Mississippi on the Thames?

Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.

We certainly have our share of doom and gloom occupying the airwaves.

In education, the latest reason for it is a dismal set of PISA scores.

U.S. scores continue to drop …

… but the global collapse has been even more pronounced, such that relative to other developed countries, our position has actually improved somewhat.

So bad here.

Even worse elsewhere.

Doom compounded by gloom.

Among the few modestly positive stories is the one coming out of England.

England has now risen into the top 10 internationally for the first time, not because its scores have dramatically improved, but largely because it has held its ground amid the broader international plummet.

What makes the results particularly interesting is what has happened next door.

Twenty years ago, England and Scotland were essentially academic peers, with Scotland actually ahead in some subjects. Since then, England has held relatively steady while Scotland and Wales have dropped significantly.

Why?

Some commentators are attributing England’s relative success to its embrace of phonics, explicit instruction and a knowledge-rich curriculum.

The Financial Times makes an explicit comparison to the progress that has been seen in Mississippi, particularly in reading.

Call it a Mississippi on the Thames story, which a few of our friends are well keyed into this week.

Though I find the comparison only partially right because such a description leaves out so much of what has happened in England.

This is a multi-decade and a multi-faceted reform story.

In February, Education Next ran an in-depth piece about the encouraging results England has generated, crediting the progress to a broad array of reforms.

They include – as the FT and others cite – an embrace of what we would call Science of Reading strategies, stronger national standards, better testing, greater data transparency, more rigorous accountability and a sustained push toward explicit, knowledge-rich instruction.

The part of the story EdNext highlights that many others are shortchanging right now?

How since the beginning of the century, England has also carried out one of the most ambitious restructurings of public education governance we have seen anywhere in the world.

It created free schools – the closest English analogue to charter startups – while converting enormous numbers of existing schools to academy status, moving them outside the traditional local-authority system and into independently governed nonprofit trusts.

Some schools converted voluntarily.

Others, particularly chronically underperforming schools, were required to convert or were moved to new sponsors.

The scale is extraordinary.

Today, more than 80% of state-funded secondary schools in England are academies, along with nearly half of primary schools, representing one of the most sweeping transformations of a public education system anywhere in the world.

Research on performance isn’t perfectly uniform, but current performance data show free schools and voluntary converter academies generally performing strongly relative to other schools, while credible research on the original sponsored-academy model has also found meaningful gains following significant changes in governance.

There is no magic legal status.

But there is plenty of evidence suggesting that autonomy and new forms of governance have been an important part of the broader English story.

Which creates an interesting paradox.

In one sense, England has been very anti-Mississippi.

Mississippi has used a strong statewide framework to drive change inside conventionally governed district schools – literacy requirements, assessments, educator support, accountability and clear expectations around reading instruction.

England, meanwhile, devolved enormous amounts of operating authority away from local authorities.

But it did so while simultaneously maintaining a very strong accountability architecture.

Regional Directors within the national Department for Education play something close to an authorizer role. They can issue intervention notices, move academies from one trust to another and, in some cases, terminate funding agreements altogether. Alongside that sits Ofsted, England’s national school inspectorate, which provides another layer of accountability by evaluating not only outcomes but curriculum and instruction, including approaches to early reading.

So England did not choose between autonomy and accountability.

It chose both.

Add it all up, and I would call it not Mississippi on the Thames.

But more like:

Half Mississippi, Half Indy on the Thames.

Because in some ways the comparison to Indianapolis is striking.

Indy has built a public education system that includes independent charter schools, Innovation Network Schools and remaining IPS-run schools.

Different operators.

Different levels of autonomy.

Common standards and assessments.

A citywide choice infrastructure.

And an increasingly substantial body of evidence suggests that the more autonomous parts of the system are performing better.

This past week I ran a regression controlling for demographics showing the relative performance of independent charter schools, Innovation schools and IPS-run schools in Indianapolis.

Admittedly, it is a descriptive demographic-adjusted analysis rather than a causal study. Additional pressure-testing would undoubtedly add nuance.

But to a real degree, the visual speaks for itself, wouldn’t you say, CharterFolk?

Independent charter schools substantially outperform what their demographics would predict.

Innovation schools roughly meet demographic prediction overall while performing considerably better than IPS-run schools after adjustment.

And IPS-run schools are disproportionately concentrated in the bottom quartile.

Does that prove causality?

Of course not.

Neither does England’s experience.

And that is really the point.

No one is ever going to perfectly disentangle how much of England’s relative resilience came from phonics, curriculum, accountability, academies, free schools or the interaction among all of them.

But what England has done is what we in CharterLand would recognize as crafting and continually refining a shared North Star.

Improved instructional focus, greater transparency, firmer accountability, greater school autonomy, and maybe the ingredient that most distinguishes Indianapolis and England:

A commitment to reform that has been sustained since the beginning of the century.

At roughly the same time Tony Blair was pushing education reform in England …

… Bart Peterson, Teresa Lubbers and others were pushing through Indiana’s charter school law and beginning its implementation.

And then others kept the effort going.

Blair’s successors dramatically expanded academies and created free schools after 2010.

In Indianapolis, new leaders picked up the baton too. The Mind Trust called for a fundamental restructuring of IPS in 2011, and Innovation Network Schools later became another major part of the city’s reform architecture.

Different people.

Different moments.

Same willingness to keep pushing.

Which brings me to the final common ingredient.

The courage required to generate change.

In one of my earliest posts here at CharterFolk …

I quoted Tony Blair:

There have grown up powerful interest groups that can stand in the way of substantial and necessary reform. Anyone who has ever tried to reform an education system, for example, knows how tough and bitter a struggle it is. The bureaucracy fights change. The teachers’ unions fight change. The public gets whipped up to defeat change even when it is in the public’s own interest. The nearest I came to losing my job as prime minister was not over policies of war and peace, but over education reforms.

Think about that.

What nearly cost him his job?

Matters of war and peace?

No.

Education reform.

And as Brandon’s conversation with me last year revealed …

… the Indianapolis story has required a similar kind of fortitude – a level of courage that sometimes seems impossible to believe should be necessary when you are simply trying to make things better for kids.

But so it is.

Even today, the fights continue.

Last month, the Indianapolis Education Association came out against the current local funding proposal because of the way resources would be shared with charter schools.

Last week, IPS announced that its directly managed schools and non-charter Innovation schools will leave Enroll Indy, the common enrollment infrastructure the city has spent roughly a decade building.

Meanwhile, England’s relative success is prompting status quo forces to dig in their heels even more deeply to prevent similar reforms from taking root in their parts of the UK.

So, none of this is meant to suggest that we’ve found some pure anti-doom or anti-gloom story in England or Indianapolis.

Results themselves demonstrate how much further we have to go.

England’s story isn’t one of PISA scores soaring. It’s one of holding steady while much of the world declined.

And while Indianapolis’s progress is encouraging, absolute proficiency rates for kids across the city remain unacceptably low.

But we know enough to have a true sense of confidence about how to proceed.

Not pursuing one reform.

But rather, a full package of reforms sustained over time.

At some point, the question stops being whether we know enough.

The question becomes whether we can summon the resolve and courage to keep pushing reforms we have very good reason to believe will work.

Indy on the Thames.

England on the White.

Not perfection achieved.

But encouraging progress we can build upon along every river in the country.

If not every river in the world.