FOR MERIT PAY

MARK WILSON, president and CEO, Florida Chamber of Commerce

The Miami Herald – link to original article
March 25, 2010

The key to a student’s success in the classroom is the quality of the teaching. To ensure continued professional development and excellence from teachers, we must implement a market-based approach to compensation under which good teachers are rewarded and low-performers are removed if they do not improve.
State legislators have an opportunity to introduce such a merit-based compensation system with passage of SB 6, sponsored by Sen. John Thrasher. This bill calls for changes to Florida’s outdated teacher-tenure system and for teacher evaluation methodologies based primarily on student achievement — not merely time served — and is supported by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the Council of 100, the Foundation for Florida’s Future and many others.
Why? For Florida to remain competitive in the global marketplace, we must graduate students who have experienced exceptional teaching and are qualified for jobs, becoming part of a talented workforce that fuels Florida’s economy and contributes to the innovations of tomorrow.
We need to prepare students to understand global issues and to be curious, interested and engaged. We must equip them with the tools, resources and confidence to make sense of what is happening in their communities and the world beyond their own borders.
We need teachers who are motivated, passionate and dedicated; committed to students’ progress; and who provide an environment in which every student can excel at any level.
But we can’t guarantee any of this if teachers do not have adequate financial incentives that help inspire and encourage greatness. Studies have shown that the quality of a teacher is the most important aspect in a student’s success. The positive impact a good teacher has on a student can last a lifetime — not just a school year.
In 1955, the organizers of a White House education conference presented a report to President Dwight D. Eisenhower advising him that, “Every effort must be made to devise ways to reward teachers according to their ability without opening the school door to unfair personnel practices.” More than 50 years later, we still have not heeded this advice. Merit pay for teachers makes sense for a number of reasons:
• Americans value hard work that produces results.
• Teachers will work smarter and produce better results. What motivation exists for teachers to excel if low-performing teachers are paid the same as stellar ones?
• Merit pay can help recruit and retain the brightest minds in the teaching field.
Every year scores of teachers leave the field because their paychecks don’t reflect the effort and professionalism they bring to the classroom. That leaves many schools with mediocre teachers who get “drive-by” evaluations from principals who are sometimes more interested in classroom behavior than quality of instruction.
Teacher merit pay is one of the reforms that President Obama’s administration is encouraging. The Race to the Top initiative, for which Florida is a finalist, will distribute more than $4 billion to school districts willing to implement education reforms, including teacher merit pay.
Unless we act aggressively on this and many other proposals that can transform the way we educate and evaluate both teachers and students, there will be dire consequences from having an ill-prepared and under-educated workforce — and we will have failed our best teachers.
MARK WILSON, president and CEO, Florida Chamber of Commerce, Tallahassee

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/28/1550277/encourage-excellence-in-teaching.html

They’re growing, despite union hostility.

The Wall Street Journal - link to original

Charter schools reached a new milestone this year. According to the Center for Education Reform, more than 5,000 charters are now operating in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Considering that the first charter didn’t open until 1992, and that these innovative schools have faced outright hostility from teachers unions and the education bureaucracy, their growth is a rare gleam of hope for American public schools.

More than 1.5 million students now attend charters, an 11% increase from a year ago. That’s only about 3% of all public school students, but the number has more than quadrupled in the past decade. And it would be much higher if the supply of charter schools was meeting the demand. As of June, an estimated 365,000 kids were on waiting lists.

The students who attend these schools, which are concentrated in urban areas, tend to be low-income minorities. Yet they regularly outperform their peer groups in traditional public schools often located blocks away. In their 18-year history, only 740 schools have lost their charters and been shut down for poor performance. Unlike traditional public schools, charter schools must be re-authorized every few years, which means they don’t exist in perpetuity to fail multiple generations of youngsters.

Despite this record of accomplishment and accountability, the charter school movement continues to face all manner of obstacles. Eleven states ban charters, and even those that don’t can make it very hard for them to succeed and multiply. Charters typically receive less money per pupil and, unlike other public schools, they must pay for the buildings they occupy. In many states, charter enrollment is capped and only school districts—which generally oppose charter schools—are allowed to approve charter applications.

The Obama Administration has said it will withhold discretionary federal education dollars from states that block the creation and growth of charter schools. Let’s hope it follows through. We’d be hard pressed to name a more successful education reform in recent decades.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A26

The Ford Foundation finds a needy cause: teachers unions.

Nov 17, 2009

The Wall Street Journal, page A24 -  link to original article

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574527641778464958.html?mod=article-outset-box

We hate to say it, but don’t be misled by headlines. The biggest headline in education circles last week was that the Ford Foundation is making a whopping $100 million grant “to transform secondary education in the nation’s most disadvantaged schools.”

Our eyes raced to see which piece of the vibrant school-reform movement Ford was going to support. Would it be America’s 4,600 charters schools, many outperforming their traditional school peers and some even closing the race gap? Maybe it would be Teach for America, busting at the seams and turning down Ivy League applicants by the hundreds. Or, who knows, maybe Ford’s really on the leading edge, and would want to support voucher programs in cities like Washington.

Would you believe the recipients of Ford’s largesse are the teachers unions? Yup. The folks at Ford are giving new meaning to the word “retro.”

Ballyhooing the $100 million, the foundation’s president Luis Ubinas said, “Improving our schools, and giving the most vulnerable young people real educational opportunities, benefits all of us. With this initiative we want to shake up the conversations surrounding school reform and help spur some truly imaginative thinking and partnerships.”

And yet the Ford press release contains not one mention of charter schools, vouchers, merit pay or even Teach for America. Literally speaking, this really does shake up, not to say shock, “the conversations surrounding school reform.”

Ford’s formula for reform involves more money, less accountability and a bigger role for the unions. “Many state finance systems fail to allocate enough resources to provide quality schooling for all students,” Ford’s daring analysts write. And, “standardized tests are a blunt and inadequate tool by which to gauge student learning and school effectiveness.”

But one of the screaming ironies of public education, known to all, is that some of the worst school districts in the country spend the most money on students. Standardized tests may be a “blunt” instrument, but they are also the only way that parents have had of holding bad teachers and terrible students accountable. This is why the unions dislike student testing, as well as teacher pay based on student performance.

One of Ford’s first grants will go to the new American Federation of Teachers Innovation Fund, a “union-led initiative to make grants to AFT affiliates nationwide for innovative efforts established jointly by teachers, administrators, and parents.” Here’s guessing the main such innovation will be more money for everyone regardless of results.

The fact that Ford is supporting the unions—the biggest barrier to school reform in America—is no surprise. The foundation has funded just about every major failed liberal establishment program since the Great Society. Head Start, Job Corps and the Community Development Corporation were launched from Ford templates. In the 1970s, the foundation supported forced sterilization programs to curb overpopulation in the third world. A few years ago it gave money to an Arab NGO that wanted to wipe Israel off the map. It also largely paid for the University of Michigan’s defense of affirmative action at the Supreme Court.

Last Wednesday, by contrast, the Gates Foundation offered $10 million to help the wildly successful KIPP charter schools expand in Houston. One might have hoped that Ford’s administrators would have looked at some of the real innovation being done by philanthropies such as Gates or the Walton Foundation and seen how truly far behind the times Ford’s ideas are.

Oh, well, another $100 million for education down the drain.

——————————————

Letters to Editor – Dec 3, 2009

Ford Foundation Has Right Idea in Helping Education

It is unfortunate that too many people involved with education reform reinforce outdated ideas and create other barriers to real change (“The Edsel of Education Reform,” Review & Outlook, Nov. 17). However, the notion that we can move forward and improve education in this country without addressing and grappling with the complex issues of teacher unions in a way that ultimately supports the primacy of educators is both shortsighted and counterproductive.

It is essential that we untangle the terrible knot that both management and labor have created when it comes to defining teacher roles. Today’s schools need to improve, and real improvement evolves from redefining the roles and responsibilities of educators in a way that supports both teachers and learners. We must give teachers the resources necessary to provide all students with high-quality educational experiences and we must hold educators accountable in fair, rigorous and meaningful ways.

The Ford Foundation seems to recognize this, and to simply cast its strategy as another stage in some supposedly backward-thinking program ignores both its regard for diligence and the priority it has consistently placed on innovation across all of their grant-making. If anything, the foundation deserves credit for taking another stab at undoing a difficult knot that the status quo has long kept tangled.

Nicholas C. Donohue

President and CEO

Nellie Mae Education Foundation

Quincy, Mass.

The Ford Foundation is pumping $100 million into the teachers unions—hoping for a miracle. Pouring more money into an inferior system will continue to result in the same disastrous outcome; that’s what happened to the U.S. auto industry and that is precisely what will happen in the U.S. education system.

Andre George

Paradise Valley, Ariz.

It may be true that the Ford Foundation is testing unknown reforms, but that is the perfect role for a foundation: private funds seeding innovation that can then be taken up in the public sector. Head Start is a prime example of such success. Despite the implication in the editorial, the research on the interventions lauded by the Journal is inconclusive, for any study citing benefits of charter schools you can find another documenting their shortcomings. These and other similar initiatives may appeal to an audience with a propensity towards competition and market-based solutions, but it is disingenuous to regard them as the only real reform.

Lori Bezahler

President

Edward W. Hazen Foundation

New York

The Ford Foundation’s $100 million gift to the teachers unions to “transform secondary education in the nation’s most disadvantaged schools” is more of a political donation than an educational one.

As chairman of the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama oversaw the dispersal of $110 million, all supposedly to help the kids in Chicago public schools. William Ayers co-founded the Challenge. Together they burned through the $110 million over a five-year period. Not surprisingly there was little improvement in student achievement.

Steve Tanberg

Denver

By JENNIFER MEDINA

Published: November 25, 2009

The New York Times – link to original

WASHINGTON — Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Wednesday that New York City public schools would immediately begin to use student test scores as a factor in deciding which teachers earn tenure, a proposal that has been bitterly opposed by the teachers’ union and criticized as putting too much weight on standardized exams.

The city already uses test scores in evaluating the system: to determine teacher and principal bonus pay, to assign the A through F letter grades that schools receive, and to decide which schools are shut down for poor performance. The mayor is now putting even more weight behind those scores by using them to decide which teachers should stay and which should go.

In a speech in Washington on Wednesday, alongside the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, the mayor also called on the State Legislature to make a number of changes, some of them also anathema to the unions, that would help New York State compete for hundreds of millions of dollars in the so-called Race to the Top federal grants. The program will distribute $4.35 billion in stimulus financing to states for innovative education programs.

The speech suggested that the mayor may use his third term to take on the United Federation of Teachers, which sat out the mayoral election during a period of relative labor peace. The mayor did not mention that he could achieve some of the same changes by negotiating with the union, whose contract expired shortly before the election.

While many of the changes he is seeking could be accomplished at the negotiating table, his speech indicated that he would turn to Albany to take up much of the fight.

The Bloomberg administration contends that it already has the power to use test scores in tenure decisions. But, he said that the Legislature should require all districts in the state to evaluate teachers and principals with “data-driven systems,” one of the factors Mr. Duncan will use in deciding which states will receive Race to the Top grants.

The mayor also said the state should allow teacher layoffs based on performance rather than seniority, as they are now. It is a particularly crucial topic now, because the city may face large budget cuts and potential layoffs.

“The only thing worse than having to lay off teachers would be laying off great teachers instead of failing teachers,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “With a transparent new evaluation system, principals would have the ability to make layoffs based on merit — but only if the State Legislature gives us the authority to do it.”

Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, suggested that the mayor would not find satisfaction in Albany. “These are all contractual issues that should be dealt with at the bargaining table,” he said.

The teachers’ union has fought the use of test scores in tenure decisions, and last year successfully lobbied the Legislature to ban it for teachers hired after July 1, 2008. That law is to expire next year.

The city contends that it has the power to use scores for the next batch of teachers up for tenure — those hired in 2007 — and if the Legislature does not renew its law, the city could do so for all teachers hired thereafter. Teachers generally receive tenure after three years; 93 percent of teachers up for tenure in the last school year received it.

Mr. Bloomberg said that banning the use of student achievement in tenure decisions is “like saying to hospitals, ‘You can evaluate heart surgeons on any criteria you want — just not patient survival rates.’ ”

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the city’s teacher union, said he was “very, very disappointed” in the tone of the mayor’s speech.

He did not rule out filing a lawsuit once the details of the mayor’s plan have been fleshed out.

He said that using the test scores was a poor way to measure teachers, citing criticism that the tests have become too easy, with so many students showing large improvement that they have lost their meaning as gauges of learning.

“How do we constructively fix that instead of saying let’s play political agenda and propaganda?” Mr. Mulgrew asked.

Perhaps anticipating such criticism, Mr. Bloomberg also urged the state on Wednesday to adopt national standards and make the test more difficult.

Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, called the issue of state tests the “Achilles’ heel of the accountability movement.”

“When you ask any teacher, even a good one, they tend to be pretty leery of being held accountable on these tests,” Ms. Walsh said. “These tests aren’t linked to the actual curriculum, and they have to be.”

But, she said, they have “validity for making decisions at the extreme end: Teachers who are really talented tend to be in the top and teachers who are poor tend to be in the bottom year after year.”

Teachers interviewed on Wednesday about the plan were universal in their condemnation. “It’s ridiculous,” said Kanayo Al-Broderick, a third-grade teacher at Public School 56 in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, who is in her 22nd year of teaching. “It just means they did well on this test. Does it show we’ve built them to be lifelong readers, to love reading? That’s what all teachers want.”

Education officials said they had no details on just how scores would be used for tenure decisions. Many teachers have no scores to go by: Only children in grades three through eight take the annual English and math state standardized tests, and high school students take Regents exams only in certain subjects.

The mayor also called on legislators to make it easier to fire bad teachers and teachers whose jobs have been cut but who are guaranteed their salaries even if they cannot find a new job in the system. The city is now paying more than $100 million for these so-called reserve teachers, many of whom lost their positions because their schools were closed for poor performance. Mr. Bloomberg said that the state should place a one-year limit of teachers in the reserve pool, something he could also press for in the contract.

In a move almost certain to increase that pool of teachers, the mayor also said that his goal was to shut down the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools. So far, the Bloomberg administration has shut down 91 schools across the city.

Legislators in Albany are preoccupied with cutting the state budget, and Mr. Bloomberg appears to be trying to convince them that changes in state education law could bring much-needed millions of dollars to the state.

“We’re committed to exploring any avenues to bring in increased federal funding to the state,” said Austin Shafran, a spokesman for Senate Democrats.

Many states have made significant changes to state law to improve their chances at receiving Race to the Top money, but the Legislature in New York has not made any considerable effort to do the same.

Mr. Duncan, who sat just feet away from the mayor but remained silent on most of his proposals, said that he supported the idea of tying student data to teacher evaluations but he stopped short of endorsing the administration’s plan.

“Everyone agrees the current system is broken,” he said. “We have to talk about what makes sense.”

Karen Zraick contributed reporting.

Will New York City’s public school administrators pander to the teachers’ union?

by Emily Esfahani Smith

11/12/2009

Weekly Standard – link to original

At the end of last month, the New York City teachers’ contract expired, opening the door to a series of negotiations between the teachers’ union and the city’s department of education, led by chancellor Joel Klein. But more than a week into negotiations over the new contract, the talks are ominously quiet.

Though Klein has talked tough on the unions, whether he will actually get concessions on issues like tenure, merit-based pay, and what’s known as the “absent teacher reserve” pool will soon be determined. That last point, in particular, reached a boiling point this past summer when the Department of Education instituted a hiring freeze that excluded talented new hires from getting teaching jobs–showing how necessary it is for the new contract to handle the ATR in a satisfactory way.

The ATR, or “absent teacher reserve,” excess pool is a pool of teachers that were let go by their schools’ principals. At its peaked, it numbered 3,000 this past summer. Though these teachers were let go, they still received their salaries and benefits thanks to the 2006 union contract.

One measure that Klein wants to see implemented in the new contract is limits on the amount of time a teacher can spend in the excess pool. After a nine month or so period, ideally, the teacher will no longer be on the city’s payroll. Today, they could stay in the excess pool until Armageddon. Some teachers even get tenure while they’re in the excess pool.

If each teacher received only the equivalent of a first-year teaching salary, 45,530 dollars, the Department of Education was paying at least $136,590,000 to maintain the excess pool–a significant sunk cost. As of September, about 1,400 teachers were still sitting jobless waiting to receive their paychecks.

“Excessed” teachers were either let go because their schools were downsizing or simply shut down, or because the principals were looking for ways to cut their budget. “Even with federal stimulus funds, we had a 400 million dollar gap between expenses and revenue,” said Ann Forte, spokeswoman for the New York’s department of education. The result? “Schools budgets were trimmed 3.8% on average.”

The upshot of the budget cuts is that most schools in New York City experienced a hiring freeze at the beginning of this school year, or what Teach for America’s Jemina Bernard delicately called, “restrictions on hiring.” For the most part, schools could hire internally, from teachers already on the Department of Education’s payroll–meaning that in many cases, principals must hire from the excess pool, passing over the very talented recruits of Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows.

But Klein has repeatedly said that he wants fresh blood entering the school system. Teach for America, which usually places 550 teacher recruits in public schools by the first day of school, only took on 320 this year, anticipating the Department of Education’s budget cuts, caused provisions of the 2006 contract. Still, Bernard was able to place many of her recruits in schools in large part because of some “exceptions” to the hiring freeze.

For instance, charter schools were not affected by the hiring freeze, nor were new schools less than three years old. Also, in the sciences–except for biology–and in special education, principals could continue to hire from external sources, since not enough “excessed” teachers are qualified to teach in those two areas. The Department of Education, for instance, hired only 1,700 new teachers this year–compared to last year’s 5,600–and 1,200 of those new hires were in special education and the sciences.

Despite these welcomed exceptions to the hiring freeze, the ATR still is a cause of concern. Teachers in the ATR are “excessed” based on seniority, meaning that least senior teachers are the ones principals must let go first. The highly mobile teachers market ensures that principals who need to fill vacancies will quickly snap up good teachers in the excess pool. One victory of the 2006 contract was abolition of the “seniority transfer,” which ensured that senior teachers could walk into a school and get a job. Today, thanks to the city’s education chancellor Joel Klein, that same contract allows principals to choose the teachers coming into their schools.

Now that the principals have a greater say in the hiring process, they avoid, at all costs, hiring teachers that have been in the excess pool for over nine months–and some have been in the pool for three years. Those teachers who can’t find new placements tend to either have a bad record, present themselves poorly in interviews, or simply do not want to work, since they receive a paycheck in any case. So though teachers are never put in the excess pool for incompetence, they remain there because they are unwanted.

There has been whispers in New York City that contract currently being negotiated will pander to the union agenda, despite Klein’s desire for reform. But if Klein is serious about education reform, he will at least limit the amount of time teachers can sit in the reserve pool–if not abolish it altogether.

Emily Esfahani Smith, a Collegiate Network fellow, is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Protesting parents ignored by the media.

Wall Street Journal – Sept 10, 2009 -  link to original

President Obama’s speech to students this week got plenty of attention, and many conservatives looked foolish by fretting about “indoctrination.” They would have done far more good joining those who protested on Tuesday against the President’s decision to shut down a school voucher program for 1,700 low-income kids in Washington, D.C.

“It’s fundamentally wrong for this Administration not to listen to the voices of citizens in this city,” said Kevin Chavous, the former D.C. Council member who organized the protest of parents and kids ignored by most media. Mr. Chavous, a Democrat, is upset that the White House and Democrats in Congress have conspired to shut down the program even though the government’s own evaluation demonstrates improved test scores.

The nationwide black/white achievement gap has grown in recent years, and it’s significantly wider than it was two decades ago. Yet the Obama Administration, in deference to teachers unions that oppose school choice, is shuttering a voucher program that is narrowing the racial learning gap.

“The D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far,” writes the Education Department’s chief evaluator Patrick Wolf in the current issue of Education Next. “On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.”

Democrats had pledged that if the D.C. Council supported the voucher program, they’d revisit it. “The government of Washington, D.C., should decide whether they want [the voucher program] in their school district,” declared Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, who sponsored the provision to kill the program. Well, a majority of the D.C. Council has since sent lawmakers a letter expressing support. Yet Democrats are still preventing Congress from living up to its end of the deal and voting to restore funding. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama sends his own daughters to the best private school in the District.

BY DAN LIPS

WWW.HERITAGE.ORG

 

The Miami Herald – link to original – Sept 10, 2009

A new school year is under way, but we already can grade the condition of American education. Let’s just say no “honor student” bumper stickers will be necessary.

The typical child entering first grade this year can expect taxpayers to spend more than $100,000 on his or her education through high school. (The Department of Education reports the average annual per-pupil expenditure in U.S. public schools is now more than $10,000.) But the data show that, all too often, our six-figure investment in every child’s future doesn’t guarantee a quality education.

A recent national test of eighth-grade students found that fewer than one in three were proficient in reading. The Department of Education reports that at least a quarter of all students fail to earn a high-school diploma. In many of our nation’s largest cities, more than half of all students drop out before graduation.

Widespread failure in our schools imposes serious costs — for students and society.

Consider how valuable having a high-school diploma is. If parents want to give their kids an extra reason to do their homework, here are a few handy facts.

Diploma improves lives

Statistics show that a person who graduates from high school has better odds of living a longer and more productive life. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that a high-school graduate can expect to earn at least $200,000 more over the course of his lifetime than a dropout. An analysis published by the Teachers College of Columbia University found that the average life expectancy for high-school graduates is about nine years longer than it is for dropouts.

Of course, it also matters that students actually learn while they’re in school. McKinsey and Co. estimates that our failure to ensure that all children receive a quality education has created what amounts to a permanent national recession — reducing our national economic output by $400 billion to $670 billion annually, or between 3 percent and 4 percent of GDP.

Moreover, since uneducated adults are more likely to become dependent on federal and state services, pervasive failure in American classrooms adds to our tax burden and ballooning government deficits.

The bottom line is that our nation’s education system is in a state of crisis — and everyone has a stake in seeing that it is fixed.

Tragically, we’ve known about this problem for decades. And for the most part, our elected leaders, collectively, have done little to solve it.

Special-interest groups that benefit from the status quo — led by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union — have succeeded in blocking most of the aggressive reforms so desperately needed to improve the quality of our schools.

Why are the special-interest groups so successful? Because their livelihoods are on the line. They recognize that they’re fighting for control of a $600 billion per year enterprise. And they’re willing to do whatever it takes — including hiring countless lobbyists and spending untold millions to win elections across the country — to see that their interests are protected.

Can the same be said of parents, students and taxpayers — everyone who should be concerned about the quality of our nation’s schools?

Have we done all that we can to convince our leaders and neighbors of the urgency of the education crisis and the need to put children’s futures ahead of the special interests?

You know the answers to these questions.

The simple truth is, we are responsible for the crisis in American education. We have let it happen. And millions of children will continue to pass through our nation’s schools without reaching their potential so long as we, as a nation, continue to do nothing.

Get informed

As kids go back to school, here’s some homework for adults for the coming school year. Become informed and make your voice heard in debates about education.

Learn about what we’re spending on our public schools and what we’re seeing in terms of student performance. Follow what is happening in the state legislature and on the local school board.

Write a letter to the editor and make your opinions known. Challenge your elected representatives and demand that they put the interests of kids’ ahead of the special interest groups.

It will take hard work. But if enough people get involved and demand serious reform, we can fix the chronic problems that plague our nation’s public schools.

The future of millions of children — indeed, of the nation itself — depends on it.

Dan Lips is a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation.

(C)2009 The Heritage Foundation

 

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10 years later, Florida’s FCAT, school grade reforms get mixed grades

A confluence of factors favors school choice—for now.

 By MATTHEW TULLY

Indianapolis

Wall Street Journal – link to orginal

SEPTEMBER 4, 2009

The classrooms were full and bustling with activity at Valley Mills Elementary School on the city’s southwest side one recent rain-soaked morning. Children smiled and raised their hands, eager to answer questions, and to tell me how happy they were to be in school on a summer day. This was not your father’s summer school—punitive and mandatory—but a fresh approach to bridging the achievement gap.

Education reform has long been a popular buzz phrase. But too often it’s proven to be a hollow call as the education establishment kills off common sense reforms even while we watch districts struggle with failing schools and low graduation rates. Last year, for example, the district that serves the core of Indianapolis had a heartbreakingly low graduation rate of 47% and half of the state of Indiana’s schools failed to meet federal improvement standards in English or math.

But now, as the new school year begins, a confluence of events is making Indianapolis a test case for real reform. Reformers here have dared to introduce a modicum of school choice through charters and have tried to focus the system on the quality of instruction (not just dollars spent) through merit pay. Here, reformers are receiving a bipartisan assist from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, state and local policy leaders, and from a nonprofit organization that’s filling the city with education entrepreneurs. The stars are aligned for reform, which means that if it doesn’t happen now, and it doesn’t happen here, it’s hard to image how it could happen.

Take Valley Mills Elementary. I visited the school to see an education entrepreneur in action. Three years ago, David Harris founded a nonprofit called The Mind Trust with former Democratic Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson with the goal of luring new education ideas to the city. One of their successes was on display at Valley Mills this summer. It’s called Summer Advantage USA—a five-week pilot program funded by a state grant that selects teachers and provides lively instruction to students in low-income areas. The hope is to help these kids advance by keeping them focused on their studies through the summer.

Summer Advantage is run by Harvard and Yale graduate Earl Martin Phalen. He told me his goal is to bridge the achievement gap between students of different socioeconomic groups by reversing an education tradition that “leaves three months on the table each year.” Low-income kids often fall further behind over the summer because their parents can’t afford to enroll them in summer programs. Thanks to Mr. Phalen, the students at Valley Mills didn’t suffer that fate this summer.

Other steps are being taken to increase school performance across the city. In recent years, the mayor’s office has sponsored 18 new charter schools, a trend started by Mr. Peterson and carried on by current Republican Mayor Gregory Ballard. The Mind Trust has brought several national education groups to the city, such as Teach for America. And the state’s new superintendent of public instruction, Tony Bennett, is trying to break habits that have long guided school policy.

Mr. Bennett recently unveiled a plan to pay bonuses to top teachers willing to work at the city’s worst schools, and to tie their pay to student performance in the future. He also wants to require teachers to have more expertise in their subject areas than they are required to have now.

“Our intent is to be the leader on education reform,” Mr. Bennett said in launching his initiatives earlier this year. “The question is not, how much can we do? It is, how do we become the leader?”

But change comes hard. Mr. Bennett has come under fire from local superintendents, unions and education-school leaders who fear, among other things, that merit pay will unravel a seniority system that rewards longevity not quality of instruction. Meanwhile, a group of state legislative Democrats, cajoled into action by urban school leaders, earlier this year tried to pass a bill to curtail the future growth of charter schools in the state.

It was a tough fight that ended in a close victory for reformers and that ultimately highlighted the increasing strength of the reform movement. The measure passed both houses of the legislature but was shelved in late-session negotiations after Mr. Duncan warned that he will be handing out about $5 billion this year to states that show “a deep-seated commitment to education reform,” which he partly defines as an embrace of charters.

The fight also underscored the bipartisan push for reform. Mr. Bennett and Gov. Mitch Daniels, both Republicans, routinely praised the Obama administration for challenging teachers unions on merit pay and charters, and for helping shape the debate in Indiana.

And that debate is at a full simmer at Indianapolis Public Schools, which serve the core of the city. Superintendent Eugene White has begun lobbying against collective bargaining policies that prevent merit pay for teachers and make it difficult to fire older, poorly performing teachers. Earlier this year several of the district’s “Teacher of the Year” nominees found themselves on a list of teachers who could be laid off if school budgets are cut. The reason top-notch teachers made the list is that it is based strictly on seniority.

“If you are truly going to be fair to urban students you have to provide them with the best teachers they can have,” Mr. White told me recently. “You shouldn’t have a mandate that says you are untouchable because you have been here longer.”

While Indianapolis teachers union President Ann Wilkins promises to fight any attack on seniority rules, Mr. Bennett agreed with Mr. White and told me, “The rules have to be challenged.” He isn’t alone in that belief. The New Teacher Project, a New York-based nonprofit that has studied Indianapolis Public Schools, recently surveyed district officials and found that 74% of teachers believe the district should consider more than seniority on key staffing decisions.

“That’s big stuff,” Daniel Weisberg, one the authors of The New Teacher Project’s study, told me. It’s also encouraging because it suggests support for education reform stretches from the White House to the statehouse to many of the classrooms in this city. That gives Indianapolis a rare moment to build a broad coalition for reform and enact substantial changes. But, Mr. Weisberg warned, the “window of opportunity is a small one.” If reformers fail to capitalize on the moment, it will be lost. “Now is the time to think big,” he said. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Mr. Tully is the political columnist for the Indianapolis Star.

Lawmakers threaten D.C. scholarships despite evidence of benefits – link to original article.  An unabridged version of this article is available here.

By Patrick J. Wolf   08/20/2009

Educationnext

FALL 2009 / VOL. 9, NO. 4

School choice supporters, including hundreds of private school students in crisp uniforms, filled Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza last May to protest a congressional decision to eliminate the city’s federally funded school voucher program after the next school year. That afternoon, President Obama announced a compromise proposal to grandfather the more than 1,700 students currently in the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, funding their vouchers through high school graduation, but denying entry to additional children. Both program supporters and opponents cite evidence from an ongoing congressionally mandated Institute of Education Sciences (IES) evaluation of the program, for which I am principal investigator, to buttress their positions, rendering the evaluation a Rorschach test for one’s ideological position on this fiercely debated issue.

School vouchers provide funds to parents to enable them to enroll their children in private schools and, as a result, are one of the most controversial education reforms in the United States. Among the many points of contention is whether voucher programs in fact improve student achievement. Most evaluations of such programs have found at least some positive achievement effects, but not always for all types of participants and not always in both reading and math. This pattern of results has so far failed to generate a scholarly consensus regarding the beneficial effects of school vouchers on student achievement. The policy and academic communities seek more definitive guidance.

The IES released the third-year impact evaluation of the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in April 2009. The results showed that students who participated in the program performed at significantly higher levels in reading than the students in an experimental control group. Here are the study findings and my own interpretation of what they mean.

 

Opportunity Scholarships

Currently, 13 directly funded voucher programs operate in four U.S. cities and six states, serving approximately 65,000 students. Another seven programs indirectly fund private K—12 scholarship organizations through government tax credits to individuals or corporations. About 100,000 students receive school vouchers funded through tax credits. All of the directly funded voucher programs are targeted to students with some educational disadvantage, such as low family income, disability, or status as a foster child.

Nineteen of the 20 school voucher programs in the U.S. are funded by state and local governments. The OSP is the only federal voucher initiative. Established in 2004 as part of compromise legislation that also included new spending on charter and traditional public schools in the District of Columbia, the OSP is a means-tested program. Initial eligibility is limited to K—12 students in D.C. with family incomes at or below 185 percent of the poverty line. Congress has appropriated $14 million annually to the program, enough to support about 1,700 students at the maximum voucher amount of $7,500. The voucher covers most or all of the costs of tuition, transportation, and educational fees at any of the 66 D.C. private schools that have participated in the program. By the spring of 2008, a total of 5,331 eligible students had applied for the limited number of Opportunity Scholarships. Recipients are selected by lottery, with priority given to students applying to the program from public schools deemed in need of improvement (SINI) under No Child Left Behind. Scholars and policymakers have since questioned the extent to which SINI designations accurately signal school quality because they are based on levels of achievement instead of the more informative measure of achievement gains over time.

The third-year impact evaluation tracked the experiences of two cohorts of students. All of the students were attending public schools or were rising kindergartners at the time of application to the program. Cohort 1 consisted of 492 students entering grades 6—12 in 2004. Cohort 2 consisted of 1,816 students entering grades K—12 in 2005. The 2,308 students in the study make it the largest school voucher evaluation in the U.S. to employ the “gold standard” method of random assignment.

Voucher Effects

Researchers over the past decade have focused on evaluating voucher programs using experimental research designs called randomized control trials (RCTs). Such experimental designs are widely used to evaluate the efficacy of medical drugs prior to making such treatments available to the public. With an RCT design, a group of students who all qualify for a voucher program and whose parents are equally motivated to exercise private school choice, participate in a lottery. The students who win the lottery become the “treatment” group. The students who lose the lottery become the “control” group. Since only a voucher offer and mere chance distinguish the treatment students from their control group counterparts, any signifigant difference in student outcomes for the treatment students can be attributed to the program. Although not all students offered a voucher will use it to enroll in a private school, the data from an RCT can also be used to generate a separate estimate of the effect of voucher use (see sidebar, page 50).

Using an RCT research design, the ongoing IES evaluation found no impacts on student math performance but a statistically significant positive impact of the scholarship program on student reading performance, as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT 9). The estimated impact of using a scholarship to attend a private school for any length of time during the three-year evaluation period was a gain of 5.3 scale points in reading. That estimate provides the impact on all those who ever attended a private school, whether for one month, three years, or any length of time in between (see Figure 1). Consequently, the estimate should be interpreted as a lower-bound estimate of the three-year impact of attending a private school, because many students who used a scholarship during the three-year period did not remain in private school throughout the entire period. The data indicate that members of the treatment group who were attending private schools in the third year of the evaluation gained an average of 7.1 scale score points in reading from the program.

 

What do these gains mean for students? They mean that the students in the control group would need to remain in school an extra 3.7 months on average to catch up to the level of reading achievement attained by those who used the scholarship opportunity to attend a private school for any period of time. The catch-up time would have been around 5 months for those in the control group as compared to those who were attending a private school in the third year of the evaluation.

Over time, in my opinion, the effects of the program show a trend toward larger reading gains cumulating for students. Especially when one considers that students who used their scholarship in year 1 needed to adjust to a new and different school environment, the reading impacts of using a scholarship of 1.4 scale score points (not significant) in year 1, 4.0 scale score points (not significant) in year 2, and 5.3 scale score points (significant) in year 3 suggest that students are steadily gaining in reading performance relative to their peers in the control group the longer they make use of the scholarship. No trend in program impacts is evident in math.

What explains the fact that positive impacts have been observed as a result of the OSP in reading but not in math? Paul Peterson and Elena Llaudet of Harvard University, in a nonexperimental evaluation of the effects of school sector on student achievement, suggest that private schools may boost reading scores more than math scores for a number of reasons, including a greater content emphasis on reading, the use of phonics instead of whole-language instruction, and the greater availability of well-trained education content specialists in reading than in math. Any or all of these explanations for a voucher advantage in reading but not in math are plausible and could be behind the pattern of results observed for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships. The experimental design of the D.C. evaluation, while a methodological strength in many ways, makes it difficult to connect the context of students’ educational experiences with specific outcomes in any reliable way. As a result, one can only speculate as to why voucher gains are clear in reading but not observed in math.

 

Student Characteristics

The OSP serves a highly disadvantaged group of D.C. students. Descriptive information from the first two annual reports indicates that more than 90 percent of students are African American and 9 percent are Hispanic. Their family incomes averaged less than $20,000 in the year in which they applied for the scholarship.

Overall, participating students were performing well below national norms in reading and math when they applied to the program. For example, the Cohort 1 students had initial reading scores on the SAT-9 that averaged below the 24th National Percentile Rank, meaning that 75 percent of students in their respective grades nationally were performing higher than Chart 1 in reading. In my view, these descriptive data show how means tests and other provisions to target school voucher programs to disadvantaged students serve to minimize the threat of cream-skimming. The OSP reached a population of highly disadvantaged students because it was designed by policymakers to do so.

Did Only Some Students Benefit?

Several commentators have sought to minimize the positive findings of the OSP evaluation by suggesting that only certain subgroups of participants benefited from the program. Martin Carnoy states that “the treated students in Cohort 1 were concentrated in middle schools and the effect on their reading score was significantly higher than for treated students in Cohort 2.” Henry Levin likewise asserts that “the evaluators found that receiving a voucher resulted in no advantage in math or reading test scores for either [low achievers or students from SINI schools].”

The actual results of the evaluation provide no scientific basis for claims that some subgroups of students benefited more in reading from the voucher program than other subgroups. The impact of the program on the reading achievement of Cohort 1 students did not differ by a statistically significant amount from the impact of the program on the reading achievement of Cohort 2 students, Carnoy’s claim notwithstanding. Nor did students with low initial levels of achievement and applicants from SINI schools experience significantly different reading gains from the program than high achievers and non-SINI applicants. The mere fact that statistically significant impacts were observed for a particular subgroup does not mean that impacts for that group are significantly different from those not in the subgroup. For example, Group A and Group B may have experienced roughly similar impacts, but the impact for Group A might have been just large enough for it to be significantly different from zero (or no impact at all), while Group B’s quite similar scores fell just below that threshold.

From a scientific standpoint, three conclusions are valid about the achievement results in reading from the year 3 impact evaluation of the OSP:

The program improved the reading achievement of the treatment group students overall.

Overall reading gains from the program were not significantly different across the various subgroups examined.

Three distinct subgroups of students—those who were not from SINI schools, students scheduled to enter grades K-8 in the fall after application to the program, and students in the higher two-thirds of the performance distribution (whose average reading test scores at baseline were at the 37th percentile nationally)—experienced statistically significant reading impacts from the program when their performance was examined separately. Female students and students in Cohort 1 saw reading gains that were statistically significant with reservations due to the possibility of obtaining false positive results when making comparisons across numerous subgroups.

Why examine and report achievement impacts at the subgroup level, if the evidence indicates only an overall reading gain for the entire sample? The reasons are that Congress mandated an analysis of subgroup impacts, at least for SINI and non-SINI students, and because analyses at the subgroup level might have yielded more conclusive information about disproportionate impacts for certain types of students.

Expanding Choice

The OSP facilitates the enrollment of low-income D.C. students in private schools of their parents’ choosing. It does not guarantee enrollment in a private school, but the $7,500 voucher should make such enrollments relatively common among the students who won the scholarship lottery. The eligible students who lost the scholarship lottery and were assigned to the control group still might attend a private school but they would have to do so by drawing on resources outside of the OSP. At the same time, students in both groups have access to a large number of public charter schools.

The implication is that, for this evaluation of the OSP, winning the lottery does not necessarily mean private schooling, and losing the lottery does not necessarily mean education in a traditional public school. Members of both groups attended all three types of schools—private, public charter, and traditional public—in year 3 of the voucher experiment, although the proportions that attended each type differed markedly based on whether or not they won the scholarship lottery (see Figure 2). In total, about 81 percent of parents placed their child in a private or public school of choice three years after winning the scholarship lottery, as did 46 percent of those who lost the lottery. The desire for an alternative to a neighborhood public school was strong for the families who applied to the OSP in 2004 and 2005.

These enrollment patterns highlight the fact that the effects of voucher use reported above do not amount to a comparison between “school choice” and “no school choice.” Rather, voucher users are exercising private school choice, while control group members are exercising a small amount of private school choice and a substantial amount of public school choice. The positive impacts on reading achievement observed for voucher users therefore reflect the incremental effect of adding private school choice through the OSP to the existing schooling options for low-income D.C. families.

Parent Satisfaction

Another key measure of school reform initiatives is the perception among parents, who see firsthand the effects of changes in their child’s educational environment. Whenever school choice researchers have asked parents about their satisfaction with schools, those who have been given the chance to select their child’s school have reported much higher levels of satisfaction. The OSP study findings fit this pattern. The proportion of parents who assigned a high grade of A or B to their child’s school was 11 percentile points higher if they were offered a voucher, 12 percentile points higher if their child actually used a scholarship, and 21 points higher if their child was attending a private school in year 3, regardless of whether they were in the treatment group. Parents whose children used an Opportunity Scholarship also expressed greater confidence in their children’s safety in school than parents in the control group.

Additional evidence of parental satisfaction with the OSP comes from the series of focus groups conducted independently of the congressionally mandated evaluation. One parent emphasized the expanded freedom inherent in school choice:

“[The OSP] gives me the choice to, freedom to attend other schools than D.C. public schools….I just didn’t feel that I wanted to put him in D.C. public school and I had the opportunity to take one of the scholarships, so, therefore, I can afford it and I’m glad that I did do that.” (Cohort 1 Elementary School Parent, Spring 2008)

Another parent with two children in the OSP may have hinted at a reason achievement impacts were observed specifically in reading:

“They really excel at this program, `cause I know for a fact they would never have received this kind of education at a public school….I listen to them when they talk, and what they are saying, and they articulate better than I do, and I know it’s because of the school, and I like that about them, and I’m proud of them.” (Cohort 1 Elementary School Parent, Spring 2008)

These parents of OSP students clearly see their families as having benefited from this program.

Previous Voucher Research

The IES evaluation of the DC OSP adds to a growing body of research on means-tested school voucher programs in urban districts across the nation. Experimental evaluations of the achievement impacts of publicly funded voucher and privately funded K—12 scholarship programs have been conducted in Milwaukee, New York City, the District of Columbia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dayton, Ohio. Different research teams analyzed the data from New York City (three different teams), Milwaukee (two teams), and Charlotte (two teams). The four studies of Milwaukee’s and Charlotte’s programs reported statistically significant achievement gains overall for the members of the treatment group. The individual studies of the privately funded K—12 scholarship programs in the District of Columbia and Dayton reported overall achievement gains only for the large subgroup of African American students in the program. The three different evaluators of the New York City privately funded scholarship program were split in their assessment of achievement impacts, as two research teams reported no overall test-score effects, but did report achievement gains for African Americans; the third team claimed there were no statistically significant test-score impacts overall or for any subgroup of participants.

The specific patterns of achievement impacts vary across these studies, with some gains emerging quickly, but others, like those in the OSP evaluation, taking at least three years to reach a standard level of statistical significance. Earlier experimental evaluations of voucher programs were somewhat more likely to report achievement gains from the programs in math than in reading—the opposite of what was observed for the OSP. Despite these differences, the bulk of the available, high-quality evidence on school voucher programs suggests that they do yield positive achievement effects for participating students.

Conclusions

School voucher initiatives such as the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program will remain politically controversial in spite of rigorous evaluations such as this one, showing that parents and students benefited in some ways from the program. Critics will continue to point to the fact that no impacts of the program have been observed in math, or that applicants from SINI schools, who were a service priority, have not demonstrated statistically significant achievement gains at the subgroup level, as reasons to characterize these findings as disappointing. Certainly the results would have been even more encouraging if the high-priority SINI students had shown significant reading gains as a distinct subgroup.Still, in my opinion, the bottom line is that the OSP lottery paid off for those students who won it. On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.

The achievement results from the D.C. voucher evaluation are also striking when compared to the results from other experimental evaluations of education policies. The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) at the IES has sponsored and overseen 11 studies that are RCTs, including the OSP evaluation. Only 3 of the 11 education interventions tested, when subjected to such a rigorous evaluation, have demonstrated statistically significant achievement impacts overall in either reading or math. The reading impact of the D.C. voucher program is the largest achievement impact yet reported in an RCT evaluation overseen by the NCEE. A second program was found to increase reading outcomes by about 40 percent less than the reading gain from the DC OSP. The third intervention was reported to have boosted math achievement by less than half the amount of the reading gain from the D.C. voucher program. Of the remaining eight NCEE-sponsored RCTs, six of them found no statistically significant achievement impacts overall and the other two showed a mix of no impacts and actual achievement losses from their programs. Many of these studies are in their early stages and might report more impressive achievement results in the future. Still, the D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far.

The experimental evaluation of the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program is continuing into its fourth and final year of studying the impacts on students and parents. The final evidence collected from the participants may confirm the accumulation of achievement gains in reading and higher levels of parental satisfaction from the program that were evident after three years, or show that those gains have faded. Uncertainty also surrounds the program itself, as the students who gathered on Freedom Plaza in May currently are only guaranteed one final year in their chosen private schools. What will policymakers see as they continue to consider the results of this evaluation? The educational futures of a group of low-income D.C. schoolchildren hinge on the answer.

Patrick J. Wolf is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and principal investigator of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program Impact Evaluation. The opinions expressed in this article are his own.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

Methodology Notes

If one’s purpose is to evaluate the effects of a specific public policy, such as the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), then the comparison of the average outcomes of the treatment and control groups, regardless of what proportion attended which types of school, is most appropriate. A school voucher program cannot force scholarship recipients to use a voucher, nor can it prevent control-group students from attending private schools at their own expense. A voucher program can only offer students scholarships that they subsequently may or may not use. Nevertheless, the mere offer of a scholarship, in and of itself, clearly has no impact on the educational outcomes of students. A scholarship could only change the future of a student if it were actually used.

Fortunately, statistical techniques are available that produce reliable estimates of the average effect of using a voucher compared to not being offered one and the average effect of attending private school in year 3 of the study with or without a voucher compared to not attending private school. All three effect estimates—treatment vs. control, effect of voucher use, and impact of private schooling—are provided in the longer version of this article (see “Summary of the OSP Evaluation” at www.educationnext.org), so that individual readers can view those outcomes that are most relevant to their considerations.

I have presented mainly the impacts of scholarship use in this essay. Those impacts are computed by taking the average difference between the out comes of the entire treatment and control groups—the pure experimental impact—and adjusting for the fact that some treatment students never used an Opportunity Scholarship. Since nonusers could not have been affected by the voucher, the impact of scholarship use can be computed easily by dividing the pure experimental impact by the proportion of treatment students who used their scholarships, effectively rescaling the impact across scholarship users instead of all treatment students including nonusers. I focus here on scholarship usage because that specific measure of program impact is easily understood, is relevant to policymakers, and preserves the control group as the natural representation of what would have happened to the treatment group absent the program, including the fact that some of them would have attended private school on their own.

Useful literature on school vouchers

August 28, 2009

Washington Post - link to original article

PRESIDENT OBAMA reportedly has a hefty reading list while vacationing this week, but we would like to offer two additions, both hot off the presses. One is an article by the education expert who studied the D.C. voucher program; the second is a study on school safety in the city’s public and private schools. Read together, they might cause the president to rethink his administration’s wrong-headed decision to shut down the voucher program to new students.

He should start with Patrick J. Wolf’s article in the new issue of Education Next. Mr. Wolf, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, is the principal investigator of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows low-income children to attend private schools. He was unequivocal in his findings: “The D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far.” Equally adamant was his opinion that vouchers paid off for the students lucky enough to win them: “On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.”

Mr. Obama, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has repeatedly promised to support “what works,” so we figure he should be interested in Mr. Wolf’s findings. Also instructive is a new report by the Heritage Foundation, in conjunction with the Lexington Institute, on violence and criminal activity in D.C. schools. The report pays particular attention to the plight of the 216 students who had planned to attend private school before the administration rescinded their scholarship offers while Congress debates the future of the program. The study looks at the 70 public schools to which these students have now been assigned and finds there were 2,379 crime-related incidents, including 666 violent incidents (one of which was a homicide), for the 2007-08 school year. No wonder many parents cite school safety when explaining why they want choice in where their child goes to school.

Latasha Bennett, for example, lost a nephew to school violence: “I wonder if he would be sitting here today as a success story, if a scholarship had been available for him to attend private school.” Ms. Bennett, as we have reported before, is scrambling to find a school for her daughter after Mr. Duncan decided to withdraw the scholarship that would have allowed her to attend Naylor Road School, where Ms. Bennett’s son is enrolled by virtue of a voucher.

As we’ve said before, vouchers aren’t the answer to Washington’s school troubles; we enthusiastically support public school reform and quality charter schools, too. But vouchers are an answer for some children whose options otherwise are bleak. In Washington, they also are part of a carefully designed social-science experiment that may provide useful evidence for all schools on helping low-income children learn. Why would a Democratic administration and Congress want to cut such an experiment short?