The Wake School Choice Plan (Part 3)

This post continues my exploration of the Wake School Choice Plan (WSCP), a student assignment proposal advanced by the Wake Education Partnership. This third post focuses on whether the WSCP would use our schools efficiently. I tackle this question from three angles: facilities use, transportation cost, and “other.”

Facilities Use

The WSCP makes a strong effort to match the population of its three “areas” to the capacities of their schools. Generally speaking, this sort of approach should promote efficient facilities use, though it is not much different than what we try to do now.

The WSCP also assigns kindergarten students and other “choosers” one at a time. This does differ from the node-at-a-time approach we now use. Further, this approach should permit the WSCP to better use capacity limits to ensure that there are few, if any, crowded schools in 2012. Although the plan would allow this, it does not appear to do it. It appears to favor giving people their choices instead, contemplating school crowding of up to 125%. This level of crowding is extreme by today’s standards. This problem could easily be fixed by restricting crowding to lower levels.

In comparison to our current node-based assignment approach, I think the WSCP will have a harder time using middle schools and high schools efficiently. The difficulty arises from the plan’s “feeder patterns.” Students in a given elementary school will automatically be assigned to a particular middle school. Students in a given middle school will automatically be assigned to a particular high school. Feeding one entire school into another—rather than particular nodes, as we do now—does not provide much flexibility to adjust enrollment at the middle and high school levels.

While the plan specifies which schools are in each of its three “areas,” it does not identify the feeder patterns for each area. This makes it hard to demonstrate the problem convincingly, but there will almost certain be one, particularly at the high school level, where our high schools already operate at 112% of their optimum capacity. This must be watched carefully.

Transportation Cost

Despite the many choices it provides, the WSCP posits significantly lower transportation costs than now exist based on a projected annual reduction in student transport distances of approximately 12.2 million miles. It achieves these projected savings in the following ways: (1) it assumes that students in a choice regime will overwhelmingly attend their nearby schools, and that far more of them will be able to walk; and (2) despite indications that the WSCP would preserve the current systemwide magnet program with transportation, the plan seems to ignore the associated transportation costs.

With respect to the first point, the WSCP’s transportation cost estimates claim to assume something called a Reverse Fibonacci distribution of students. (I don’t think it adheres to the assumption for middle and high schools, but this is not discussed and cannot be demonstrated from the limited data provided.) This distribution posits that 38% of elementary students will attend their closest school (lower than the 53% who do so now), but 77% will attend one of the three closest (much higher than current conditions) and only 3% will attend one of the three farthest options.

The WSCP provides no empirical support for the assumption, which is said to be based on experience. I doubt it’s accurate. To me, it seems likely that an even higher number will select their closest school, because it is closest and because the WSCP strongly incentivizes you to choose it by giving you priorities if you do. After that, however, I think the choices of many will focus on the magnets among the choices or on the schools with the fewest low achieving, or poor, or nonwhite students, whether they should focus on these considerations or not.

As to the second point, there is simply no discussion of systemwide magnet transportation, from which I deduce that its cost has not been factored in. Nor is there any discussion of the cost of providing transportation to grandfathered students, which is likely to be substantial in the short run.

On the plus side, the WSCP transportation analysis may underestimate the efficiencies that could be generated through the above-discussed feeder patterns. These might—if students strongly select their neighborhood schools, and if the feeder patterns can actually be implemented—streamline current transportation patterns even further than the plan anticipates.

On the whole, the WSCP’s transportation cost proof posits savings of over 12 million student miles traveled. This sounds like a lot. But students currently travel 223 million miles, so it really isn’t. It’s about 5% of current miles. And this assumes that the plan’s projections are accurate rather than optimistic.

It was politically necessary to try to show that the WSCP could be implemented without increasing transportation costs. It may even be true. But it is important to keep in mind that whatever the difference in cost between the old assignment plan and the new one, it is unlikely to be material if the new plan works better. Total transportation costs are about 5-7% of our overall and local spending, so any difference between two reasonable plans is likely to be small.

Other Costs

This plan has two other potential costs that are not discussed: the cost of “outreach” and the cost of enhancing underchosen schools. I will not take these up here, because I have no way to estimate the cost of “outreach” designed to induce folks to make good choices, and the cost of enhancing underchosen schools is one we will likely bear in some form or fashion regardless of the assignment mechanism.

Conclusion

If the WSCP did not worry too much about whether folks were actually granted their wishes, and if it did not incorporate guaranteed feeder patterns, it would not be difficult for it to ensure near perfect utilization of every school. Because the WSCP does try to grant wishes, and does incorporate guaranteed feeder patterns, there will be some significant inefficiencies, just as there are now.

The WSCP’s transportation cost estimates depends heavily on the assumptions it makes about where children will choose to attend school. While I am not convinced that transportation costs will be lower under the WSCP, I doubt they will be materially higher.

In a nutshell, I would not focus too much on the efficiency and cost factors in considering whether the WSCP is a good idea. I would focus more on whether it will promote achievement and whether it would increase parent satisfaction. 

If you have any thoughts on things I missed in this post, please use the feedback form or email me at nriemann@bellsouth.net. In my next and final post, I will look at whether there are any alternatives to the WSCP that might provide better results.

The Wake School Choice Plan

This post takes a first look at the Wake School Choice Plan (WSCP).

The WSCP is a student assignment proposal by the Wake Education Partnership and its consultant, Michael Alves. The WSCP offers the Wake County Board of Education a compromise approach that might achieve some goals of the new Board majority while preventing the proliferation of schools where many kids are not proficient.

According to the plan document, the WSCP is built on four “pillars”: stability, choice, proximity, and student achievement. If you are not familiar with the plan already, you can find an overview of the plan here (and its details here).

My discussion will assume that you have read the above-cited executive summary, if not the whole plan. For that reason, I will not summarize the WSCP in the post but will instead look at the following four issues of concern to me (and, I hope, to you):

(1) Would it promote student achievement?

(2) Would it increase parent satisfaction?

(3) Would it use schools efficiently?

(4) Are there any superior alternatives?

In this first post, I take up only the issue of student achievement.

Would the WSCP promote student achievement?

I can think of two ways an assignment system might promote student achievement. First, it might create better learning environments for students by limiting the number of low achieving students at any one school. Second, it might provoke schools to compete for students in ways that promote academic achievement. I look at the WSCP from each of these angles below.

Student Mix

I will assume here that—all else being equal—a high number of low achieving students in a given school makes it more difficult for that school to educate its students. The point can be, and has been, argued, but I will not revisit those arguments here.

The WSCP rejects assignment decisions based on race or socioeconomic status, but it does include “student achievement” as one of its four “pillars.” According to the Executive Summary, designing schools where 70% of the children are at or above grade level is a “good target,” but “[a] specific achievement quota is not educationally necessary or operationally practical.” Systemwide, 71.9% of WCPSS students passed both the 3-8 reading and math EOGs in 2009-10, so it would be ambitious to set a 2012 goal of 70% student body proficiency for each school if the Board intended to allow any variance in achievement at all.

It may not matter. Despite the plan’s talk of proficiency targets and ranges, the plan does not appear to implement any. Instead, the WSCP focuses on the identification of “at risk” kindergarten students and assumes that distributing these students “proportionally” across elementary schools will be sufficient to distribute low achieving students, since predictable feeder patterns will distribute these kids all the way through high school.

The success of this approach depends on at least three contestable assumptions: first, that kindergarteners labelled “at risk” are highly correlated with low achievers; second, that the “at risk” kindergarteners can be efficiently distributed across schools; and third, that each feeder pattern educates the “at risk” populations with similar rates of success. Otherwise, things will get out of whack rather quickly, achievement-wise.

Given the importance of these three assumptions, the WSCP should have addressed them more carefully.

With respect to the first, the WSCP avoids a political “hot potato” by declining to specify how the “at risk” kindergarten students should be identified, calling only for “an informed and research-based determination” as to the school readiness of each child. The plan implies—but does not state—that this determination should look at the parent’s education, whether the child is being raised by a single parent, whether the child is poor, whether the child has limited English proficiency, and whether the child has a learning disability. Unfortunately, the plan does not discuss the correlations between this laundry list of factors and student achievement. Nor does it propose any answers to the hard choices that must be made about how to use this data (or any other data) to determine who is “at risk.”

With respect to the second assumption mentioned above, the plan does not discuss how difficult it will be to allocate what it calls a “proportionate number of seats” for at risk students at each school in an assignment area, given the other priorities of the plan and the way its lottery system works. Will choice and the lottery be overridden for low achieving students, once a school exceeds its “proportionate number” of low achieving students? Will choice and the lottery be overridden for low achieving students when a high achieving school is not chosen by enough low achieving students? These are hard questions for which I found no answers in the plan document.

Further, while each of the three large achievement area has a relatively equivalent number of low achieving students, the typical assignment choice—ten elementary schools closest to any given address, including at least two magnets and two year-round schools—do not. This seems to imply that achievement distribution will work only if some are not offered a choice of their ten closest elementary schools. If that is going to happen, or must happen to make the plan work, it should be discussed more directly.

Instead, it is addressed obliquely. The plan’s executive summary notes, without explaining, that the plan’s achievement goal “means the district’s current magnet school program must be retained. The measure of a magnet school’s success, however, will change significantly. Wake County’s magnet schools were created primarily to fill seats and create diversity. This plan suggests magnet schools be used to increase parental choice and improve student achievement.” Despite the claim, I don’t think it is really changing all that much. I think the WSCP needs magnets for the same reason the current system needs them—to make sure that you can fully utilize certain school facilities without overloading them with low achieving students. Without magnet student set-asides in most of the current locations, it would be hard to limit the proportion of low achieving students who attend those schools.

As for the third and final assumption identified above, the plan does not discuss how stable these achievement distributions might be as the kids progress through different feeder patterns. Even if each pattern is equally effective, educationally, the outputs may vary due to differential access to other educational options. Some feeder patterns may see more good students (or poor students) opt out for private schools, charter schools, or magnets due to the location of these alternatives.

If a plan like this were to be implemented, the Board should consider whether it will be sufficient to focus on achievement distribution at kindergarten and then forget about it, as the WSCP’s actual mechanics seem to propose. As far as I can tell, the plan includes only one mechanism for recalibrating the achievement distribution after the initial kindergarten assignments: the atypical student who rejects her current assignment or her “feeder pattern” to middle or high school and enters the lottery would receive a priority if she promoted “achievement level-diversity in [her] first-choice school.” But this priority does not come into play until the school has accommodated all feeder pattern students, all sibling applicants, all applicants who live within a mile and a half, all applicants applying to their nearest school, all applicants applying to their nearest uncrowded school, and all applicants applying to their nearest nonmagnet school. It is hard to see how this would have much impact.

Because this plan incorporates achievement interventions, it would produce fewer low achieving schools than a strict neighborhood schools plan. Because the achievement interventions are minimal, it would likely produce more low achieving schools than we have had in the past. Still, it might better address the problem of low achieving schools in areas like Garner, East Wake, and the “Rim,” where low achieving schools are not adequately addressed by the magnet program. Rigorously applied, it could even produce fewer low achieving schools than we have now, but this would require much more aggressive achievement sorting than it appears to contemplate.

Competition for Students

The nature of the plan requires students to choose a school, so schools are, in a sense, competing for students. Will this competition encourage schools to raise achievement? The plan assumes so. It argues that “nothing makes a school more attractive than high student achievement.” For that reason, "schools that are consistently under-chosen by parents will be targeted for school improvement measures that would make these schools more academically attractive."

I am skeptical of the claim that “nothing makes a school more attractive than high student achievement.” I think most people—not all, but most—avoid high poverty schools, low achieving schools, and racially isolated schools. Otherwise, I think they choose among reasonably good schools based on factors like programs, convenience, student peers, staff personalities, and facilities. I asked Mr. Alves about this, but he did not really answer me—he just said that folks expressed lots of reasons for choice that did not differ by race. But the reasons for choice are important, because if I am right, the competition may not center on achievement.

Furthermore, the competition for students under this plan seems like the proverbial pie eating contest where the prize is more pie. If you bring in more students, you get a somewhat proportionate increase in teaching resources and a more crowded school. The school that failed to bring in students is the one that gets the program enhancements.

Even that possibility seems suspect. WCPSS is not a system with 30% excess capacity, like those found in many urban settings. It is a system that will soon be able to fully utilize every school whether it is underchosen or not. Program enhancements may not be necessary to fill underchosen schools. Further, where will the money to make program enhancements come from? The proposal includes no price tag for these enhancements, implying that the enhancements would be minimal, would come at the expense of existing programs, or would constitute an undiscussed cost of the WSCP approach.

For these reasons, I think it unlikely that the type of competition promoted by the WSCP will promote (or undermine) systemwide student achievement.

***

To wrap up, the achievement “pillar” of the WSCP raises more questions than it answers. I do not think the choice aspect of the plan, by itself, will do much for achievement, for reasons just mentioned. But a plan that gives achievement any attention at all would, by definition, produce fewer low achieving schools than the strict neighborhood schools plan advocated by many. Much turns on how the Board would implement the fourth pillar of the WSCP, and the plan intentionally or inadvertently leaves that very vague. I do not think it was a service to do so, and vigilance is called for.

If you have any thoughts about the WSCP and its student achievement “pillar,” or the ideas expressed in this post, please contact me via the feedback link or email me at nriemann@bellsouth.net. If there are enough interesting points raised, I will post some follow up discussion.

In my next post, I will look at the WSCP’s potential impact on parent satisfaction with assignment.

"Controlled Choice" at the Wake Education Partnership Roundtable in Garner

I attended a Wake Education Partnership Education Roundtable in Garner today. At the Roundtable, Tim Simmons presented information on the "controlled choice" plan now being developed for the Partnership by Michael Alves in the hope that the School Board will consider adopting it, or something like it.

While the plan is still a work in progress, it is an "assignment-area" (i.e. zone) plan that will, if it works as advertised, improve on the zone-based plan developed by the Student Assignment Committee in three key ways:

1. It avoids isolating poor, African-American, Hispanic, and low-performing students by using 2-4 much larger assignment areas and considering achievement in assignments;
2. It preserves the existing magnet system, though who can attend each school might change; and
3. It handles growth better because the larger assignment areas enable better use of capacity. 

The Partnership says the plan has four guiding principles: choice, stability, proximity, and student achievement.

Stability is the easiest to explain. Apparently, stability means that once enrolled in a school, you are not called upon to leave it until you graduate from it. It also means that if you have a sibling currently attending a school, you have a right to attend it when the time comes. (If the plan were adopted, existing assignments would also be grandfathered to avoid controversy.)

Choice means families choose schools, generally from their own assignment area, subject to constraints. At this point, the "controlled choice" plan's constraints are as vague as those from the SAC, though all calendars and some magnets will be available in each Zone. If you do not exercise your right to choose, a choice will be made for you, and likely not one most would have chosen.

Living within walking distance of a school gives you some sort of advantage. There is something called a "base option" which appears to mean that you can request a nearby school designated as your base, and you might have a better chance of getting it than someone for whom it is not so designated. It is not a guaranteed "base assignment." 

The plan would consider the "academic mix" of the school in granting requests so that schools can perform well and can retain teachers. For elementary schools, this will mean considering predictors for likely achievement like free and reduced lunch status, single-parenthood, and mother's education level rather than actual school readiness, unless the system wants to pay to test every entrant.

Other goals: The attendance boundaries will be contiguous. The areas will be designed to grow at similar paces. Transportation costs will resemble those today.

It sounds like a tall order. The plan is due to be presented to the Board in December.