The Charter Bond Time Bomb

Inspired by the stunning NEPC report on just how deeply and thoroughly charter schools are used as a mechanism for sucking public tax dollars into private pockets, I've been trying to read up on this stuff, in particular by looking through the work of one of the reports co-authors, Bruce Baker (Rutgers University). Baker operates the blog School Finance 101, and it's an excellent resource for those trying to make sense out of the arcane world of, well, school finance.

I'm dipping into Baker's work to lay out one simple progression that takes charters from vexing to terrifying in just a few steps of property acquisition, in the process setting a ticking time bomb. I'm going to try to lay this out in my own words, mainly as an exercise for myself (one of my personal and professional principles of learning is this: want to really understand something? try to write about it), but I recommend you follow the links and read the full originals. (Also, any mistakes in what follows are mine, not Baker's).

STEP ONE: Double Purchase and Zero Ownership

In this piece, Baker explains how the taxpayer buys the same property twice, and ends up with no control over it. Here's how I think it works.

I buy a house. Well, I take out a mortgage on the house. But now I'm on the hook financially for the house. I make my payments. I may even pay it off.

Then Chris comes along and proposes to buy the house from me. And Chris's proposal is that I take out a mortgage for Chris, but give Chris the deed to the property.

So now I have taken out two mortgages on the same piece of property. I have bought it twice. And it now belongs to Chris.

STEP TWO: Kick the Can and Light the (Very Long) Fuse

With schools, the device used for getting yourself in debt isn't a mortgage, but a bond.

A bond works like this: I loan you some money, and you promise to pay me regular interest on it. You also promise to eventually pay me back the principal when the bond "matures." That's why the highest-rated, most secure bonds are loans to things like municipalities-- organizations that nobody expects to vanish and skip out before the bond matures and the principal is due. That's important, because a bond is different from stock: when you buy stock, you own a piece of the company, but bondholders own nothing except the bonds.

Here is the scariest chart from Baker's recent piece on Subprime Chartering.

That's right. Billions of dollars in debt is out there, and it doesn't come due for decades-- well after the time that charter businesses have to decide whether or not to stay in the business. If I were an unscrupulous charter operator, I could float my charter on an ocean of bond money, use a variety of devices (see that NEPC report) to shovel that money into my pocket and then, when my renewal time came around, just not even apply to have my charter renewed. The possibilities are mind-boggling and remind me of nothing so much as Bialystock and Bloom in The Producers.

And even if I'm a moderately- or highly-scrupled charter operator, maybe I will do what many charter operators do-- decide that the business just isn't producing the kind of returns I need to make it worth my while, so I'm going to fold up my tent and go.  

Remember that much of this debt was not run up by the charters, but "on behalf of charters." So who's left holding the bag, and how many of those bag holders eventually discover that they are holding a bag of air, that the investment has vanished.

Set the whole host of educational issues aside-- is the continued proliferation of charters creating another financial time bomb? Are investors and bankers and venture capitalists and hedge funders creating a future financial catastrophe?

Probably not. I mean, those guys are knowledgable financiers who know what they're doing. Surely the investors and bankers and capitalists would never do something so foolish, reckless and short-sighted that it would pose a serious risk to the nation's economic health.

Raj Chetty for Dummies

The name Raj Chetty has been coming up a great deal lately, like a bad burrito that resists easy digestion. A great deal has been written about Chetty and his scholarly work, much of it by other scholars in various states of apoplexy.My goal today is not to contribute to that scholarly literature, but to try to translate the mass of writing by various erudite economists, scholars and statisticians into something shorter and simpler than ordinary civilians can understand.

In other words, I'm going to try to come up with a plain answer for the question, "Who is Raj Chetty, what does he say, how much of it is baloney, and why does anybody care?"

Who is Raj Chetty?

Chetty immigrated to the US from New Delhi at age nine. By age 23 he was an associate professor of economics at UC Berkeley, receiving tenure at at age 27. At 30, he returned to his alma mater and became the Bloomberg Professor of Economics at Harvard.

He has since become a bit of a celebrity economist, consulted and quoted by the President and members of Congress. He has won the John Bates Clark Medal; Fortune put him on their list of influential people under forty in business.

Chetty started attracting attention late in 2010 with the pre-announcement of a publication of research that would give a serious shot in the arm to the Valued Added Measurement movement in teacher evaluation. His work has also made special appearances in the State of the Union address and the Vergara trial.

What does Chetty say?

The sexy headline version of Chetty is that a child who has a great kindergarten teacher will make more money as an adult.

The unsexy version isn't much more complicated than that. What Chetty et al (he has a pair of co-authors on the study) say is that a high-VAM teacher can raise tests scores in younger students (say, K-4) and while that effect will disappear around 8th grade, eventually those VAM-exposed children will start making bigger bucks as adults.

Implications? Well, as one of Chetty's co-authors told the New York Times--

“The message is to fire people sooner rather than later,” Professor Friedman said.

Chetty's work has been used to buttress the folks who believe in firing our way to excellence-- just keep collecting VAM scores and ditching the bottom 5% of your staff. Chetty also plays well in court cases like Vergara, where it can be used to create the appearance of concrete damage to students (if Chris has Mrs. McUnvammy for first grade, Chris will be condemned to poverty in adulthood, ergo the state has an obligation to fire Mrs. McUnvammy toot suite). You can read one of the full versions of the paper here.

Who disagrees with Chetty?

Not everybody. In particular, economist Eric Hanushek has tried to join this little cottage industry, and lots of reformy poicy makers love to quote his study.

But the list of Chetty naysayers is certainly not short. Chetty appears to evoke a rather personal reaction from some folks, who characterize him as everything from a self-important twit to a clueless scientist who doesn't understand that he's building bombs that blow up real humans. I've never met the man, and nothing in his writing suggests a particular personality to me. So let's just focus on his work.

Moshe Adler at Columbia University wrote a research response to Chetty's paper for NEPC. This provoked a response from Chetty et al, which provoked yet another response from Adler. You can read the whole conversation here, but I'll warn you right now that you're not going to just scan it over lunch.

Meanwhile, you'll recall that the American Statistical Association came out pretty strongly opposed to VAM, which also put them in the position of being critical-- directly and indirectly-- of Chetty. Chetty et al took it upon themselves to deliver the ASA a lesson in statistical analyses ("I will keep my mouth shut because these people are authorities in areas outside my expertise," is apparently really hard for economists to say) which led to a conversation recounted here.

What do the scholarly and expert critics say?

To begin with, the study has a somewhat checkered publication history, debuting as news blurbs in 2010 and making its way up to publication in a non-peer-reviewed journal, then to republishing as two articles, then in a peer-reviewed journal. That history, along with many criticisms of the study, can be found here at Vamboozled, the blog of Audrey Amrein-Beardsley (the blog is a wealth of resources about all things Vam).

Many criticize Chetty's methodology. Adler's critique suggests that Chetty may have fudged some numbers, dis-included some data, and ignored previous research that didn't fit his framework. Amrein-Beardsley (and others) accuse Chetty of ignoring context of the data. Many critics suggest that Chetty is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. 

You can chase scholarly links all day long, though the NEPC link to Moshe's work and simply typing "Chetty" into the VAMboozled search box will provide more than enough reading for an afternoon. Or two.

So how much of Chetty's work is bunk?

I'm going to go with "most of it."

Chetty's idea was to link VAM measures to later success-- to be able to say, "Look! High-VAM teachers grow successful students." There are several problems with this.

First, studies of VAM-based teacher effectiveness always seem to descend into the same tautology. Use test scores to measure VAM. Use VAM to id the best teachers. Check to see if VAM-certified teachers raise test scores. Strip out the fancy language and funky math and you're left with a fairly simple tautology-- "Teachers who get students to have high test scores tend to get students to have high test scores." This is no more insightful or useful than research to show that bald men tend to be bald.

Second, Chetty doesn't seem to distinguish between correlation and causation. His results seem to scream for that consideration-- six year olds who do better on tests don't grow into twelve year olds who do better tests, but they do grow into twenty-eight olds who make more money. I'm no economist, but to me, the yawning gulf between the alleged cause and the supposed effect leaves enough room for a truckload of other possible causes. This holds together just about as well as "because I buried a toad under a full moon a year ago, I met my true love today."

And as it turns out, an explanation is readily available. We know who does better on standardized tests-- the children of high income families. We know who's more likely to get better-paying jobs as adults-- the children of high income families. It seems highly probable that the conclusion to be drawn from Chetty's research is, "Children of higher-income families do better on tests and get higher-paying jobs." 

Chetty himself tried to plug that last hole, with research about economic mobility that concluded that it's not any worse than it was a decade ago-- but it's still pretty lousy. Chetty et al also insist that the students were distributed across the classrooms in completely random fashion. This strikes many as an assumption without foundation.

Put another way-- a mediocre teacher with a classroom full of rich kids who test well would earn a high VAM and those well-heeled students would still go on to have well-paying jobs, and nothing in Chetty's model would ever reveal that Mr. McMediocre was less than awesome.

There are other detail-inhabiting devils. The "big difference" in future earnings seems to vary according to which draft of the report we're looking at, and Chetty only claims them as far as the students turning twenty-eight-- the "lifetime earnings" claims are based on the assumption that the subjects will just keep getting the same raises for the rest of their lives that they got up until age twenty-eight. That is a heck of a bold assumption.

Chetty's work rests on the unproven assumption that VAM is not junk. VAM, in turn, rests on the assumption that 1) the Big Standardized Tests provide meaningful data and 2) that a magical formula can filter out all other factors related to student results on the BS Tests. Chetty's work also assumes that adult success is measured in monetary terms. And Chetty's work ignores the difference between correlation and causation, and instead makes a huge leap of faith to link cause and effect. I wold bet you dollars to donuts that we could perform research that would "prove" that eating a good breakfast when you're six, or having a nice pair of shoes when you're ten, can also be linked to higher-paying jobs in adulthood. As it is, we have "proof" that Nicholas Cage causes death by drowning, and that margarine causes divorce in Maine.

Chetty's work is not going to go away because it's sexy, it's simple, and it supports a whole host of policy ideas that people are already trying to push. But it is proof positive that just because somebody teaches at Harvard and wins awards, that doesn't mean they can't produce "research" that is absolute baloney.

Fiction, Charter Fiction, and Damned Lies

Back in August of 2014, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools published "Separating Fact & Fiction: What You Need To Know About Charter Schools." This is kind of like reading a tobacco industry publication about the health benefits of smoking. Admittedly, the NAPCS only suggests they're going to separate fact and fiction, not tell us which are which. But the National Education Policy Center, one of the most indispensable research centers for education, did their own review of the charter report, and that review was just released.

NEPC's review is scholarly, thorough, and responsible. So I figured I would take a quick scan through the NAPCS piece with a somewhat less grown-up eye (since I missed it when it first came out) and see what kind of baloney the charter folks are selling.

I'll preface this, as always, by saying that I believe there is a place for charters, particularly the classic charters that pre-date the current explosion of charters that are more interested in investment return and money-funneling than actual education. It's unfortunate that the current crop of charters are making the whole concept of charter schooling look bad. So, no, I'm not a knee-jerk automatic charter hater.

Now let's check out some myths.

MYTH: Charter Schools Are Not Public Schools

Their claim is that they meet the legal definition of a public school. Of course, there are states (looking at you, OK) where helpful legislators are actually trying to get charters excused from those pesky testing and transparency requirements. Otherwise, the rule remains the same-- charters are public when they want access to public money, and private when they want to avoid being transparent-- even to other parts of the charter network!

MYTH: Charter schools get more money than other public schools.

I see what you did there with the word "other"-- asserting some more that charters are public schools. Their claim is that charters get less money. Of course charters also get more free buildings for co-locations or just plain take overs. And charters have started agitating hard for a bigger piece of the pie, so I guess all that talk about how charters would do more with less was just a sales pitch.

MYTH: Charter schools receive a disproportionate amount of private funds.

Well, "disproportionate" is a fancy word for "fair," and fairness is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly some charters have some fancy high profile fundraisers while schools like mine are holding car washes. But I have no idea how we figure this, since every dollar a parent spends on a Hello Kitty backpack would conceivably count as a private fund.

MYTH: There is a lack of transparency around charter schools' use of funds.

Well, yes. There was also a lack of civility during assault on the US Embassy in Benghazi. Charters don't so much lack transparency as they fight it like cats being forced to bathe. One of the authors of the NEPC review sent out 400 Freedom of Information Act requests to charters. 20% answered, 10% asserted their right to ignore FOIA requests, and 70% simply ignored the request.

Now, what NAPSC actually says is that charter schools "have greater accountability and scrutiny over their finances than traditional public schools." They have no real support for that other than claiming that they must meet all state laws as well as keep their authorizers happy. Maybe what they really mean is that they have to answer to their investors.

MYTH: Charter school teachers are less qualified than teachers in traditional public schools.

"Like all public school leaders, charter leaders aim to hire talented, passionate, and qualified teachers who will boost student achievement and contribute to a thriving school culture." Well, baloney. Nobody asked what you aim at. You can aim at anything. But since charters aim to spend less money on teaching staffs and charters aim to fill spaces with easily-replaced TFA temps and charters aim to install systems where they can hide lousy pay structures with shiny "merit" systems, we can easily predict that what their aim is confused. They may be aiming for the target, but their big cheap gun is pointed straight at the floor. I have no doubt that there are many excellent teachers working in the charter world, but since they prize the "flexibility...to draw from a wider candidate pool," they will, in fact, have a teaching pool of less-qualified people filling teaching slots.

MYTH: Charter schools are anti-union.

The National Alliance believes that teachers in any school should be treated fairly and should be given the due process rights they are accorded under the law. And we believe in giving school leaders the flexibility they need to staff their schools with teachers who support the mission and will meet school standards. 

We are happy to have unions, as long as they are ineffective and powerless and never intrude on the management's freedom to run the school however they wish.

MYTH: Charter schools aren't accountable to the public since their boards aren't elected.

Yeah, we're just going to fudge our way through this one. See charters have to answer to authorizers, who are just like the public. "Charter schools are uniquely accountable to the public because they sign contracts with a government-endorsed authorizer..." So, no, they aren't accountable to the public. In fact, they rather like it that way.

MYTH: Charter schools cream or cherry-pick the best students from traditional public schools.

NAPCS says that charters are "generally required" to accept all students. But one of their most vocal supporters says, no, they don't, and that's a good thing. The modern charter is excellent at making sure it only serves the kind of students it wishes to serve, and this selectivity has been demonstrated by researchers again and again, to the point that the New Jersey Charter Schools group tried to use the court system to stop one set of researchers from proving that yet again, the charters do not serve the same population as the public system.

Part of the answer here is also marketing. If you market a restaurant as a prime steak house, you won't pull big vegan clientelle. If you market a charter as a no excuses, all science all day, we make slackers miserable school, your potential market will do some of the cherry picking for you.

Also, you know what kind of student charters never have to accept? The kind of student who comes into school in the middle of the year. For the most part, charters do not have to back fill their empty seats. None of their students have come in in the middle of the year-- those kids can hie them to a public school.

MYTH: Charter schools don't enroll children from underserved families.

The research is stacking up that charters accelerate segregation by both race and class (NEPC has a list of six). Charters do enroll such students, but not at the same rate as public schools.

MYTH: Charter schools serve fewer English language learners than traditional public schools.

NAPCS says there is "no significant difference" in the percentage of ELL students served by charter and public schools. NEPC says this claim is "unsubstantiated and demonstrably false" which is the polite researcher way of calling pants on fire. Maybe NAPCS thinks "no significant difference" means "no difference large enough to bother us."

MYTH: Charter schools serve fewer students with disabilities.

NAPCS says they're at 10% enrollment versus 12% for public schools. They neglect to mention how the disabilities sort out as far as severity, so they are counting a child with a mild processing disability the same as a child with severe learning challenges. They also give themselves a big pat on the back for keeping a huge percentage of their students in a least restrictive environment of a regular classroom, which is a great way to spin providing no special supports for students with special needs.

MYTH: Charter schools depend on counseling out for academic results blah blah this is a wordy one for some reason.

Well, not for some reason. The myth is worded to embed the notion that charters get better academic results, which they don't. The NAPCS defense is awesome: "There is no evidence of charter school policies that explicitly push out students." So, "You'll never catch us doing it."

MYTH: Charter schools have higher suspension and expulsion rates.

Pretty sure that's just wrong. For instance, Chicago just noticed a problem. And DC is really out of whack. NAPCS is using a single Education Week article covering 2009-2010 data. It's a weak stretch.

MYTH: Charter school students do no better than traditional public schools.

NAPCS uses their own studies to assert their superiority. Well, actually, just a couple of their own studies. Funny they didn't use any of the independent studies out there, most of which show that charters generally are neither better nor worse than public schools. But I'm going to give them a pass on this because most of those studies reach their conclusions by looking at standardized tests scores, and those things don't really tell us how any students in any schools are really doing.

MYTH: Underperforming charter schools are allowed to remain open.

Tricky one to defend, since the most striking defense is that the really bad charter schools often just close up shop during the school year with no warning at all. Closing whenever they feel like it is one of the defining characteristics of the modern charter school, and one of the reasons I oppose them.

MYTH: Charters are an urban-only phenomenon.

Well, I believe that probably is a myth. I'm sure that charter operators will go anywhere they think the market is ripe for the plucking. Pennsylvania's cyber charters have displayed a rapacious love of money that knows no boundaries whatsoever. Of course, if we can agree that charters also appear in suburbs, small towns, and rural areas, then perhaps we can move onto the next logical question, which is "So what?"

MYTH: Competition from charter schools is causing neighborhood schools to close and harming the students attending them.

MYTH: Charter schools take funding away from traditional public schools.

Again, the statement of the first myth itself is a big fat lie. The implication here is that charters are just out-competing those lame-o public schools. But no-- it's not the competition that's doing the damage-- it's the sweet, sweet political deals that turn charter systems into bloodsucking leeches firmly latched onto the veins of public education.

NAPSC's defense is stupid. "No research has shown that the presence of public charter schools cause neighborhood schools to close."  Come visit me at my home, and I will walk you across the street to the former neighborhood elementary school that was closed a few years ago. In that year, our goal was to save about $800K in operating expenses. In that same year, we handed over about $760K to cyber-charters. Charters suck the money out of public schools. In places like New York City where politically-connected profiteers like Eva Moskowitz can strong-arm the city into handing them free real estate, charters are literally taking the school buildings away from the neighborhood.

One of the biggest, boldest, fattest, most destructive lies of the charter movement is that we can operate multiple school systems for the cost of one. But charters have made sure that their political backers will insure that it's the public system that loses out and that the public schools will be the ones stripped of resources and left with less than they need to function.

In 2014, the charter industry could still claim with a straight face that only a portion of the per-pupil cost left the public schools with the student. But they have been working on that. Indiana's Governor Pence actually wants the charters to get MORE per pupil tan a public school.

NAPSC ends with a non-denial denial, leaning on the competitive aspect. In essence, their position is, "Well, yes, we take resources away from pubic schools. But we are better, so we deserve to."

MYTH: Charter schools resegregate pubic education.

Asked and answered. All the reputable research suggests that they do, in fact, do this. In fact, the NAPCS defense is, "Yeah, we're working on that."

MYTH: Some charter schools are religious schools.

NAPCS response is that it would be wrong to operate as a religious school, which I guess means that charters are careful enough not to get caught. NEPC wryly observes that researchers are studying faith-based charters, which suggests that such schools exist.

MYTH: Charter schools aren't the incubators of innovation that they claim to be.

NAPCS wants you to remember that charters themselves are an innovation (though I don't know if you get to call yourself a new idea if you are older than the internet). And they've blending learning  and using online instruction. So, you know, innovation! You might expect a longer list to back this point up, but I guess this is all they've got. In all fairness to charters, I think I more often here the incubator of innovation claim from their supporters (e.g. POTUS). I don't recall often reading about a charter saying, "Hey, everyone, come look at this innovative success we're having here," probably for the same reason that you don't hear me holler, "Hey, everyone, come watch me flap my arms and fly off the top of the Chrysler Building."

That's the myth portion.

Post-mythbusting, the paper moves into the endnote section, which leans heavily on the work of NAPCS and other charter school boosters. Not so much on actual real research.

I give them credit for not crafting all of the myths as straw men, but here's the thing about myths-- they often spring into being because many, many people encounter something and reach a similar conclusion. The idea, for instance, that gay folks are actually human beings pretty much like other human beings seems to have spread mostly because, as gay folks stopped hiding the gay, straight folks looked around and went, "Oh. I know some gay folks. They appear to be regular human beings." It did not require a massive PR campaign.

Charter folks may be confused here because they shoved their way into recent prominence by spending a lot of money for PR and political influence. So perhaps they feel that these myths are the result of some sort of massive PR counter-offensive, and not the result of people using teir eyes and ears and brains. People know that charters are bleeding public schools dry because they have eyes and ears. People know that charters cream and cherry-pick and push out because people have eyes and ears.

But if you want to counter these counter-myths with facts and research and scholarship, I recommend the NEPC report, which handles the Big Bunch O' Charter Talking Points nicely. Let's hope it helps beat back the modern wave of charters and helps keep alive that charter schools can go back to being the positive force for education that they once were.

The Very Best Policy Memo on Testing

Policy memos, like white papers, reports and means for grown-ups to say, "Hey, here's what I think should happen," are often a motley crew with little foundation and a lot of hot air. These kinds of reports are all-too-often just blog posts in a glossy tuxedo.

But the National Education Policy Center can be counted on to do actual research, use actual facts, and express their ideas in clear, cogent prose. And when it comes to the issue of ESEA renewal and testing, they do not disappoint.

"Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Time To Move Beyond Test-Focused Policies" is a mouthful of a title, but in a mere dozen pages (several are endnotes), Kevin G. Welner and William J. Mathis deliver a clear and thorough response to those who insist that annual standardized tests need to be the engine that drives the pubic education system. I am not going to do it justice here in this space, but let me give you the nickel tour of some of the best of the many great pull-quotes in the piece.

Their first paragraph presents a clear foundation:

Today’s 21-year-olds were in third grade in 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act became law. For them and their younger siblings and neighbors, test-driven accountability policies are all they’ve known. The federal government entrusted their educations to an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores, we would have almost everyone scoring as “proficient” by 2014. Thus, we would achieve “equality.” This approach has not worked.

They drop back for a history lesson, beginning with where we started:

NCLB was an ineffective solution to some very real problems.

But policy fails to provide supports for student success and ignores "the many opportunity gaps children face outside of school." Federal funding has been insufficient, has run out, has been kicked in the teeth by the Great Recession. "Adequate school funding remains a key, unaddressed issue."

NEPC then goes on to look at the testing debate itself, making this key point about what is not being included:

Nevertheless, the debate in Washington, D.C., largely ignores the fundamental criticism leveled by parents and others: testing should not be driving reform.

But the problem is not how to do testing correctly. In fact, today's standardized assessments are probably the best they've ever been. The problem is a system that favors a largely automated accounting of a narrow slice of students' capacity and then attaches huge consequences to that limited information.

 The paper goes on the list some of the undesirable side effects of that "singular focus," including (and I'll paraphrase) sucking the fun out of school, turning teaching into clerical gruntwork, giving up on an actual well-rounded education, and tossing out non-academic skills related to becoming a decent human being.

Tests, they caution, can be useful when used properly and for their intended purposes.

The problem is not in the measurements; it is in the fetishizing of those measurements. It is the belief that measurements will magically drive improvements in teaching and learning.

NEPC next turns to the Equity Argument for Test-Based Reform. They note the real reasons, including historic neglect of some groups, for people to find this argument compelling.

...we do not see any reason to believe that a test-focused ESEA in 2015 would yield any greater focus on opportunities to learn than did a test-focused ESEA in 2002.

The writers note that the achievement gaps were well-known and documented via NAEP  results before NCLB was ever hatched. Test-based attempts to close the achievement gap have never worked. And the NAEP provides all the measurement we'll ever need.

The secret? Poverty. The original ESEA language called for an additional 40% of a state's spending for each child living in poverty. This would be one of those parts of the law that nobody has ever come close to following. Meanwhile, poverty is making a mess, inevitably leading to larger opportunity gaps and achievement gaps. "Testing will document this, but it will do nothing to change it."

What about universal accountability?

NCLB and similar policies have done a disservice to the word "accountability." Our nation and our nation's education system need accountability, but it must be fair and it must be universal. Holding teachers accountable but excusing policymakers who fail to provide necessary supports is as harmful and illogical as holding students accountable but excusing poor teaching. Today's demoralized teaching force has been given too much responsibility for outcomes and too little control over these outcomes.

And then they wind to a close, which like the rest of the paper is thoroughly quoteworthy. Let's use this line:

The way forward is not to tinker further with failed test-based accountability mechanisms; it is to learn from the best of our knowledge.

The NEPC has an open letter to Congress with this report attached for any researchers and professors to sign; so far almost 1,500 names are attached. If you are a researcher or college prof, you should sign it. If you are a person who cares about public education, you should read the entire document. If there is an app that allows us to give something a standing ovation on the internet, this paper deserves it.