Beyond Standards: The Fragmentation of Education Governance & the Promise of Curricular Reform

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Morgan Polakoff. Dr. Polikoff is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education. His areas of expertise include K-12 education policy, curriculum reform, standards and assessment policy, survey research in education, and the measurement of alignment and instruction. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and he's the author of Beyond Standards, The Fragmentation of Education Governance and the Promise of Curriculum Reform, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:47] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:49] SPEAKER_00:

Morgan, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thanks very much. Glad to be here. Well, in the book, very excited to talk about this because you make the argument that our focus on standards over the past 30 years really has not made as much of a difference as everyone hoped. That we've put all this effort into developing new standards, whether we're talking about state-level standards in the 90s, or the Common Core standards, which of course started kind of nationally, but were owned by the states and then kind of went in different directions and faced lots of opposition. And then of course, we've had lots of testing and accountability from No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

[01:23]

You make the case early on in the book that all of this effort has not really brought about the level of improvement that we would like to have seen. What is the impact of all of that work and where do things stand currently in your view?

[01:39] SPEAKER_01:

Sure. I think that the best evidence suggests that standards-based reforms produce a non-trivial sort of bump in educational achievement for students, particularly in sort of the early years of the No Child Left Behind era. I mean, if you look at longitudinal test scores, there really was a pretty pronounced bump, especially in mathematics in those first few years. But you know, two things. First, those effects seem to have sort of petered out. There really hasn't been much gain at all, especially over the last 10 years.

[02:11]

If anything, maybe even some slight evidence of decline. And second of all, it's not really clear that whatever bumps that we saw were really attributable to the standards themselves or whether they were attributable to the accountability policies that came along with standards. Sort of like, you know, giving us sort of a little bump or a little prod to maybe the lowest performing schools in those early years. And that's great, but we really haven't seen the kind of movement that we would like since then. And I also talk about evidence about instruction. And sort of similarly, it's not that we haven't seen instructional change.

[02:48]

We certainly have seen instructional change. I mean, you can go into any classroom and see obvious signs of response to Common Core or similar standards that are in place in other states. But we still see a great deal of misaligned instruction along various dimensions that I talk about in the book. And we just don't see the kind of consistent and coherent implementation of standards across classrooms that we would need to see in order for the theory of action for standards to actually be working. So that's where I would say we are as of now.

[03:25] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, let's talk about that theory of action, because as practicing educators, we all operate within a system of assumptions about how this is all supposed to work, that there are standards. And if those standards are high enough, if they're quality, if we're identifying the right standards for our students, and then if we develop or select curricular materials for helping students reach those standards, and we use those materials with a certain degree of fidelity, then student learning will improve. because those standards were in place and dictated what happened within the curriculum. And yet it's not necessarily that simple, right? That's kind of a rosy scenario for that to work.

[04:02] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. It's a rosy scenario. And what it requires, I mean, it requires a lot of assumptions, I think some of which do hold and some of which don't really hold. You really have to do with a couple things. You know, one of the big assumptions of standards is, you know, the state's going to put out a set of standards and educational actors, you know, people at the district level or maybe at the state level, are going to provide the kinds of instructional support that teachers need to implement those standards well. And we've seen a variety of evidence that that really hasn't happened at any meaningful scale.

[04:40]

So, you know, The one that I talk by far the most about in the book is curriculum materials. And so, you know, on the one hand, states say, oh, we want all schools to be teaching these standards. But then on the other hand, in a lot of states, they don't say anything at all about what curriculum materials school districts should adopt. And similarly, school districts might say, oh, well, we want all teachers to be teaching the standard zone, so we're going to adopt this book that we think is standards aligned. But then they don't actually say really anything at all about how teachers are supposed to use those curriculum materials or to work together to collaboratively implement them. And so there's this big disconnect from the standards at the top and then the expectations for what actually goes on in the classroom.

[05:26]

There's all these layers of governance and really decentralized governance that make it very, very unlikely that there's kind of coherent implementation all the way down.

[05:39] SPEAKER_00:

And if we think about where the alignment is and where the autonomy is and where the opportunities for disconnect are, First of all, we're talking about state-level standards, not federal or national. We're talking about local school district decisions to adopt curriculum. We're talking about individual school decisions to offer different courses or select different textbooks. We're talking about individual teacher decisions as far as what and how to teach. So there's a lot of autonomy. And I have to ask, as you look at the way other education systems around the world work, are we weird in having all that autonomy?

[06:14] SPEAKER_01:

Well, there's definitely an array. So there are places, I mean, first of all, we're one of the only places that doesn't have national standards. So that's one thing. I think that that's actually a relatively minor point. I used to think that was a big deal, and now I maybe don't think it's quite as much of a big deal, although I still personally believe that having common standards is beneficial for a variety of reasons.

[06:37] SPEAKER_00:

But you even say, like, we don't have a realistic chance of having any kind of national standards or...

[06:42] SPEAKER_01:

I mean, you can look at what's happening right now in the federal government around history curriculum, which admittedly is more contentious than some other subjects. But even in mathematics, we're having... debates right now about standards, you know, with California's new curriculum framework. So no, I don't think that there's any realistic chance of national standards.

[07:02]

But yeah, so there's that. But we also have this, we do have a really sort of uniquely decentralized system with, you know, 13,000-ish school districts. that are each relatively autonomous to make their own decisions. Of course, the degree of autonomy of school districts varies a lot by state. Some states are much more local control. The size of school districts also varies quite a lot by state.

[07:27]

Florida has big county-wide districts. New York and New Jersey has really tiny districts. And, you know, so there's that level of variation. And then there's also the level of sort of curriculum control that individual teachers have. And that also varies pretty substantially across countries. Right.

[07:45]

So, you know, if you go to, you know, I was visiting Scotland a few years ago and I would say there teachers actually seem to have more curriculum control than they have here. Teachers are really different. all creating their own curriculum materials. But in most countries, the typical is that there's a couple of textbooks that are sort of state approved, and basically everyone uses those state approved textbooks, which is very, very different from what we have here in terms of teachers' use of curriculum materials and sort of the size and scope of the curriculum materials market.

[08:20] SPEAKER_00:

So Morgan, one aspect, kind of our somewhat bizarre system and our very varied system, as you said, you know, we have county districts, we have huge urban districts, we have tiny rural districts. You note in the book that the majority, something like 85% of school districts are tiny, and that is very unusual. And it actually, you know, that ability of school districts to be small and to have, you know, somewhat arbitrary boundaries drawn between them is actually what creates a lot of the inequities that we see in our system. What is it about that particular district structure and the sheer number of districts we have that limits opportunity and that creates those district to district inequities?

[09:00] SPEAKER_01:

Sure. So, and to be clear, I'm not first and foremost an expert in school desegregation, but my understanding of school desegregation cases is a case law is that essentially school district boundaries are impermeable to desegregation efforts, meaning that, you know, you can have some redistribution within school districts. You can force some redistribution of students within districts, but school district boundaries, you can't force across districts. And so that's often so. So, you know, we have there's an organization now defunct, but that did some wonderful work called EdBuild. And they have the fabulous website that you can go to and you can see many examples of school district boundaries acting as segregating, you know, segregators.

[09:45]

Right. So they're drawn in such a way that they keep all the white kids on one side and all the black kids on another side or all the affluent kids on one side and all the lower income kids on another side. And anyone who has, you know, who is familiar with, you know, school districts in, frankly, liberal states in the, you know, I'm from the Chicago area or states in the Northeast or even California can identify these very specific school district boundaries that create huge systemic inequities. And they certainly play out in curriculum materials, but they also play out in finance and they also play out in just, you know, keeping kids apart. And so I argue about whether we should think about, me as a progressive person, how we should think about the way that we allow these school district boundaries to act as essentially tools of inequity.

[10:42] SPEAKER_00:

And if we think about it from the extreme cases, if we just had one school district for the whole country, then of course the demographics of that district would reflect the demographics of the country. But the smaller and smaller we slice it, the more opportunities there are for there to be kind of a right side of the tracks and wrong side of the tracks and have those be two different districts. that are touching, but vastly different in terms of tax base, in terms of resources, in terms of governance. But one case that I'm sure you're familiar with is what happened with Memphis City Schools and Shelby County and the other districts that formed out of Shelby County. And what happened there was that Shelby County Schools were basically whiter and more affluent than Memphis City Schools. Memphis City Schools in 2013 abandoned its charter and kind of consolidated with the surrounding county schools.

[11:31]

And then, I'm sure this has happened other places, but this was the most striking example to me. Something like seven different kind of townships broke off and formed their own municipal districts. so that they would no longer be a part of the now much larger and more diverse Shelby County school system. So we have all these tiny districts that are saying, you know what, we're going to kind of declare independence. We're going to draw a boundary and kind of say, these are our schools. We're not part of this bigger thing.

[11:56]

And it was, I mean, literally it was secession. It was a drawing of boundaries that did not exist before. And I don't think anyone would have stood up and said, you know what, we actually want to deprive our neighbors of the resources that we want to ensure our students, our own kids have. But that was effectively what happened, that those boundaries were drawn. And to me, that is one of the most striking examples of this kind of systemic or systematic, you know, kind of creation of an equity that's possible within our system. What is the system of kind of state and local and even national policies that allow that kind of thing to happen?

[12:35]

Like, why don't we have a better system where segregation is just harder to create? It just seems like it's so easy to segregate students and it shouldn't be.

[12:45] SPEAKER_01:

You're getting a little bit above my pay grade, I think, in terms of my knowledge of constitutional law. But I will say that, you know, basically education is a state control issue, right, due to the Constitution. And, you know, there are certainly there have been prominent court cases in education that we're all familiar with, Brown versus Board of Education. You know, court cases in Seattle and such. My understanding of certainly what education would say is that the current court is very unlikely to try and rein in, you know, local control decisions that create segregation, just given the composition of the court. And so it's up to individual states.

[13:22]

Now, states can pretty much do what they want, right? Because states are the primary funders of education through state taxes. In a lot of states, in some states, it's local taxes. But still, states can pretty much decide how much they want to be a local control state versus a state control state. And I think some states have clearly, whether intentionally or not, made the choice to have more of a strong hand in education policy. than other states.

[13:51]

And this degree of local control, I think it has pluses and minuses. It's one of these things that it's very hard to argue against local control. Local control, everyone thinks that they like local control. But there are some serious trade-offs that come with local control. And at the extreme, you have the case like you just described, which is white affluent parents literally seceding from a district because they don't want to have their kids go to more integrated schools, racially or socioeconomically. And it seems like the sort of thing that obviously should not be allowed and yet clearly is and has happened.

[14:31]

And again, there's another thing. Edbill has a whole report on district secessions that I encourage people to go and take a look at. That's the most extreme example. But even if you're not even if you don't go as far as seceding, the system already is segregated in these ways, according to school district boundaries. And so you don't have to go all the way to seceding to still be you're still allowing the segregation via the district boundaries that are already there.

[14:57] SPEAKER_00:

And I appreciate the way you point to the state as the unit that has the most flexibility, right? There are huge barriers to any kind of national control of education. We're probably not going to get more federal control. Maybe we'll get more federal money, and that comes with some strings attached to it. But states really are the unit that has the opportunity to do more, to cut down on you know, some of those, you know, district to district inequities in terms of funding, in terms of resources, in terms of staffing. What are some of the odd governance things that happen at the local level?

[15:30]

Because you say, you know, many, many school districts are tiny. People are elected to school boards on very short cycles. They tend to look at, you know, kind of short-term goals. And you point out early on in the book that often school board members are barely, if at all, held accountable for academic achievement. or student learning at all? What's going on there in local school districts that makes them just not great at this?

[15:56] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So, I mean, you raised several important points there. I mean, one point is ostensibly school boards should be accountable for their performance. And there's just not much evidence that that's true, right? So the voters don't seem to hold school board members accountable in any meaningful way, regardless of how the district does. You have, you know, there's quite a lot of evidence that local school boards are not demographically representative of the students in those schools, that school board members tend to be more affluent, wider than the students in the districts that they serve.

[16:31]

The school board, you know, participation in school board elections is vanishingly low, you know, 10, 20 percent. And oftentimes that's because these elections are held off cycle. Right. So meaning that they're not on the presidential cycle there in April or whatever. And people just don't turn out for that kind of election. And, you know, and then there's also just some wacky politics.

[16:54]

And you're going to see a lot more of that coming soon because, you know, we're seeing with these these history issues. There's a new PAC that was started just last week to fund challengers in local school board elections based on sort of the history curriculum that they want to put in school. So yeah, school boards can be quite dysfunctional. They're certainly unrepresentative. On the other hand, I think if political scientists were here, they would say that school boards often serve as sort of first stepping stones for underrepresented folks to get into politics. They can, you know, again, on paper, it sounds like a nice thing, right?

[17:34]

You've got local control. You've got democratic accountability. It's just in practice that doesn't really happen very much. And, you know, you get you get situations like whether you're talking about big districts or small districts, you get situations of, you know, school boards driven more by politics than by, you know, what's best for students or what's best for educators.

[17:57] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Morgan, you make the argument in the book that one way that states can play an improved role in curriculum and in ensuring that all students receive a high quality education is to not stop at standards, right? To go beyond saying, here are the standards and here's a huge list of approved materials. But you say that states should actually provide more specific recommendations or more specific materials for teachers to use and not leave so much up to chance and so much up to individual choice. Take us into that argument a bit.

[18:30] SPEAKER_01:

Sure. Well, to be clear, you know, in a lot of states, they don't even get past the standards. That is, they don't even recommend any curriculum materials at all. That's about half the states. The other half, the states, they do, you know, they're somewhere on a continuum from just putting out a big list, as you say, to sort of the other end of the continuum, which is there's a few states now that are essentially requiring districts to use, you know, from a very small list of approved materials, like a handful, two to six or something like that. And what I argue is that Certainly, that's well within states' rights to do that.

[19:05]

States will always fall back on local control because that's easy to fall back on. But it is certainly within the purview of state departments of education to require or strongly recommend from a small list of approved materials. But it's not enough to just say, okay, districts, you should use one of these three reading books. There are, I think, advantages that come along with having all districts on sort of the same page like that, and states should take advantage of those. So, you know, you can, in Louisiana, the state literally provides professional development opportunities to something like 5,000 teachers each summer on their Louisiana guidebooks, which is the top used PLA curriculum in that state. It's used by something like three quarters of all districts.

[19:53]

And, you know, you can't do that if every district is adopting a different book, but you can if districts are all on the same page. And you can also, you know, that's an instance where the state actually saw that there wasn't a core material out there that they liked and they actually created one and have evolved it sort of iteratively over time. They're on their third version of it now. And that itself has advantages, right? So you can tailor, at a state level at least, you can tailor things to the local context in some way. You can build in sort of cultural relevance for the kinds of students who are in your state.

[20:31]

So that's one example of the kind of leverage that states can exert. And we don't see evidence that teachers in Louisiana are less happy with their curriculum options. In fact, surveys from RAND suggest that teachers are more satisfied and also that they understand the standards better and are implementing them more in the classroom. And I think those are the consequences when you move beyond just a set of standards and to something that really helps teachers understand and implement the standards in the classroom and supports them to do so.

[21:07] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, it seems to me like that creates so many more opportunities, as you said, for professional development, for collaboration. It reduces the reinvention of the wheel and the duplication of effort that occurs when every district or even every teacher is on their own. And, you know, one of the things that's been the most disturbing to me about curricular materials in the last decade has been just the winging it and just the making stuff up. That's a very low quality and getting stuff off the Internet. That's a very low quality that's gotten easier. You know, like it's it's great that there are more resources and teachers can, you know, kind of buy things one by one online at various marketplaces.

[21:44]

But. You know, to me, it's appalling sometimes at just what low quality there is in those materials. And as you said, state departments of education can play a really powerful role, and they're respected by teachers and administrators, right? Teachers love going to these, you know, these trainings, these events that are well organized, that are funded, they're paid to go to them, they have the opportunity to collaborate with other educators and actually get the detailed support they need. So I hope that is a message that is heated in the coming years. But I want to ask you as kind of a closing question here, if you could wave a magic wand and get one big thing to happen, based on your research and your recommendations in the book, what would you make happen if you had the magic wand to make it happen?

[22:30] SPEAKER_01:

I'm going to give you a very comprehensive one big thing. So the one big thing would be states essentially requiring districts to adopt from a very small list of core materials in most subjects. So maybe something like three materials. The state then providing training on that and in the sort of model of Louisiana. And I think the important thing to get to your last point, before this question is supporting districts to figure out a way to attack the supplementation issue that you just raised, right? So one of the big phenomena of American teaching is supplementation of core curriculum.

[23:09]

And if teachers view it as their responsibility to go out and curate a curriculum from Teachers Pay Teachers or the book in the back of the classroom or their colleague across the hall, as opposed to starting from a really high quality core material and then perhaps collaboratively supplementing as needed with teachers in their school, We're just not going to see the kind of improvement if every teacher's out there scouring Teachers Pay Teachers for lessons every night. And this is not to knock on Teachers Pay Teachers in particular. It's just an example that a lot of people know. So in addition to the state requiring a small list of materials and supporting teachers to implement them, I think districts really need to come up with structures and systems and clear expectations for how teachers use the materials and how they supplement.

[24:01]

Right. Which isn't to say that teachers shouldn't ever supplement. They should. Of course, that's an important part of professional autonomy and teacher authority. But, you know, you just it's malpractice to have. And we've all seen these examples, you know, teachers either creating or selecting materials that have horribly racist or offensive things in them.

[24:22]

I mean, they come up all the time or that have mathematical errors in them. And there's just no quality control at all for these kinds of materials. So you really need to get a handle on that in some kind of way. And I talk in the book about some examples of districts that I've observed that I think do this relatively well.

[24:38] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Beyond Standards, The Fragmentation of Education Governance and the Promise of Curriculum Reform. Morgan Polikoff, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[24:50] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you very much.

[24:52] Announcer:

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