Primer, April 2010

April 2010   Volume 5, Number 4

Editor’s note: Boosting performance at our lowest-achieving schools has become a national imperative. Federal attention to chronically underperforming schools heightened with the No Child Left Behind act and has increased in the years since. Under U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, federal efforts have focused on turning around the bottom five percent of schools, and last month Ohio learned it will receive more than $132 million in turnaround funds through the School Improvement Grants program. As the state works to win additional dollars for turnaround efforts in its second Race to the Top application, we recognize the need to be sure those resources are going toward strategies that will be successful. In its report Turnaround Schools That Work: Moving Beyond Separate but Equal the Century Foundation proposes an alternative to two commonly used turnaround strategies. The author spoke this month in Cleveland to urban educators involved in high school transformation.

Turning around schools through magnet approaches that create socioeconomic diversity

By Richard D. Kahlenberg
The Century Foundation

Education Secretary Arne Duncan courageously has taken on the most important—and most difficult—problem in American education: turning around America’s lowest-performing schools. Duncan has noted that for years districts allowed failing schools to slide and has called, instead, for “far-reaching reforms” that fundamentally change the culture in the country’s worst five thousand schools.1 Seeking to transform these poorly performing schools into successful ones — creating what is known as “turnaround schools” — is indeed an ambitious challenge. Ironically, Duncan’s approach, which focuses almost entirely on changing the faculty and school governance, is itself too timid.

In Education Week, Duncan wrote that, in Chicago, “We moved the adults out of the building, kept the children there, and brought in new adults.”2 But the exclusive focus on achieving performance gains through changing the principal and teachers misses the important role played by the two other big groups in a school community: students and parents. There is ample research showing that having an economic mix in that larger community can have a beneficial result.3

The turnaround approach taken in Chicago was a partial one, and, as education consultant Bryan Hassel told the New York Times, it achieved only “mixed” results.4 The Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago noted in a recent report that “most students in Chicago Public Schools continue to fail.”5 Nationally, turnaround schools have seen “lackluster” results.6 While there have been “scattered, individual successes,” according to a widely cited 2007 report by Mass Insight Education and Research Institute, research finds “very little enduring progress at scale.”7 Citing extensive research in California, Ohio, Maryland, and elsewhere, Andrew Smarick writes in Education Next, “overall, school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen short of hopes and expectations.”8 Likewise, while some charter schools such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools and the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) Promise Academies have been highly successful with low-income students, those models have limited applicability to the nation’s five thousand lowest-performing public schools.

Why Current Turnaround Approaches Are Inadequate

The most discussed plans for turning schools around—firing the principal and teachers in a school, or adopting a charter school governance structure—fail to recognize that school quality is driven by three sets of actors in a school community: students, parents, and faculty (teachers and principals).

Classmates

Many years of research have confirmed what all parents know: kids learn from one another as well as from the teacher. In high-poverty schools, a child is surrounded by classmates who are less likely to have big dreams, and, accordingly, are less academically engaged and more likely to act out and cut class. In such schools, peers are less likely to do homework and graduate, and more likely to watch television and cut class—all of which have been found to influence the behavior of classmates.

Low-income schools have widespread disorder problems three times as often as middle-class schools, so less learning goes on. Classmates in high-poverty schools also are more likely to move in the middle of the year, creating disruption in the classroom. (By third grade, 60 percent of very low-income students have attended two schools, compared with 30 percent of more affluent third graders.) Research finds that it is an advantage to have high-achieving peers, whose knowledge is shared informally with classmates all day long; but low-income peers come to schools with half the vocabulary of more-advantaged children, for example, so any given child is less likely in a high-poverty school to expand his vocabulary through informal interaction.9

Parents

Parents also are an important part of a school community. Students benefit when parents regularly volunteer in the classroom and know how to hold school officials accountable when things go wrong. Low-income parents, who may be working several jobs, may not own a car, and may have had a bad experience themselves as students, are four times less likely than more-affluent parents to be members of a PTA.10 They are only half as likely to volunteer in the classroom or serve on a school committee.11 Finally, low-income parents are less likely to have the political power to push for adequate resources, which helps explain why even within school districts, spending disparities exist, generally to the  disadvantage of low income students.12

Teachers and Principals

The makeup of a school in terms of students and parents profoundly affects the type of teachers who typically can be recruited. Research consistently finds that the best teachers, on average, avoid high-poverty and high-minority schools.13 Teachers in disadvantaged schools are less likely to be licensed, to be teaching in their field of expertise, to have high teacher test scores, to have considerable teaching experience, and to have extensive formal education. Principal turnover also is higher in high-poverty schools.14

School leaders employing traditional turnaround efforts try to fix the maldistribution of high-quality teachers by firing existing teachers in high-poverty schools and hiring new ones, citing data on the seminal role that teachers play in raising student achievement.15 But without
changing the student and parent mix, this effort is usually an uphill battle. Teachers generally consider it a promotion to move from poor to middle-class schools, and many of the best teachers transfer into middle-income schools at the first opportunity.

Research consistently finds that teachers care at least as much about work environment as they do about salary.16 Teachers care about school safety, whether they will have to spend large portions of their time on classroom management, and whether parents will make sure kids do their homework. (In urban schools, teachers are more likely to say parents do not support teachers.17) The departure of some good teachers sets off a vicious cycle, as younger teachers seek schools with colleagues who will help them perfect their craft.

Accordingly, it is very difficult to attract and keep great teachers in high-poverty schools, even when bonuses are offered….

In discussing the difficulties of making high-poverty schools work, it is important to draw a distinction between the problems associated with concentrations of school poverty and beliefs about the ability of poor children to learn. Many people confuse the first with the second. Evidence suggests that children from all socioeconomic groups can learn to high levels if given the right environment. High-poverty schools, however, do not normally provide the positive learning environment that children need and deserve.

A Better Approach:Turning Around Schools with Magnet Approaches that Integrate Students by Socioeconomic Status

The most promising turnaround model is one that seeks to turn high-poverty schools into magnet schools that change not only the faculty but also the student and parent mix in the school. Failing schools can be shuttered, reinvented, and reopened with new themes and pedagogical approaches that attract new teachers and a mix of middle-class and low-income students. Some low-income students from the old school would be given the opportunity to fill the spots in more-affluent schools vacated by middle-income children who were transferring to the magnet school.

Evidence that Turnaround Magnet Schools with an Economic Mix Can Raise Student Achievement

A number of studies over the past quarter century have found that magnet schools have higher levels of achievement than do other schools, and produce faster achievement gains in most subjects. Several of these studies account for self-selection bias by examining gains in over-subscribed magnet schools and regular public schools, comparing lottery winners and losers, and continue to find advantages to attending magnet schools….18 Moreover, the magnet school turnaround model — in which schools seek to improve the performance of low-income students by drawing into a high-poverty school a contingent of middle class students — is backed up by four decades of research finding that the socioeconomic composition of a school profoundly affects the achievement of any given student in the school.

This research dates back to the landmark 1966 Coleman Report, which found that the most important predictor of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of the family a child comes from, and the second most important predictor is the socioeconomic makeup of the school she attends.19 More recently, a growing number of studies have linked a school’s socioeconomic status with student achievement, after controlling for the individual socioeconomic status of a student’s family.20 Indeed, a new re-analysis of Coleman’s data using a more sophisticated statistical technique (hierarchical linear modeling, or HLM) finds that the social class of the school matters even more to student achievement than does the socioeconomic status of the family. Geoffrey Borman and Maritza Dowling of the University of Wisconsin at Madison concluded that “the achievement difference between a school attended by students of average wealth and a school with a student body composed of students 1 standard deviation below the mean level of wealth was nearly 1¾ times greater than the achievement difference between a student of average wealth and a student who was 1 standard deviation less wealthy.”21

Today, more than sixty-five school districts have acted on this research and employ explicit policies seeking to reduce concentrations of school poverty. These districts generally have seen strong achievement gains and other positive academic outcomes.22 In Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, a longstanding policy of universal magnet schools to balance student populations, originally by race and more recently by socioeconomic status, has yielded very positive benefits. In 2008, Cambridge graduated 88.8 percent of its low-income students in four years compared with 64.8 percent of low-income students statewide and 59.1 percent of low-income students in Boston. Cambridge’s black and Hispanic students also far surpassed black and Hispanics in Boston and statewide in graduation rates, while whites in Cambridge graduate at the same level as whites statewide, and far ahead of whites in Boston.

Identifying the Root Problem in Failing Schools: Segregation and Poverty, not Teacher Unions

Fundamentally, it is time to rethink the basic theory of turning around failing schools. One unspoken assumption of many current approaches is that teachers in high-poverty schools (and their union protectors) are to blame; and that if we could fire those teachers, and bring in  union-free charter schools, we could fix the problem. This approach is mistaken. Teacher unions are hardly perfect, but there is no solid research suggesting that they are on balance damaging to the education of children. The American South, and America’s charter schools, both of which have weak teacher unions or none at all, generally have lower student performance than schools in states, such as New Jersey and Massachusetts, that have strong unions.23 Moreover, there is ample research to suggest that teacher unions produce very positive educational benefits: they reduce teacher turnover, boost salaries, and reduce class size….24

Mountains of research suggest that the reason high-poverty schools fail so often is that economic segregation drives failure: it congregates the children with the smallest dreams, the parents who are the most pressed, and burnt out teachers who often cannot get hired elsewhere. There is a strange quality to the turnaround debate, in which we stand in awe of the impressive efforts of a few schools and ignore the larger reality that economic segregation normally perpetuates failure. As James Foreman, Jr., has written, “As much as it thrills us to read about extraordinary people succeeding with poor children, I want to see how ordinary people can do the same.”25 Using magnet themes to turn around failing high poverty schools will not work everywhere, but high quality economically integrated schools should be the first turnaround option explored, with efforts to make the segre-gation condoned in Plessy v. Ferguson work — always an uphill battle — reserved only as a fallback.

Read the full report.

About the Author
Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and writes about education, equal opportunity, and civil rights. Previously, he was a fellow at the Center for National Policy, a visiting associate professor of constitutional law at George Washington University, and a legislative assistant to Senator Charles S. Robb.

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Footnotes

1. Arne Duncan, “Education Reform’s Moon Shot,” Washington Post, July 24, 2009, A21.

2. Arne Duncan, “Start Over: Turnarounds Should Be the First Option for Low-Performing Schools,” Education Week, June 17, 2009, 36.

3. Richard D. Kahlenberg, All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001).

4. Sam Dillon, “U.S. Efforts to Reshape Schools Faces Challenges,” New York Times, June 2, 2009.

5. Still Left Behind: Student Learning in Chicago’s Public Schools (Chicago: Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, June 2009), 1.

6. Bryan C. Hassel and Lucy Steiner, Starting Fresh: A New Strategy for Responding to Chronically Low Performing Schools (Chapel Hill,
N.C.: Public Impact, December 2003), 2.

7. Andrew Calkins, William Guenther, Grace Belfiore, and Dave Lash, The Turnaround Challenge: Why America’s Best Opportunity
to Dramatically Improve Student Achievement Lies in Our Worst-Performing Schools (Boston, Mass.: Mass Insight Education and
Research Institute, 2007), 10.

8. See Andrew Smarick, “The Turnaround Fallacy,” Education Next, Winter 2010.

9. See Kahlenberg, All Together Now, 50–58; E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 59 (mobility rates); Eric A. Hanushek, John F. Kain and Steven G. Rivkin, “Why Public Schools Lose Teachers,” Journal of Human Resources 39, no. 2 (2004): 326–54 (mobility hurts the achievement of stayers and newcomers); Rachel Dinkes, Emily Forrest Cataldi, and Wendy Lin-Kelly, Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2007 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, and U.S. Department of Justice, December 2007), 82, Table 6.2 and Table 7.2 (disorder); Paul Barton and Richard Coley, Windows on
Achievement and Inequality (Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 2008), 9, Figure 2 (at thirty-six months of age, children from professional families have 1,116 words in their vocabularies, and children from welfare families have 525).

10. Kahlenberg, All Together Now, 62–64.

11. Parent and Family Involvement in Education, 2006–07 School Year (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics,
August 2008).

12. See Richard Rothstein, “Equalizing Education Resources on Behalf of Disadvantaged Children,” in A Notion at Risk: Preserving Public Education as an Engine for Social Mobility, ed. Richard D. Kahlenberg (New York: Century Foundation Press, 2000), 79–85.

13. See e.g. Debra Viadero, “Teacher Transfers Linked to Influx of Black Students,” Education Week, June 10, 2009, 7 (citing research by Cornell’s C. Kirabo Jackson, finding that, as Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools resegregated, the best teachers tended to leave schools with an influx of black students).

14. Kahlenberg, All Together Now, 67–74.

15. See, e.g., Robert Gordon, Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger, Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job, Hamilton Project Discussion Paper 2006-01 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, April 2006), 8 (suggesting that an average child assigned to a teacher in the top quartile of effectiveness will gain ten percentile points per year over the average child assigned to a teacher in the bottom quartile of effectiveness, and extrapolating that “if the effects were accumulative, having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap”).

16. Brian A. Jacob, “The Challenge of Staffing Urban Schools with Effective Teachers,” The Future of Children 17, no. 1 (2007): 140;
Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin, “Pay, Working Conditions, and Teacher Quality,” The Future of Children 1, no. 1 (2007): 82.
17. Hanushek and Rivkin, “Pay, Working Conditions, and Teacher Quality,” 73.

18. For a discussion of these studies, see Frankenberg and Siegel-Hawley, “The Forgotten Choice?” 13–14.

19. See James S. Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966).

20. For a summary of dozens of studies conducted from the 1960s through 2000, see Richard D. Kahlenberg, All Together Now, 25–42
(reviewing numerous studies).

21. Geoffrey Borman and Maritza Dowling, “Schools and Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity Data,” Teachers College Record 112, no. 5 (2010): 1–2.

22. Kahlenberg, Rescuing Brown v. Baord of Education, 9–41

23. See Linda Darling Hammond, “What Are the Best Methods for School Improvement?” National Journal, September 4, 2009,
http://education.nationaljournal.com/2009/08/what-are-the-bestmethods-fo.... Critics correctly will note that performance is linked
in large measure to the higher economic status of Northerners, but that is precisely the point: addressing poverty (though programs like
pre-kindergarten) is far more productive than focusing on teacher union density. Note also that some KIPP schools are unionized, as
are the Green Dot charter schools that are widely lauded. See Steven Greenhouse and Jennifer Medina, “Teachers at 2 Charter Schools
Plan to Join Union, Despite Notion of Incompatibility,” New York Times, January 14, 2009; and Mathews, Work Hard, 284.

24. Richard D. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 369–70 (reviewing the research on teacher unions).

25. James Foreman Jr., “No Ordinary Success,” Boston Review, May/June 2009.

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Editor’s note:  Ohio Governor Ted Strickland earlier this year called for a focus on “green-energy jobs” at a time when the state is shedding jobs at an increasing rate. He proposed such measures as a $40 million Energy Gateway Fund for high-tech energy companies and eliminating Ohio’s tangible personal property tax for green energy companies that break ground this year and start producing energy by 2012. Just this month, Ohio education and workforce leaders spent considerable time at a statewide conference talking about how to prepare more workers for green jobs. To understand this opportunity better, Ohio Education Matters asked the Center for Community Solutions to project employment trends and training needs in select green industries to provide solid information for Ohio leaders in their employment training and economic development efforts. We offer a summary of those findings and recommendations in this month’s essay.

 

 Ohio Green Jobs and Workforce Needs

 

 

By  John Habat  

Senior Fellow, Center for Community Solutions

 

Ohio was a leader in traditional manufacturing for more than 100 years. As traditional manufacturing left the state for foreign shores and modern technology fueled cheaper production processes, Ohio lost – a loss that leaves a continuing legacy of struggles: economic, employment, environmental, educational and social. But there is good news: Our state’s manufacturing is being revitalized by adapting to green industries. Ohio businesses sense this transformation: They project very substantial growth in green business and green employment over the next several years and decades.

 

The outlook for green jobs in Ohio

 

According to a report issued by The Pew Charitable Trusts in June 2009, new jobs connected to the green economy grew 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007. Based upon employment projections from a variety of recent studies, a reasonable estimate is that 15 to 20 jobs are created for every $1 million expended in green economic activities.

 

Our research found that:

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->The $82 billion in federal funds and tax credits authorized in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for renewable energy and conservation activities will potentially create between 1.2 and 1.6 million jobs over the next two years – 45,000 to 62,000 of them in Ohio.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->Green businesses are very optimistic on future growth prospects:

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->o   <!--[endif]-->Business Growth: 54.6 percent of respondents projected moderate (4 to 8 percent) to significant growth (9+ percent) of their businesses over the next two years, and 69.9 over the next five to seven years.

<!--[if !supportLists]-->o   <!--[endif]-->Employment Growth: While employment projections slightly lag business growth projections, they are also optimistic: 43.2 percent of respondents projected that employment in green jobs would grow from moderate to significant over the next two years, and 55.9 percent over the next five to seven years.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->Businesses engaged in energy efficiency activities – specifically building and residential climate controls (HVAC) – dominate the green economy. Reducing energy usage for interior climate control offers the largest reduction potential, the quickest pay back of investments, and the most new jobs.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->The large majority of businesses (86.6 percent) engaged in green economic activities have fewer than 100 employees; almost three‐fourths have 25 or less.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->For many businesses, engagement in green economic activity represents a relatively small percentage of their workforce; however, for 37.4 percent, their workforce is at least 50 percent engaged.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->The skills and capabilities of existing workers are readily adaptable to green jobs.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->Half of all respondents are not experiencing any challenges in filling their employment needs; the other half identified challenges that break almost evenly between basic skills and advanced skills. 

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->Businesses generally are able to fill their need for employees with specialized skills, though this likely will become a greater challenge once the economy improves.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->A large majority (70 percent) of all businesses indicated that at least some of their employees in green jobs need specialized skills. There is a significant need for engineers, educators/trainers, HVAC mechanics/installers, and electricians.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->o   <!--[endif]-->More than one out of four businesses identified need for some type of engineer in their businesses.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->Workers in green jobs are represented at all skills levels – from lower to professional.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->o   <!--[endif]-->There appears to be a greater need for persons with a Bachelor Degree as compared to those having an Associate Degree.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->Most of the training of new skills to existing employees is done by an in‐house trainer with training time of 80 hours or less.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->o   <!--[endif]-->More than 12 percent of the businesses indicated a need for in‐house educators or trainers.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->There is a decreasing need for workers in green jobs with a high school degree or less, but workers at that skill level still comprise more than half of the jobs at green businesses.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->A solid majority of respondents (58.3 percent) indicated that there are career‐ladders for lower‐skill workers in their businesses.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->·         <!--[endif]-->Most of the businesses (58.3 percent) have been engaged with green occupations for seven years or less.

 

Potential Employment Impact  

 

Although this study did not seek to project the number of jobs that may be potentially created in Ohio as a result of moving away from fossil fuels toward a green economy, there are several studies that attempted such quantification. Based upon these, the Center for Community Solutions (CCS) calculated some macro projections of green jobs in Ohio.

 

Based on a cumulative average of these projections, a reasonable composite projection of jobs created per $1 million investment is approximately 15 to 20 direct, indirect, and induced jobs.

 

The American and Recovery Reinvestment Act (ARRA) provides a minimum of $62 billion in federal funds for a wide variety of renewable energy and conservation activities, plus an additional $20.3 billion in tax credits18 for individuals and businesses, for a total of $82.3 billion. This amount is in addition to funds and tax credits that were included in the regular federal budget.

 

Using the above approach of estimating potential job creation (15‐20 jobs per $1 million invested), ARRA funds and credits can potentially generate 1,234,500 to 1,646,000 jobs nationally during the next two years. Assuming Ohio obtains an amount based upon its share of national population (3.77 percent), the state will have 46,540 to 62,045 new jobs related to renewable and green energy economic activity. This is a conservative estimate that does not fully account for the concentration of manufacturing in Ohio that is likely to produce a disproportionate amount of the equipment and machinery used in renewable energy products, such as solar panels and wind turbines. “[T]he 20 states benefitting the most from investment in wind are almost identically the 20 states that have lost the most manufacturing jobs in the country over the past 3 years…. The potential benefit to Ohio manufacturing industries is even greater.”1

 

Recommendations

 

Based upon the research and findings in this report, CCS offers the following recommendations to the State of Ohio; post‐secondary education, training, and workforce institutions; and to foundations and other organizations working to advance green economy and green jobs.

 

<!--[if !supportLists]-->1.       <!--[endif]-->Energy efficiency measures offer the most immediate and significant opportunities to reduce a substantial amount of energy usage and to create the most jobs. A more in‐depth study should be undertaken of the specific workforce needs associated with energy efficiency (climate control and lighting) in office buildings and residences, which are responsible for 40 percent of all U.S. energy consumption. As noted in this report, there are more than 5,000 Ohio businesses engaged directly in HVAC alone, and thousands more in the supply chain related to it.

 

2.    A capacity assessment of the post‐secondary educational resources and training programs specifically linked to HVAC and lighting should be undertaken.

3.    All types of engineers – electrical, mechanical, environmental, civil, materials, chemical, structural, systems – are the professionals upon which the movement to renewable energy and green jobs is being built. In total, 26.6 percent of the businesses identified some type of engineer as the specialized skills needed in their workplace. A capacity assessment of Ohio universities’ engineering programs should be undertaken.

4.    Almost 68 percent of businesses indicated that they provide in‐house training; 12 percent of businesses indicated a need for an in‐house educator/trainer. It is important to understand why these training programs are being done in‐house, and to what extent government workforce programs can partner with businesses to secure the training needed.

a. The state should analyze each renewable energy sector and identify specific engineering needs unique to that sector.

b. The state should identify other skilled‐jobs, such as electricians, that are needed by some or all of the energy sectors.

5.    Few jobs will exist for persons lacking a basic education. State and local education providers must continue to focus on basic skills training – including the so‐called soft skills – and on increasing the rate of high school graduation.

 

 

 

1. Component Manufacturing: Ohio’s Future in the Renewable Energy Industry, Renewable Energy Policy Project, October 2005, pp. 3 and 5.

 

About the Author

The Center for Community Solutions is a nonprofit organization that provides strategic leadership to improve targeted health, social and economic conditions. It helps policymakers, community leaders and service providers identify health, social and economic challenges, and target resources toward sound, cost-effective solutions. Based in Cleveland, its goal is to provide information, support and advocacy to help community organizations and service providers address the significant problems faced by Northeast Ohioans. http://www.communitysolutions.com/