Make No Small Plans

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood, and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram, once recorded, will never die…”

-Daniel Burnham, American architect, 1910

More than 100 years ago, architect Daniel Burnham expressed an important insight. “Make no little plans,” he said. Many people have said that, one way or another. But Burnham’s insight was that big plans matter because they “have magic to stir men’s blood.” Small plans do not, and for this reason may never even be implemented. Burnham believed that even if big plans fail, they have influence into the future, as little plans do not.

Make no small plans.

In education, we sometimes have big plans. Examples include comprehensive school reform in the 1990s, charter schools in the 2000s, and evidence-based reform today. None of these have yet produced revolutionary positive outcomes, but all of them have captured the public imagination. Even if you are not an advocate of any of these, you cannot ignore them, as they take on a life of their own. When conditions are right, they will return many times, in many forms, and may eventually lead to substantial impacts. In medicine, it was demonstrated in the mid-1800s that germs caused disease and that medicine could advance through rigorous experimentation (think Lister and Pasteur, for example). Yet sterile procedures in operations and disciplined research on practical treatments took 100 years to prevail. The medical profession resisted sterile procedures and evidence-based medicine for many years. Sterile procedures and evidence-based medicine were big ideas. It took a long time for them to take hold, but they did prevail, and remained big ideas through all that time.

Big Plans in Education

In education, as in medicine long ago, we have thousands of important problems, and good work continues (and needs to continue) on most of them. However, at least in American education, there is one crucial problem that dwarfs all others and lends itself to truly big plans. This is the achievement gap between students from middle class backgrounds and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. As noted in my April 25 blog, the achievement gap between students who qualify for free lunch and those who do not, between African American and White students, and between Hispanic students and non-Hispanic White students, all average an effect size of about 0.50. This presents a serious challenge. However, as I pointed out in that blog, there are several programs in existence today capable of adding an effect size of +0.50 to the reading or math achievement of students at risk. All programs that can do this involve one-to-one or one-to-small group tutoring. Tutoring is expensive, but recent research has found that well-trained and well-supervised tutors with BAs, but not necessarily teaching certificates, can obtain the same outcomes as certified teachers do, at half the cost. Using our own Success for All program with six tutors per school (K-5), high-poverty African American elementary schools in Baltimore obtained effect sizes averaging +0.50 for all students and +0.75 for students in the lowest 25% of their grades (Madden et al., 1993). A follow-up to eighth grade found that achievement outcomes maintained and both retentions and special education placements were cut in half (Borman & Hewes, 2003). We have not had the opportunity to once again implement Success for All with so much tutoring included, but even with fewer tutors, Success for All has had substantial impacts. Cheung et al. (2019) found an average effect size of +0.27 across 28 randomized and matched studies, a more than respectable outcome for a whole-school intervention. For the lowest-achieving students, the average was +0.56.

Knowing that Success for All can achieve these outcomes is important in itself, but it is also an indication that substantial positive effects can be achieved for whole schools, and with sufficient tutors, can equal the entire achievement gaps according to socio-economic status and race. If one program can do this, why not many others?

Imagine that the federal government or other large funders decided to support the development and evaluation of several different ideas. Funders might establish a goal of increasing reading achievement by an effect size of +0.50, or as close as possible to this level, working with high-poverty schools. Funders would seek organizations that have already demonstrated success at an impressive level, but not yet +0.50, who could describe a compelling strategy to increase their impact to +0.50 or more. Depending on the programs’ accomplishments and needs, they might be funded to experiment with enhancements to their promising model. For example, they might add staff, add time (e.g., continue for multiple years), or add additional program components likely to strengthen the overall model. Once programs could demonstrate substantial outcomes in pilots, they might be funded to do a cluster randomized trial. If this experiment shows positive effects approaching +0.50 or more, the developers might receive funding for scale-up. If the outcomes are substantially positive but significantly less than +0.50, the funders might decide to help the developers make changes leading up to a second randomized experiment.

There are many details to be worked out, but the core idea could capture the imagination and energy of educators and public-spirited citizens alike. This time, we are not looking for marginal changes that can be implemented cheaply. This time, we will not quit until we have many proven, replicable programs, each of which is so powerful that it can, over a period of years, remedy the entire achievement gap. This time, we are not making changes in policy or governance and hoping for the best. This time, we are going directly to the schools where the disadvantaged kids are, and we are not declaring victory until we can guarantee such students gains that will give them the same outcomes as those of the middle class kids in the suburbs.

Perhaps the biggest idea of all is the idea that we need big ideas with big outcomes!

Anyway, this is my big plan. What’s yours?

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Note: Just as I was starting on this blog, I got an email from Ulrich Boser at the Center for American Progress. CAP and the Thomas Fordham Foundation are jointly sponsoring an “Education Moonshot,” including a competition with a grand prize of $10,000 for a “moonshot idea that will revolutionize schooling and dramatically improve student outcomes.” For more on this, please visit the announcement site. Submissions are due August 1^st at this online portal and involve telling them in 500 words your, well, big plan.

 

References

Borman, G., & Hewes, G. (2003).  Long-term effects and cost effectiveness of Success for All.  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 24 (2), 243-266.

Cheung, A., Xie, C., Zhuang, T., & Slavin, R. E. (2019). Success for All: A quantitative synthesis of evaluations. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Madden, N.A., Slavin, R.E., Karweit, N.L., Dolan, L.J., & Wasik, B.A. (1993).  Success for All:  Longitudinal effects of a restructuring program for inner-city elementary schools.  American Educational Research Journal, 30, 123-148.

 

 

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Evidence For Revolution

In the 1973 movie classic “Sleeper,” Woody Allen plays a New York health food store owner who wakes up 200 years in the future, in a desolate environment.

“What happened to New York?” he asks the character played by Diane Keaton.  She replies, “It was destroyed.  Some guy named Al Shanker got hold of a nuclear weapon.”

I think every member of the American Federation of Teachers knows this line.  Firebrand educator Al Shanker, founder of the AFT, would never have hurt anyone.  But short of that, he would do whatever it took to fight for teachers’ rights, and most importantly, for the rights of students to receive a great education.  In fact, he saw that the only way for teachers to receive the respect, fair treatment, and adequate compensation they deserved, and still deserve, was to demonstrate that they had skills not possessed by the general public that could have powerful impacts on students’ learning.  Physicians are much respected and well paid because they have special knowledge of how to prevent and cure disease, and to do this they have available a vast armamentarium of drugs, devices, and procedures, all proven to work in rigorous research.

Shanker was a huge fan of evidence in education, first because evidence-based practice helps students succeed, but also because teachers using proven programs and practices show that they deserve respect and fair compensation because they have specialized knowledge backed by proven methods able to ensure the success of students.

The Revolutionary Potential of Evidence in Education

The reality is that in most school districts, especially large ones, most power resides in the central office, not in individual schools.  The district chooses textbooks, computer technology, benchmark assessments, and much more.  There are probably principals and teachers on the committees that make these decisions, but once the decisions are made, the building-level staff is supposed to fall in line and do as they are told.  When I speak to principals and teachers, they are astonished to learn that they can easily look up on www.evidenceforessa.org just about any program their district is using and find out what the evidence base for that program is.  Most of the time, the programs they have been required to use by their school administrations either have no valid evidence of effectiveness, or they have concrete evidence that they do not work.  Further, in almost all categories, effective programs or approaches do exist, and could have been selected as practical alternatives to the ones that were adopted.  Individual schools could have been allowed to choose proven programs, instead of being required to use programs they know not to be proven effective.

Perhaps schools should always be given the freedom to select and implement programs other than those mandated by the district, as long as the programs they want to implement have stronger evidence of effectiveness than the district’s programs.

How the Revolution Might Happen

Imagine that principals, teachers, parent activists, enlightened school board members, and others in a given district were all encouraged to use Evidence for ESSA or other reviews of evaluations of educational programs.  Imagine that many of these people just wrote letters to the editor, or letters to district leaders, letters to education reporters, or perhaps, if these are not sufficient, they might march on the district offices with placards reading something like “Use What Works” or “Our Children Deserve Proven Programs.”  Who could be against that?

One of three things might happen.  First, the district might allow individual schools to use proven programs in place of the standard programs, and encourage any school to come forward with evidence from a reliable source if its staff or leadership wants to use a proven program not already in use.  That would be a great outcome.  Second, the district leadership might start using proven programs districtwide, and working with school leaders and teachers to ensure successful implementation.  This retains the top-down structure, but it could greatly improve student outcomes.  Third, the district might ignore the protesters and the evidence, or relegate the issue to a very slow study committee, which may be the same thing.  That would be a distressing outcome, though no worse than what probably happens now in most places.  It could still be the start of a positive process, if principals, teachers, school board members, and parent activists keep up the pressure, helpfully informing the district leaders about proven programs they could select when they are considering a change.

If this process took place around the country, it could have a substantial positive impact beyond the individual districts involved, because it could scare the bejabbers out of publishers, who would immediately see that if they are going to succeed in the long run, they need to design programs that will likely work in rigorous evaluations, and then market them based on real evidence.  That would be revolutionary indeed.  Until the publishers get firmly on board, the evidence movement is just tapping at the foundations of a giant fortress with a few ball peen hammers.  But there will come a day when that fortress will fall, and all will be beautiful. It will not require a nuclear weapon, just a lot of committed and courageous educators and advocates, with a lot of persistence, a lot of information on what works in education, and a lot of ball peen hammers.

Picture Credit: Liberty Leading the People, Eugène Delacroix [Public domain]

 This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Effect Sizes and Additional Months of Gain: Can’t We Just Agree That More is Better?

In the 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, there is a running joke about a hapless band, Spinal Tap, which proudly bills itself “Britain’s Loudest Band.”  A pesky reporter keeps asking the band’s leader, “But how can you prove that you are Britain’s loudest band?” The band leader explains, with declining patience, that while ordinary amplifiers’ sound controls only go up to 10, Spinal Tap’s go up to 11.  “But those numbers are arbitrary,” says the reporter.  “They don’t mean a thing!”  “Don’t you get it?” asks the band leader.  “ELEVEN is more than TEN!  Anyone can see that!”

In educational research, we have an ongoing debate reminiscent of Spinal Tap.  Educational researchers speaking to other researchers invariably express the impact of educational treatments as effect sizes (the difference in adjusted means for the experimental and control groups divided by the unadjusted standard deviation).  All else being equal, higher effect sizes are better than lower ones.

However, educators who are not trained in statistics often despise effect sizes.  “What do they mean?” they ask.  “Tell us how much difference the treatment makes in student learning!”

Researchers want to be understood, so they try to translate effect sizes into more educator-friendly equivalents.  The problem is that the friendlier the units, the more statistically problematic they are.  The friendliest of all is “additional months of learning.”  Researchers or educators can look on a chart and, for any particular effect size, they can find the number of “additional months of learning.”  The Education Endowment Foundation in England, which funds and reports on rigorous experiments, reports both effect sizes and additional months of learning, and provides tables to help people make the conversion.  But here’s the rub.  A recent article by Baird & Pane (2019) compared additional months of learning to three other translations of effect sizes.  Additional months of learning was rated highest in ease of use, but lowest in four other categories, such as transparency and consistency. For example, a month of learning clearly has a different meaning in kindergarten than it does in tenth grade.

The other translations rated higher by Baird and Pane were, at least to me, just as hard to understand as effect sizes.  For example, the What Works Clearinghouse presents, along with effect sizes, an “improvement index” that has the virtue of being equally incomprehensible to researchers and educators alike.

On one hand, arguing about outcome metrics is as silly as arguing the relative virtues of Fahrenheit and Celsius. If they can be directly transformed into the other unit, who cares?

However, additional months of learning is often used to cover up very low effect sizes. I recently ran into an example of this in a series of studies by the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), in which disadvantaged urban African American students gained 59 more “days of learning” than matched students not in charters in math, and 44 more days in reading. These numbers were cited in an editorial praising charter schools in the May 29 Washington Post.

However, these “days of learning” are misleading. The effect size for this same comparison was only +0.08 for math, and +0.06 for reading. Any researcher will tell you that these are very small effects. They were only made to look big by reporting the gains in days. These not only magnify the apparent differences, but they also make them unstable. Would it interest you to know that White students in urban charter schools performed 36 days a year worse than matched students in math (ES= -0.05) and 14 days worse in reading (ES= -0.02)? How about Native American students in urban charter schools, whose scores were 70 days worse than matched students in non-charters in math (ES= -0.10), and equal in reading. I wrote about charter school studies in a recent blog. In the blog, I did not argue that charter schools are effective for disadvantaged African Americans but harmful for Whites and Native Americans. That seems unlikely. What I did argue is that the effects of charter schools are so small that the directions of the effects are unstable. The overall effects across all urban schools studied were only 40 days (ES=+0.055) in math and 28 days (ES=+0.04) in reading. These effects look big because of the “days of learning” transformation, but they are not.

In This is Spinal Tap, the argument about whether or not Spinal Tap is Britain’s loudest band is absurd.  Any band can turn its amplifiers to the top and blow out everyone’s eardrums, whether the top is marked eleven or ten.  In education, however, it does matter a great deal that educators are taking evidence into account in their decisions about educational programs. Using effect sizes, perhaps supplemented by additional months of learning, is one way to help readers understand outcomes of educational experiments. Using “days of learning,” however, is misleading, making very small impacts look important. Why not additional hours or minutes of learning, while we’re at it? Spinal Tap would be proud.

References

Baird, M., & Paine, J. (2019). Translating standardized effects of education programs into more interpretable metrics. Educational Researcher. Advance online publication. doi.org/10.3102/0013189X19848729

CREDO (2015). Overview of the Urban Charter School Study. Stanford, CA: Author.

Washington Post: Denying poor children a chance. [Editorial]. (May 29, 2019). The Washington Post, A16.

 

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Charter Schools? Smarter Schools? Why Not Both?

I recently saw an editorial in the May 29 Washington Post, entitled “Denying Poor Children a Chance,” a pro-charter school opinion piece that makes dire predictions about the damage to poor and minority students that would follow if charter expansion were to be limited.  In education, it is common to see evidence-free opinions for and against charter schools, so I was glad to see actual data in the Post editorial.   In my view, if charter schools could routinely and substantially improve student outcomes, especially for disadvantaged students, I’d be a big fan.  My response to charter schools is the same as my response to everything else in education: Show me the evidence.

The Washington Post editorial cited a widely known 2015 Stanford CREDO study comparing urban charter schools to matched traditional public schools (TPS) in the same districts.  Evidence always attracts my attention, so I decided to look into this and other large, multi-district studies. Despite the Post’s enthusiasm for the data, the average effect size was only +0.055 for math and +0.04 for reading.  By anyone’s standards, these are very, very small outcomes.  Outcomes for poor, urban, African American students were somewhat higher, at +0.08 for math and +0.06 for reading, but on the other hand, average effect sizes for White students were negative, averaging -0.05 for math and -0.02 for reading.  Outcomes were also negative for Native American students: -0.10 for math, zero for reading.  With effect sizes so low, these small differences are probably just different flavors of zero.  A CREDO (2013) study of charter schools in 27 states, including non-urban as well as urban schools, found average effect sizes of +0.01 for math and -0.01 for reading. How much smaller can you get?

In fact, the CREDO studies have been widely criticized for using techniques that inflate test scores in charter schools.  They compare students in charter schools to students in traditional public schools, matching on pretests and ethnicity.  This ignores the obvious fact that students in charter schools chose to go there, or their parents chose for them to go.  There is every reason to believe that students who choose to attend charter schools are, on average, higher-achieving, more highly motivated, and better behaved than students who stay in traditional public schools.  Gleason et al. (2010) found that students who applied to charter schools started off 16 percentage points higher in reading and 13 percentage points higher in math than others in the same schools who did not apply.  Applicants were more likely to be White and less likely to be African American or Hispanic, and they were less likely to qualify for free lunch.  Self-selection is a particular problem in studies of students who choose or are sent to “no-excuses” charters, such as KIPP or Success Academies, because the students or their parents know students will be held to very high standards of behavior and accomplishment, and may be encouraged to leave the school if they do not meet those standards (this is not a criticism of KIPP or Success Academies, but when such charter systems use lotteries to select students, the students who show up for the lotteries were at least motivated to participate in a lottery to attend a very demanding school).

Well-designed studies of charter schools usually focus on schools that use lotteries to select students, and then they compare the students who were successful in the lottery to those who were not so lucky.  This eliminates the self-selection problem, as students were selected by a random process.  The CREDO studies do not do this, and this may be why their studies report higher (though still very small) effect sizes than those reported by syntheses of studies of students who all applied to charters, but may have been “lotteried in” or “lotteried out” at random.  A very rigorous WWC synthesis of such studies by Gleason et al. (2010) found that middle school students who were lotteried into charter schools in 32 states performed non-significantly worse than those lotteried out, in math (ES=-0.06) and in reading (ES=-0.08).  A 2015 update of the WWC study found very similar, slightly negative outcomes in reading and math.

It is important to note that “no-excuses” charter schools, mentioned earlier, have had more positive outcomes than other charters.  A recent review of lottery studies by Cheng et al. (2017) found effect sizes of +0.25 for math and +0.17 for reading.  However, such “no-excuses” charters are a tiny percentage of all charters nationwide.

Other meta-analyses of studies of achievement outcomes of charter schools also exist, but none found effect sizes as high as the CREDO urban study.  The means of +0.055 for math and +0.04 for reading represent upper bounds for effects of urban charter schools.

Charter Schools or Smarter Schools?

So far, every study of achievement effects of charters has focused on impacts of charters on achievement compared to those of traditional public schools.  However, this should not be the only question.  “Charters” and “non-charters” do not exhaust the range of possibilities.

What if we instead ask this question: Among the range of programs available, which are most likely to be most effective at scale?

To illustrate the importance of this question, consider a study in England, which evaluated a program called Engaging Parents Through Mobile Phones.  The program involves texting parents on cell phones to alert them to upcoming tests, inform them about whether students are completing their homework, and tell them what students were being taught in school.  A randomized evaluation (Miller et al, 2017) found effect sizes of +0.06 for math and +0.03 for reading, remarkably similar to the urban charter school effects reported by CREDO (2015).  The cost of the mobile phone program was £6 per student per year, or $7.80.  If you like the outcomes of charter schools, might you prefer to get the same outcomes for $7.80 per child per year, without all the political, legal, and financial stresses of charter schools?

The point here is that rather than arguing about the size of small charter effects, one could consider charters a “treatment” and compare them to other proven approaches.  In our Evidence for ESSA website, we list 112 reading and math programs that meet ESSA standards for “Strong,” “Moderate,” or “Promising” evidence of effectiveness.  Of these, 107 had effect sizes larger than those CREDO (2015) reports for urban charter schools.  In both math and reading, there are many programs with average effect sizes of +0.20, +0.30, up to more than +0.60.  If applied as they were in the research, the best of these programs could, for example, entirely overcome Black-White and Hispanic-White achievement gaps in one or two years.

A few charter school networks have their own proven educational approaches, but the many charters that do not have proven programs should be looking for them.  Most proven programs work just as well in charter schools as they do in traditional public schools, so there is no reason existing charter schools should not proactively seek proven programs to increase their outcomes.  For new charters, wouldn’t it make sense for chartering agencies to encourage charter applicants to systematically search for and propose to adopt programs that have strong evidence of effectiveness?  Many charter schools already use proven programs.  In fact, there are several that specifically became charters to enable them to adopt or maintain our Success for All whole-school reform program.

There is no reason for any conflict between charter schools and smarter schools.  The goal of every school, regardless of its governance, should be to help students achieve their full potential, and every leader of a charter or non-charter school would agree with this. Whatever we think about governance, all schools, traditional or charter, should get smarter, using proven programs of all sorts to improve student outcomes.

References

Cheng, A., Hitt, C., Kisida, B., & Mills, J. N. (2017). “No excuses” charter schools: A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence on student achievement. Journal of School Choice, 11 (2), 209-238.

Clark, M.A., Gleason, P. M., Tuttle, C. C., & Silverberg, M. K., (2015). Do charter schools improve student achievement? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 37 (4), 419-436.

Gleason, P.M., Clark, M. A., Tuttle, C. C., & Dwoyer, E. (2010).The evaluation of charter school impacts. Washington, DC: What Works Clearinghouse.

Miller, S., Davison, J, Yohanis, J., Sloan, S., Gildea, A., & Thurston, A. (2016). Texting parents: Evaluation report and executive summary. London: Education Endowment Foundation.

Washington Post: Denying poor children a chance. [Editorial]. (May 29, 2019). The Washington Post, A16.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.