Stephen: We know the kids are ready and the question is, are we ready to really help those
kids have the opportunities that we know how to give them?
Nat: Hi, I'm Nat Malkus, resident fellow in education policy at the American Enterprise
Institute.
Today, I've got a conversation with Stephen Raudenbush of the University of Chicago on
his new book, "The Ambitious Elementary School."
Stephen, it's great to have you here.
Stephen: Thanks for inviting.
Nat: "The Ambitious Elementary School" is a fantastic book.
I just can't recommend it enough.
It's really challenging in a number of ways.
So just to lay out the basics, it chronicles the organization of two University of Chicago
charter schools on the south side of Chicago, North Kenwood Oakland and Donoghue.
And the schools are organized ambitiously in two ways: one, they have ambitious goals
for student outcomes and student learning, but it's also ambitious in the bold design
of the schools to depart from sort of the traditional organizations that we have sort
of become used to.
So, can you just give us a layout of the basic systems underlying these schools?
Stephen: Yeah, well, the ambition for the kids, of course, is we're talking about kids
who are African-American kids, 85% low income, who historically had been behind in achievement
and who...
So the idea is that the school is gonna bring those kids up to being equal with more middle-class
kids, kids who are non-minority kids.
So that's a huge ambitious goal.
The kids are...like kids anywhere, very heterogeneous.
They come into school at all different levels.
And so this project of catching up the kids, when the kids are actually heterogeneous,
this is a challenging problem for people in any school.
But also, the teachers have different levels of experience and skill, so they are also
heterogeneous.
And to do this hard work of helping these kids catch up, the teachers have to be operating
at a really high level.
So that means teachers have a lot to learn, and the teachers who know the most have to
somehow be able to help the teachers who don't know as much learn more so that everybody
can be effective in doing this.
So that's a big project.
And part of the strategy is to keep very close track of every kid.
So, to know where every child is in reading and math, and other areas.
Kids are assessed every 10 weeks.
They're all over the place.
You make an instructional plan for every single child.
Nat: For every child, not just children with special needs.
Stephen: Every child.
The child is down here.
Where is that child gonna be in 10 weeks?
How's that gonna get out to where that child needs to be?
Up here, how does that child go farther?
How do the kids who at the very top go even higher, you know?
So you're not gonna focus on kids who are having trouble at the expense of kids who
are higher or look only at the high fliers and ignore the lower achieving kids.
Everybody's gonna move up.
So you're gonna test these kids.
You're gonna have an instructional plan for each child, and 10 weeks later, you're going
to assess them again and you're gonna ask, "Did the instructional plan actually work?
And if it didn't work, what were we doing wrong?
How are we gonna make it work?
We're gonna have a new instructional plan."
Nat: Right.
One of the things in the book that's evident is how wide a web of support you create for
these kids.
And one of the challenges that struck me, how does this model work is trying to distribute
the information about each kid to everybody throughout.
And this is not just teachers on a grade level.
It's teachers, support professionals, the school leaders, all the way down to the extended
day people.
Stephen: That's right.
Nat: So how do they manage information in such a demanding network?
Stephen: No, that's really a key to the whole thing, is to have an information system that's
constantly being updated and then it's accessible to everybody.
So, a teacher can walk into the principal's office and see where that teacher's children
are, every single one of those kids, and where every other child in the school is.
So a second grade teacher can see where her kids are and see where other second grade
kids are.
She can see whether her kids are moving on this assessment and whether other kids are
moving.
And if kids aren't moving, there's gonna be some kind of a conference to figure out how
are we gonna get them to move.
The school brings the parents and say, "Your child is at step eight.
Ten weeks from now, we're gonna expect your child's gonna be at step nine in reading.
Here's what you can do to help."
So the printouts of this have to be then made available to the parents.
And you're right, the social workers are involved in understanding the achievement of the kids.
They have a plan for the social development of the kids.
It's a very demanding information system, and getting people to use the information
and to collaborate, and to understand how to use that system is a whole part of what
we think of as teacher expertise or social worker expertise.
It's how you use the system.
It's not whether you have a high SAT score or you went to a fancy college.
It's do you know how to use...can you use this system in your instruction?
Nat: All right.
You know, that points to a pretty interesting departure, at least from a lot of the literature
and writings I've read on teachers in economics, right.
The idea in economics is, well, if we can just move the distribution of teacher quality
up.
It's sort of like almost as if we can replace teachers like widgets.
But, this system has a very different vision.
It starts with distributed leadership across the school, not just for the principal, but
also from other teachers.
And then, the other component that I find compelling but also a challenge is sort of
an open door policy, not as an empty policy but where it's normal for teachers to have
other people come out and observe, give them feedback and grow.
So, as opposed to sort of getting inputs and putting them in place, there's a real development
process.
Stephen: Exactly.
Nat: So, just tell me how that works in school.
Stephen: Right.
So one way to say this is you have to have a way of defining expertise, and they have
to have a way of revealing it.
And you have to have a way of enabling the more expert teachers to help the less expert
teachers gain expertise.
I mean, you've gotta start with the idea everybody's not the same.
People come in with different backgrounds, different experiences.
They've been doing this for different amounts of time, so it's very natural to think that
people would have different levels of expertise, and it's a little bit uncomfortable to...for
everybody to know who's really good at doing this and who's not as good.
But if everybody has an incentive to get better, then the person who needs...you know, who's
a newer person, hasn't learned the system yet, wants to learn that system, that person's
gonna wanna have an expert person helping them.
And when a person's really good at it and consistently produces good data for their
children, and that person has actually learned how to not only teach well, but help somebody
else teach better, then that person is gonna be having more responsibility and is gonna
have some reward for doing that as well.
So there's gonna be some career advancement within teaching as you get better at doing
it, and you can help other people do it.
You can advance in your profession without leaving the classroom.
This has been a problem in education.
The only way you could get ahead was to get out of the classroom and become an administrator.
Well, here...and by the way, I should say, if you become an administrator, you're still
a part of the instructional system.
In fact, you're a crucial part of it because you are an instructional leader in that system,
and it's the people who work within that system and thrive within that system and who've shown
a track record of helping other people who become leaders in that same system and who
continue to provide leadership for other teachers.
Nat: Right, more than managing a building or a set of human resources.
Stephen: Yeah.
So the idea is to have a Chief Operating Officer who's gonna take care of that work and create
a kind of division of labor so that the director of the school is mainly an instructional leader.
Nat: Yeah, you know, there's an...I found a really compelling idea in the book, and
I'll tell you, the book is packed with information so there's no way that we can cover it all.
One of the ideas was this idea you're using the word infrastructure, the idea that in
some more centralized education systems, there's a lot more infrastructure.
But typically, in American public schools, we have a pretty decentralized system.
Part of this is the view of teachers where they're sort of broken off and they can close
their door and do what they do in their room and sort of have this isolated expertise.
But, what informs a lot of the school model is infrastructure that may be hard to come
by.
So, in your words, what do you mean by infrastructure, and then, who might supply it in a decentralized
education system?
Stephen: Right, because within a school, we talked about some of the infrastructure having
an assessment system, having text books, having people who can coach and who can help other
people get better, that's infrastructure that helps a person get better.
But if you look between schools, you don't want every school individually to have to
reinvent the wheel and create a powerful instruction system.
If other people have learned how to do this and we have textbooks that work, and we have
methods of assessment, we have tools that work, technological tools, you were talking
about having an information system, you wouldn't want every school to have to invent that.
That would be just crazy.
Once you know how to do that, you wanna make it more widely available.
How is that gonna happen?
Well, it could happen through a local school district.
It could happen through a charter management organization.
Universities, we think, could play a much bigger role in partnership with schools and
helping supply infrastructure.
Because one thing about scholars, they all are trying to figure out what's going on all
over the place, what do we know, and what works best.
They have...you know, presumably, we're able to get our hands in some evidence about that.
Making that accessible in a usable way through usable tools to people who are trying to make
schools work has a lot of potential that were not explained right now, we think.
Nat: So I don't wanna bury the lead here.
You've got some results.
Can you just give us a thumbnail on, first of all, how you know what you know about the
outcomes of these students, and give us some perspective on how big they are.
Stephen: Right, yeah, sure.
Well, the reason we know is we're very fortunate that every year in each of the schools in
each grade, people come and apply for the school, and there are more people applying
than there are seats.
And so, admission to school is decided by a randomized lottery.
So what that means is that we have, for these schools, we have statistically equivalent
group of kids who win the lottery and therefore go to the school and another group of kids
who lose the lottery and therefore, don't go to the school.
So that means that we can make fair, objective comparisons of these two groups and make a
determination of what is the impact of the school that's free of the usual biases that
we see when we just look at achievement between two different schools.
So that's a randomization, randomized lottery.
It's kind of we call it in social science the gold standard for causal inference, okay?
To try to really make these results plain, let's think about two distributions.
There's a distribution of test scores for all the white kids in Chicago and there's
a distribution of test scores for the black kids in Chicago.
Okay, let's take the white kids.
If I'm at the 50th percentile of the white distribution, I'm a white kid in Chicago,
that means that I'm scoring below half the kids but above half the kids.
I'm right in the middle of the distribution, okay?
And same thing, if I'm a black kid, I may be in the middle of black distribution.
So the question is, how do those two distributions compare if kids lose the lottery and, as a
result, are not able to go to the charter school, okay?
And what we know is that the kid who's in the middle of the black distribution is gonna
be at the 26th percentile of the white distribution, okay?
So that means that the typical black kid is gonna be outscored by 74% of the white kids,
okay?
What we'd like to see is we'd like to see the black distribution move up and become
the same as the white distribution.
If it were, that would mean that the child in the middle of the black distribution would
be right in the middle of the white distribution, 50-50, be at the 50 percentile of white distribution.
What we see is that, as a result of winning the lottery and attending the charter school,
that the black distribution moves up from the 26th percentile of the white distribution
up to the 44th.
So the typical kid who wins the lottery and attends the school is gonna be at the 44th
percentile of the white distribution.
We want it to be 50 and we're not there, but we have moved a long way from 26 up to 44.
Nat: Far more than half the achievement.
Stephen: Far more than half the achievement.
And I wanna say one other thing.
When these kids leave the elementary schools, this is where we're really surprised to see
this.
A lot of social science research would have predicted that those effects would fade out...
Nat: Fade out, yeah.
Stephen: ...when they go to secondary school because they are no longer under the care
of this particular school, which is quite unusual.
But what we see is quite the contrast.
In fact, the effects increase.
So these are not effects that fade out.
These are effects that grow as kids move into a secondary school.
Nat: You know, that's fantastic.
So I sort of approached a lot of my studies from the economic lens, which, you know, we
talked about the benefits and we talked a minute about the cost.
I know it may not be easy but there's sort of three things to talk about.
One is just the funding, but beyond that, it seems like you had two elements that also
helped the University of Chicago schools.
One is the University of Chicago, which sort of drew expertise.
That would be expensive and is perhaps hard to estimate but still important.
And then there's also some other in kind resources that it seemed to get that weren't from the
university, that were, you know, from the community and so forth.
So can you just give us a thumbnail also on the resource side?
Stephen: Sure.
Well, very basically, these are Chicago public schools.
And although they are formally charter schools, they are funded with regular per pupil expenditures
for the Chicago public schools.
And so, if you know about Chicago public schools, the funding is not high compared to a lot
of other urban districts: New York, D.C., Boston, many other urban districts.
So it's a pretty low funded district.
And so, we do...to make this model work, we try to raise some extra money, about $2,000
per pupil that would bring...but that would bring the cost of educating these kids up
to where actually still below where a lot of urban schools are but a little bit closer.
So it's not an...just in terms of outright expenditures, it's not an overly expensive
model by any stretch of the imagination.
But as you pointed out, and this is an excellent point, there are hard to measure advantages
that the school gains by working closely with the university, where the university is...we
have something called the Urban Education Institute of the University of Chicago, is
actually operating almost as a small district.
I didn't mention, we actually have four charter schools because we have a high school and
another middle school, as well as these two elementaries.
And the Urban Education Institute does other things and it has very good practitioners,
as well as researchers.
So, that benefit of being able to work closely with the University of Chicago and helping
develop some new assessments, some new tools, some new coaching methods, and using research
the...we have access to other universities that do a really good job with reading instruction.
They've done research and we've used those things.
So we make those things available.
So that's the thing that we do that maybe a lot of other...talk about infrastructure,
a lot of other districts might not be doing or some other organizations.
But we think that other institutions, like I say, charter school management systems or
districts could do more of that.
And we also think there's a much bigger role for universities to play and making partnerships,
and helping generate the know-how for excellent schooling.
And I wanna say one other thing.
What we find when we work with...at the university, we work with teachers, we find wonderful people,
exemplary people, teachers who have incredible ideas, we can help those people get their
ideas out.
A lot of what you see in the book are actually quotes from just fantastic leaders in schools.
So by getting their word out, practitioners aren't paid to tell the world what they know,
they just do it.
So universities can help make accessible to a broader range of people what great practitioners
know, and we think that's another thing that universities can do much more of.
Nat: Well, perhaps a lot of universities that focus on teacher training can export a little
teacher training to the schools and can provide a little infrastructure in return, so that's...
Stephen: Yeah, I think we have to take a hard look at how we do teacher training and how
we learn from the teacher training that we're doing.
I think we can do a lot better with that, takes it kind of in a different direction
but...
Because just having the experience we've seen, where we take these kids who would have perhaps
really not fared so well and who are doing so well and knowing that they will tremendously
respond if given the opportunity, it makes you wanna think about everything you can do
to ensure that every child has this kind of opportunity.
This is kind of the...the moral side of this for me is that we know the kids are ready,
and the question is are we ready to really help those kids have the opportunities that
we know how to give them?
Nat: Well, I think that's a great point to end it on, Stephen.
Thanks for coming to AEI.
Thanks for the book, and I'm glad to have it on my shelf.
Stephen: Thanks for the invitation.
It's been a pleasure.
Nat: All right.
Hey, everyone, that's the end of our discussion with Stephen Raudenbush.
Thanks for watching.
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