EAA (Update)

GRADING THE EAA

It’s way too early to deem authority a savior — or a failure

   The Education Achievement Authority has operated schools in Detroit for all of seven months, and already the argument over its success or failure is making me weary.

   Supporters are hailing the EAA as a savior in breathless new releases touting test scores and impassioned legislative testimony urging quick, massive expansion.

   Critics are declaring it a failure of abject proportion, decrying the very idea of a turnaround district.

   Come on. Nearly everyone is ahead of themselves.

   I’ve been a supporter of the EAA, in concept, since before Gov. Rick Snyder even unveiled the idea. It simply makes no sense to let schools in Detroit (or anywhere else in the state) fail persistently, without intervention.

   And there are many models around the country, in states that have been much more aggressive about reform than Michigan, for so-called “turnaround” districts. Michigan just needed to pick one, and begin applying a pretty simple concept: Failing schools should be improving or closing.

   The EAA’s harshest critics have focused on everything but that standard. They’re concerned about control and whether the 15 EAA schools are still part of DPS.

   But they’ve offered no antidote to the decades-long failures that saw generations of kids passed along without even the most basic skills, and where support for struggling teachers, reform of curriculum and accountability for everyone was nothing more than myth. And the hangups over governance are infuriatingly shortsighted.

   Michigan has an obligation — a constitutional one, you could argue — to focus intently on the worst, chronically failing schools. The EAA is the first real attempt at it, and it deserves more than seven months to prove it can make a difference.

   The model it’s using — a highly individualized curriculum that’s tailored toward meeting kids at their current academic level and moving them from there, rather than lumping them into rigid grade-levels — is not just intuitive but also innovative.

   At the same time, there has been enough about the execution of the EAA to raise some cautionary flags, and to hold back from a hurried expansion based on — again — just seven months that have produced paltry supporting data.

   The EAA has been operating with a disturbing amount of secrecy, for example. The district is getting extra funding from philanthropic interests, but the state has refused to share the sources of that funding, or to quantify it.

   And last week, there was news that the EAA borrowed money from DPS without the knowledge of some EAA board members.

   The loans were necessary, likely because the EAA’s lack of formal codification in state law prevents it from borrowing on its own. And the philanthropic support is key — a sign of intense interest in the district’s success.

   But the secrecy, in either case, is unacceptable. The EAA ought to be operating like any other school district, in the light of day. And if it’s getting extra money from philanthropic interests, we ought to know who they are and why they’re giving.

   In truth, the state should be ultra-transparent about what’s going on in the EAA, given the importance of its approach and the great need to replicate any success it experiences.

   And if it’s costing more to make the EAA run than it does to operate ordinary public schools, that’s important, too, as a lesson about the extreme level of difficulty involved in educational turnaround.

   It will be at least a few years before it’s fair to say what the EAA proves, or doesn’t, about failing schools. Test scores over the first year will begin to tell the story, but it’s progress over time that will matter most.

   That should be a good guide for critics and advocates alike: Wait until there are actual results, and more than a year’s worth, to either declare the EAA worthy of expansion or doomed to failure.

   Anything else is a rush to judgment that can’t yield the solution Detroit and the whole state need for schools that just can’t seem to get it right.

   Stephen Henderson is editorial page editor for the Free Press and the host of “American

   Black Journal,” which airs at 1p.m. Sundays on Detroit Public Television. Follow

   Henderson on Twitter@ShendersonFreep, or contact him at 313-222-6659 or shenderson600@freepress.com  .

Elexus Spencer, left, and Darius Jones, both 16, listen to teacher Vincent Smith along with fellow student Bridgette Chandler, 18, a senior, at Mumford High School, part of the Education Achievement Authority. 2012 PHOTO BY MANDI WRIGHT/DETROIT FREE PRESS

STEPHEN HENDERSON EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

Local commentary

Trust and transparency among issues with EAA

By Thomas Pedroni

   It’s been a month of bad optics for the Education Achievement Authority.

   First, there was the fivefold increase in discipline incidents in the second quarter. The 8,000-student district recorded 5,200 incidents in less than three months.

   Then the EAA, a public entity, required Rep. Ellen Cogen Lipton of the House Education Committee to pay thousands of dollars for information to assess the district’s capacity and performance. The documents Lip-ton, D-Huntington Woods, obtained reveal high rates of midyear teacher turnover, falling enrollment and persistent financial difficulties.

   With discipline, enrollment, teacher retention and finances lagging (we might add transparency), supporters of legislation to codify and expand the district are banking on academic results.

   Enter Mary Esselman, the EAA’s chief accountability officer, who told legislators 43% of math students and 48% of reading students were on track for a year’s academic growth. Even better, many of those students had already achieved a year’s growth.

   Of course, spun a different way, the same numbers tell us 57% of students in math and 52% in reading are not on track to make expected gains.

   And her claims about what the results say about the EAA’s effectiveness might hold more water if Scantron, the producer of the assessment underlying her claims, signed off on those conclusions.

   To find out more about the EAA’s use of the assessment, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request. Documents I received raise questions about the integrity of EAA’s implementation of the assessment.

   First, hundreds of e-mails attest to significant disruptions during the baseline administration of the assessment, in the fall. Headsets needed for audio were not available; weak wireless signals could not accommodate the online testing load; many students couldn’t log in, and when they did, many were dumped from the system.

   In contrast, the winter assessment, which was measured against the fall baseline for growth, ran much more smoothly.

   There were other stark differences between the fall and winter administrations.

   While 91% of students took a reading test in the fall, only 72% did so in the winter.

   And while in the fall 14% of students in grades 2 through 9 took a modified reading foundations test, less than 1% did in the winter.

   The modified test is intended for K-1 students and supplies non-readers with audio. Sue Newell, Scantron’s EAA consultant, explained in a phone interview that the modified and regular test icons are side-by-side on the login screen. Many older students “took the foundations incorrectly” in the fall.

   By the winter administration, they knew better.

    Newell also explained a category of test-takers identified in the winter but not the fall — invalids. These were students whose test scores showed considerable decline since the baseline. Scantron assumes, probably correctly, that these students did not take the winter test seriously.

   Logically, there is no special designation for students who did not take the fall administration seriously, because there is no earlier data to which their scores could be compared.

   I asked Newell whether students who did not take the test seriously in the fall but did in the winter might constitute a bias in the results much like the invalids — one that would inflate the appearance of student growth. Newell agreed, but said, “There’s no way to measure that.”

   Stacey Ridgeway, senior manager at Global Scholar/ Scantron answered my final question.

   Given the severe technological glitches, frustrations and incorrect test selection in the fall, and the much lower proportion of students tested in the winter, did Scantron stand behind the claims about student progress?

   Ridgeway expressed confidence that the numbers indicated that amount of growth, but conceded, “The testing environment has gotten a whole lot better.” Although gains could therefore appear larger than they really were, “you don’t throw the whole thing out just because of those issues.”

   Future tests, Ridgeway argued, will give us “a more realistic look” at how successful the EAA model really is.

   In every respect, the Legislature should take a more realistic look at the EAA. And it should do so before approving the expansion and codification legislation before it.

   Thomas Pedroni is an associate professor of curriculum studies at

   Wayne State University.

Put education first, not failed ways of the past

By John Covington

   One of the most disheartening parts of the ongoing discussion of the Education Achievement Authority of Michigan is the way so much of the educational establishment has banded together to try to kill this innovative approach to educating young people who have been abjectly failed by an outdated system of public schooling.

   The EAA was created to transform the worst of the worst — schools that have been consistently, over a number of years, failing the young people they are supposed to educate. At the beginning of the school year, baseline testing showed only 2% of elementary and middle school students coming into the EAA were proficient in math — none in the sixth grade — and only 18% were proficient in reading.

   I see no value for students to force them to remain in a system that allows them to graduate and receive a diploma that they are unable to read. This will have severe adverse effects on Michigan’s economy for decades and on the communities in which these young people reside.

   The EAA approach is based on the belief that children in failing schools want to learn, can learn and will learn if they are provided the right environment.

   The EAA approach is student-centered, which means each student works on a curriculum that is designed to meet that student’s specific needs. If the student is reading at the second grade level, his or her reading assignments are at the second grade level. As the student improves to the third- and fourth-grade level, the reading assignments are elevated. A student doesn’t have to wait a year to go to the next level. The student advances at his or her own speed.

   The EAA also assembled its teaching corps from scratch, hiring new principals for each school. These principals were able to hire their own faculty at each school. The principals and teachers were initially screened by the Harvard University Graduate School of education, with the final hiring decisions made locally. All the teachers are fully certified.

   The initial results are encouraging. Tests administered in late January and early February showed that in reading, after just four months under the new system, more than 27% of EAA students in second through ninth grades achieved a full year’s growth or more. In mathematics, 22% achieved one or more year’s growth.

   How do parents react to the new system?

   We’ve heard lots of positive reaction. One parent Sharon Reed Thompson said her son couldn’t read when he completed the third grade last year at Brenda Scott Elementary/Middle School, an EAA school But this year, she said, it took only a week for her to realize that her son would make progress.

   How does the educational establishment react to all of this? Many teachers, unions, principals, superintendents and Democrats in the State Legislature are fighting it tooth and nail, along with some political allies who should be expected to welcome the opportunity for a better education for urban school children.

   When the EAA was a finalist for Race to the Top funding last fall, the Michigan educational establishment united in a frenzied attempt to block the selection of the EAA. And they have bombarded the EAA at times with outright falsehoods, such as claiming EAA teachers are not certified and that college students are teaching in EAA schools. How much longer do we place adult issues at the forefront rather than what’s truly best for young people?

   The schools that are part of the EAA were failing before the EAA took them over. Now they show early, clear and welcome signs of success.

   I see no value for students in forcing them to remain in a system that allows them to graduate and receive a diploma that they are unable to read.

   The shame is that those who should welcome this improvement for the kids who need it most are wedded so resolutely to the old, failed status quo. Our kids deserve better from them. They deserve for us to fight for their chance to succeed in life — a chance that those of us working in the EAA intend to make sure they get.

   John Covington is chancellor of the Education Achievement Authority of Michigan.

John Covington