Group items tagged

"Systems like the APPR system in NY mistakenly place an emphasis on human capital rather than social capital and thus are doomed to failure. Rooted in what Michael Fullan categorized as "wrong drivers of change," systems that emphasize individual human capital over social capital and that emphasize the use of accountability data in a punitive way are simply doomed to failure. To replace old systems with similar systems, repeatedly, gets us to the insanity that some other than Einstein, Franklin, or Twain described."

In any case, among these five interventions (tutoring, extended time, improving human capital, interim assessments and "high expectations"), only one of them - "improving human capital" through more selective hiring and performance bonuses - focuses directly on improving teacher quality, the primary tool advocated by market-based reformers. Frankly, the human capital component is really the only one that could be called "market-based" by any reasonable definition (though the regular analysis of interim assessment data might be loosely classified as such). In other words, the teacher-focused, market-based philosophy that dominates our public debate is not very well represented in the "no excuses" model, even though the latter is frequently held up as evidence supporting the former.

"The problem with this fight is that it drains the system of energy - energy that should be spent on the teaching and learning process. This very visible fight, often fought through the media, is a significant distraction from the work that needs to occur in schools. What's worse, however, is that the battle is over the wrong things. The problem is that the battle lines are all over a misplaced emphasis on human capital over social capital."

"For the past few months, we have been insisting, through this blog series, on the idea that education reform has a social dimension or level that often is overlooked in mainstream debate and policy. Under this broad theme, we've covered diverse issues ranging from how teachers' social capital can increase their human capital to how personnel churn can undermine reform efforts, or how too much individual talent can impede a team's overall performance. This collection of issues may prompt a number of important questions: What exactly is the "social side?" What are its key ideas? I would like to offer a few initial thoughts and share some resources that I've compiled."

The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism. Though Klein's book provides much evidence of the Shock Doctrine, the Disaster Capitalists rarely come out and acknowledge their strategy. That's why Watkins' outburst of candor, buried in this front-page New York Times article yesterday, is so important: It shows that the recession and its corresponding shock to school budgets is being  used by corporations to maximize revenues, all under the gauzy banner of "reform."

"The democratic mission of public education is under assault by a conservative right-wing reform culture in which students are viewed as human capital in schools that are to be administered by market-driven forces."

Education advocacy organizations (EAOs) come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some focus on specific issues (e.g. human capital decisions, forms of school choice, class size) while others approach policy more broadly (e.g. changing policy environments, membership decisions). Proponents of these organizations claim they exist, at least in part, to provide a counterbalance to various other powerful interest groups.

This fall, the District of Columbia Public Schools gave sizable bonuses to 476 of its 3,600 educators, with 235 of them getting unusually large pay raises. "We want to make great teachers rich," said Jason Kamras, the district's chief of human capital. The profession is notorious for losing thousands of its brightest young teachers within a few years, which many experts attribute to low starting salaries and a traditional step-raise structure that rewards years of service and academic degrees rather than success in the classroom.

"One of the problems with current reform is that there does not seem to be an elaborated philosophy of education or theory of learning underlying the current reform movement. There is an implied philosophy and it is a basic economic/human capital one: Education is necessary for individual economic advantage and for national economic stability. This focus is legitimate but incomplete, for it narrows the purpose of education in a democracy, which should also include intellectual, social, civic, and ethical development. The theory of learning embedded in an accountability system based on standardized testing is a simplified behaviorist one. Learning is pretty much the acquisition of discrete bits of information measured quantitatively by a standardized test. Teaching is likewise reduced to a knowledge delivery system based on the mastery of a set of teaching techniques."

The racial achievement gap in education is an important social problem to which decades of research have yielded no scalable solutions. Recent evidence from "No Excuses" charter schools - which demonstrates that some combination of school inputs can educate the poorest minority children - offers a guiding light. In the 2010-2011 school year, we implemented five strategies gleaned from best practices in "No Excuses" charter schools - increased instructional time, a more rigorous approach to building human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations - in nine of the lowest performing middle and high schools in Houston, Texas. We show that the average impact of these changes on student achievement is 0.276 standard deviations in math and 0.059 standard deviations in reading, which is strikingly similar to reported impacts of attending the Harlem Children's Zone and Knowledge is Power Program schools - two strict "No Excuses" adherents. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of the scalability of the experiment.

The articles in this issue are designed to do exactly that: to defend the hope that public education (an education truly controlled by the public) provides, while promoting the goal of all true education-the emancipation of human creativity, i.e., of human beings themselves.

This paper outlines how such an investment structure might be used to solve a different challenge: chronic academic underachievement among low-income students. The academic achievement gap is well documented and seemingly intractable. Low-income students do consistently worse than their middle and upper-income peers in all measures of academic success at every grade level, including standardized test scores, high school graduation rates, and college completion rates. A number of social and education reforms have been offered to help close the achievement gap. This paper will not attempt to add to this voluminous history; rather, it will explore a new approach to financing schools that demonstrate success in closing the gap. It will also deliberately steer clear of any discussion of pedagogy. Curriculum reform is beyond the scope of this proposal as well. That said, this paper will focus on a particular type of school-charters-because many have demonstrated success serving low-income students.

Students receive abundant information about their educational performance, but how this information affects future educational-investment decisions is not well understood. Increasingly common sources of information are state-mandated standardized tests. On these tests, students receive a score and a label that summarizes their performance. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we find persistent effects of earning a more positive label on the college-going decisions of urban, low-income students. Consistent with a Bayesian-updating model, these effects are concentrated among students with weaker priors, specifically those who report before taking the test that they do not plan to attend a four-year college.