LEADERS and LAGGARDS A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Innovation Copyright© Center for American Progress, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, November 2009 Leaders and Laggards A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Innovation What Is Educational Innovation? In our view, educational innovation means discarding policies and practices that no longer serve students while creating opportunities for smart, entrepreneurial problem-solvers to help children learn. Table of Contents Overview. 7 Major Findings. 10 Recommendations . 12 State of the Nation . 14 Table: Educational Innovation Across the States. 15 School Management . 16 Table: School Management. 18 Innovation Highlight: Incubators of Talent. 19 Innovation Highlight: Expanded Learning Time . 21 Finance. 22 Table: Finance. 24 Innovation Highlight: Student-Based Funding . 25 Staffing: Hiring & Evaluation. 27 Table: Staffing: Hiring & Evaluation. 29 Innovation Highlight: Performance Pay . 30 Innovation Highlight: Alternative Recruitment and Preparation Programs for Principals . 32 Staffing: Removing Ineffective Teachers. 34 Table: Staffing: Removing Ineffective Teachers. 35 Data . 36 Table: Data . 38 Innovation Highlight: Data Capacity. 39 Pipeline to Postsecondary. 41 Table: Pipeline to Postsecondary. 43 Innovation Highlight: Early College High Schools. 44 Technology. 46 Table: Technology. 48 Innovation Highlight: Digital Textbooks. 49 State Reform Environment. 51 Table: State Reform Environment. 52 Innovation Highlight: State-Based Education Reform Organizations. 53 State Report Cards. 55 Endnotes . 107 Acknowledgements. 109 Leaders and Laggards • Table of Contents • 5 6 • Leaders and Laggards Overview Two years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the much of such educational innovation over the years, as Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of evidenced by the sequential embrace of fads and the the American Enterprise Institute came together to grade hurried cycling from one new “best practice” to another that the states on school performance. In that firstLeaders so often characterizes K–12 schooling. States and school and Laggards report, we found much to applaud but even systems, in other words, have too long confused the novel more that requires urgent improvement. In this follow-up with the useful. Rather, we believe innovation to be the report, we turn our attention to the future, looking not at process of leveraging new tools, talent, and management how states are performing today, but at what they are strategies to craft solutions that were not possible or doing to prepare themselves for the challenges that lie necessary in an earlier era. ahead. Thus, some states with positive academic results receive poor grades on our measures of innovation, while Our aim is to encourage states to embrace policies that others with lackluster scholarly achievement nevertheless make it easier to design smart solutions that serve 21st earn high marks for policies that are creating an century students and address 21st century challenges. The entrepreneurial culture in their schools. We chose this focus impulse to either dictate one-size-fits-all solutions from the because, regardless of current academic accomplishment top or simply to do something—anything—differently will not in each state, we believe innovative educational practices address our pressing needs. Instead, this report seeks to are vital to laying the groundwork for continuous and foster a flexible, performance-oriented culture that will help transformational change. our schools meet educational challenges. And change is essential. Put bluntly, we believe our Today, various organizations are addressing stubborn education system needs to be reinvented. After decades challenges by pursuing familiar notions of good teaching and of political inaction and ineffective reforms, our schools effective schooling in impressively coherent, disciplined, and consistently produce students unready for the rigors of the strategic ways. Some are public school districts, such as modern workplace. The lack of preparedness is staggering. Long Beach Unified School District in California and Aldine Roughly one in three eighth graders is proficient in reading. Independent School District in Texas. An array of charter Most high schools graduate little more than two-thirds school entrepreneurs are also working within the public of their students on time. And even the students who do school system and seeing encouraging results, such as receive a high school diploma lack adequate skills: More the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academies, YES than 33% of first-year college students require remediation Prep, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, and in either math or English. Achievement First. Other independent ventures have also devised promising approaches to important challenges, But we also believe that reinvention will never be including Citizen Schools, EdisonLearning, The New Teacher accomplished with silver bullets. Our school system needs Project, K12 Inc., Blackboard Inc., Wireless Generation, far-reaching innovation. It is archaic and broken, a relic of Teach for America, and New Leaders for New Schools. a time when high school graduates could expect to live prosperous lives, when steel and auto factories formed Even these marquee reformers, however, struggle to the backbone of the American economy, and when sidestep entrenched practices, raise funds, find talent, and laptop computers and the Internet were the preserve secure support. Moreover, these highly successful ventures of science fiction writers. And while the challenges are often pale when viewed beside the larger K–12 enterprise. many—inflexible regulations, excessive bureaucracy, a The 80-odd KIPP schools, approximately 130 school dearth of fresh thinking—the bottom line is that most leaders trained annually by New Leaders for New Schools, education institutions simply lack the tools, incentives, and and 2,200 teachers trained each year by The New Teacher opportunities to reinvent themselves in profoundly more Project are dwarfed by the nation’s 14,000 school districts, effective ways. 100,000 schools, and 3.2 million teachers. The challenge is to boost the chance that creative problem solvers will By “innovation” we do not mean blindly celebrating every ultimately make a real, lasting difference for our nation and nifty-sounding reform. If anything, we have had too our children. Leaders and Laggards • Overview • 7 Fortunately, our report comes at a time when national To examine the degree to which states have developed attention to educational innovation is on the upswing. The such a culture, we focused on eight areas: new federal Race to the Top Fund has brought additional attention to the need to rethink our system, for instance, • School Management (including the strength of charter while numerous other efforts are under way at the state school laws and the percentage of teachers who like and local levels. It is far too early to endorse any particular the way their schools are run) plan or to say which ones will be effective. But now is the • Finance (including the accessibility of state financial time for state leaders to show the political will to pursue data) reform. • Staffing: Hiring & Evaluation(including alternative certification for teachers) Along the way, high standards, accountability, and sensible • Staffing: Removing Ineffective Teachers (including progress measures are essential. But care must be taken the percentage of principals who report barriers to the not to allow familiar modes of measurement to smother removal of poor-performing teachers) reform. Too often, reformers tend to embrace only those • Data (including such measures as state-collected advances that we can conveniently measure with today’s college student remediation data) crude tools, such as grades three-to-eight reading and • Technology (including students per Internet-connected math scores. The principal virtue of the No Child Left computer) Behind Act, for example—a much-needed focus on • Pipeline to Postsecondary (including the percentage outcomes and transparency—has been coupled with of schools reporting dual-enrollment programs) a bureaucratic impulse and an inflexible, cookie-cutter • State Reform Environment (an ungraded category approach to gauging teacher and school quality. We that includes data on the presence of reform groups must not retreat from the promise of high standards and and participation in international assessments) accountability. But we should also embrace what might be called smart quality control. That means measuring the Our data come from a wide variety of sources, from federal value of various providers and solutions in terms of what education databases to our own 50-state surveys. We they are intended to do—whether that is recruiting teachers should note that the data limitations we encountered were or tutoring foreign languages—rather than merely on a significant hindrance to our efforts, even more so than whether they affect the rate at which students improve their when we prepared our firstLeaders and Laggards report. performance on middle school reading and math tests. We received invaluable assistance from an outside panel Improved accountability and flexibility, while vital, will not of academic experts. We shared our methodology with be enough to achieve the changes we seek: Capacity Jack Buckley, professor of applied