap between the middle class and the working poor. This should give pause to those who dismiss education reform as something that affects other people. If you’re middle class, you’re on the losing side of the achievement gap.Defining the achievement gap in terms of income is trickier than defining it in terms of race. The black-white achievement gap, for example, is relatively easy to determine: Determine proficiency rates for students classified as black and for students classified as white, then subtract. Income, however, exists on a spectrum, not in demographically discrete groups.The most commonplace approach to describing the income achievement gap is to artificially define two discrete groups, the poor and the non-poor. Continue Reading