Education Week - August 21, 2019 - 14

Auditor Wants W.Va. to Open the Book on K-12 Spending
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it spends its money.
Being slow to embrace transparency
has inflamed mistrust between taxpayers and public school officials and left a
$2 billion blank space (more than half
the state's budget) in the auditor's popular and award-winning "WVCheckbook" website, where taxpayers can
search through thousands of government transactions and salaries.
When the state's legislature this
year decided through House Bill 206
to provide $177 million more for its
schools, bump teachers' pay by 5 percent, and give districts more flexibility
over how they spend their money, it
also told the state department that it
will have to work with the state auditor to build a searchable data website
that lists every person and vendor receiving money from all of the state's
55 school districts, what tax revenue
source that money came from, and
what the money was used for.

Tall Task
If McCuskey is successful, it would
make West Virginia's 280,000-student public school system one of the
most transparent K-12 systems in the
country when it comes to spending.
McCuskey and his transparency disciples, who now include hundreds of
parents and school board members,
predict the flood of data will reveal

LEFT: Striking West Virginia
teachers and supporters at
the state Capitol in
Charleston, W.Va., last winter.
Teachers are opposed to
a complex education bill

John Raby/AP

passed by the Legislature.

cost savings, build greater participation in the politically combative budget process, and assure taxpayers that
money is being spent in an efficient,
fair, and legal way.
"We need to make sure all the data
that we maintain regarding student
achievement and spending is available to the public in a way that they
can understand," McCuskey said.

"This is the public's data. The school
officials don't own their children, their
schools, their money. It's [the public's]
money, their schools, their children,
and it's their data."
But the task ahead for McCuskey
won't be easy.
West Virginia stores its financial data
in software that's more than 30 years
old, which makes culling real-time

West Virginia State Auditor
John "JB" McCuskey.

transactions from it, as McCuskey and
his team plan to do, especially hard.
The department has no plans to replace or update the system anytime
soon, a job that could run into the millions of dollars.
"We'd rather have any new money
we get to go directly to the classroom," said Sarah Stewart, the executive director of policy and government

relations for West Virginia's department of education.
Theodore Pauls, the school board
president of Brooke County schools,
called that sort of sentiment "absurd."
He compared it to a starving family refusing to purchase a door lock to make
sure nobody steals the little food they
have.
"I appreciate the fact that they want

mara suggested that changing a student's GPA from 2.0 to 2.1 is "not really
changing a whole lot. ... Something
that actually changes [students'] GPA
in a practical way-that college admissions can notice the difference-I think
would be important."
Although relatively small, the mindset intervention's benefits could be
"pretty meaningful if you're talking
about a scalable, low-cost intervention," argued Mayme Hostetter, the
president of the Relay Graduate School
of Education in New York, who was
not involved in the study but does incorporate mindset instruction for the
preservice teachers in her program.
"The effect size is the kind of thing
you're seeing from far less scalable, far
more costly interventions that school
districts and states paid for year after
year. So, from a bang for your buck perspective, this seems incredibly potent."
For example, Yeager and his colleagues noted that for students start-

Ninth grade students

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and teachers," said David Yeager, an
associate professor at the University
of Texas at Austin who led the study.
"So we thought that a mindset that
could instill optimism at that key
juncture might be a welcome change
for young people and set them on a
better path."
Specifically, researchers found lowperforming students who participated
in the exercise developed a stronger
"growth mindset"-the belief that
skills are developed over time and
through effort, rather than being innate and "fixed." By the end of freshman year, low-performing students
who had participated in the program
had higher grade point averages, both
in core academic classes and specifically in math and science courses,
which prior research has suggested
may be more likely to trigger a fixed
mindset.
A nationally representative sample
of 76 public high schools participated
in the project. Researchers randomly
assigned incoming 9th graders to
participate in one of two 25-minute
online interventions. For one of them,
a control group of half of the students
learned about and reflected on functions of the brain, without focusing on
beliefs about intelligence.

The second intervention, given
to the other half of the students, addressed beliefs associated with a fixed
mindset: that having to try hard or ask
for help or failing means a student
lacks the ability to succeed; and that it
is better to choose tasks that students
know they can achieve rather than
challenging themselves. Students see
quotes from other students about how
they apply a growth mindset during
challenging activities. They are told
about the mindset study, and asked
to help by writing to explain the concept to another student and give advice about how it might apply in high
school.
"We had students who were historically underperforming, off gradelevel, and chronically embroiled in
discipline consequences putting in
their absolute best effort to give advice about growth mindset to the students coming along behind them,"
said Deanne Lowe, a curriculum facilitator at Ragsdale High School in
Jamestown, N.C., one of the schools
that participated in the study. She
said students at her school were
particularly engaged when trying to
help other students."It blew me away
every time I saw it and convinced me
that the design of the growth mindset
modules hit a nerve and stimulated
heartfelt responses from teenagers."

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | August 21, 2019 | www.edweek.org

National Study of Learning Mindsets

Academic Payoff for 'Growth Mindset'
Challenge Measuring Impact
The concept of growth mindset has
gained traction in the last decade, as
more schools have experimented with
ways to get students to think differently
about their own abilities and learning.
But the effects of individual programs
to encourage growth mindset have
been mixed, and some researchers
have voiced doubt that relatively short
interventions can give a practical benefit to a wide array of students.
In a series of research meta-analyses in 2018, Brooke Macnamara, an
associate professor in cognitive psychology at Case Western University,
and colleagues found that the average effect size for growth mindset
interventions tends to be small and
focused mainly on low-performing or
low-income students.
While Yeager's intervention is free to
schools, "there are always opportunity
costs," Macnamara said. "What you
don't want is time spent on a growth
mindset intervention that doesn't benefit most students or produces very
small effects, and give up the opportunity to, say, learn the new math technique or a new topic in science."
Yeager and his colleagues found the
growth mindset intervention was associated with .10 of a point improvement
on a four-point GPA scale. Macna-

collaborate on exercises
designed to teach them
about "growth mindset"
as part of the National Study
of Learning Mindsets. The
nationally representative
study found that the short
program helped improve
students' grades.
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