Today, a lot has changed. Back in 2005, Gates Foundation officials were, for the first time, seriously considering whether to play an active role in shaping public policy. Race to the Top, the Common Core, Democrats for Education Reform, and StudentsFirst were unimagined. No one would seriously suggest New Orleans, Washington, D.C., or Newark as hotbeds of school reform. Diane Ravitch was still a champion of school choice and accountability, and few had heard of Michelle Rhee, Deborah Gist, Jon Schnur, or Geoffrey Canada. No Child Left Behind was still novel and fairly popular, and not a single state was trying to build teacher evaluation around value-added systems.

Today, the world looks real different. These developments all (for better and worse) owe something to policy-oriented giving. “New sector” philanthropy has helped shift the school reform landscape. For a quick glimpse of what’s happened, just compare the biggest givers in 2010 and those a decade before.

According to the Foundation Center, the five biggest K-12 givers in 2010 were:

1. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — $209 million;
2. Walton Family Foundation — $110 million;
3. W.K. Kellogg Foundation — $58 million;
4. Michael and Susan Dell Foundation — $55 million; and
5. Silicon Valley Community Foundation — $35 million

Back in 2000, the Foundation Center reported that they were:

1. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation–$276 million
2. The Annenberg Foundation–$88 million
3. Walton Family Foundation–$48 million
4. J.A. & Kathryn Albertson Foundation, Inc.–$32 million
5. The Ford Foundation–$25 million

While the Gates Foundation has remained the biggest player over the past decade, the Walton Foundation has substantially upped its investment. Meanwhile, once-influential entities like Annenberg and Ford have declined in import.

All this has profound implications for the way we view education philanthropy. As I write in PDK:

A decade ago, a big frustration for edu-philanthropists was the sense that they would invest in exciting programs or practices, but that these never seemed to deliver lasting improvement. A piloted reading or mentoring program would offer promising results, only to disappoint when scaled. Or a foundation would underwrite professional development or a new curriculum for several years, only to see it die on the vine when outside funding dried up. Or funders would help launch dynamic schools, only to see them fall apart when the charismatic founder left.
Where an earlier generation of donors had chalked up the challenges to problems of implementation or program design, the new philanthropists were much more receptive to the notion that the problem was the inhospitable cultures, systems, and policy environments in which those scale-ups were being attempted. New donors who had made their fortunes in the new economy frequently staffed their foundations with Teach For America alums, MBAs, or other nontraditional educators and focused on problems posed by system rigidity, leadership, and policy. The new givers gravitated towards a strategy that rested on three key insights, all sketched out in The Best of Intentions:

First, University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene’s seminal analysis pointed out that the amount of edu-philanthropy is so small that it’s ridiculous to think that investments in programs or practice will have a noticeable impact. Using various approaches, Greene calculated that all private giving combined amounts to perhaps 1% of total K-12 spending — or, maybe, one penny on the dollar. Consequently, he argued that philanthropy only mattered when it funded “high-leverage investments” (e.g. when it altered policies or practices governing the long-term use of the public funds that account for 99% of school spending).

Second, Don McAdams, founder of the Center for Reform of School Systems, argued that philanthropy typically entails limited dollars in the grand scheme of things, but has an outsized influence because this money is nimble and can be used to drive a state or a district’s reforms, where it’s hugely difficult to redeploy more than a sliver of public funds.

Third, a vital piece of leverage was producing research and supporting advocacy in a manner that would shape policy. Policy analyst Andy Rotherham argued that this kind of investment could be aptly captured by the old adage: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Foundation-backed advocacy, research, and proof points that new rules were possible offered a way to alter public policies and priorities.

Back in 2005, I heartily endorsed the policy-centric approach that the contributors had encouraged. I continue to do so today. And I think the results speak to the potential impact of this tack. At the same time, I’ve long wrestled with the repercussions. I’ve worried about foundations being wedded to reformers who tell them what they want to hear, the perils of groupthink, and the disinclination of critics to challenge deep-pocketed funders. And I’ve worried how all of this gets even dicier when foundations are linking arms with the federal government.

I’ve no easy answers, other than the surety that these are questions we need to talk about and openly discuss more frequently, more productively, and with less hostility than has been the norm.

- Rick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Anyway, wanted to share one title that’s uber-relevant today. It’s Great Promise Thwarted: The Humbling History of the Common Core, 2008-2018. It’ll be written by my good friend, eminent NYU edu-historian Jonathan Zimmerman, and e-published by Harvard University Press, in 2022.

It’s worth quoting a long excerpt from the book’s conclusion:

For a brief time, during 2010-2012, the success of the Common Core seemed assured. Proponents had compelling arguments. Existing state standards were generally awful. The No Child Left Behind accountability system designed to accommodate variation in state standards and assessments was problematic. Conservative supporters argued that the Core would make it possible to do away with intrusive federal regulations governing accountability and easier to provide transparency and accountability with a light touch. Moreover, the Core would make it possible to credibly compare student and school performance across the nation, while allowing mobile students or those learning online to move across schools or programs with minimal disruption.
Proponents argued that the Core would reduce the barriers that hindered virtual schools, online instruction, and the emergence of “21st century” assessments and instructional tools. Observers generally characterized the standards as a substantial improvement on those in place in most states. And Core proponents enjoyed enormous political muscle. A push that would have been laughable in 2006 seemed a fait accompli by 2010, with forty-plus states on board. The effort enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of the Gates Foundation (what we today would call Gates-ECB; this was before the Foundation absorbed the European Central Bank following the third Greek default), the Obama administration, nearly the whole of the education “reform” community, and Republican leaders including both members of the 2016 GOP presidential ticket. Major publishers and test-developers were quiescent or supportive, while education technology entrepreneurs were enthusiastic.

So, what went wrong? Why is it that today just eleven states use a Common Core assessment, less than a third of the states are judged to have made any effort to adhere to the Core, and the phrase “Common Core” remains polarizing and generally unpopular with Republicans, parents, and teachers? How did such a promising effort run aground?

In hindsight, four factors were responsible. Notably, none turned on technical debates over the merits and rigor of the standards. All were the product, to varying degrees, of the “we’re-in-a-hurry” hubris that has so often humbled would-be social reformers. Indeed, as one of the Core’s great champions, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation president Chester E. Finn, Jr.,prophetically wrote in early 2012, “It will, of course, be ironic as well as unfortunate if the Common Core ends up in the dustbin of history as a result of actions and comments by its supporters.”

First, an effort that began as a bipartisan, state-driven enterprise, spearheaded by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, started to look to skeptics like a federally-inspired, politicized project. The Department of Education’s decision to link federal funding to the Core in its Race to the Top program, its NCLB waiver effort, and its “ESEA blueprint,” and the provision of $350 million in federal funds for Core-related tests, all alienated anti-Washington conservatives who would have remained neutral if the question had merely concerned states collaborating to set standards in math and English language arts. By the time nationally influential conservative pundit George Will questioned in 2012 whether the federal government had exceeded its legal authority, the challenge for proponents was clear. Indeed, “Tea Party” conservatives came to regard the Common Core as part and parcel of Obama administration efforts to extend the federal role in domestic policy, an extension of contemporaneous fights over health care, spending, clean energy, the auto industry, housing, and financial regulation. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan demonstrated an unfortunate knack for making it appear that the Core was a pet Obama project–initially, when he excoriated South Carolina in 2012 for expressing second thoughts, but most famously when he futilely blasted the dozen states that announced their “implementation hiatus” in 2014. All of this served to make the Core a partisan question viewed with suspicion by conservatives, undermining the bipartisan support needed to sustain implementation in many “red” and “purple” states.

Second, the Common Core advocates were tripped up by their own impatience. After nearly all states adopted the Common Core in an early rush, proponents exhibited little interest in making the case for its merits, responding to critics, or explaining what was in store. Outside of the occasional op-ed, little sustained attention was devoted to explaining the changes or building broad-based support. For instance, hardly anyone other than Core enthusiasts realized that the comfortable, familiar high school math curriculum of math, algebra and geometry was to be eliminated and replaced with the antiseptically titled Integrated Math I, II, and III. When the magnitude of the shift became clear in 2014, confused parents and irate math teachers bombarded legislators and state board members with calls to delay implementation or alter course. Enthusiasts concentrated on designing instructional materials, consulting with states and districts, and training leaders and teachers, seemingly presuming that the public knew what they were up to and supported their effort. In the event, this turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. The early success of the Common Core was remarkable, but proponents failed to recognize that this quick success meant few voters or legislators really understood what was involved or that real success would depend crucially on the breadth and depth of support.

Third, Core advocates never did a good job of explaining how their efforts intersected with other reform priorities. Observers asked about whether the math assessment would strangle the abilities of charter schools or specialty district schools to use nonstandard math curricula. Core proponents never really answered such questions in public, tending instead to favor quiet, technical fixes (in this case abandoning mandatory “through-course” assessment) that didn’t address broader concerns. Skeptics wondered whether the testing “windows” needed to assess all children with the new computer-assisted tests would be so wide as to undermine the viability of sophisticated value-added evaluation systems that states were eagerly building. TheWashington Post’s Jay Mathews pointed out, in 2012, that the new assessments would “delay, if not stop altogether, the national move toward rating teachers by student score improvements” and that radical change would force systems “to wait years to work out the kinks in the tests” before they could resume those efforts. In hindsight, the backlash produced by the chaos over teacher evaluation and school accountability systems during 2014 and 2015 was predictable and preventable.

Finally, insufficient public attention to practical questions of cost, technology, and practice ultimately proved crippling. Despite frenzied efforts to support new assessments, instructional materials, and implementation during 2011-2014, interviews from that era with state legislators, district officials, educators, and parents showed remarkably little awareness of the costs and practical difficulties that lay ahead. When the 2012 technology scan showed that most districts had the requisite technology platform, few realized that the minimum specs had been dumbed-down or that this meant the new tests would sacrifice most of the hoped-for features–turning them into little more than traditional paper-and-pencil tests taken on a computer. At the same time, lousy records and a desire to avoid embarrassment meant that many districts had overstated their capacity in the tech census; they were suddenly faced with millions or even hundreds of millions in unanticipated new expenses, even as they dealt with the practical headaches of inadequate technology. And when the price tag for the full cost of new technology, training, leadership, teacher preparation, and all the rest became clear in 2014 and 2015, just as states emerging from the Great Recession were restoring cuts to state agencies and hoping to trim taxes, it was no surprise that a slew of states decided they’d keep the Core standards but also their old assessments, instructional materials, training, and teacher preparation.

The Core is still with us, of course, but it remains a shadow of what its more optimistic proponents envisioned a decade ago.

As I perused Zimmerman’s account, I could only feel for my many friends working so hard to make the Common Core a success. But then I thought, “Wait a minute. The future hasn’t happened yet. It’s like Marty McFly using his knowledge of the future to change the future. They can still alter course.” Will they? I suppose that’s up to them.

(Oh, and by the way, my favorite paper from the 2022 AERA conference? “When All Your Hurtful Yesterdays Become All My Gendered Tomorrows”: Transgressive Ontologies Disrupting the Heteronormative Praxis Posed by a Post-Foulcauldian, Neo-Ravitchian Autoethnography of the Lived Lives of Three Indigenous Culture-walkers in a Neo-liberal Dystopia.)

-Frederick Hess

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

To me, this suggests the need for recruiting a deeper, richer, more diverse pool of leadership talent, from inside and outside of schools, and then deliberately training them in a fashion that permits them to learn from peers outside of K-12, exposes them to leadership and management thinking from outside K-12, and integrates thinking on entrepreneurship and unbundling (see Education Unbound for more context) into the very fabric of their preparation. There are a handful of current efforts seeking to do just this.

For my money, one of the more interesting of those efforts is Rice University’s Education Entrepreneurship Program (REEP). Launched in 2008 and housed in Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, REEP is designed to prepare select Houston-area educators (from districts and charters) to become transformative school leaders. (Full disclosure: I was recruited in 2008 by my friends Mike Feinberg and Leo Linbeck to help design REEP and continue to serve as the lead education faculty member.)

How does REEP actually work? Practically and legally, how does one prepare certified edu-leaders in a school of business? How did REEP get started, and what are the lessons for those enamored by the model? How does REEP training differ from that offered in traditional ed admin programs? My crack colleague Daniel Lautzenheiser and I examined these questions in “Educational Leadership for a New Era:The Rice University Education Entrepreneurship Program,” just published last week by REEP. Here are a few key takeaways; if you’re interested, check out the full piece.

REEP’s basic premise is that key leadership and management skills are universal, regardless of one’s field of endeavor, and that aspiring K-12 leaders can actually become more adept at these skills by learning with and from peers and faculty who have diverse expertise and experiences. In holding that “school leadership” is not as unique as generations of ed leadership experts have suggested, REEP offers a sharp and significant break with traditional practice. At a practical level, Rice is the first institution in the nation allowed to issue would-be administrators a state principal certification through a business school. The REEP model makes it possible for full-time teachers and administrators to pursue either a two-year MBA (via Rice’s MBA for Professionals track) or a one-year fellowship via the Jones School’s Executive Education training program.

Daniel and I conclude the piece by flagging key lessons evident in Rice’s early experience. I’ll highlight six of those here:

Advantages
• Fresh opportunity to build an innovative program. Unlike most ed school-business school partnerships, which inevitably draw upon the faculty and programs already in place, Rice was able to build a unique education leadership training program from scratch. This opportunity to start fresh meant that REEP could use the expertise of the Jones School without worrying about stepping on the toes of an ed school or having to use education faculty.
• A chance to cultivate the local talent pool. Unlike education leadership programs with a more national focus, REEP was designed to cultivate the talent pool in one community. REEP’s design is intended to offer an alluring new path to potential leaders, to keep those talented leaders in the local ecosystem, to forge new ties across districts and across the district and charter sectors, and to infuse local leadership with thinking and networks that stretch beyond the narrow world of K-12.

Challenges
• Squeezing a different approach into a self-assured field. A key tension for programs like REEP is the attempt to pioneer a new direction in leadership training while having to comply with state-level guidelines that presuppose a particular approach to training school leaders. These “correct” approaches to K-12 leadership imply certainty on questions that most non-K-12 authorities in management and leadership regard as uncertain.
• Can leaders use what they’re learning? Business schools often operate under the assumption that leaders have a substantial ability to reallocate time, staff, and dollars and to remake routines. However, in K-12, leaders often operate in highly constrained environments.

Lessons Learned
• Influentials committed to the effort. Inside and outside of Rice, REEP enjoyed advocates who helped it clear logistical hurdles, secure funds, develop local relationships, and recruit students and a national faculty. Equally critical was support from the Jones School. On the outside, REEP’s advisory board included key contacts in leadership roles in local school districts, in high-profile charter management organizations, and at Teach For America. This helped with visibility, coordination, and recruitment.
• Doubts about whether REEP could be launched at an institution with an education school. Those involved in launching REEP repeatedly expressed skepticism that they could have built it at Rice if an education school had been in place. Those who had dealt with other local schools of education spoke of the frustrations of having to negotiate ways to ensure that new programs didn’t step on the toes of established programs or faculty members. Rethinking the assumptions of how to train school leaders was thought to be possible only when working on a fresh slate.

-Rick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Rick Hess: Heather, what’s your role with TFA?
Heather Harding: I am a vice president of research at Teach For America. Our focus is to initiate and help facilitate external partners doing research on the impact of Teach For America. I’m essentially a matchmaker or a conductor for all the folks internally who are working on programs and continuous improvement and the larger research community.

RH: At this point, TFA has been with us for a touch over 20 years. What do we know about TFA at this point? If there are three or four key findings, what are they?
HH: We know that Teach For America is good at identifying the folks who are going to be leaders in a variety of sectors and redirecting their energy towards the education sector. That includes classroom teaching but it also speaks to education leadership, policy, and those sorts of things, with entrepreneurship being a key piece of that. The other thing we know is that Teach For America corps members tend to outperform their peer teachers, both beginning and more experienced, in math and science. And people can quibble because some of those effect sizes are small, but if you look through the trend line over time, even in the early studies, you see this pronounced effect in math and science teaching.

And the third thing that we know is that Teach For America programmatically has made dramatic changes in training and ongoing support that seem to have allowed us to maintain quality as we grow to scale. The difference between training and supporting 500 teachers in the 1990s and 4,000 teachers, 6,000 teachers in the new millennium is [huge]. It’s something that we’ve had to think about; about how to maintain quality over time, in selecting them, training them, and then offering this development program. And we haven’t seen a downward trend in the results on student achievement, so I think you have to believe that we’re maintaining quality and paying attention to continuously improving the model.

RH: Recently, there’s been criticism of TFA’s research record. Philip Kovacs, a professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, suggests that we don’t really have much sense of how effective TFA teachers are, that we’re not doing a very good job of understanding their impact, and that we’re paying insufficient attention to the effects of TFA-induced turnover. What are your thoughts on this score?
HH: In the last five years, we’ve been relatively fortunate that, one, there’s been a number of studies mainly coming out of the states with stronger data. So New York has strong data sets [as do] North Carolina, Louisiana, [and] Tennessee. Policy folks and economists interested in teacher quality and teacher effectiveness have [been able to] conduct studies that we’ve been happy to participate in that compare teachers from various sources.

The Kovacs debate is largely one that relies on the peer review process. [Ed. Note: one of Kovacs' criticisms surrounding a study by George Noell and Kristin Gansle of Louisiana State University and hosted by the National Council on Teacher Quality on TFA in Louisiana was that the study was not peer-reviewed.] We think that’s important, but we also think that if you look at the evidence, both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed [but featuring] a standard methodological rigor, that we see that there’s clearly a pattern that Teach For America corps members achieve academic gains that are equal to or larger to those of other new teachers and, in some instances, more experienced teachers. It’s a small relative advantage, but it does seem relatively clear in math and science and high school…[and] we see that other areas like middle school, English, language arts are slowly catching up. So we feel encouraged.

Many of these studies come out initially in a pilot form or are self-published and then they go through the peer review process. So we see that as important, but academic processes are long and we’re a program that changes our model and tries to make improvements every year. So we want to grab whatever evidence we can. And we also hope that as data systems become stronger, we can have these kinds of studies in every state. We’ve got ones going on right now that we’re collaborating with or participating in Missouri. We’re trying to get one up in Florida. It looks like there’s going to be one in Arizona. We really welcome a lot of activity on this front.

RH: This doesn’t necessarily address the concern that much of this work has not appeared in academic journals or undergone peer review. How do you respond to that concern?
HH: I think that the methodology across [the studies] is very similar. While all of them haven’t been through peer review, I don’t think that they have huge methodological challenges. As you know, there are all kinds of philosophical wars about methodology and, frankly, the relevance of standardized test scores. We think that’s one vehicle to consider our impact. We’d love more studies on different metrics.

One of the things that we don’t necessarily have a lot of control over is what a researcher decides to do with the study that they write. We are supportive of people going through the peer review process…[but] we’re partnering with folks who are going to do research probably with or without us.

RH: Now, how about the critique that the research focuses fairly narrowly on value-added reading and math scores? Kovacs suggests that TFA places a premium on driving those scores, and therefore, while it’s not a surprise that TFA teachers seem to do okay by that metric, it’s unclear whether the students are benefiting to the degree that value-added might imply.
HH: I think we want to know more about how to better study those other things. We’re very interested in that. And in our internal system, we actually use our “teaching as leadership” rubric to test for those things that aren’t necessarily going to show up on a test score. I think where you have a great test you’re going to have good teaching and learning. When you have a not so great test, you might be concerned. So, while we think the tests are telling us something important, we don’t think they’re the only metric out there.

However, the currency of policy research [today] is the test score. That’s really the legacy of NCLB that we all have to live with. It’s not telling us nothing, right? So it’s not a useless exercise to look at the student learning that’s reflected in a test score. I look to the lessons that Louisiana has provided. The state department took the initiative and looked at their teacher prep programs comparatively and used value-added to do that, and then used that information to push back on programs where they were falling down. That’s how we use this information.

That being said, we also look at observational data on teachers. We’re…looking to add some student surveys. We’re interested in all of it. The fact that we have work focused on student test score data doesn’t mean that we are exclusively interested in that. We’re interested in that, no doubt, but we also think you need to get as much information as you can. Test scores don’t really predict [a student's] destiny and their educational opportunities.

RH: Speaking of which, there was a recent debate between two TFA corps members about the whole “locus of control” question and whether TFA’s commitment to having its corps members drive student learning means that TFA can seem dismissive or unaware of the other challenges in children’s lives. How do you think about this challenge when evaluating teacher performance?
HH: Our rubric is more expansive than just measuring students’ learning through test scores. If folks look at our rubric they’ll see that we’re looking at things more holistically…Just in the last year we’ve begun to look at creating a richer portfolio of data that we can collect from teachers about their impact in the classroom. It includes formative assessments, both off the shelf as well as developed by teachers. It includes observational data. In the last year, we’ve incorporated a real shift in language that talks about transformational teaching…that makes a difference on any growth measure that you might select, but that it’s also important for the work we’re trying to do that teachers consider what would put kids on a different life trajectory and what that’s going to mean. So you might imagine that it’s good for kids to know their multiplication tables, but it’s also important for them to understand if they want to be an astronaut or a medical doctor, what would the course sequence look like and can they see themselves filling those roles?

RH: What are a couple current research relationships that TFA is involved with?
HH: We’re in an ongoing relationship with Ed Labs, Roland Fryer’s outfit at Harvard. He has continued to have an interest in how programs can further engage young leaders in education reform. We did two studies that came out over the summer focused on our selection model and on our alumni’s perceptions and their continuation and work in the education sector.

We’re going to continue to look again at selection and, in particular, we’re going to look at how to better screen candidates…We’re also going to do some testing around professional development interventions that seem to make a difference for impact on value-added. We have an ongoing relationship with Monica Higgins, who is looking at our alumni impact, thinking about whether and how our folks become interested in social entrepreneurship and what kinds of things we do or what kind of experiences they have [that prepare them for] those challenges.

We want to know a little bit more about Teach For America’s alumni long-term and their retention in the sector. We have another project that’s looking at the relationship between Teach For America corps members in a school community and the rate at which students in that school apply to more selective colleges. And this work is being done by a young scholar named Jonathan Meer, who is at Texas A&M, along with Caroline Hoxby. It’s not a causal relationship, but the correlation that if you bring in folks who have a higher-profile college experience, that might encourage young people to apply to a wider variety of schools.

RH: If you had to name a couple key research priorities for TFA going forward, what are they?
HH: We want to continue to understand the value added by our teachers in every market. We’re a national program and we have studies that look at the impact on student achievement in about six states. We’re in 30-plus states, so we need these studies all over because our hunch is that the teacher market is different. We want to continue to do that work and find good partners.

We know that a big part of our mission is focused on what alumni do. We have a long way to go to figure out what we mean by leadership in the education sector, so we need to do some internal work, but we also want to keep tracking what our grads do and what our alums do. We’re interested in their role in school leadership and understanding the barriers for them moving forward. I think the Fryer and Higgins studies are really cutting-edge and we want to continue that momentum.

Finally, I would say that we need to start thinking about the macro impact at Teach For America. So what has it meant given that we’re 20 years old? What has it meant for Teach For America to be in the ed reform sector, what’s been the impact on policy, on how we think about what investments to make, and on Teach For America’s impact in communities where we’ve been for 20 years?

RH: There are voices in the education research community who have felt that TFA is not that interested in the traditional education research space. I’m curious whether you think TFA has contributed to that impression and whether you’re interested in working with researchers who are not already partnering with you?
HH: I think that for a long time Teach For America was small enough that helping somebody gather data for a relatively small impact study was not very interesting or didn’t seem like it would be a worthwhile pursuit. I think that we are operating at scale now and there are a lot of opportunities to partner with us and get access to some of the data that we have. We have a robust network of universities that partner with us so that our folks can get certified and get masters degrees. Faculty on those campuses have some advantage in terms of having access to programs. But my team at Teach For America fields all kinds of requests to do research with us and we also go out looking for people to do that kind of work with.

We don’t fund a lot of those activities but we do partner with people to go out and identify funding. I think that’s sometimes been the challenge. We’ve been criticized for not being open, but in my four-year tenure, I think we’ve only said “no” to a couple of proposals that have been presented to us.

RH: If somebody wanted to reach out to you guys, who is the appropriate person to reach out to and what’s the best way to get a hold of them?
HH: On our webpage, on the research section, we have an email address that goes right into our request system. Or people can reach out directly to me: heather.harding@teachforamerica.com.

-Rick Hess

This blog entry also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

On the other side, we’ve got teachers and “public school defenders” who aren’t content to challenge simple-minded solutions, but who argue that we can’t really distinguish good educators from bad ones…and ought to instead spend lots of time worrying about whether teachers are happy.

I’ve no use for either camp. I don’t want to split the difference, find a “middle course,” or any of that. I think that both camps just get it flat wrong. It’s good to identify problems and to respond. But it’s a mistake to imagine that those responses can always be translated into policy solutions.

On Wednesday, in a terrific piece, the Washington Post‘s Bill Turque penned a page one story on Sarah Wysocki, a former DC Public Schools teacher who was terminated under DC’s IMPACT teacher evaluation system because of low value-added scores. Wysocki may or may not be a good teacher. She sounds good in the account, and had promising evaluation scores. But there are certainly reasonable concerns about whether her value-added scores were compromised by cheating that may have inflated fourteen students’ prior year scores–as well as all the usual questions about how much weight we want to put in these numbers, and how fully we think they reflect a teacher’s performance.

Especially intriguing is that Wysocki was quickly snatched up by neighboring Fairfax County, one of the nation’s highest-performing school systems. Fairfax superintendent Jack Dale told me on Wednesday that he questioned how much faith to put into Wysocki’s value-added scores, and added that Fairfax is focused on more than just a teacher’s reading and math scores. Dale said that Fairfax parents probably regard instruction reading and math as no more than “twenty to twenty-five percent” of what they expect from their schools and that, “More and more parents are saying we test too much, so they’re not really looking at those test scores that much… I see less and less emphasis on test scores now than even a couple years ago.”

I grew up in Fairfax and know the system fairly well. It’s fair to say that Fairfax families generally chose the system’s schools because they desire a broad emphasis on science, world languages, gifted programs, music, and an array of aptitudes that those assessments don’t capture. DCPS’s laser focus on reading and math gains, and the assumption that these scores are a good proxy for a teacher’s general performance, doesn’t make sense in the Fairfax context.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong-headed for DC. The DCPS leadership is trying to turn around a historically low-performing system that has long failed at even its most basic responsibilities, and where vast numbers of students lack rudimentary skills in reading and math. Thus, it’s certainly reasonable for DCPS to build a teacher evaluation system that seeks to base 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation on reading and math value-added.

In other words, neither Fairfax nor DCPS are necessarily right (or wrong). Rather, they’re confronting different challenges and needs, and trying to make reasonable choices about how to proceed. The world is a complex place and adopting mechanistic, one-size-fits-all solutions, like so many of the statewide teacher evaluation and pay systems being championed today, make it likely that thousands of schools and millions of teachers and students will be snared by systems that are a poor match for their needs.

Also on Wednesday, MetLife released the 28th annual Survey of the American Teacher, which reported that 44 percent of the nation’s teachers are “very satisfied” with their jobs. This was the lowest reading since 1989. The decline in satisfaction occasioned the usual hand-wringing and angst. (At the same time, 77 percent of teachers said they’re treated as professionals by the community, suggesting that those who claim teachers feel under assault may be exaggerating just a wee bit.)

I don’t get the angst. Why? This is just another face of the one-size-fits-all problem. I don’t care that teacher morale is down in the aggregate. I would care if we knew that morale is lousy among teachers who are doing a good job and working hard. I want those teachers to feel valued, energized, enthusiastic, and all that. On the other hand, if a teacher is lousy or doing lousy work, they should have lousy morale. Hopefully it’ll encourage them to leave sooner. And we’ve got plenty of reason to worry about teacher quality in the aggregate. For instance, 29 percent of teachers say they are likely to leave the teaching profession within the next five years–up from 17 percent in 2009. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think the right answer is: neither. Getting it just right, Regis Shields, director of Education Resource Strategies, told Ed Week‘s Liana Heitin, “We need more information on who the 29 percent” are. Shields said, “If these aren’t effective teachers and this increases the effectiveness of the teaching force, that’s great. If they’re high-quality teachers, then we have some concerns.”

And that’s about as smart a response to one-size-fits-all thinking as I can muster.

- Rick Hess

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The title may be a bit weird, but the premise is simple: I believe that two things are true. It is true, as would-be reformers often argue, that statutes, policies, rules, regulations, contracts, and case law make it tougher than it should be for school and system leaders to drive improvement and, well, lead. At the same time, however, it is also true that these leaders have far more freedom to transform, reimagine, and invigorate teaching, learning, and schooling than is widely believed.

The problem is that in selecting, training, socializing, and mentoring leaders (and their teams), we have generally not equipped them for this work. You only need to talk to school and system leaders or board members; examine education leadership programs; or read texts by edu-leadership icons like Sergiovanni, Fullan, Bolman, Deal, and Leithwood to understand that leaders are expected to succeed via culture, capacity-building, coaching, and consensus–no matter the obstacles in their way. Let me be real clear: these are all good things. Instructional leadership, a strong culture, stakeholder buy-in, team cohesion, and professional practice are all terrific. The mistake is to imagine that leaders can do these things successfully or sustainably without also diligently taking steps to escape the cage created by regulations, rules, and routines (or combating the myths, excuses, and confusion that surround these).

Meanwhile, the sloganeering, crude policy proposals, and anti-union broadsides of the “reformers” often fail to address real chokepoints–even as they excuse timid, lethargic leadership by blaming everything on “the union.” Even energetic leaders seen as exemplars are often long on passion, commitment, charisma, and hard work, but are ultimately tripped up by a dearth of smart strategies for escaping the cage. They do good things, but mostly by stacking new dollars atop old, while much of their handiwork evaporates when they move on. We wind up with much happy talk about the need for better “human capital” and accountability, or more time and money and technology, but remarkably little exploration of how schools and systems might use time, talent, and technology in smarter, more cost-effective ways.

A great example of how this plays out involves today’s efforts to boost teacher quality. We hear a lot about what leaders can’t do when it comes to staffing, incentive pay, dismissals, and the rest. Yet, while much of this is valid, it’s also the case that these leaders can do a lot more than sometimes thought. For example, when John Deasy, now superintendent of Los Angeles, was superintendent of Prince George’s County, Maryland, he transferred hundreds of teachers to new schools and initiated a pay-for-performance system despite the traditional belief that these moves were prohibited by the collective bargaining agreement (CBA). When asked how this was possible, Deasy would smile. “Nothing prohibited any of this,” he said. “Why does it not happen? [Because] most people see the contract as a steel box. It’s not. It’s a steel floor with no boundaries around it. You’ve just got to push and push and push.”

Deasy is the exception, not the rule. Indeed, after studying Massachusetts collective bargaining agreements, Vanderbilt professor Dale Ballou observed, “On virtually every issue of personnel policy, there are contracts that grant administrators the managerial prerogatives they are commonly thought to lack. When more flexible language is negotiated, administrators do not take advantage of it [but still] blame the contract for their own inaction.” Even charter schools, supposedly free from the “system’s” surly bonds, are often voluntary cage-dwellers. In his recent study of charter school CBAs, Washington University researcher Mitch Price concluded that charters are “not as innovative as they might be” when it comes to areas like evaluation, staffing, and compensation, “given the opportunity teachers and school leaders have to craft agreements from scratch.”

As I travel the country, I inevitably hear from folks that have both kinds of stories–horror stories about getting caged in by rules, regulations, policies, and statutes, and cage-busting stories from leaders who found ways to escape or explode those constraints. In addition, my colleague Whitney Downs and I have interviewed school and system leaders, district administrators, educators, board members, consultants, attorneys, business partners, vendors, and state chiefs.

But, and here’s where you come in, we know that even our best efforts are missing a wealth of insight, experience, and expertise. So, I’d love to hear any tales that readers would care to share.

The stories that will be most useful (and most likely to inform the book) are those that illustrate either:
A] the ways in which you’ve been hemmed in by federal/state laws or regulations, district policies, employee contracts, IT/HR/finance operations, established routines, or stagnant cultures, or
B] the ways in which you, or your colleagues, have found ways to escape or explode those constraints.

If you’d care to share, please feel free to post it as a comment or to share it directly with Whitney at whitney.downs@aei.org. (Of course, we won’t use any material without your permission; and it’s perfectly fine to share something with us on background–with the understanding that your name and information won’t appear.)

-Frederick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Rick Hess: Many readers may not be familiar with Douglas County. Can you say a bit why some observers think the district is such an interesting place?
Liz Fagen: There are a few things that the school district has taken on in a systematic fashion. Probably the most noteworthy is the board voted in what we call the choice scholarship program. Other people call it a voucher, [but] I think it’s slightly different than just the pure voucher. The idea is to allow students to select [a partner] school. The child can attend a private school with a portion of the revenue we receive from the state. That’s one of the big things.

[Another is] we have discovered that while there are a lot of assessments out there, there are really no assessments that measure what we–and our parents–find to be the most important outcomes for our students. So what we’re working to do is develop our own assessment system. Which has turned out to be, really, quite a project, because we haven’t been able to find the third-party support we thought we might.

So we’re working with our own teachers and our own assessment department, developing assessments for our students’ most important outcomes. [This includes] some of the more interesting 21st-century skills [around] creativity, collaboration, and communications…. [We want] a higher quality assessment, and then to collect the data that we get from those assessments and use that to identify some of the best teachers in our school district.

RH: You’re pushing forward on teacher evaluation, too, with a bit of a twist. Can you say a bit about what you’re doing?
LF: We have three different areas where we measure teacher performance. One is through a new evaluation instrument; the second is through the balanced assessment system, which I just referred to; and the third is in areas that we call world class education targets. Basically, they’re things that we believe we need to see in every classroom going forward. And if the teacher does well in all three areas, then we have put forward a framework that provides them with an additional amount of pay for hitting the rigorous targets…We’re moving away from the step-and-lane salary schedule toward what we hope is paying teachers based on market value for what they can teach their students. And [we're] then overlaying that with pay-for-performance systems where they can make additional money based on how good they are.

RH: The assessment piece obviously entails a ton of work on your part. What are you looking for in assessments that you are having trouble finding?
LF: What we’re finding is really low-level kind of stuff that’s out there. What we call the “floor.”… What we want from our students is a lot more than that for them to be college and career ready…where students actually perform something and then the teacher loads the data about their performance into the system. Or even performance tasks that are more electronic in nature. Our dream is the Microsoft Light Table, where you have kindergartners doing work on a computer screen and the information is being captured about their progress and the teacher can assess that information.

I use the example of the Tag Reader pen. Leap Frog has this little pen and when my daughter uses it in a Tag Reader book the pen actually learns what my daughter can do. And if I plug the pen into my computer it…will actually show me how she’s doing on the various components of the learning progression. The pen is measuring what my daughter is doing as she’s doing it. But it’s not an additional assessment. I’m from Iowa and I joke with my teachers that if the pig doesn’t get fatter stop weighing it. So we don’t want to spend a whole lot of time assessing. We want the assessments to be natural, in real time. We don’t want our great teachers to have to do extra stuff. Instead we want to capture all that data real time just like that little pen does.

RH: Where are you on the assessment and evaluation pieces, in terms of the time line?
LF: Our assessment department is currently field testing items in math and reading. Our principals are working through the year getting used to the new evaluation system, really getting their feet wet with it. Of course the market-based pay and the components of pay have to go through negotiation process. So we’re doing that right now.

RH: Will the assessments have to be revisited when the Common Core is implemented?
LF: I believe that our assessment officer would tell you that because we’re using the Common Core to develop the most important outcomes for our students, we’re already aligned–we just exceed it.

RH: How do you characterize the Douglas County school system?
LF: Douglas County is just south of Denver. We have approximately 60,000 students, about 80 schools, including 11 charter schools that are district-operated. Our demographic is largely a middle-class school district. We don’t have a great deal of minority students [or] low-income students. We do have a few schools that have higher numbers [of those students], so it exists in pockets.

RH: And what’s achievement look like?
LF: It’s a very high-achieving school district; we’re always in the top three districts in the state. And again, we don’t feel like that gives us a lot of information. We’re really interested in knowing how our students are doing on a more international stage. So this year we are piloting the PISA test in two of our high schools. We want really want to know that our students can compete with any students in the world for whatever they want to do. And so we’re trying to push the envelope and think about things well beyond the low-bar state standards.

RH: Can you talk a bit more about this choice scholarship program? What was the thinking behind it and how has it been received?
LF: I wasn’t actually here when that started. But in 2009 there were a slate of candidates for the board that ran together. And they ran on a reform platform [saying that Douglas County] is a good school district…but it’s time to push it forward. They were all elected at a pretty high margin and they felt like the community had spoken clearly and was saying, “We want reform, we want you to get in there and push the district forward again.”…So the board came in and they started out of the gate with some charter school work [and] eventually they started what was called the choice task force.

We took [the task force's recommendations] and we immediately went and met with the Colorado Department of Education. We explained that we have the most amazing schools in Douglas County [and] we do not fear competition from private schools. But we would like the opportunity to make other schools available if our students wanted to go there. So CDE worked together with us, we met with various groups, and we took lots of feedback and input.

And ultimately we designed the program, private schools applied to be our partners, we put them on a list, and we had a pilot of 500 students. The students get to choose from any of these private schools, but they have to get in on their own merit. If they do, we give the parents a check endorsed over to the school for 75 percent of the pupil’s tuition… In March the board voted to accept our entire strategic plan including the choice scholarship program. They created the policy and we were off and running. And then we were sued by the ACLU and it was enjoined by a Denver district court judge.

RH: And what’s the current court status?
LF: It is now in the Colorado court of appeals. We’ve been told that no matter how that goes either side would appeal, so we know that we’re heading for the Colorado Supreme Court. We are in such an interesting budget time in our school district, where for the first time, really, budgets are shrinking instead of growing. And we are a growing school district–even during these times we grow around 1,200 to 2,000 students per year. We used to grow as many as 3,000 per year. The board was really committed to saying, “Look, we know that the budgets are shrinking..So we will not pay any litigation. So we’re going to privately raise all that money,” and that’s what we’ve done.

RH: You’ve sketched an agenda that most would regard as pretty contentious, especially for a high-performing system. Have you gotten much push back with the board or the community?
LF: The board is great… I think that the community is a fifty- fifty split on the choice scholarship program. Just because there are people that question their tax dollars going to a private entity, and particularly to a religious school.

RH:You’re a suburban district, and few suburban districts in the nation have embraced this kind of reform agenda. Why do you think that is?
LF: I think one of the reasons is it is harder in a suburban school district when you have high-performing students. Change is hard if all of your metrics are implying that everything is great…. [But] I think it’s incumbent on school districts like Douglas County to lead the way, to try things and to be partners with urban districts in saying, “We’re going to pilot this and we’ll let you know how it goes. And we’ll help you if you want to do it and vice versa.”

-Frederick Hess

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up

The idea intrigues me, but I’ve been as confused as most others about what ARPA-ED would look like or actually do. To try to get a clearer picture of what Sen. Bennet and the Obama administration have in mind, I invited the Senator and some key authorities over last week to explain it all at more length. The conversation included a public event, featuring Bennet; Jim Shelton, chief of ED’s Office of Innovation and Improvement; John Easton, Director of the Institute for Education Sciences; and Ken Gabriel, the Deputy Director of DARPA (you can watch it here).

I came away more comfortable with the proposal. It didn’t hurt that Gabriel did a terrific job of clearly and bluntly discussing DARPA and its role. Created in 1958 in the aftermath of the Soviet launch of Sputnik, DARPA operates as a nimble operation able to pursue strategically critical R&D.

Gabriel argued that the key word in the agency’s title is not “advanced” or “research,” but “project.” This gives the agency a tightly defined mission–to pursue and create applied, transformative capabilities. This tack obviously requires a willingness to invest in programs with uncertain prospects and which may take a number of years to deliver, if they ever do. One current project is seeking to design a plane than can fly Mach 20 (twenty times the speed of sound). Previous projects have eventually yielded success like unmanned aircraft, stealth technology, and the internet. This patient, applied approach is very different from how R&D typically unfolds in education, where research is far less likely to focus on developing applications and where there is a demand for big answers that can be used right now. DARPA’s focus on specific breakthrough capabilities strikes me as analogous to what I’ve previously described in Education Unbound as creating new “one percent” solutions–where you develop the ability to get profoundly better at solving one small but significant problem. One percent solutions don’t “fix” schools; but if you develop one, and then another, and then another, stubborn problems start to become more tractable.

Any reason to think this kind of approach can usefully translate to the world of schooling, higher education, and workforce training, where it’s about complex human interactions and not stealth technology? I think so. First, it’s not as if the Department of Defense doesn’t deal with teams, mentoring, training, and such. More to the point, ARPA-ED would make more sense for some kinds of capabilities than others. It would need to be directed accordingly. I find it much easier to envision a promising program to help students master conversational Mandarin or the principles of calculus in six weeks than one which “turns around” schools or figures out “optimal” pay systems. I could imagine projects that help an ELL student make up three years of English acquisition in three months, an iPad app that can help identify and remediate problems in early reading, or an assessment that can capture cognitive development in more robust, compelling ways.

Gabriel alluded to an intriguing DARPA project that enjoyed enormous success at workforce training. The Institute for Defense Analysis has reported, “In a recent study, DARPA compared students who trained to be Navy Information System Technicians, and found that those who had been trained by a new digital tutor outperformed traditionally-trained students by two standard deviations. In other words, the average student trained by the new digital tutor outperforms around 98 percent of students trained using traditional instruction.”

Gabriel was very clear about what enables DARPA to be successful despite its modest size (DARPA spends just $2.8 billion of the Department of Defense’s sprawling, $60 billion annual research and development budget). An independent agency of about 220 employees, DARPA’s director reports directly to the Secretary of Defense. It’s a remarkably flat operation, with just a half-dozen office directors, a deputy director, and a director providing all the management. The agency has freedom from civil service and hiring restrictions, and purposefully recruits outsiders from the worlds of academe, research, science, and technology to generate fresh thinking and ideas. Employees typically stay three to five years, and the work mostly consists at any given moment of different staff pursuing about 100 projects, each costing perhaps $15 or $20 million. The actual work is not done by DARPA, but by research universities, private sector firms, and other contracted parties. Gabriel was excruciatingly clear that DARPA wouldn’t work if it was run like a typical federal agency. He remarked that “people are the lifeblood of the agency” and that “ideas are fragile,” and therefore that the agency must be free to seek technical expertise; to recruit “with a sense of urgency;” to be small, autonomous, and agile; to have staff serve and then leave; and to be buffered from personal and political agendas on Capitol Hill or in DoD.

For any ARPA-ED proposal to make sense, it has to incorporate the same capabilities as DARPA. And that’s an immense challenge. One savvy DC veteran enumerated on Wednesday the things that could go wrong: Congressional micro-management and an insistence on “immediately useful” results; an inability to attract or hire real talent due to hiring rules; an inability to move quickly due to cumbersome agency procedures and procurement rules; the desire of established research outfits, advocacy groups, and regional interests for earmarks and set-asides; and ED’s aversion to dealing with for-profits.

There are a bunch of interesting details I won’t wade into right now. One is that DARPA can count on DoD to be a giant customer for its best work. An ARPA-ED would have to instead depend on districts, states, and colleges to buy its product. Shelton spoke to this, arguing that the logic of ARPA-ED does depend on the faith that demand will emerge for capabilities which clearly represent a profound improvement. Another issue is that DARPA seeds innovation by being clear that intellectual property is owned not by the government but by those doing the work; that ensures it seeds the marketplace and doesn’t stifle it. It’s also unclear how ARPA-ED would proceed with funding which would amount to just one or two percent of what DARPA enjoys.

Here’s where I come out. I like the idea. I believe there’s a vital role for this kind of project-driven federal R&D. This can, as Shelton notes, help equip U.S. firms to thrive in the multi-trillion dollar international education marketplace. But this is only worth doing if it’s done right, and that will be enormously difficult. There will be huge temptations to leave the design vague, get the thing launched, and then hope for the best. I think that would be a catastrophic mistake. And, we don’t have new money to spend. So, I’m in…if the proposal is cost-neutral and, more importantly, if the legislation carefully and explicitly incorporates and safeguards the features that have fueled DARPA’s success.

-Frederick Hess

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Rick Hess: You’re moving into the role of state chief after having already served as head of Louisiana’s Recovery School District. And, you’re stepping in as state supe in a state that is widely regarded as a national reform leader. How does all of that shape your mindset and your agenda?
John White: On the one hand, it’s very emboldening to be in a place that has the courage to say, “Even if it’s good, it’s not good enough,” and to press further faster. On the other hand, having been RSD superintendent, I know that oftentimes the state bureaucracy can impede the progress that local superintendents are trying to make. So on the one hand, I am emboldened, and on the other hand, I am committed to empowering people at the local level to make change.

RH: What’s an example of how the state bureaucracy got in your way at the RSD?
JW: Oftentimes people in Washington and people in state capitals don’t fully appreciate the sheer volume of work that legislatures and bureaucracies have created over time, and how much time that takes for people working day-to-day in districts and charter schools. So, for example, dozens of reports from one office to the next are not coordinated with one another. And when you think about that, those reports are oftentimes literally required in districts with 100,000 kids and by one individual charter school with 300 kids. You quickly realize how perverse that system is.

RH: How much of an opportunity do you think you will have to rectify some of those problems, or are these federal rules that are out of your hands?
JW: No, I think a lot of it is within our control; more than we think is within our control. And it’s no one individual’s fault. We’ve all been telling each other, “This is how things are done,” for however many years. And you know, part of the job of a state education agency should be getting out of the way.

RH: So given that, what is your agenda? What are the top priorities for your first year?
JW: I think there are really three things. We are participating in the national program of raising standards for student and teacher performance. Our schools and districts need to focus as much of their energies on that as possible. But we are not being honest if we say that our current system is, in and of itself, adequate to get every child prepared for a college degree or a professional career. So, second, we are committed to building a system of choices, not just among traditional public schools, but also charter schools, private schools, higher education, and workplace experiences. Finally, in order to do either of those things, we have to relieve the burdens that we have unnecessarily placed on school districts and on entrepreneurs. We constantly report and monitor things that have nothing to do with student achievement.

RH: Your predecessor, Paul Pastorek, voiced frustration about some of the difficulties extending the reach of the RSD model beyond New Orleans. How big a concern is that?
JW: Looking at the successes that we’ve had in our high density urban environment and thinking about how those principles play out in an environment of low population concentration far from our big economic hubs, there are real challenges…. But we have the evidence that we can make progress toward our most dramatic challenges. And ten years ago, if you would have said New Orleans will soon be performing at the state average in literacy, you would have been laughed at.

RH: Speaking of urban environments, national observers have heard a lot about what’s happened in New Orleans. But how, for instance, is Baton Rouge faring? Are you seeing similarly dramatic efforts?
JW: Other large cities [in the state] haven’t taken on the comprehensive reform in the way that New Orleans has. And in Louisiana and across the country you’ll hear people say, “Well, [New Orleans did so] because of the flood.” But a flood doesn’t have anything immediately to say about how you educate your children. We can create the conditions for change in any one of our parishes. And if we don’t, it’s because we are choosing not to.

RH: So, is it fair to say you think other areas of the state needs some of the same kind of systemic reform we’ve seen in New Orleans?
JW: It’s completely fair to view any school system as one that requires whole system transformation, and then you can create a plan to do that. It’s also fair to say that if it’s a real plan for kids, it invariably will involve adults changing the way they do their work, and that it will look different from setting to setting. A rural parish with five schools is obviously going to have a different set of challenges and opportunities than an urban district with 100 schools. But every school system is one that can be transformed.

RH: Louisiana has moved aggressively on a number of fronts, such as evaluating teacher programs, teacher value added, and data systems. Are there particular successes or challenges worth noting?
JW: I am proud of how committed the state has been to giving its teachers the roadmap to success through its evaluation system. Many states have come up against, frankly, adult- oriented challenges, and our state is moving ahead with great urgency. I think that our accountability reforms, and our entrepreneurial approach to charter schools and for educators to think outside the box, have been tremendous contributions to people’s sense of what’s possible. But we have a really long way to go. Though our graduation rate increased three points last year alone, we still only graduate seven in ten of our kids. And our ACT average is still hovering at less than twenty. So the mission of getting every child on track to a college degree or professional career still has a ways to go.

RH: How much of a consideration is it that Louisiana has relatively weak collective bargaining provisions compared, say, to New York, where you worked previously?
JW: It’s a factor. But you know, we still see seniority-based compensation, compensation based on master’s degree and professional development, credit-based financial awards based exclusively on seniority, just because that’s the old way of doing things and because it’s not hard. The problem is it doesn’t help kids. So, the actual mindset about what’s good for children is a much bigger challenge to overcome than is collective bargaining or any other regulation.

RH: Louisiana pioneered the RSD model that’s now being imitated elsewhere, in states like Tennessee and Michigan. What are a couple of key lessons or cautions that you think others would do well to take from Louisiana’s experience?
JW: I think two things are needed to sustain the change. One, investments in talented educators from the get-go; without a high-quality workforce, no reform will move ahead. Second, we need to get to a place where the community is pulling the change. A government can’t do it alone. We need organizations that are actively building a sense of the community’s power to choose a better education for the children. Until we have that, our reforms will be provider-led rather than consumer-led; that’s sustainable for a while, but not in perpetuity.

RH: How do you see your relationship with the RSD in your new role?
JW: I plan to be very involved, because New Orleans is showing us two things. One is that children, even the children with the greatest level of challenge–and having worked in New York and in Chicago, I can tell you that the children in New Orleans face challenges that are on par with any I have ever worked with–can be excellently prepared for life after 12th grade. They can achieve anything the rest of us can achieve. And second, that we may well have to think completely differently about our work each day in order to achieve it. That may even go beyond talking about rigorous teacher evaluation systems and Common Core standards to do things that are counterintuitive to many of us in government–like actually recognizing that people on the ground might know more than we do.

RH: New Orleans has benefited greatly in recent years from the post-Katrina infusion of philanthropy and talent. As Katrina recedes and funders and talent providers turn elsewhere, how difficult is it going to be to sustain the momentum?
JW: Difficult, but school reform is an organizational challenge. And the greatest way of recruiting talented people is having organizations that are led by talented people and empowering their leaders to do what they need to do. We have set up organizations that have been allowed to flourish. That’s much more sustainable than any superintendent-led school system. A district like Philadelphia, which has had a difficult superintendent transition, could take months or even years to get back on track to a coherent reform plan. Our schools are strong organizations unto themselves. And provided we can keep making courageous decision to replicate high- performing schools and remove low-performing schools, then we will be okay.

RH: Post-Katrina, there were concerns about outsiders invading New Orleans schooling. There have been intense racial politics. How did you negotiate that during your time at the RSD, and how does that shape your approach going forward?
JW: It’s extremely important as a leader to never give up on your ideals. But on the other hand, never give up on respecting everyone at the table. That gives you a baseline of credibility off of which to operate.

RH: Can you offer an example of how you do this?
JW: Yes, at John McDonogh High School. When I first came to New Orleans, the word on the Street was we were going to shut down the building of that 100-year-old high school. And now we’ve announced that we are spending $35 million to renovate it. Steve Barr [founder of Green Dot Public Schools] and teachers now are going to take over the school’s management…By staying at the table, by sitting through the discussion, by always insisting that this can be a college and career school, we had a compelling vision that attracted great partners, and are in a position to turn one of the lowest performing high schools in the country into a real beacon for change.

RH: You previously worked in New York under Joel Klein. Can you talk a bit about what your responsibilities were there and what lessons you’ve taken from that experience?
JW: I had two different responsibilities [in New York]. One, as Deputy Chancellor for talent, labor, and innovation, was to manage labor policy, teacher evaluation, compensation, union relations, and so on. The other job, as head of our portfolio group, was to create charter schools, close low-performing schools, plan enrollment changes, and so on. And those jobs are almost diametrically opposed, because one is about improving the guts of the system as it currently exists, and one is about trying to create a new system of choices.

And on one hand I learned that you should never, even as you are calling for change, give up on trying to reach the teacher, the average classroom teacher that’s out there, because it will always surprise you how many of them agree with you even when people say they don’t. But on the other hand, [I learned] that we can’t [allow] hundreds of pages of union contracts, thousands of pages of regulations [to stop us] from creating great options for our kids. They can’t wait.

RH: In your new role, which state chiefs out there are you looking to as models or mentors? And what have been a couple of the most useful pieces of advice you received?
JW: Kevin Huffman [Tennessee's chief] was one my bosses at Teach for America. Chris Cerf [chief in New Jersey] was my predecessor and my Deputy Chancellor in New York. [New York chief] John King was my longtime partner in New York State. So there are relationships that I come to and I work with. But the first superintendent that I went to see on a visit recently was [Indiana chief] Tony Bennett. And Tony said some really, really powerful things to me. One, he said, “Discipline yourself and don’t overestimate what you can actually do to achieve change. Empower people locally to achieve change and hold them in high standards.” And, secondly, he said, “That shouldn’t stop you from getting out and carrying the message. And you should never be behind the desk. If you have something that you believe in, sell it, talk to people, take the criticism, and be out in the community.”

RH: Last question. A year from now, how will you know whether your first year was a success?
JW: I am going to want to look, district to district, classroom to classroom, and even within our own organization at the state level, to see what we have going on in real terms. Does it have the potential to be catalytic for kids in schools?

-Frederick Hess

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Now, let’s just stipulate that President Obama and the folks at the Department of Education are good people who want to help kids. But that doesn’t excuse an exercise that struck me as hypocritical, graceless, and troubling. Six things about this latest spin of the waiver saga that seemed particularly disconcerting:

First, setting aside my reservations about Sec. Duncan’s right to not merely grant selected waivers but to impose wholly new requirements that exist nowhere in federal law, I was struck by the sheer number and scope of conditions that Duncan cheerfully imposed. These new requirements included, according to the White House release: “States must adopt and have a plan to implement college and career-ready standards. They must also create comprehensive systems of teacher and principal development, evaluation and support that include factors beyond test scores, such as principal observation, peer review, student work, or parent and student feedback…they must set new performance targets for improving student achievement and closing achievement gaps. They also must have accountability systems that recognize and reward high-performing schools and those that are making significant gains.”

Second, maybe it’s just me, but I have trouble reconciling this list with the President’s proclamation yesterday that, “We want high standards, and we’ll give you flexibility in return…Because what might work in Minnesota may not work in Kentucky.” Indeed, one only had to read Duncan’s complicated, jargon-laden, finger-wagging letters to the ten approved states to see just how prescriptive the process is. In fact, I don’t think the extent of the new demands–and the limited flexibility granted–will be clear for weeks, at best. It’ll require patient observers to wade through the requests, letters, conditions, and so on. Just for starters, it would appear that the waiver “winners” just promised to adopt narrow, prescriptive teacher evaluation and school improvement policies that apply to charter schools as well as district schools–but not even charter authorities are entirely clear on how this will play out in reality or if these commitments should be taken any more seriously than so many empty promises in the Race to the Top applications.

Third, I found remarkably graceless the way in which the administration chest-thumpingly blamed the waivers on congressional inaction, while taking no responsibility for the slow pace of ESEA reauthorization (much less acknowledging that it dawdled for 14 months with a Democratic Congress before ever introducing its initial ESEA “blueprint.”) The White House gleefully declared, “The administration’s decision to provide waivers followed extensive efforts to work with Congress to rewrite NCLB.” This may come as news to those GOP edu-staff who complained persistently throughout 2009 and 2010 that they couldn’t get the Department to give them the time of day. The history added irony to the President declaring, with less respect for the U.S. Constitution than I might expect from a law professor, “After waiting far too long for Congress to act, I announced that my administration would take steps to reform No Child Left Behind on our own.”

Fourth, I was unimpressed by the way in which the administration–even as it criticized Congress for failing to act–went out of its way to steal attention from House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline’s long-scheduled introduction of two bills crucial to moving NCLB reauthorization. It’s hard to take seriously an administration that complains about congressional inaction and then counter-programs so as to minimize attention to congressional action. (If you want to hear more about what Kline has in mind, check out what he had to say when he previewed the bills at AEI. You can find the event here.)

Fifth, I was struck (and not favorably) by the “Stockholm Syndrome”-ness of it all. Watching governors and state chiefs go to the administration on bended knee and hustle to comply with its various demands, out of desperation to escape the more destructive elements of NCLB, doesn’t strike me as good for democratic government or school improvement. And I thought the celebratory press releases would’ve felt more authentic if they’d been read into a camera and recorded on grainy videotape. I’m sure it’s just my skeptical nature, but I couldn’t help flashing on those old Soviet show trials when the President opened by declaring, “I want to start by thanking all the chief state school officers who have made the trip from all over the country. Why don’t you all stand up just so we can see you all, right here.”

Finally, and maybe it’s just me, but I found it patronizing when the President mused yesterday, “So Massachusetts, for example, has set a goal to cut the number of underperforming students in half over the next six years. I like that goal!” Or, “Florida has set a goal to have their test scores rank among the top five states in the country, and the top 10 countries in the world. I like that ambition!” I’m sure it makes me old-school, but I prefer it when the President doesn’t treat governors or respected state chiefs as so many ruddy-cheeked toddlers competing for his approval.

- Rick Hess

P.S.  Help Wanted: Seeking Rising Start to Become AEI Edu-Scholar.  A surfeit of cool work has made it necessary to add another scholar to my edu-team at AEI. The new research fellow will become the fourth scholar on the AEI edu-team, joining Mark Schneider, Andrew Kelly, and yours truly. They’ll also have the opportunity to work with a program and research team that, I’m firmly convinced, is the most talented, most disciplined, smartest, hardest-working, and nicest in the nation. It’ll be a chance to work with a fantastic team on important questions, and to do so at a phenomenally supportive and intellectually vibrant institution. All in all, a pretty sweet gig for the right candidate.

The new hire won’t have to raise money or sit in committee meetings. What they will do is tackle a range of intriguing K-12 and higher ed projects, dealing with issues like entrepreneurship, higher ed productivity, philanthropy, mobilizing parents, higher ed transparency, the future of the teaching profession, ESEA reauth, technology, K-12 and higher ed leadership, career and technical education, Common Core implementation, citizenship, state- and district-level reform, and much else (the mix would be, in part, a matter of interest). The right candidate will be ready to take the reins on a handful of projects, collaborate on research and writing, pursue their own lines of inquiry, collect data, provide incisive editing, write for scholarly and more general audiences, and welcome the chance to become a public thinker and speaker.

We’re open to pre-docs, post-docs, junior faculty, or newish Ph.D.’s currently ensconced in some other setting. Are flexible on disciplinary and methodological background, though comfort with quantitative analysis is essential. The candidate needs to have sharp writing, analytic, editing, organizational, and interpersonal skills and should be a dynamic thinker willing to challenge convention and eager to pioneer new lines of research or analysis.

Now, as I think most readers know, my shop has certain biases, and any candidate ought to be moderately comfortable with those. What are they? That for-profits aren’t all bad, educators aren’t all angels, the ability to disagree civilly is a virtue, good intentions are no excuse for sloppy thinking, transparency is a virtue, jargon should not be mistaken for expertise, healthy markets are a powerful mechanism for channeling human ingenuity, and research rarely offers conclusive answers to the most important questions.

If this sounds like a good fit, or if you’ve got someone to recommend, I’d love to hear from you. Please contact us via the offices of my uber-competent research assistant Daniel Lautzenheiser at daniel.lautzenheiser@aei.org.

These blog entries originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Regarding the Obama administration’s proposal to grant NCLB waivers to states who shift from subgroups to “super-subgroups”–allowing schools to make AYP based on the overall performance of their most vulnerable kids, rather than by requiring specific performance levels for a laundry list of demographic groupings–Williams wryly said he’s hoping to duck the hullabaloo because the emphasis on racial subgroups is the “linchpin” that glues the DFER reformers together with their civil rights allies. Cunningham implied that ED had little to do with the President’s demand that states raise the compulsory education age to 18; that the idea came “from the White House.” He told observers to not jump the gun in judging ED’s response to waivers, urging them to await the Secretary’s announcement before reaching any conclusions.

Klein said that 99 percent of the Hill sources she talks to think NCLB reauth will wait at least for 2013, that key spending questions won’t be sorted out until the post-election lame duck session, and that recent years have seen education lose its bipartisan patina and become “just another [partisan] issue.”

Winston told a room full of edu-enthusiasts that their focus on waivers, Common Core, ESEA/NCLB , turnaround models, and the rest amount to a fascination with process that doesn’t register with voters–who want to know the impact on education outcomes, jobs, and the economy. Haley acknowledged that the House Republicans failed to take Secretary Duncan up on the opening he created with his November 2010 call to embrace the “new normal” and focus on getting more bang for our buck in schooling, largely because the new majority’s huge freshmen class was still finding its bearings and got caught up in manifold other debates.

There was broad agreement on the value of the transparency that NCLB brought to outcomes but serious disagreement on what reauth should look alike. There was broad agreement that the action is shifting to governors. Cunningham said that Secretary Duncan routinely talks with Republican governors like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, and John Kasich; urged Hill Republicans to talk to GOP governors when judging the administration’s education proposals; and opined, “Governors will be in the driver seat in 2012, and that’s the way it should be.”

I asked the participants what we’ve seen the feds get right this past decade when it comes to schooling. Haley cited the transparency produced by NCLB. Williams flagged the attention and energy that infuse efforts to improve schooling. Cunningham pointed to three things: promoting transparency, using the bully pulpit to start conversations with lagging states, and using “carrots” like Race to the Top to catalyze reform.

Those responses starkly illustrated the value of the insights and lessons sketched in Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit. Featuring contributions penned by thinkers and doers including Ron Ferguson, Mike Smith, Larry Berger, Charlie Barone, Maris Vinovskis, Mike Casserly, Checker Finn, Mark Schneider, Liz DeBray, Pat McGuinn, Jennifer Wallner, Paul Manna, Josh Dunn, and Jane Hannaway, the book examines what we’ve learned about what Uncle Sam does and doesn’t do well when it comes to education innovation, accountability, equity, and research. The authors extract lessons from litigation, efforts targeted on urban systems, edu-lawmaking, NCLB implementation, initiatives designed to spur innovation, and more. More than anything else, the book offers a chance to focus not only on what we might like the federal government in schooling to do but also on the question of what Uncle Sam can actually do well given the shape of our federal system. And our conversation about what’s ahead in 2012 reminded me once again how much such thinking can usefully temper and inform our debates.

-Frederick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Rick Hess: What do you see as the agenda for Ohio school reform unfolding in 2012?
Bob Sommers: It will be a smaller agenda because we moved 13 out of 15 major reforms we wanted last year. And, frankly, the system has to implement some things. But one big push this year will be around data quality. The P-20 data pipeline is not very exciting, but we have got to get better data from pre-kindergarten all the way through to the workforce. And get greater clarity around how the system is working. How many kids are kindergarten-ready? Who’s doing a good job and who isn’t? How many kids are reading by the end of third grade? Out of college, are they getting employed? Are they making good wages? Are they living in Ohio? Are they being good citizens? So, that’s a big one. It’s greater transparency around performance and cost-effectiveness. Along with that one is improving school report cards. Right now, we have a convoluted report card system that can label a school with a fifty percent rate of failure as “honors with distinction.” That just doesn’t work. We need a much more understandable report card.

RH: Last year, what were the two or three most significant reforms that passed?
BS: We completely removed the cap on charters. We quadrupled vouchers. We got the school ranking system developed. School rankings, I would put up there in the top two. We now rank all the schools and school districts. And that has really changed the conversations. You now get people asking, “What do you mean my elementary in my wealthy school district is 1,100th out of 4,000 schools? I thought it was the best school in America.”

RH: How big a deal was the defeat on Question Two [the referendum which overturned Ohio collective bargaining reform] last November?
BS: The people spoke on the issue of collective bargaining rights. They didn’t appreciate collective bargaining being attacked. So the people spoke. From an education standpoint, though, there were very few things that we were looking for in changes in employment, compensation, and teacher relationships that we didn’t get [in separate legislation]. We eliminated seniority pretty much up and down the line. We got options in for performance-based pay. We got a teacher evaluation system that includes student achievement.

You know, politics is like farming. You can’t harvest unless you sell and cultivate. And we just didn’t do a good enough job of explaining to the public the problem that we tried to solve. The public didn’t see the problem that we saw…We knew we had to have more flexibility to manage costs. Teachers have a right to collective bargaining over their wages and hours, but they shouldn’t be able to bargain class sizes and which curriculum.

RH: What are a couple of key lessons that you take from the defeat on Question 2? And how might those inform the reform effort this year?
BS: We’re going to make sure we do a lot better job of explaining the problem we’re trying to solve. And to make sure that the public actually sees the problem the same way that we do. That’s the big lesson. You’ve got to go out. You’ve got to cultivate the fields….And so, a lot of our reforms are around that transparency. Making sure people are crystal clear where they are. And given huge latitude for the local levels to solve those problems that they all know what the problems are. And they can get them fixed.

RH: Is the Governor planning on reintroducing any elements from Senate Bill 5 [the collective bargaining bill] this year?
BS: No, I don’t expect so. The Governor is aggressive. But he’s also very respectful to the people. It’s the people’s government. And that’s not a company answer. That’s a genuine John Kasich answer. He pushes hard. He pushed to do the things, you know, to balance an eight billion dollar hole in the budget. He’s made some really tough reforms. He doesn’t mind taking a beating. But when it’s clear that the public doesn’t want something, then that’s the way it is.

RH: How have the politics of school reform changed in Ohio over the past year? What’s different this year than from where you were a year ago?
BS: I think it’s the classic “The more reform you get done, the harder the status quo pushes back.” The people that don’t get it, they fight back. They’re not bad people, but they’re just traditionalists…You make major changes. It takes time to implement. And so, there’s a pressure to slow down. When you have a lot of the things that we have done in the way of teacher evaluation, the up and coming changes in assessments, the Common Core, closing poor-performing schools–there are just a whole lot of things that take time to implement.

RH: Where is the Governor and where are the Republicans in the legislature on the Common Core at this point?
BS: I can’t speak necessarily for the legislature as a whole. But, I know the Governor is very supportive of Common Core. [State superintendent] Stan Heffner is very supportive of Common Core…Now, Ohio historically has had better than average standards. So, it isn’t as dramatic a change as it would be for some states. But we’re still going to go through some significant updates.

RH: And what’s the status of Race to the Top implementation right now?
BS: If you believe the feds, we’re like number two or three in the country in the quality of engagement. And I think it’s true. The disappointing thing–and the Governor talks about this all the time–he says, “Only half our schools are on board. What happened to the other half?”
When you look at Race to the Top, and you look at the Kasich administration’s reform agenda, you can’t tell them apart. You just can’t. And so at the half [of schools] that [aren't on board with Race to the Top], it’s the case that the unions wouldn’t agree, or that the school board wouldn’t agree, or the administration didn’t care, or whatever. But now, because of the Governor’s legislation, they’re going to have to implement all of the reforms anyway, just without the extra Race to the Top money.

RH: Have you felt like the Race to the Top implementation has made it easier to push the Governor’s agenda?
BS: There were times when somebody would say [of the Governor Kasich's agenda], “It’s those terrible right wing Republicans [who are pushing these ideas]!” And I don’t think Obama would have appreciated being called a right wing conservative. So yes, it was, it was valuable.

RH: As far as implementing the reforms, what are the key challenges?
BS: Number one, educators think the world is a non-competitive, fair place. And it isn’t. And if we’re going to have our kids ready, they need to recognize that effort doesn’t matter, results do. So, that’s the first thing. There’s also a lack of clarity in the education community of how important it is to be aggressive in preparing kids for life. Number three is that school and district leaders get stuck in tradition. There are a million things that there are absolutely no laws against. But people think there are.

RH: What’s an example?
BS: Blended learning. It’s a pretty phenomenal approach that has a lot of promise. People say, “Well, we can’t do that. It’s against the law.” But we’ve been doing it in the state of Ohio since 2003. There are no laws against it. It’s just a lack of willingness to go beyond tradition. I think school boards are more obstructionists than visionaries. The other thing is a lack of focus on performance and cost effectiveness. You’ve got to get better performance at a lower price…And oddly enough, it’s rarely the law that’s the problem. And it’s rarely cash. But that’s what everybody complains about. But I don’t think those are the problems.

RH: Ohio is famous for its uneven charter school sector. How big a concern in this?
BS:People aren’t willing to take on [some of the bad operators] for any number of political reasons. But last year we put in place some of the toughest school closure laws in the country. And we’re starting to close schools. We do have a problem with sponsor quality. In Michigan, where I operated before, you have universities serving as sponsors, and a university has a reputation to uphold that goes beyond the charter schools. So, they really want the charter schools that they sponsor to be good quality because they’re an extension of their larger image. In Ohio, we don’t have that. The sponsor network is pretty weak. So, that’s a huge problem, but I do think we’ve made great progress in correcting that.

RH: Last question. You’ve been working in K-12 a long time, and in a lot of roles. What surprised you most about tackling K-12 improvement from Columbus?
BS: The thing that surprised me shouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, I spent 15 years with the Department of Ed and so should have known it. But I’ve been away for a long time. It’s that state level reform cannot be on the aggressive leading edge simply because you’re moving a whole state. Aggressive leading edge reform only occurs at the school, school district, or charter level. And that’s part of the reason I’m going back there. I’d much prefer to be on the extreme edge of reform. And I think that’s maybe as it should be. It’s one thing to have an individual school try an extreme reform and fail. It’s another one to do that on an entire state. The speed with which reform is possible at a state level is slower than I had hoped.

-Frederick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Rankings were restricted to university-based researchers and excluded think tankers (e.g. Checker Finn or Russ Whitehurst) whose job is more focused on influencing the public discourse. After all, the intent is to nudge what is rewarded and recognized at universities. (The term “university-based” provides a bit of useful flexibility. For instance, Tom Kane currently hangs his hat at Gates, and Tony Bryk his at Carnegie. However, both are established academics who retain a university affiliation and campus digs. So they’re included.)

The scores reflect, in roughly equal parts, three things: articles and academic scholarship, book authorship and current book success, and presence in new and old media. (See yesterday’s post for the specifics.) The point of measuring quotes and blog presence is not to tally sound bites but to harness a “wisdom of crowds” sense of a scholar’s footprint on the public debate–whether that’s due to their current scholarship, commentary, larger body of work, media presence, or whatnot. We worked hard to be careful and consistent, but there were inevitable challenges in determining search parameters, dealing with common names or quirky diminutives, and so forth. Bottom line: this is a serious but inevitably imperfect attempt to nudge universities, foundations, and professional associations to consider the merits of doing more to cultivate, encourage, and recognize contributions to the public debate.

The top scorers? All are familiar edu-names, with long careers featuring influential scholarship, track records of comment on public developments, and outsized public and professional roles. In order, the top five were Linda Darling-Hammond, Diane Ravitch, Eric Hanushek, Larry Cuban, and Richard Arum. Darling-Hammond and Ravitch lapped the field, cracking 200 points on a scale where only a handful of scholars topped 100. Rounding out the top ten were Terry Moe, Paul Peterson, Pedro Noguera, Daniel Koretz, and David Cohen. Notable, if not too surprising, is that the top ten are all veteran, accomplished scholars. This reflects the nature of the scoring, which heavily weights the influence of a scholar’s body of work and not simply whether a scholar collected a bunch of press clippings or blog mentions in 2011.

Stanford University fared very well, claiming three of the top five scholars (and six of the top fifteen). Harvard University claimed four of the top fifteen, and NYU claimed another three.

By category: Darling-Hammond posted the top Google Scholar score, at 83; Cuban topped the books category at 37.5; Ravitch topped the Amazon rankings with a 19.7; she also posted the high score in the education press category, at 41.5; twelve scholars topped the blog mentions by maxing out at 50 points (although, without the cap, Hanushek would have taken the prize quite handily); and Arum topped the general press mentions with a 26.8.

A number of top scorers, like Ravitch, have books of recent vintage. For instance, among the top ten, just in the past two years, Moe published Special Interest, his unflinching critique of teacher unions; Darling-Hammond published The Flat World and Education; Peterson published Saving Schools; Cohen published Teaching and Its Predicaments; and Noguera published Creating the Opportunity to Learn. And Arum doubtless benefited from the continuing outsized impact of his oft-cited Academically Adrift.

As with any such ranking, this exercise ought to be interpreted with appropriate caveats and caution. That said, it’s revealing that a number of sober, less-controversial scholars–like Arum, Cohen, Dan Koretz, and Bob Pianta–dotted the top twenty. Meanwhile, less senior scholars who punched above their weight included Roland Fryer, Sara Goldrick-Rab, and Patrick McGuinn.

Given that professional norms vary (note that few economists crack the top twenty), it’s interesting to eyeball the results discipline by discipline (admittedly, there’s a bit of fuzziness when it comes to pigeonholing some scholars). The top-ranked economists were Hanushek, Hoxby, Roland Fryer, Hank Levin, and Tom Kane. The top-ranked political scientists were Moe, Peterson, Richard Elmore, Mike Kirst, and Bruce Fuller. The top-scoring sociologists were Arum, Noguera, Gary Orfield, Adam Gamoran, and Tony Bryk. Top scorers in the area of teacher education and curriculum and instruction were Darling-Hammond, Gloria Ladson-Billings, David Berliner, Ken Zeichner, and Carol Tomlinson.

The emphasis accorded to an established body of work advantages senior scholars at the expense of junior academics. And, given that the ratings are a snapshot of 2011, the results obviously favor scholars who recently penned a successful book or big-impact study this year. But both of these also accurately reflect how thinkers can disproportionately impact public discussion–so I’m disinclined to see problems in such a “bias.”

There’s also the challenge posed by bloggers like Jay Greene, Goldrick-Rab, Bruce Baker, and Sherman Dorn, whose own blogging or think tank critiques mean that they are publishing with great frequency. The key: the aim was not to measure how much a scholar writes, but how much resonance their work has. Flagging blog entries and newspaper mentions in which a scholar is identified by university affiliation here serves a dual purpose: avoiding confusion caused by common names while also ensuring that scores aren’t unduly padded by a scholar’s own blogging (since those posts generally don’t include an affiliation). If bloggers are provoking discussion, the figures will reflect that. If a scholar is mentioned sans affiliation, that mention is omitted here; but that’s true across-the-board. If anything, that probably tamps down the scores of well-known scholars for whom university affiliation may seem unnecessary. C’est la vie.

If readers want to argue the relevance, construction, reliability, or validity of the metrics, I’ll be happy as a clam. I’m not sure that I’ve got the measures right, that categories have been normed in the smartest ways, or even how much these results can or should tell us. That said, I think the same can be said about U.S. News college rankings, NFL quarterback ratings, or international scorecards of human rights. For all their imperfections, I think such efforts convey real information–and help to spark useful discussion. That’s what I’ve sought to do here.

I’d welcome suggestions regarding possible improvements–whether that entails adding or subtracting metrics, devising smarter approaches to norming, or what have you. I’d welcome critiques, concerns, questions, and suggestions. Take a look, and have at it.

- Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up

The exercise starts from two simple premises: 1] ideas matter and 2] people tend to devote more time and energy to those activities which are acknowledged and lauded. The academy today does a passable job of recognizing good disciplinary scholarship but a pretty mediocre job of recognizing scholars who effectively help to move ideas from the pages of barely-read journals into the national conversation around schools and schooling. This state of affairs may work fine when it comes to the study of material science or Renaissance poetry, but it doesn’t cut it for those wanting to encourage social scientists with something to say to wade responsibly into public debates.

In baseball, the ideal is the “five-tool” ballplayer. This is a player who can run, field, throw, hit, and hit with power. A terrific ballplayer might excel at just a couple of these, but there’s a special appreciation for those with a full suite of skills.

Among scholars who do policy-relevant research, there’s an analogous need for us to do a much better job appreciating scholars who do more than publish opaque articles in niche journals, sit on committees, and serve as officials in professional associations. To my mind, the engaged policy scholar is a “five-tooler” in her own right.

As I see it, the extraordinary policy scholar excels in five areas: disciplinary scholarship, policy analysis and popular writing, convening and quarterbacking collaborations, providing incisive media commentary, and speaking in the public square. It’s the scholars who are skilled in most or all of these areas who can cross boundaries, foster crucial collaborations, and bring research into the world of policy in smart and useful ways. The academy, though, treats many of these skills as an afterthought–if not an outright blemish on a scholar’s record! And while foundations fund evaluations, convenings, policy analysis, and dissemination, few make any particular effort to develop multi-skilled scholars or support this whole panoply of activity.

Today, academe offers big professional rewards for scholars who stay in their comfort zone while pursuing narrow, hyper-sophisticated research, but little recognition, acknowledgment, or support for scholars who operate as “five-tool” scholars. One result is that the public square is filled by impassioned advocates, while we hear far less than I’d like from those who are more versed in the research and equipped to recognize complexities and explain hard truths. Now, one can hardly blame those academics who seek to avoid the unpleasantness by remaining swaddled in the pleasant irrelevance of the ivory tower. After all, wading into the public debate can anger friends and call forth vituperative personal attacks. One small way to encourage academics to step into the fray and to push back on the academic norms fueling the status quo is, I think, to do more to recognize the value of engaging in public discourse and the scholars who do so.

With that aim, tomorrow’s Edu-Scholar rankings offer one way to gauge whether and how scholars are impacting the public discourse. The scores really reflect three things: the influence of a scholar’s articles and academic scholarship, their body of work when it comes to books, and their impact on conversation as reflected in old and new media. Broadly speaking, the scores generally draw about 40 percent on scholarly influence in terms of bodies of work and citation counts, 25 percent on book authorship and current book success, and about 35 percent on presence in new and old media.

Readers will note that the rankings do not address things like teaching, mentoring, and community service. Such is the nature of things. These scores are not imagined as a summative measure of a scholar’s contribution to teaching and knowledge. Rather, they are a counterpart to traditional publication-heavy measures of research productivity. Those results tell us something, but don’t offer much insight into how scholars in a field of public concern are influencing thinking and the national discourse. These results are designed to say more on that score.

The RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Presence Scoring Rubric

We opted to employ metrics that are publicly available, readily comparable, and replicable by third parties. This obviously limits the nuance and sophistication of the measures. The scoring is determined as follows:

Google Scholar Score: This figure gauges the number of articles, books, or papers a scholar has authored that are widely cited. A neat, commonly used technique for measuring breadth and impact is to tally the scholar’s works in descending order of how often each is cited, and then to identify the point at which the number of works is finally exceeded by the cite count for the least-frequently cited article. For instance, a scholar who had 10 works that were each cited at least 10 times, but whose 11th most-frequently cited work was cited just 9 times, would score a ten. A scholar who had 27 works cited at least 50 times, but whose 28th work was cited 27 times or fewer, would receive a 27. An assistant professor will typically have a number in the low single digits, while veteran scholars may score a 40 or higher. This reflects the fact that bodies of work matter, by influencing what others think and how issues are understood. By design, this bias favors veteran scholars. The search was conducted on December 20-21, 2011, using the scholar’s name under the “author” filter in an advanced search in Google Scholar, with the search limited to the “Business, Administration, Finance, and Economics” and “Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities” categories. A hand-search culled out works by other, similarly named, individuals. While Google Scholar has its flaws and is less precise than more specialized citation databases for such a search, it has the virtues of being multidisciplinary and publicly accessible. This category ultimately counted the most–amounting to between 25 percent and 60 percent of the score for most scholars–as it’s a quick way to gauge both the expanse and influence of a scholar’s body of work.

Book Points: An author search on Amazon was used to tally the number of books a scholar had authored, co-authored, or edited. Scholars received 2 points for a single-authored book, 1 point for a co-authored book in which they were the lead author, a half-point for co-authored books where they were not the lead author, and a half-point for any edited volume. The search was conducted using an “Advanced Books Search” for the scholar’s first and last name. (On a few occasions, a middle initial or middle name was used to avoid duplications with authors who had the same name, e.g. “David Cohen” became “David K. Cohen,” and “Deborah Ball” became “Deborah Loewenberg Ball.”) The “format” searched “Printed Books” so as to avoid double-counting books which are also available as e-books. This obviously means that books released only as e-books are omitted. However, circa 2011, that seemed a modest price to avoid double-counting and to maximize accuracy (given that very few relevant books, as of yet, are released only as e-books; this is likely to change in fairly short order.) In each category, a hand-search sought to guard against double-counting and to ensure an accurate score. Amazon-available reports and articles were excluded, as was any source listed as “out of print”–only published, available books were included. The search was conducted December 20-21. The high score in this category was 37.5, but most scholars scored between zero and 20.

Highest Amazon Ranking: The author’s highest-ranked book on Amazon, as of December 20-21. The highest-ranked book was subtracted from 400,000, and that figure was divided by 20,000 to derive a point total of somewhere between zero and 20. This score, due to the nature of Amazon’s ranking algorithm, is fairly volatile and biased in favor of more recent works. For instance, a book may have been very influential in the 1990s, impacting citation counts and the likelihood that a scholar is quoted in newspapers, but may not produce points in this category in 2011. The result is a decidedly imperfect way to gauge the impact of books, but one that conveys real information. To that point, many of the books that have stoked public discussion in the past few years fared relatively well. About a third of the scholars examined, including fifteen of the top twenty, scored points in this category.

Education Press Mentions: The total number of times the scholar was quoted or mentioned in Education Week or the Chronicle of Higher Education between January 1 and December 20-21. The search was conducted using each scholar’s first and last name. To norm the value of this category, the total number of appearances was divided by 2 to calculate Ed Press points. Scores in this category ranged from zero to 41.5, with most falling between zero and ten.

Blog Mentions: Based on a search using Google Blogs, this reflects the number of times a scholar was quoted, mentioned, or otherwise discussed in blogs between January 1 and December 20-21. The search was conducted using each scholar’s name, plus their affiliation (e.g. “Bill Smith” and “Rutgers”). Requiring university affiliation serves a dual purpose: avoiding confusion due to common names while ensuring that scores aren’t padded by a scholar’s blog posts (which generally don’t identify a scholar by affiliation). If bloggers are provoking discussion, the figures will reflect that. If a scholar is mentioned sans affiliation, that mention is omitted here; but that’s true across-the-board. If anything, that probably tamps down the scores of well-known scholars for whom university affiliation may seem unnecessary. Especially since the Ravitches, Hanusheks, Arums, and Darling-Hammonds still fare just fine, I’m good with that. Because blogging can tend towards the informal, the blog search also included the most common diminutive for a given scholar (e.g., “Rick Hanushek” as well as “Eric Hanushek;” “Pat McGuinn” as well as “Patrick McGuinn”). To norm the value of this category, points were calculated by dividing the total number of mentions by four. We also chose to cap the scores at 50 points to ensure that the rankings recognize impactful contributions without allowing the blog metric to overwhelm the other metrics. Twelve scholars hit the 50 point cap, but the vast majority of scholars scored between zero and 20.

Newspaper Mentions: Based on a search using Lexis Nexis, the number of times a scholar was quoted or mentioned in U.S. newspapers between January 1 and December 20-21. Like Blog Mentions, the search was conducted using each scholar’s name plus their affiliation. To norm the value of this category, points were calculated by dividing the total number of mentions by four. Scores ranged from zero to 26.8, with most falling between zero and ten.

Congressional Record Mentions: We conducted a simple name search in the Congressional Record for 2011 to determine whether a given scholar was called to testify or if their work was referenced by a member of Congress. The reference or testimony had to have occurred on or before December 21. If a scholar was included in either capacity, they received five points in this category.

There are obviously lots of provisos in making sense of the results. Different disciplines approach books and articles differently. Scholars of K-12 and higher education may have different opportunities to engage in the public square. Senior scholars have obviously had more of a chance to build a body of work.

Moreover, some readers may have more use for some of these categories than for others. That’s fine. The whole point is to encourage discussion and debate about the nature of responsible public engagement, who’s doing a particularly good job of it, how much these things matter, and how to accurately measure a policy scholar’s contribution.

Two questions sure to arise: Can somebody game this rubric? Am I concerned that this exercise will encourage academics to chase publicity? As for gaming, I’m not at all concerned. If scholars (against all odds) are motivated to write more relevant articles, pen more books that might sell, or be more aggressive about communicating their ideas and research in an accessible fashion, I think that’s great. That’s not “gaming,” it’s just good public scholarship. As for academics working harder to communicate beyond the academy–well, there’s obviously a point where public engagement becomes sleazy P.R., but most academics are so immensely far from there that I’m not unduly concerned.

A final note. Tomorrow’s rankings will feature 121 university-based edu-scholars who are widely regarded as having some public presence. However, this list is not intended to be exhaustive. There are many other faculty addressing public questions of education or education policy, and some of them may grade out quite highly on these metrics. Tomorrow’s scores are for a prominent cross-section of faculty, from various disciplines, institutions, generations, and areas of inquiry. For those interested in scoring additional scholars, it should be straightforward to do so using the rubric sketched above. Indeed, the exercise was designed so that anyone with an Internet connection can generate a comparative rating for a given scholar in no more than 15-20 minutes. (At this end, for his assiduous labor and invaluable advice on how to pull this together, I owe a big shout-out to my indefatigable and eagle-eyed research assistant, Daniel Lautzenheiser. I also want to give a shout-out to his colleagues Becky King and Taryn Hochleitner).

- Rick Hess

This also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

10] “GOP presidential nominee abandons primary season attacks on Department of Education; talks up education reform in push for moderates.”

9] “Aggressive efforts to tackle bullying starting to raise questions and fuel backlash. After a number of elementary-age boys are disciplined or even suspended for ‘harassment’ that included routine tussling and name-calling, many parents and school board members are asking whether the anti-bullying effort has gone too far.”

8] “Relentless attacks by media, Obama administration, and Senator Harkin on for-profit operators in K-12 and higher ed increasingly lead for-profit entrepreneurs to focus their energies in more receptive climes of Asia, the Middle East, and eastern Europe.”

7] “Conservative lawmakers push first two or three states to reverse course and abandon the Common Core, prompting fierce breaks in Republican ranks over the Common Core to spill out into the open. Jeb Bush and leading conservative governors are the face of one side; Rick Perry and the Tea Party are the face of the opposition. Clash makes it tricky for nominee to find firm footing on education standards and accountability.”

6] “Hill, administration leaders acknowledge that NCLB will not be reauthorized by year’s end. Urgency around reauthorization eases as many states obtain waivers. ‘We expect to win reelection, and then we’re hopeful we can get it done in 2013,’ says Obama administration official.’”

5] “Questions about the slow, haphazard implementation of Race to the Top promises start to fuel questions about whether the effort was oversold.”

4] “Obama administration officials ‘disappointed’ to see that for-profit colleges are pruning enrollment and rejecting students in response to ‘gainful employment’ regulation. One official explains, ‘Sure, we’ve promised to punish for-profits if they enroll students who don’t graduate or earn enough after completion, but we just assumed they’d find ways to ensure that these students get a degree and a good job.”

3] Even so, I expect to read: “Obama campaign makes Race to the Top, push on college affordability a centerpiece in effort to woo suburban swing voters.”

2] “Despite the improving economic picture, lagging property values and competing obligations mean education dollars are coming back more slowly that district leaders had hoped.”

1] And, finally, “Mixed results for the Khan Academy’s ‘flipped’ classroom lead some educators and policymakers to worry that the model doesn’t work for kids who don’t do the requisite work at home. One expert notes, ‘The kids who didn’t do their reading or homework before are the same kids who aren’t viewing their lessons and lectures now.’”

Now, I’m generally a lousy prognosticator and wouldn’t bet the farm on any of these. But I guess we’ll see.

- Rick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Say something smart once and there are huge rewards for spending a career saying it, in increasingly elaborate forms. Academics who own an idea get hired by prestigious universities, deliver keynotes, and get all kinds of attendant perks. Consultants who own an idea become must-haves for districts, foundations, and contractors. The result is a familiar kabuki of hyperspecialists airing their prebaked views.

The world is composed of niches. In each, a thinker may be iconic so long as she stays in her little crevice. Thus, an expert in pharmacology may speak to a cheering conference hall of awe-struck attendees only to walk across the campus or the hotel and quickly become just an anonymous face in the crowd. An expert on school violence or science instruction might be feted as legendary by those in her field but sacrifice that respect and deference should she wander outside that circle. The result discourages individuals from spending much time wrestling with thorny questions or complexities that reach beyond their core expertise. Hence, enormously respected thinkers will offer prescriptions for educational policy or practice that are woefully naïve in terms of political dynamics, organizational realities, institutional pressure, incentives, or practical constraints. Why? Because many of these experts have never spent much time thinking about how their expertise intersects with all the stuff in which they’re not expert.

Meanwhile, within niches, the interest in weighing competing arguments or determining how one’s expertise translates to the larger world is massively undervalued. Expertise promotes deep knowledge, which can too readily lead to inflexibility and self-assuredness (along with the expectation that one’s biases and assumptions will be afforded deference). There are always exceptions, but most thinkers become expert by struggling to the top of their niche on the back of their big idea, and then do all they can to extend the reach of that idea and of the acolytes who aid in that quest–incidentally, or quite purposefully, stymieing heterodox perspectives. In fact, the very nature of expertise is that it stifles dissent and reifies the orthodoxy of the moment.

Moreover, since established figures typically find themselves addressing friendly audiences and gatherings where it is deemed impolite to contest their assumptions and evidence too ardently, it is frighteningly easy for experts to settle into a comfortable bubble where they are surrounded by like-minded peers and adoring disciples, their word is gospel and they are buffered from anything more than occasional interaction with those who might disagree.

Finally, our criteria for expertise are, almost inevitably, relational (e.g. my colleague tells me Trang is terrific) or formulaic (e.g. Wylie was executive director of X for a number of years, launched Y program, or has published eleven articles on this). Why? Our ability to form independent judgments of the hundreds or thousands of individuals most directly engaged in our field of endeavor, much less the thousands more peripherally engaged, is limited by our own inexpert grasp of the world. Only the arrogant or the deluded imagine they perfectly understand the strengths and skills of hundreds of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Thus, we turn to proxies that are themselves deeply imperfect–but that can lead to our investing great authority in this or that expert for a season.

Done with sufficient skepticism and care, this manner of finding experts is natural and normal. But there’s a decided temptation to lodge excessive influence in our choice of the moment. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been talking with a superintendent who has become a guru for a foundation and found myself wondering why this unremarkable man was deemed any more deserving of that status than any of a dozen other superintendents. The difference, in many cases, is nothing more than a personal relationship, experience in a few big districts, or the fact that a superintendent was an early adopter of a reform–all of which, perhaps bizarrely, results in an individual being invested with presumed expertise across a broad range of issues.

So why does any of this matter? Does it make any practical difference when it comes to schools or schooling? I think it does. In education, for instance, despite decades of research, experts have no systematic way to tell who will be a good teacher or how to design practices that lead to predictable improvement at scale. This state of affairs means at least four things.

First, we ought to be hesitant in casually suggesting that we can name, based on our experience, a list of the nation’s best school districts, superintendents, or reading programs. Short of some protocol that helps us identify excellence in a transparent and consistent fashion (for better or worse), we ought to be much humbler about such exercises. They frequently amount to nothing more than an echo chamber, with participants passing on names that they themselves have received second- or third-hand.

Second, we should be wary of prescriptive advice, especially when it’s based on the assumption that expertise easily and immutably travels across contexts. In fact, given its narrowness, expertise can exert a gravitational pull that distorts how one thinks about the larger world. Expertise can come at the cost of perspective when an expert starts contemplating efforts to change policy, organizations, or human behavior. After all, expert advice tends to reflect what experts know, which may not reflect what is most useful for solving the larger problem in the real world. For instance, grand assertions about merit pay, school choice, differentiated instruction, or class size reduction that overlook the practical impact of contracts, policies, existing incentives, and embedded routines can yield results quite different from those the experts are touting.

Third–all that said–expertise has a terrifically useful place, as long as we understand what the experts actually know, which is how to do specific, concrete tasks right. I’m always eager to turn to an expert when the question is how to build a bridge, estimate how many people will visit Vegas next month, design an assessment, erect a new school, or conduct a complicated statistical analysis. I’m less inclined to do so when the questions are bigger, messier, and more dependent on judgment and values.

Finally, we need to recognize that individual experts ought not be invested with too much prescience, but the right mix of experts can help identify tensions, incentives, and the contours of possible solutions. If one assembles the right mix of experts, their competing views can prove enormously helpful in crafting smart policies. The key, however, is not to empower any one expert to play guru but to allow competing expertise to illuminate and inform complex decisions.

One last thought. For what it’s worth, my approach nowadays is not to casually reject educational expertise but to regard its acclaimed ministers with the same attentive skepticism I reserve for financial advisers and real estate agents. They know stuff that’s useful, but that doesn’t entitle them to blind deference or even trusting obeisance. At least not in my book.

- Rick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

I used to think that experts really understood the world. Now I think that they are people who know a great deal about tiny slivers of life, but that this narrow expertise is often of dubious value when it comes to tackling complex challenges or making the world a better place. More to the point, I now think that experts get so taken with their tiny slivers of expertise that they routinely overestimate both how much they know and their ability to produce broad, beneficial change.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Most “experts” always struck me as pompous, self-satisfied, pretentious, venal, and biased. But I tended to place some degree of confidence in their particular insight and expertise. And now, as we say, not so much.

While it may not be immediately obvious, all this has had a profound impact on how I think about schooling, education, and policy. Before I go there, however, it might be useful to back up and explain how I got here.

For the longest time, I was taken with the notion of expertise. I can still remember when I was fourteen and my dad promised me that, if I gave my old bike to my younger brother, I could have his beat-up, yellow Honda Civic when I turned sixteen. The catch was that the Civic no longer ran; rather, my dad (a pretty fair bootstrap mechanic) and I were going to fix it.

It sounded like a good deal. That Saturday we headed out to the Honda resting under the carport, and popped the hood to reveal an indecipherable mash-up of hoses, molded steel, and wiring. I can still clearly recall my response to the sight. It pretty much amounted to, Ah, @#%&! Tellingly, in that moment, I felt a deep and utter helplessness in the marrow of my bones. One thought, clear and certain, ran through my mind: I could study this engine for a month and it wouldn’t make any sense to me. Don’t be fooled. There’s no happy, touching redemptive story here. I slunk away, threw in the towel, and, when I turned sixteen, bought an old Plymouth Duster for $900.

Now, the engine of a Honda Civic, built in the 1970s, was not, in fact, indecipherable. I had buddies who enjoyed working on cars who found engines to be interesting, manageable puzzles. That experience seemed to illustrate for me how sadly inept I was at things that mattered. For much of my life–through childhood, adolescence, college, teaching, graduate school, and into my tenure as a professor at the University of Virginia–I always labored under the strong suspicion that lots of other people had a perfectly lucid understanding of things that were opaque to me.

I remember as a high school and college student reading about new technology companies, research studies, or arms control negotiations and thinking that the people who were doing these things were incomprehensibly smart and informed. I’d read book critics and wonder how they could know so much and find such textured nuance in a book I’d found tedious, or hear football coaches talk about the enormous complexity of their offensive schemes and be dazzled by their terminology.

I would meet fellow college students full of confidence in their future plans, who seemed to know how the medical or legal profession worked and how to go about getting themselves started. I remember standing in line at the Harvard University campus waiting to the take the GRE in political science and listening to all the students chattering about sophisticated political concepts, contacts, and graduate programs. I felt overwhelmed, and tired. How could they know so much?

-Frederick Hess

This post also appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up

President Obama’s remarks on inequality, stoking populist anger at “the rich,” suggest that the theme for his reelection bid will be not hope and change but focus on reducing class disparity with government help. But this effort isn’t limited to economics; it is playing out in our nation’s schools as well.

The issue is whether federal education efforts will compromise opportunities for our highest-achieving students. One might assume that a president determined to “win the future” would make a priority of ensuring that our ablest kids have the chance to excel.

To Obama, however, as for President George W. Bush, such concerns are a distraction at best. Last year the Education Department’s civil rights division announced that it would investigate local school policies that have a “disparate impact” on poor or minority students — signaling a willingness to go to court if department officials think that school systems have too few of such children in gifted programs or Advanced Placement courses. This bit of social engineering ignores the unseemly reality that advantaged children are statistically more likely to be ready to succeed in tough classes than are low-income children raised in households with fewer books and more television.

The result is a well-intended but misguided crusade to solve via administrative fiat the United States’ long-standing achievement gap: the dramatic differences in test scores between white and minority students and between middle-class and poor youngsters. The message to schools was unmistakable: Get more poor and minority children into your advanced courses or risk legal action by Uncle Sam.

Then, in September, the president offered states and school districts flexibility around onerous provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act — linked to certain conditions. Among these: States must explain how they are going to move more students into “challenging” courses. The effect will be yet another push to dilute high-level classes.

The goal of helping more young people succeed in challenging coursework is laudable. But pushing ill-prepared students into tougher classes without adequate preparation isn’t doing anyone any favors.

Indeed, the administration’s strategy has been tried. Nationally, the number of graduates who had taken Advanced Placement exams rose from 1 million students in 2003 to 1.6 million in 2008. In a 2009 study of AP teachers, just 14 percent of educators said that the growth stemmed from an increase in the pool of qualified students. Half of the AP teachers in high-poverty schools said that their African American and Hispanic students were not prepared for AP instruction. Fifty-six percent said that too many students were in over their heads, with adverse consequences for those students and their better-prepared classmates.

Our single-minded focus on closing achievement gaps has almost certainly hurt our top students. In 1996, Rand Corp. scholars determined that low-achieving pupils benefit when placed in mixed-ability classrooms, faring about five percentage points better than those placed in lower-track classes, but that high-achievers score six percentage points worse in such general classes.

In 2008, six years after No Child Left Behind became law, a survey of teachers found 60 percent saying that struggling students were a “top priority” at their schools, while just 23 percent said the same of “academically advanced” students. Eighty percent said that struggling students were most likely to get one-on-one attention from teachers; only 5 percent said the same of advanced students.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association released a study in September that tracked more than 100,000 high-achieving pupils over time and found that more than one-third lost steam as they progressed through school. The Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless has reported that, while the nation’s lowest-achieving students made significant gains in reading and math between 2000 and 2007, top students’ gains were “anemic.”

There are trade-offs here. But the possibility that what’s best for our worst-off students is bad for high achievers is blithely ignored by the Obama team and many other school reformers. (To be fair, it was ignored by the Bush team, too.) Advocates with a single-minded focus on closing achievement gaps have insisted that what’s good for the neediest kids is best for all kids. Those who question this mantra risk being labeled racist.

It’s not like we can afford to coast. Just 6 percent of U.S. eighth-graders scored “advanced” on the 2007 international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study assessment, while many nations fared at least twice that well.

Implemented thoughtfully, a commitment to getting more students into advanced classes is an objective worthy of a great nation. But it’s not going to happen overnight — not without defining “excellence” down.

At this very moment, millions of high-achievers are waiting to be challenged. Meeting their needs is another objective worthy of a great nation. They deserve our encouragement, not our indifference.

-Mike Petrilli and Rick Hess

First, in Minnesota, the Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools, a non-profit launched by the AFT local, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, has been approved to operate as a charter school authorizer. Supported by the AFT’s Innovation Fund, the venture will, in the words of MFT president Lynn Nordgren, seek to “authorize schools that rely on teacher expertise to identify and use effective teaching strategies, promote engaged student learning, create educational autonomy, ensure effective organization and develop shared management.” This is potentially a really interesting development, and one that ought not be merely brushed aside.

Last Thursday, in Washington, the NEA’s Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching released its notable new report Transforming Teaching: Connecting Professional Responsibility with Student Learning, (full disclosure: I served on the advisory committee). Chaired by Maddie Fennell (a former Nebraska teacher of the year) and savvily stocked with other accomplished educators (including nine other teachers who’d claimed their state’s teacher of the year award), the commission could easily have churned out one more tedious document. They didn’t. They explicitly embraced the notion that teachers should be responsible for student learning. The report endorses dismantling “state requirements [that] create barriers” to hiring good teachers and closing down lousy teacher preparation programs. It calls for differentiating professional development based on teacher experience and evaluations, among other criteria. It champions peer evaluation, promising that this will help ensure due process rights while expediting “dismissal” of ineffective teachers. It suggests that, in such a context, seniority should only be a factor in teacher retention or assignment when all other factors are equal. It calls for differentiating teacher compensation based on teacher effectiveness, the roles that teachers play, the difficulty of teaching assignments, and the length of the school year or school day. This is real stuff, especially when you consider the NEA’s history on these issues.

Now, there’s lots of room for skepticism. Will the Minnesota Guild prove to be a responsible authorizer? We’ve already got lots of problems with authorizer quality and Andy Rotherham has wisely pointed out that a proliferation of nonprofit authorizers raises lots of questions. How seriously will the MFT be about charter schooling? Is the AFT’s stance more about politics than enthusiasm for the charter concept? And what will the NEA actually do with its big report? Will the locals and state affiliates that drive the NEA take the effort seriously, or will it gather cyber-dust on the cyber-shelf? Is the national NEA serious about any of this, or is just an effort to deflect criticism and slow down the push for policies designed to reshape teacher evaluation or pay? How many teachers does it expect to actually be moved out of the profession under peer review? How seriously should we take its talk about removing licensure barriers or closing down lousy teacher prep programs?

All of these questions are fair and valid. But, at times like these, I find it useful to recall Ronald Reagan’s motto for dealing with the Soviet Union when it came to nuclear disarmament. “Trust, but verify,” the Gipper advised. If it was good enough for a Cold Warrior facing down the Soviets, I think it’ll do here.

- Rick Hess

The background on how the piece came to be is only mildly interesting. Linda and I had no scheme to hatch a grand compromise. Rather, when the Senate HELP Committee held its final hearing on Harkin-Enzi last month, I was invited to testify. Linda, with whom I am friendly, reached out to say, much to my surprise, that she had heard what I had to say and that we were on the exact same page. Given that the two of us happened to agree on this issue, despite our substantial differences on many issues, we thought it worth writing something that sketched out some shared principles as to what a smart federal role should look like. We knew the “odd couple” pairing would attract notice, but we thought what was most interesting was that we could start from very different places and still agree on the shape of a sensible federal role.

Let’s address my friend Andy’s concerns. First, I’ve noticed that Andy seems to have developed a tic: whenever I make an argument he deems insufficiently “reformy,” he accuses me of triangulation. His lede in discussing our piece? “Look ma! I’m reasonable!” Okay, then…

More substantively, Andy thinks I’m flip-flopping because I’ve frequently argued against subgroup-based accountability but here am fine with subgroup reporting for transparency purposes. There’s no flipping; these are distinct questions. I’ve problems with subgroup-based accountability systems because they tend to steer all of our energies into “gap-closing” amongst particular subgroups. That said, I believe that transparency-minded subgroup reporting provides a valuable X-ray of how various populations are faring (though I strongly prefer basing subgroups on income or needs rather than race, because I’m skeptical of race-based policies).

Andy also takes issue with our statement, “Instead of the vague mandate of ‘adequate yearly progress,’ federal financing should be conditioned on truth in advertising…” Andy seems unable to reconcile this with the fact that Linda and I have previously noted that NCLB is too prescriptive. AYP is a vague mandate because it doesn’t actually mean anything: its meaning changes state-to-state based on standards, assessments, cut scores, and the rest (it can even change school-to-school depending on subgroup size, safe harbor, etc.). At the same time, the machinery of the law, the AYP calculation, and the remedy cascade are unduly prescriptive. What we’re advocating is a truth-in-advertising standard, where folks have a better idea what the results mean but where the feds aren’t trying to rate schools or specify interventions.

Third, he seems annoyed, in noting the principled case for a federal role in supporting basic ed research, that we didn’t list various administration efforts or proposals (like i3 and ARPA-ED). I won’t bother here dwelling on the fact that i3 isn’t basic research (key difference: basic research is a public good, leading to a dearth of private investment, while applied research has benefits for private actors and therefore is less in need of public investment. For example, the difference between investigating the chemical properties of a new compound versus designing a marketable drug, or in education, between funding research in neuroscience versus developing that research into instructional resources). And ARPA-ED was mentioned by name in the initial piece, but we had to trim in many places during the editing process. Our point was precisely the value of federal research investment and support for the principle of ARPA-ED (of which I spoke approvingly to HELP).

Finally, he objects to our relatively harsh characterization of Race to the Top as “demanding that winning states hire consultants to comply with a 19-point federal agenda, rather than truly innovate,” by firing back, “Really? Of all the critiques you can level at RTT that’s a pretty weak one.” Andy knows that I’ve offered much more extensive discussions of the pros and cons of RTT (given that he’s pushed back on several of my points in his blog and over beers), but I thought this phrase pithily captured the problems with RTT as an example of competitive grants. Again, if we had another 100 words, we could’ve said much more with more nuance; but, well, we didn’t.

Anyway, it’s nice to see that the op-ed prompted some conversation, which is kind of the point of these kinds of pieces.

-Frederick Hess

This post also appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up

Here’s the problem. Author Michael Lewis made it real clear in the book (though it’s less clear in the movie, which features scouts talking about whether players have attractive girlfriends) that the problem in baseball prior to Beane’s revolution in Oakland was not an absence of data. In fact, baseball has been a geek haven for generations because of all its statistics. The problem? The stats in question–typically home runs, runs batted in, and batting average–are flawed measures of individual performance. They routinely understate (or overstate) a player’s value by ignoring the stadium he plays in, how often his teammates get on base, how selective he is at the plate, how well he fields, and so on. A big part of the problem wasn’t a lack of numbers; it was a reliance on overly simplistic measures. Consequently, players who hit a lot of home runs or who hit for a high average were massively overpriced, while players who walked a lot or hit a lot of doubles were undervalued.

This is where value-added enthusiasts come in. Value-added is a potentially very useful (if limited) tool, but it’s one that’s still in its relatively infancy. It can tell us what we might otherwise overlook or fail to see, helping correct our tendency to overvalue or undervalue certain teachers and techniques. The problem is our impatience and, sometimes, hubris. There’s a sense among too many would-be reformers that our new edu-statistics are ready for prime-time, and even an inclination to imagine that they can render judgment and common sense superfluous. Nope.

Look, it’s frustrating, but today’s data dashboards and crude value-added measurements only mean we have finally caught up to the pre-”moneyball” era. We finally have simple, incomplete performance measures like home runs and batting average. These tell us something useful, but they can provide a distorted picture or lead us astray if not used with care. Today’s metrics conflate the effect of support staff and teachers of record, capture only a narrow slice of instructional quality, are exceedingly imprecise, and are relevant (even incompletely) for no more than perhaps 30 percent of teachers. This is a far cry from counting and measuring everything that matters, and then allowing calculations of cost-effectiveness to guide hiring and staffing decisions.

Paul DePodesta, the inspiration for Jonah Hill’s ubergeek statistician in the movie, has explained that the “moneyball” idea was not to scrap baseball’s traditional metrics or scouting systems. (Again, this kind of gets lost in the film version; and even in Lewis’s book.) Rather, DePodesta has pointed out that baseball execs are “constantly trying to predict the future performance of human beings. We’re trying to get our arms around that uncertainty. Scouts really help you deal with that uncertainty. On the other hand, we looked at it and said, ‘How can we further decrease that uncertainty?’ And being able to use data was one of the ways we could do that.”

It’s not that “moneyball” is a bad analogy. It’s a terrific analogy. But you’ve got to use it right. And I fear that the value-added enthusiasts who imagine they’re right now gearing up to play moneyball in K-12 are actually going to find, to their chagrin, that they’re the potbellied scouts hoping to sign an overpriced free agent because the guy drove in 100 runs for the Yankees last year.

- Rick Hess

This post appeared earlier on Rick Hess Straight Up.

When asked how to boost America’s educational competitiveness, a staple response is the emphatic assertion that we need to be more like Nation X. It can be South Korea, Finland, or wherever country the guru has visited most recently. But, just for a moment, let’s entertain the radical proposition that a better course is to tap into uniquely American strengths like federalism, entrepreneurial dynamism, and size and heterogeneity.

Those besotted with international envy find it hard to accept that America’s “handicaps” are the inevitable flip side of its unique strengths. Rather than figuring out how to undo them, we would be better served figuring out to leverage them.

American federalism frustrates “Nation Xers,” who see states not as laboratories of innovation but as unruly children that need to be firmly brought into line. Thus, they champion national policies for teacher recruitment, preparation, and evaluation. Yet, as with welfare reform, our federal system offers invaluable opportunities to explore different approaches to incentives, monitoring, and delivery. Since the “right” model of teacher evaluation or preparation is hardly self-evident, much less the “best” way to help teachers use new technologies like computer-assisted tutoring or online instruction, this natural variation provides an invaluable asset.

American growth and prosperity have long been fueled by a dynamic private sector supported by sensible public investments in research, transportation, and ensuring honest and open markets. In automobiles, air travel, appliances, media, personal technology, software, and any number of venues, entrepreneurs have lit our path.

America is a really big country. By population, it’s the third largest in the world, and it boasts the most racially and culturally diverse society in history. This is a huge impediment for those who dream of mimicking national policies suited to tiny islands of homogeneity, like Finland. However, this makes the U.S. capable of embracing and supporting many models of teaching and schooling, with each still able to reach critical mass.

The idea that America has unique competitive advantages in K-12 is a radical one. More prevalent are grandiloquent international best practice reports, from the likes of the National Center on Education and the Economy or McKinsey & Co., in which the authors identify a couple of homogenous nations the size of Minnesota that produce good test scores, cherry-pick a few of their educational practices, and then draw broad prescriptions.

Such reports represent a triumph of the bureaucratic mindset and a disdain for America’s historic strengths. Earlier this year, the Washington Post‘s Charles Lane eviscerated the fascination with Germany’s economic “miracle” as a case of latching onto a “foreign flavor of the month.” He recalled the awe that the smart set once evinced for the economies of “Japan, Inc.” and the Soviet Union, and noted that Germany’s current success benefits from liberalization “that made the country a little bit more like…the United States.” Lane wisely advised, “[While] there’s plenty we can learn from the Germans, Japanese, Chinese, [and everyone else]…Americans need to identify our comparative advantages–social, cultural, political and economic–and exploit them, instead of worrying about copying the competition.”

Embracing America’s comparative advantages requires appreciating that, when the world changes, the challenges, as well as the tools, talent, and technology at our disposal, also change. Seeking to provide high-quality instruction to every child in the 21st century is a sea change from our agenda a century ago–when we only expected one student in ten to finish high school and when it was impossible to instruct a child who was 1,000 feet away. Today, we can meet new demands by drawing upon a talent pool and tools unimaginable in 1911.

American K-12 schooling is a hotbed of dynamic problem-solving on this front. Non-profits like Teach For America, Florida Virtual School, The New Teacher Project, Carpe Diem, and Citizen Schools are showing new ways to recruit and utilize educators. For-profits like Wireless Generation, Tutor.com, Pearson, Discovery, and Rosetta Stone are offering up a range of ways to harness new tools and technology to support teaching and learning. Figuring out how to leverage these new problem-solvers is a place where our state systems, districts, and schools have fumbled badly. This is an area where would-be reformers have devoted far too little attention. Meanwhile, not only have the “best” performing nations not done any better on this count, but the schemes promoted by those covetously eyeing Finland inevitably entail oodles of regulations and rule-writing calculated to stifle such providers.

Indeed, if we look to nations that are gearing up to lead the pack in 2052, rather than 2012, we see that countries like Qatar and India are busy spying on these American ventures to help them make the leap. We would be well-advised to take the hint, and to push forward by drawing on what the U.S. has always done best.

-Frederick Hess

This post also appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up

My take is threefold. (An earlier version of this originally appeared as an Ed Week commentary, but I thought it worth sharing a tweaked version here.)

First, claims that teachers are, in Duncan’s words, “desperately underpaid,” are a familiar refrain. Yet, given that we’ve steadily boosted staffing and after-inflation spending in recent decades to little obvious effect, and that states and districts are wrestling with structural shortfalls, it’s healthy to question such orthodoxies. Biggs and Richwine remind us that the costs of teacher benefits dramatically inflate the cost of compensation, even if the results aren’t always obvious when scanning a paycheck. Recall, for example, that University of Arkansas economist Bob Costrell pointed out during the Wisconsin collective bargaining fight earlier this year that the average Milwaukee teacher earned a salary of $56,500 but, due to benefits, actually cost the district $100,005 in total compensation. This ought to be of particular concern to educators eager to see more of their compensation show up in their pay stubs. In light of that, I’m disappointed (if not surprised) that most of the responses I’ve seen to Biggs and Richwine have been ad hominem, with Duncan declaring in the Huffington Post that the study “insults teachers and demeans the profession.”

Second, their analysis is intriguing, but it rests upon assumptions and data which deserve to be carefully scrutinized. For instance, Biggs and Richwine rely upon SAT and GRE scores to measure cognitive ability. It’s fair to ask both how good those metrics are and how much they may say about teaching ability. And it’s worth noting that their cognition data are nearly two decades old; if the makeup of the teaching force has changed significantly in that time, it would obviously change the outcomes. Similarly, the job-security and benefits data don’t reflect more recent developments or the fact that teaching positions may be less secure going forward; it will be interesting to see how such changes might impact the underlying data. At the same time, it’s important to note that Biggs and Richwine penned for the HuffPo what I thought was a pretty compelling response to the two methodological criticisms that Duncan had raised.

Third, I ultimately think the are-teachers-overpaid-or-underpaid question is just not that interesting or helpful to those of us in the fields of schooling and education. It’s a useful question for policymakers who must decide how to allocate dollars for highways, health care, and schooling, but for those of us working in the K-12 arena, the more relevant question is: How do we most wisely spend the dollars we have?

For what it’s worth, I’m firmly convinced that, today, some teachers are underpaid and others are overpaid. When I am asked the long-standing question about whether teachers are underpaid or overpaid, my consistent refrain is, “Yes.” I’m much more interested in the broader issue of how we can rethink the profession, make fuller use of talented teachers, and wisely spend the dollars we do have than in debating what the “right” wage level should be.

Under today’s step-and-lane pay scales, the primary way we determine how much teachers are worth is how long they’ve taught and how many graduate credits they’ve accumulated. Now, there’s nothing innately wrong with step-and-lane compensation. Indeed, when introduced in the early 20th century, it was a sensible response to reflexive, sweeping discrimination under which women were routinely paid half as much as their male counterparts. When a captive market of women had few options except to teach, the benefits of this more equitable system outweighed its defects.

Today, however, the world has changed. Whereas limited professional options meant that more than half of women graduating from college became teachers in mid-20th-century America, the figure today is closer to 15 percent. At the start of the 21st century, new college graduates–both men and women–are much less likely to stick to a job for long stretches, the competition for college-educated talent has intensified, and we are becoming better able to track educational outlays and outcomes. All this adds up to a new environment in which step-and-lane industrial-era pay is ill-suited to attracting and retaining talent. The consequence of treating different employees similarly, despite their varying work ethics and skills, has become a growing burden.

As school systems wrestle with tough fiscal decisions, it’s vital to understand that one-size-fits-all pay is insensitive to questions of productivity. Although the term “productivity” is typically regarded as a four-letter word in K-12 conversations, teacher productivity means nothing more than how much good a given teacher can do. If one teacher is regarded by colleagues as a far more valued mentor than another, or helps students master skills much more rapidly than another, it’s axiomatic that one teacher is more productive than the other. Yet, step-and-lane pay makes no allowance for such differences.

Today, we’re paying the most productive employees too little, paying their less productive colleagues too much, or, most times, a little of each. In a world of scarce talent and limited resources, this is a problem. School systems casually operate on the implicit assumption that most teachers are similarly adept at everything. In a routine day, a 4th grade teacher who is a terrific English language arts instructor might teach reading for just 90 minutes. This is an extravagant waste of talent, especially when one can stroll down the hallway and see a less adept colleague offering 90 minutes of pedestrian reading instruction.

One approach to using talent more wisely might entail overhauling teacher schedules and student assignment so that an exceptional 4th grade English language arts instructor would teach many more students. Colleagues, in turn, would shoulder that teacher’s other instructional responsibilities. An essential component of such rethinking is to adjust compensation to recognize the importance of their various roles.

After all, we pay thoracic surgeons much more than we do pediatric nurses–not because we think they’re better people or because they have lower patient-mortality rates, but because their positions require more sophisticated skills and more intensive training and because surgeons are harder to replace. Salary should be a tool for solving problems by finding smarter ways to attract, nurture, and use talent; it should not be an obstacle to doing so.

Almost any effort to really rethink staffing and pay entails some educators earning more–probably, a lot more–and other educators earning less. That sounds about right. The real question isn’t whether we should pay all teachers more or less; it’s how to pay the right teachers more, in a way that serves students and maximizes the bang we get for the educational buck.

-Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Charter and school voucher advocates haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory when answering these concerns. A big chunk of the charter community has embraced death-grip regulation based on reading and math scores–presuming that parents are indeed dopes, and easily suckered. Meanwhile, libertarian choice enthusiasts argue that what parents choose for their kids is none of our business (though they should recall Milton Friedman’s observation that the state has an obligation to safeguard minors, and perhaps ask themselves how much support you’ll win championing the right of parents to feed lead paint chips to their kids). For what it’s worth, seems to me there’s a sensible middle ground that values quality-conscious authorizing and performance metrics but that doesn’t imagine that reading and math scores are the be-all and end-all when it comes to gauging schools.

Directly relevant here is the intriguing new National Bureau of Economic Research paper “School Choice, School Quality and Postsecondary Attainment.” What economists David Deming, Justine Hastings, Tom Kane, and Doug Staiger find is that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (CMS) open-enrollment initiative, which launched in 2001, yielded surprisingly substantial long-term gains for the participating students. They were able to track the results for nearly 20,000 students after high school graduation, and reported that students who won the lottery to attend a school outside their own neighborhood were more likely “to graduate from high school, attend a four-year college, and earn a bachelor’s degree. They are twice as likely to earn a degree from an elite university.” The researchers found no evidence of “cream skimming,” and noted that lottery winners closed nearly a quarter of the black-white difference in college completion.

Maybe parents aren’t dopes. Maybe reading and math scores, at least on today’s assessments, are actually muddy measures of how much kids are benefiting. Maybe parents who express high levels of satisfaction with choice see that their kids are better behaved and more focused, disciplined, and academically engaged. Maybe they judge that this gives their kids a much better shot at a bright future, even if their short-term reading and math scores aren’t moving a lot. (After all, one of the seminal findings from James Coleman’s 1980s research on Catholic schools was that low-income, African-American students who attended parochial schools were vastly more likely to make it to college than were otherwise similar students in the public school system).

Now, let’s be clear. I don’t know that any of this is true. But it seems as viable as the “parents are dopes” hypothesis. Yet school choice researchers have been so focused for two decades on examining whether choice lifts test scores that they’ve not yet spent much time exploring just why it is that parental satisfaction seems to so dramatically exceed the test score evidence. On the bright side that just means there are huge opportunities ahead. So, guys, how about it?

-Frederick Hess

This post also appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

This black-and-white storyline plays out in education, even as other sensitive areas of domestic public policy (like health care or environmental protection) prove far more comfortable with the role that for-profits play. In an invaluable new analysis, John Bailey of Whiteboard Advisors–and veteran of the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of Commerce–examines how the federal government excludes for-profit educational providers even as it welcomes for-profits in a raft of other vital areas (Full disclosure: Bailey’s piece is published by my shop at AEI, as part of my ongoing series on “Private Enterprise in American Education.”)

Bailey notes, “When it comes to other crucial challenges our country faces–creating a more reliable health care system, finding efficient sources of clean energy, or improving space exploration–policymakers do not ask whether they should engage for-profit companies, but how they should.”

Bailey surveys key federal agencies that are actively engaging for-profits as collaborators. For example, NASA, with President Obama’s approval, set aside $6 billion to support private ventures that will compete to build and operate spacecraft, with NASA overseeing quality assurance and safety. The upside of tapping into private sector capabilities can be immense. Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) recently launched into orbit their Dragon capsule, designed to transport humans and cargo into space. The total cost of the Dragon was $800 million–compared to the $10 billion NASA spent on similar models in the past six years. By utilizing private companies like SpaceX, NASA can access innovators who would likely never choose to work in the public sector. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, for instance, also founded PayPal and Tesla Motors. Let’s be honest: Musk wasn’t going to work for NASA.

Bailey notes a similar comfort with for-profit ventures in the fields of electronic medical records and energy. The dreaded emphasis on profitability means that private sector ventures have much more cause to pursue efficiency and scale than do non-profits or public ventures. They also have the luxury of operating free from much of the red tape and bureaucratic culture that characterizes government agencies.

When it comes to education, however, policymakers create unique policy and funding barriers that apply to for-profit entities. Citing numerous examples, Bailey observes, “Federal policy toward private-sector education companies lags compared to other sectors. As a result, education remains one of the only public policy areas where private companies have difficulty entering and thriving.” Restrictive laws, limited funding, and numerous regulations limit for-profit providers from entering the education space. Such measures are visible in i3, school improvement, and the Obama administration’s gainful employment proposal–making it hard for even high-quality for-profits to compete on a level field.

Given the Obama administration’s goal of having the feds play a catalytic role in school improvement, it’s a useful time to revisit this state of affairs. Let’s be clear: the point is not to advocate for federal subsidies or marketplace manipulation, but for policymakers to relax the anti-for-profit mentality that is uniquely evident when it comes to schooling. As Bailey writes, “[A]n entrepreneurial education landscape…is one in which [government and foundations] help remove barriers to entry for quality providers and think deeply about the impact their policy or philanthropic decisions will have on the broader educational marketplace and potential investors or entrepreneurs in the field.”

-Frederick Hess

This post also appears in Rick Hess Straight Up.

First, Biddle claims that I argue in National Affairs that “the achievement gap is a matter not worthy of addressing.” That’s simply false. Any reader of the piece knows I never say anything like that. I say that an emphasis on gap-closing is sensible, admirable, and laudable, but that it’s been short-sighted, politically tone-deaf, and educationally destructive to ignore the implications of focusing monomaniacally on gap-closing. As I argued last week, and as Andy Rotherham and I argued in Phi Delta Kappan back in 2007, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make achievement gaps a priority–but it does mean that they shouldn’t consume the whole of our attention.

Second, Biddle asserts, “Here’s the thing: When we improve instruction and curricula for our students who have been the most ill-served by American public education–including for young black, white and Latino men–we are improving education for our high-performing students as well.” Again, those who’ve read the essay know that I didn’t dodge this “fact,” but take pains to make the case that it’s a fiction–a soothing claim that gap-closers have peddled. Doing better by the most challenged children does not necessarily help us better serve high-performers. Indeed, many times these aims are in tension. As I note in National Affairs, “The kinds of teaching and support that can help disadvantaged students acquire the skills and knowledge that they did not receive at home are often superfluous or inappropriate for more advantaged children. In this way, gap-closing can transform from a strategy that lifts up the least proficient students into one that slows up the most proficient.” We need to start facing up to this frustrating fact, and not ducking it by hiding behind banalities.

Finally, Biddle marries kind words about some of my past work (such as Tough Love for Schools) with accusations that I’ve become a showboating “contrarian” who has “lost [my] taste for strong systemic reform.” He pleads, “Can the real Rick Hess please come back?” His critique makes me think that there’s some confusion as to how I think about school reform. For starters, I see the writings that RiShawn decries, whether the National Affairs piece or my critiques of Brill and Guggenheim, not as critiques of “reform” but of simple-minded, chest-thumping certitude.

As I’ve observed before, I embrace measures like school vouchers, accountability, or rethinking teacher pay not because they are solutions, but because they open the door for problem-solving. These things are tools, not solutions–and how they’re used matters as much as whether they’re used.

Earlier in the decade, when the armies of reform were fewer and less organized, I did my best to help sound the trumpet. (And I sound it still, in works like Education Unbound and The Same Thing Over and Over, in which my aim is not to celebrate the past decade’s policy victories but to make clear that they are only modest, tentative steps along a much longer path.)

Today, there are growing ranks of would-be reformers. That’s terrific. The danger in such moments is that groupthink and political gamesmanship can turn promising directions into troubling orthodoxies. That’s what can too easily happen, I’ve argued, with “merit pay” or value-added testing, and what happened with gap-closing and NCLB. I’m all for tough-minded attention to incentives and performance, but schools and school systems are complex organizations and it’s crucial that policies intended to reshape the landscape not devolve into stifling orthodoxies.

By the way, that’s why I’m so hard on Guggenheim and Brill. It’s not because they’re outsiders (I’ve spent much of the past decade making the case for the value of nontraditional educators) but because they enthusiastically spin sensible notions into dogma (not incidentally, helping to make it so that anything other than blind obeisance to the party line can be dismissed as “school reform denial”).

I believe “Our Achievement Gap Mania” is wholly consistent with what I’ve been writing since the 1990s. There’s an obvious difference in emphasis from what I penned in a different edu-landscape, but many of the key points are implicit in pieces like 2000′s American School Board Journal article “None of the Above: The Promise and Peril of High-Stakes Testing” or 2004′s Common Sense School Reform. In Common Sense, for instance, I noted that test-based accountability is an invaluable tool but also cautioned that it’s “a crude instrument that can unduly narrow the scope of teaching and squeeze valuable material from the curriculum…[and] is a poor device for pushing schools to excel at teaching advanced material, content outside of the core disciplines, or the performing arts” (pp. 69-70).

If anyone thinks I’ve changed my tune, perhaps it’s because they’ve only been hearing what they’ve wanted to hear. Indeed, if anyone thinks I’ve “flipped” on achievement gaps, I’d encourage them to take another look. Unless I somewhere succumbed and made an isolated concession to convention, I believe the discerning readers can comb through all of my books, research, articles, and commentary without ever once finding the suggestion that gap-closing ought to be our organizing educational aim.

Schooling is important enough to demand tough love. And tough love isn’t a sometime thing. It applies to one’s friends and allies as well as to those with whom one has more fundamental disagreements. It’s why I frequently angered my friends in the Bush administration, why I frustrate my friends in the Obama administration, and why I wind up here accused by RiShawn of being a “contrarian.” It’s why I argued back in 2002′s Revolution at the Margins that school choice wasn’t enough to create meaningful competition, getting hammered for it at the time by many friends who accused me of being “anti-choice.” Nearly a decade later, many of those same friends now concede the argument was a useful and prescient caution.

I’m no contrarian. Trust me, it’s more fun to be with the team, especially when you know that speaking up is going to tick off your friends. But I’ve been doing this for a while now and have learned something about the dangers of groupthink, unintended consequences, and the limits of good intentions. When I see overly exuberant reformers mishandling good ideas or stretching them into troubling fads, I feel obliged to speak up. I wrote some hard things about prevailing orthodoxies when I first achieved notice for Spinning Wheels. It’s what I continue to try to do today. And it’s what I hope I’ll be doing for years to come. For better or worse, I’d like to think that is the “real Rick Hess.”

-Frederick Hess

This post also appears in Rick Hess Straight Up.

Proponents of the gap-closing gospel cheerfully assure us that everybody wins. Education Trust vice president Amy Wilkins has rejected as a “false choice” the notion “that we have to make a choice as a country between equity and excellence. Our policies need to marry both.” That’s a swell aspiration. Unfortunately, I think the evidence suggests that focusing our attention and finite resources on some children will frequently come at the expense of others. Now, it may very well be that we should choose to focus them on gap-closing. At the least, though, we owe it to our children and ourselves to be more forthright and more conflicted by the fact that we’re privileging the needs of some children over those of others.

And this matters, a lot. For instance, it’s hardly the case that the U.S. can afford to be cavalier about the performance of our more advanced students. Stanford University’s Eric Hanushek, Harvard University’s Paul Peterson, and the University of Munich’s Ludger Woessmann reported earlier this year that the share of U.S. students accomplished in math trails those of most other industrialized nations. Thirty of the 56 nations participating in the Program for International Student Assessment math test had a larger percentage of students scoring at the international equivalent of the advanced level on NAEP than we did. Indeed, just 6 percent of American eighth graders scored “advanced” on the 2007 Trends in International Math and Science Study. In Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Finland, the proportion of students achieving at the same level was at least three times as large.

A universal and exclusive focus on low-achieving kids ignores the fact that different education strategies work best for different kinds of students. Before they ever enter the classroom, many children from low-income and minority households are at a distinct educational disadvantage. Research demonstrates that children from more educated families tend to start school with much larger vocabularies, more exposure to the written word, more time having been read to, and more of the habits that make for a responsible, successful student.

Kindergarteners from low-income households typically have a vocabulary of about 5,000 words, compared to the typical 20,000-word vocabulary of their more advantaged peers. The disparity results, in part, from the fact that many low-income children don’t attend pre-school; low-income parents speak to their children about one-third as much as parents who are professionals; low-income parents read to their children much less than other parents; and low-income children watch much more television than do their peers.

Let’s take individual needs and differentiated instruction seriously. Some important differences likely overlay the “achievement gap” divides. From the very beginning, for instance, disadvantaged and advantaged children may have different educational needs and stand to benefit from different kinds of instruction. The kinds of teaching and support that can help disadvantaged students acquire the skills and knowledge that they did not receive at home are often superfluous or inappropriate for children who are ready to move on. In this way, gap-closing can shift from a strategy that lifts up the least proficient students into one that slows up the most proficient.

And children who are ready for new intellectual challenges may pay a price when they sit in classrooms focused on their less proficient peers. In 2008, Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless reported that while the nation’s lowest-achieving students made significant gains in fourth grade reading and math scores and eighth grade math from 2000 to 2007, top students made anemic gains. He concluded, “It would be a mistake to allow the narrowing of test score gaps, although an important accomplishment, to overshadow the languid performance trends of high-achieving students.”

Loveless’s findings echo a massive 1996 RAND Corporation meta-analysis. RAND researchers have previously reported that when low-achieving students were placed in mixed ability classrooms, they did about five percentage points better. High-achieving students, however, fared six percentage points worse in such classes–and middle-achieving students fared two percentage points worse than they did when placed in “tracked” classes. Weighing these effects out, the authors concluded that switching to mixed-ability classes in math would reduce aggregate achievement by 2 percent. That may suggest that promoting mixed-ability classes is a sensible and just course of action, but it’s not cost-free.

There is, of course, the occasional extraordinary teacher who can make heterogeneous classes work for all students. But such teachers are the exception, not the rule. Value-added testing guru Bill Sanders has reported, based on Tennessee achievement data, that high-scoring students made adequate gains only with the top 20 percent of teachers. Students at lower achievement levels, however, made progress with all but the least effective teachers. In other words, Sanders’s research suggests that teacher quality may matter more for high-performing students than for their peers.

As with so much of the “achievement gap” agenda, mixed-ability instruction is not a bad idea per se. But it does impose costs. The gap-closing gospel holds that it is improper or out-of-bounds to discuss such things. That’s bad for kids, bad for school improvement efforts and, as I’ll talk about next week, likely to undermine the kind of middle-class and suburban parental and political support needed to sustain improvement efforts.

-Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

A decade ago, the No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of federal educational accountability marked by relentless focus on closing race- and income-based “achievement gaps” in test scores and graduation rates. The language has become instinctive, with a generation of would-be reformers learning to focus on closing achievement gaps. For all the subsequent critiques of NCLB, both deserved and undeserved, this has been universally hailed as an unmitigated good. It is not. It has shortchanged some children. It has undermined public support for reforming schools while ghettoizing school reform. It has narrowed the scope of schooling and stifled educational innovation. Oh, and its moral philosophy is, at best, shaky.

A year ago, Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, moved to eliminate after-school science labs for Advanced Placement classes and five science teachers so that the resources and faculty could be devoted to struggling students, in a push to address “Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap.” The New York Times has reported that, in Sacramento, California, low-performing students are only permitted to enroll in math, reading, and gym, in a mad dash to help close the achievement gap. The Center for Applied Linguistics has reported that the share of U.S. elementary schools offering foreign language classes fell by one-fifth from 1997 to 2008. Instruction in foreign language and advanced science have come to be seen as frills.

The all-consuming push to “close achievement gaps” has meant focusing, to the exclusion of nearly all else, on boosting math and reading proficiency and the graduation rates of poor and minority children. The Education Trust, perhaps the nation’s most influential K-12 advocacy group, explains, “Our goal is to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement.” The National Education Foundation has launched its own “Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative.” The California Achievement Gap Educational Foundation was launched in 2008 to “eliminate the systemic achievement gap in California K-12 public education.” Elite charter-school operator Uncommon Schools says its mission is running “outstanding urban charter public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college.” Education Week, the newspaper of record for American education, ran 63 stories mentioning “achievement gaps” in the first six months of this year.

Indeed, at the elite level, there’s a bipartisan consensus on this question. President Bush bragged in 2008 that NCLB “focused the country’s attention on the fact that we had an achievement gap that–you know, white kids were reading better in the 4th grade than Latinos or African-American kids.”
Echoing Bush, President Obama has termed education the “civil rights issue of our time” and declared that his agenda is intended to address “the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan repeated the familiar formulation last year at the National Press Club, declaring, “The achievement gap is unacceptable. Education is the civil rights issue of our generation.”

Such sentiments are admirable. And it’d be hard to argue that any of this is bad on its own terms. The legacy of achievement gap mania isn’t necessarily undesirable. Focusing on the neediest students is admirable, as far as it goes. With limited time, talent, and resources, we can’t do everything–and it’s not unreasonable that some think our priority in every case should be the most in need.

The real problem has been the unwillingness of gap-closers to acknowledge the costs of their agenda or its implications. And yet, the groupthink consensus that the business of education is “closing achievement gaps” has made it tough to talk honestly about the costs–for fear of being branded a racist or thought unconcerned with inequities. It has dreadfully narrowed the potential coalition for reform. It has distorted the way we’ve approached educational choice, accountability, and reform. It has warped and retarded the pace, reach, and power of school improvement efforts. And it has yielded a stifling and ultimately troubling vision of schooling. If you’re curious as to how I can say such things, check out the essay here.

-Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

A few weeks back, the Indiana Department of Ed opted to intervene in seven schools across Indiana. Six of the schools are in Indianapolis and one is in Gary. Of the seven, the Indiana Department of Ed is taking over five, and contracting with three different external operators to take the lead on these schools. The lever was provided by Public Law 221, which allows the state superintendent to bring in external turnaround school operators for a school that has received the state’s lowest grade for six consecutive years. The operators are Edison Learning, EdPower, and Charter School USA. (The other two schools will remain under the auspices of the local school district.)

Chu explained that contractors will only study, monitor, assist, and engage the community in the first year, and not take over the schools in question until year two. He said, “The first year is a transition year, which will be run by the local school district. The following year, the outside operators will actually start to run the school.”

He said, “In the transition year, the operators are getting to know stakeholders, assets, and liabilities in the school; figuring out which staff they’ll keep and which to let go; [looking at the schedule and curriculum]; and concurrently recruiting folks they might need… By the end of the transition year, they’ll have a comprehensive plan for operational authority for the following years.” Also during this transition year, the operators will be required to craft targets and metrics to gauge school improvement for future years.

When asked where this phased approach came from, Chu noted that the Indiana team had visited Louisiana’s famed Recovery School District several times. “But one of the things we found,” he said, “is that when the RSD started up, they were dealt a hand in terms of Katrina [and so Louisiana] had to do something dramatic. [But] they had no exit strategy going in… [and] they created sort of another bureaucracy.” Chu cautioned that Indiana doesn’t want to create “another layer” where the state becomes in effect “the largest school district.”

When it comes to contracts and compensation, the six schools will no longer be under the Indianapolis Public Schools master contract. This will give the operators a free hand with regard to personnel decisions, and will challenge IPS to make tough calls about how it will handle educators who don’t make the cut at the contract schools.

Federal dollars are the primary funding source for all this. The phased transition varies in cost by school to school, but totals in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Chu explained that, for better or worse, “In this first year, the transition year, we want to minimize any sort of withholding of dollars.”

It’s hard to know a priori whether the phase-in year is going to prove a terrific way to facilitate the change in management and support smart decision-making, or more of a moderately expensive delay. Nor is it yet clear how this approach, and its accompanying “exit” strategy, will compare to Louisiana’s RSD model or imitators in Tennessee and Michigan. So long as we’re honest about this, with ourselves and each other, we have the chance to learn a whole lot about how to do this work better.

-Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Koedel compares the distribution of course grades at two state flagship universities, Indiana University and the University of Missouri. At both universities, the average GPAs for the other twelve majors were roughly similar, while education stood as a stark outlier. Indeed, the average education GPA was 3.66 at Indiana University and 3.8 at U. Missouri. At Missouri, he reports that “every single student received an A (that is, 4.0) in one out of every five undergraduate education classes.” One possible explanation is that all of the most accomplished students are majoring in education. However, rendering that explanation somewhat less likely, Koedel notes that ed majors “score considerably lower than students in other academic departments on college entrance exams.”

In other recent work, Koedel has made it clear that these findings are not unique but actually appear to be pretty typical. How much does all this matter? Koedel suggests the answer is “a lot.” First, he argues that grade inflation leads to reduced effort in college. A recent study by Philip Babcock, an economist at UC-Santa Barbara, shows that, for each one point increase in a student’s expected grade, a student will typically reduce study time by 20 percent. Cory calculates that aligning grading in education departments to those in the other majors he looked at would boost student effort by more than 10 percent.

He also argues that education departments are contributing to the culture of low standards for educators. He cites a 2008 study by Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren that asked principals to evaluate their teachers on a 10-point scale (with 1 representing “inadequate” and a 10 representing “exceptional”). Jacob and Lefgren found that a majority of teachers received an 8 or better. Such results echo the tendency of principals to evaluate less than 1 percent of their teachers as unsatisfactory, a routine brought to national attention in The New Teacher Project’s The Widget Effect. Koedel remarks, “Undergraduate education majors become teachers, teachers become principals, and principals become district-level administrators. Ultimately, a sizable fraction of the workforce in the education sector is trained in education departments where evaluation standards are astonishingly low. Should we be surprised that low standards persist in K-12 schools?”

This phenomenon isn’t new. Koedel notes that, more than fifty years ago, Robert Weiss and Glen Rasmussen documented that undergraduates taking education classes were twice as likely to receive an A as students taking classes in business or liberal arts departments. It’s a familiar, endemic problem. For all the fanciful talk about clinical preparation, it’d be nice to see the nation’s teacher prep programs finally decide to get serious about simple things like insisting on some minimal rigor. A half-century of tolerating mediocrity really should be enough.

-Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Rick Hess: As you know, Secretary Duncan recently criticized Texas’s schools, saying that they have “really struggled” under Governor Perry and that “far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college.” He said, “You have seen massive increases in class size” and that “I feel very, very badly for the children there.” Did Duncan get it right? What was your reaction to his comments?
Robert Scott: I corrected him because he made several glaring errors. He talked about our graduation rates being among the worst in the nation. I pointed out that if you look at the [National Governors Association] rate, which is the rate all fifty governors agreed to, out of only twenty-six states that had reported as of 2009, we were ranked seventh. And we have an 84.3 percent on-time graduation rate, which is far better than many other states. And I think this year, when you see other states finally having to report that, you’ll notice a significant increase in Texas’ position nationally. I also pointed out the NAEP scores bear out that our African American students tied Massachusetts for number one on the math NAEP, [and in eighth grade science] our Hispanic students were eighth [and] our Anglo students…were second only behind the Department of Defense schools. And so, I simply pointed out that his generalizations were wrong.

RH: Any idea what prompted Duncan’s remarks?
RS: I can’t speak to motivations. He might have just called an audible himself and decided he was just going to go off and criticize Texas. The unfortunate part about it was the timing. It was three days before we went back to school. I was trying to focus on back to school as a very positive time for kids and parents, and I think when you send that kind of message out right around back to school it’s counterproductive.

RH: Governor Perry’s decision to join the Presidential contest has turned the spotlight on Texas schools. What are one or two things you are most enthusiastic about having the nation see?
RS: I think continually raising standards…and continuing to do that with end-of-course implementation. That will present its challenges, but I think it’s the right thing to do. We’re implementing a brand new assessment and accountability system so that we are actually starting to evolve beyond what is just happening on a standardized test. Our new accountability system will reward school districts and acknowledge them for high-quality career and tech programs, high-quality fine arts programs. Those are the things I’m most excited about. Moving beyond just the core standardized test areas and talking about what else is going on in the school.

RH: So how does that look in practice? How do you do it?
RS: We’re putting together teams of educators in each of the areas that we’re going to have a distinction award in. They will come up with the standards that schools are measured by to show what is a high-quality career and tech program, what is a high quality fine arts program. We have our state academic competition for the university interscholastically. That may be a component. Making regionals or semi-finals, that might be a standard that we look to for recognition.

One other thing that we just implemented is called Project Share. It’s a statewide portal where educators and students can go online to access professional development and information. We’ve got ties to NASA, the Smithsonian, the National Archives, PBS. We’ve got about 355,000 teachers and 100,000 students with accounts now, and by the end of the year we’ll have one million students with accounts. And they’ll be able to create e-portfolios of their work. So if they are a career tech student or a fine arts student they will be able to document their successes and their work throughout the school year and throughout their academic career. So it will be about what happens [in schools] on every other day besides the test day.

RH: And is the plan that those materials can then be shared with their next grade-level teacher, or for college admissions?
RS: There’s that. And let’s say students get together and design a model of a bridge. The teacher can invite an architect to come in and critique the design. So they can get feedback and encouragement from both educators and professionals.

RH: What have been the biggest challenges for Texas schools?
RS: As with many other states, our changing demographics present a challenge. I also think we present ourselves with challenges by continuing to raise the bar. And the end-of-course exams will be a bit of a shock. They will be very rigorous, so that’s a challenge we’ve created for ourselves. And the big point will be where we set the cut score initially and how fast do we raise that over time.

RH: Some Texas teachers and parents have suggested that budget cuts have had a devastating effect. What do you make of these concerns?
RS: Well, I think the initial budget cut that was proposed was far different from what actually happened at the end of the legislative session. The supposed cut right now is actually a cut to an increase. It’s an age-old question of government, is a cut to a proposed increase actually a cut? What the legislature actually did was provide enough additional revenue to fill the hole left by the absent stimulus fund. So they actually put more for general revenue in and were able to level [school] funding. I testified before the finance and appropriations committee that the initial cut was too much, and asked them to restore six billion dollars. I said that was about what you’d need to implement the new assessment and accountability system, and they ended up funding it at that level. So I think you’re seeing more districts recognizing the cuts were not as severe as they [were expected to be], and across the state I have seen evidence of districts hiring back teachers.

RH: So, how big a cut was this?
RS: For an average district, it is anywhere from three to six percent per year [from what they had anticipated]. So it’s not a monumental cut to the proposed increase, but it’s still a belt tightening exercise for any district in the state of Texas. This is what I know about working in government. Government tends to grow upon itself. And every now and then it is very healthy to prune, just like you would to a tree or bush that’s growing out of control. It is a healthy exercise to occasionally trim back.

RH: Texas’ stance on Common Core has drawn a lot of attention. Can you say a bit about why you have chosen not to sign on?
RS: Initially they asked us to sign on the standards that hadn’t been written yet. Having been involved in standards development for over two decades this seemed crazy to me–signing onto something you can’t see. And then you look at our law. Our law requires that when we develop standards we include teachers, parents, the business community, and citizens across the state. I could not have fulfilled the requirements of my state law by adopting the Common Core because the people of Texas didn’t get a seat at that table. Parents and teachers and business leaders weren’t at that table to help draft those standards…I think they have a fine goal…But I also see the downside in that they are going to lock themselves in to a very monolithic system that is going to be very difficult to change and be very costly to change over time.

In essence they are going to be Microsoft. If so, I want to be Apple. I want to be adaptive, innovative. I told [Common Core supporters] to consider us the control group. I have no malice towards any of them; some of my dear friends are working on this project. I just said we were going to sit it out, and then the [Department of Education] came out and said…we have to do this for Race to the Top, and if you want a waiver for No Child Left Behind you have to do this in some way. So I was skeptical of it and remain skeptical.

RH: It raised eyebrows when you opted out of both rounds of Race to the Top. Can you say a little about what your thinking was? And whether it was a decision made by you, by the Governor, or whomever.
RS: It was a decision made by Governor Perry with my full support. And I made the recommendation after reading the application and seeing the things that Texas does really well receiving very little points. And the things we were going to opt not to do, receiving a number of points, including Common Core. It didn’t make sense for us to put that much effort into an application that we would not be favorably viewed upon. And in the end it worked itself out because the only state west of the Mississippi that won Race to the Top was Hawaii.

RH: You’ve expressed some concerns about the Obama administration’s School Improvement Grants strategy. Can you elaborate?
RS: Well, the four turnaround models are basically the same four models we have been using in Texas for years. In some cases they’ll work and in some cases they won’t. The key is flexibility. In one case in Houston we had a campus that went from five years low performing to the second highest rating you can get in our system within one year. That certainly worked. The key to that, I think, was the change in the atmosphere and climate on the campus. But also having someone in the central office who can cut through the bureaucracy… And we’ve learned that [it doesn't necessarily work] when you try to lock in a model and say, “This is the model and to implement this model you have to fire the principal no matter what.” We look at that and say, “What if the principal just got there last year? Or we’re seeing pretty significant growth?”

RH: Broadly speaking, why does it seem that you’ve been so resistant to federal initiatives like RTT and SIG?
RS: Having worked in DC I understand firsthand what it feels like. You have access to enormous amounts of information, and I think over time people tend to mistake access to massive amounts of information for wisdom. And they tend to get that “inside the beltway” mentality. And I think my resistance has been that innovation begins at the local and state level. And I don’t think you can innovate from Austin, Texas, in a school district any more than you can in Washington, DC. I think you have to have local buy from your teachers and parents in order to really affect long lasting education reform.

RH: It sounds like you don’t have a particular problem with the Obama administration’s approach so much as efforts to drive reform from Washington more generally.
RS: That’s right. I even told [Duncan] this, the first time I met him, which was right after he took office and he laid out his four education reform priorities. And I walked up to him and said, “You are right on target, these are exactly the things I want to be working on.” My difference with the administration is how we get there. I think their target was right on for education reform; I just disagree on how we get there.

RH: Last question. During your time as commissioner, are there any big lessons that stand out?
RS: The big thing that stands out for me is that there is no such thing as a magic bullet in education. Anyone that tells you this one thing will change the course of your education system is either delusional or is lying to you. The other idea is that true reform is something that takes place over time and it has to be built upon and it isn’t something that happens overnight. Standards based reform is something that is a destination and it takes a long time to get there. But you have to be patient when you do it. You can’t just say we’re going to pass a ninety percent passing standard in year one and then scrap everything in year two when you don’t get there. You try to build over time. You try to meet the kids where they are today and then raise standards over time and push the system along as you go.

-Frederick Hess

(This post also appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

The request is anything but daunting. We’ve asked these folks to pen 1,500 words explaining why the Common Core math standards are rigorous and well-designed. The authors have been promised compensation and at least six weeks to write the piece. We’re offering the opportunity to make their case in a leading publication with an influential readership.

Not only have we gotten no takers, we’ve gotten gross disinterest. We’ve had to send two or three dozen e-mails, and make a dozen calls, just to get the six demurrals. I mentioned the situation to the chiefs of CCSSO and Achieve, two outfits deeply involved in the Common Core, and asked them to encourage their allies to step up. They indicated that they would. That request seemingly had no impact.

It’s not like we’re asking the invited contributors to tackle a pointless task. Influential figures including UPenn dean Andy Porter, UVA professor Daniel Willingham, and Texas Commissioner of Education Robert Scott have raised questions about the coherence, rigor, and value of the standards. The counterpoint piece for Ed Next is to be penned by a former Bush administration ED official. If the concerns are misguided, you’d think Common Core’s advocates would be eager to dispel them. Instead, they repeatedly indicated to me that they’re just too busy to find the time.

I’ll be blunt: I don’t believe them. After all, the leading thinkers who have found the time to contribute to Ed Next forums have included such seemingly busy people as Richard Elmore, Kati Haycock, Diane Ravitch, Hank Levin, Andy Rotherham, Joe Williams, Rick Hanushek, Checker Finn, Jay Greene, Bruno Manno, Chris Whittle, Bryan Hassel, Eva Moskowitz, Susan Eaton, and Howard Fuller. Rather, I think the reluctance to contribute is due to hubris, impatience to focus on implementation, political naivete, and disdain for what they see as mean-spirited carping.

Common Core advocates accomplished a remarkable feat in getting 40-odd states to adopt the new standards. Even with the substantial boost provided by Race to the Top and big foundation dollars, that was impressive and unexpected. But if the Common Core-ites believe that early success means they can stop making the case for what they’re doing, I think they’re making a huge mistake. We’ve yet to see good data on this, but I’d be astonished if one American in fifty can tell you what the Common Core actually is and what it involves—hell, I’d be surprised if one in five educators or state legislators can do that.

There are long rows of argument and persuasion still to be hoed. And, if you’re eager to overhaul what gets taught in forty-odd states serving forty million or more students, that’s probably as it should be. If Common Core-ites don’t have the patience or stomach for that task, they should let us know now–and save everyone a whole lot of grief.

The notion that Common Core proponents needn’t make their case is an affront to democratic values. When seeking to make substantial changes to public institutions, the burden is supposed to be on the would-be reformers. After winning a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, civil rights advocates spent decades making and re-making the case for school desegregation. Charter school advocates have spent two decades arguing their case. That’s normal and healthy. The “we’re really busy now” stance of the Common Core-ites is akin to the NAACP having decided in 1956 that it had done plenty to make its case, that everyone understood its arguments, and that it should just buckle down and focus on “implementation.” It’s akin to charter advocates having decided in 1993 that they’d adequately made their case and could move on.

Yet, Common Core advocates seem to have already grown impatient with public give-and-take and eager to declare the issue settled. They want to rush on to designing assessments, overhauling curricula and preparation, and imagining next steps. I sympathize. It’s true that the task ahead is enormous, that the impressive success of the Common Core-ites thus far amounts to running a really fast first two miles in a marathon, but that’s more cause–not less–for taking care to make their case in every quarter and to every audience. After all, success in all the miles ahead will depend crucially on the breadth, depth, and stability of public support.

As I’ve said many times, I’ve much sympathy for the Common Core effort, but am skeptical that it will turn out well. To have even a shot at working as intended, this requires bipartisan support from a range of state officials and buy-in or acquiescence from educators, parents, and voters. If the Common Core’s architects are done explaining its virtues–if they think that eighteen months of explaining its merits to a moderately attentive audience of self-selected elites amidst tumultuous debates over health care reform and the stimulus is sufficient–and that everyone needs to just sit down and get with the program, then I feel comfortable predicting that this whole exercise will end real poorly.

So, here’s a simple plea. Will someone who is involved with and supportive of the Common Core math standards please deign to make the case for them?

-Frederick Hess

(This post also appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

Here’s the deal. Education Week‘s Nirvi Shah yesterday reported that, “Districts that want to reduce special education spending from one year to the next without restoring what was cut now have the blessing of the U.S. Department of Education.” In June, Melody Musgrove, ED’s director of the office of special education programs, sent a letter to the National Association of State Directors of Special Education declaring that a school district “is not obligated to expend at least the amount expended in the last fiscal year for which it met the maintenance-of-effort requirement.” This is a healthy and important development. (And kudos to Shah for the coverage–I, for one, had totally missed this).

You see, federal law has long been taken to mean that special ed spending cannot be adjusted downward except in tightly constrained circumstances (such as when an especially costly student leaves a district). Shah noted that, “Cutting the special education budget for other reasons meant a district was running the risk of losing its share of federal funds.”

Yep, you read that right. A district which provides special education services more cost-effectively has long been threatened with losing their federal aid unless they keep on spending at the same rate. In other words, special ed policy has made it essentially illegal to improve special ed productivity. This is problematic on principle, but especially at a time when districts are being asked to make tough choices about services for all other students. Of course, the special education advocates are never called out on the troubling implications of the push to protect children with special needs no matter the cost–and folks of all stripes are terrified to ever label such sympathetic efforts as “selfish.” But systematically privileging kids in special ed necessarily requires giving short shrift to all other students.

If districts reduce their special education spending, ED says it’s now permissible to at least consider leaving it at the new level. This makes good sense. Shah quotes AASA legislative specialist Sasha Pudelski offering probably the most sensible take on the issue. Pudelski said, “School administrators have been forced to cut to the bone when it comes to general education costs, but current IDEA [maintenance-of-effort] requirements prohibit them from making the same difficult cuts to special education. Our members think this is inherently unfair…Fairness dictates that all programs and populations share in the burden of cuts, rather than holding a single program exempt.”

Predictably, the special education lobby has denounced the shift. Kathleen Boundy, co-director of the Center for Law and Education, has sent ED a letter demanding that the guidance be rescinded and arguing that districts should be required to “to maintain the level of special education expenditures from year to year based on a notion that costs rarely decrease.”

Monday, ED officials sensibly responded to such complaints by noting that IDEA’s strictures will keep districts from misbehaving. Good for ED. This was a smart, sensible call–even if it’s likely to generate more than a little undeserved grief.

- Frederick Hess

(This post also appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

In my experience, these kinds of “union leader v. ‘reformer’” conversations tend to go in three unfortunate directions. The first is that everyone engages in vague “it’s for the kids” banalities, agree that the kids must come first, and pledge vague, meaningless collaboration going forward (e.g. see the Denver labor summit that the U.S. Department of Education hosted in February). The second is that the self-styled reformers beat on the union leader to concede on this or that, or the unionists squeeze the reformers to utter reassuring things about how much they love and respect teachers. And the third is when everybody just screams that those on the other side are “seal-clubbing, crypto-fascist child-haters.” Each of these does a poor job of illuminating serious disputes or identifying places of real agreement.

You can judge for yourself, but I’d like to think that Randi and I managed to have a serious but civil debate about whether teachers are under attack, teacher pensions and health care, the new unionism, teacher evaluation, teacher pay, and the rest. We agreed on the failure of principals to do their job when it comes to teacher evaluation, the need to overhaul today’s industrial era model of schooling, the limits of trying to drive evaluation primarily off of today’s crude value-added scores on state reading and math assessments, and the value of engaging teachers in decisions regarding instruction and content (though Randi thinks it’d be a good idea to do that via collective bargaining and I couldn’t disagree more).

Randi argued teachers feel like they’re under attack. As I argued in the New York Times this spring, I said that it’s perfectly reasonable for teachers to feel angry that policymakers are looking to dial back their pensions and health care entitlements. But that doesn’t amount to disrespect or an “attack.” Truth is, Americans are much more positive about teachers today (according to Gallup) than they were 20 or 25 years ago. Indeed, I think the Republican leaders who have pushed to dial back benefits and collective bargaining have generally employed pretty respectful language. They have been answered by union advocates who have compared them to Nazis, and Republican governors like Scott Walker to Hitler and Mubarak. If anyone is under attack, seems to me it’s those political leaders who have finally shown themselves willing to start addressing the irresponsible promises and giveaways of their predecessors.

Randi made one factual assertion that I need to see fact-checked, because I don’t believe it but can’t quickly disprove it. She claimed that Cliff Janey, when superintendent of DC, fired more teachers than the DC IMPACT system did in its first year. Now, there may be definitional wiggles here–after all, Janey was supe for several years and I’m not sure if IMPACT was operationally live in its first year for purposes of teacher removal–so I’d love it if someone out there can give the straight scoop on this.

I agreed with Randi that teacher unions have been scapegoated for the appalling data regarding teacher evaluation that we’ve seen in The Widget Effect and elsewhere. Unions deserve their share of the blame for making it tough to remove lousy teachers, but the fact that 99% of teachers are routinely rated as satisfactory can be chalked up almost entirely to school and district leaders failing to do their job when it comes to evaluating personnel (unless you happen to believe we have 3.4 million phenomenal teachers). Same holds for failure to remove ineffective educators before they earn tenure.

Now, it strikes me as ludicrous for the unions to sit quietly by and share the blame for timid, tepid leadership, or when unions passively take the blame for weak teachers when teacher preparation programs produce graduates of dubious merit. In doing so, teachers and unions become complicit. The problem, I think, is a variation on Ted Sizer’s famed “Horace’s Compromise.” Teacher unions, superintendent and principal associations, schools of education, and school boards avoid calling each other out on such things, while focusing their energies on presenting a united front demanding more money and deference from taxpayers and policymakers. By the way, this phenomenon is part of what drives “reformers” to distraction. They can’t understand why so many supes and school boards seem to placidly accept onerous collective bargaining requirements, or why quality-conscious teachers don’t do more to call out feckless leadership.

Anyway, there’s plenty more. Like I said, if you’re interested, you can check the footage out here.

- Frederick Hess

(This post also appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

I’ll start by noting that I’m not a huge fan of the American public right now. After all, we’re the twits who demand lots of services but don’t want to pay for them. And then we get angry when our leaders can’t square this circle. We insist that they take painful steps to rein in spending, and then complain when they try to do it. In short, we’ve shown all the character and discipline of an irate preschooler. But what else is new?

That said, there are highlights worth noting. First off, you know all that griping from teacher leaders that there’s some mean-spirited “war” being waged against educators? Well, three out of four Americans say they want high-achieving high school students to become teachers, and two out of three would want their own child to become a teacher. Oh, and 69% of respondents give public school teachers an A or B; that’s up from 50% in 1984.

There’s good news on the productivity front. Eighty percent of respondents believe that high school classes with more students and a better teacher would result in higher student achievement than would smaller classes with less effective teachers. Since smaller classes necessarily require more teachers, and since there’s not an unlimited amount of terrific teachers out there, that suggests there may be an opportunity to wean the public from its reflexive enthusiasm for spending more and more money on smaller classes.

This reminds me of an intriguing point relating to teacher pay that was addressed by this month’s Ed Next/Harvard PEPG survey (published while I was on hiatus). When asked whether “teacher salaries in the United States should” increase, decrease, or stay the same, 55% of respondents said they ought to increase. But that figure dropped twelve percent points when respondents were told how much teachers currently earn. When respondents were told, “According to the most recent information available, teachers in the United States are paid an average annual salary of $54,819,” and then asked about salaries, support for increasing them declined to 43%.

Especially with the Wisconsin recalls finally wrapping up yesterday, was interesting to see some of the data on views of unions. Thirty-five years ago, in 1976, 38% of Americans thought teacher unions hurt public education and 22% believed they helped it. Today, opinion is more polarized and more negative: 47% believe unions hurt public education and 26% believe they help it. Yet, in an interesting wrinkle, just over half of those surveyed sided with the unions, rather than governors, in states where there were disputes over collective bargaining.

The phenomenon of “love my local schools, but hate America’s schools” was stronger than ever. Fifty-one percent of Americans give their local public schools an A or B, but just 17% of Americans would give the public schools nationally an A or B.

Overall, 41% of respondents gave President Obama an A or B on his performance with regards to public education. Opinion split cleanly along party lines. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats give the President an A or B, while 16% of Republicans do so. Thirty-five percent of Republicans give the President an F, while just 2% of Democrats do so. You think that reporters might finally notice, and move past the notion that education politics are marked by mystical bipartisan consensus? Nah, me neither.

- Fredrick Hess

As he returns to Hunter, I thought it timely to chat with David about a few of his takeaways and lessons learned from his time running the New York state education agency. This is a topic that’s been particularly on mind, given our just-issued Center for American Progress-AEI study on the challenges of SEAs and what it’ll take for them to succeed in an era of increasing responsibilities.

Rick Hess: Looking back on your time in New York as commissioner, what stands out most?
David Steiner: I think the opportunity to move reform for New York…[entailed an] ambitious but vital agenda that addressed three legs of the reform tripod. First, the standards we put in place, to which we added a commitment to standards-based curriculum. Then, a commitment to improve our assessments at the state and to contribute to the PARCC consortium work. And third, putting in place a teacher and school leader accountability system. I think those three elements must work together, and we were able to plan them together and get them funded through RTT. I would put as equally important the work we did to rethink and redesign teacher and principal certification as a way of ensuring the quality of crucial personnel in our schools.

RH: So, what were your one or two big successes?
DS: I would point to two as being successes, though still works in progress, and that weren’t embraced by other states. First, the ability to use RTT-funding for launching statewide curriculum is a critical part of the work we did. Clearly, there are constraints in what the federal government can do in the area of curriculum, but I am convinced that standards without curriculum are just half a loaf, so that has been a really important part of the work. And second is this complete redesign of teacher and principal certification. In New York state, we have moved from an essentially academic approach to a system that we’ll put in place in a few years based on performance assessment [including] value-added requirements, as well as the use of video and attached rubrics, that focus on the practice of teaching. I’m convinced that what you teach and how effectively you teach it are the two most important determinants of the quality of the education that students receive.

RH: Is there one thing that comes to mind that you’d regard as a big accomplishment that hasn’t gotten the recognition it deserved?
DS: The redo of the teacher certification has not been largely recognized, and I’m not sure why. Partly I think people don’t realize that you can’t teach in the state of New York after a certain number of years without professional certification. Historically, no one has paid attention to it because it’s been synonymous with the Master’s Degree, but now what we’ve done is make the certification a real credential in the practical sense of the skills of teaching. My guess is as people begin to see the new assessments we’re putting in place around the skills of teaching, this will be recognized as a major reform.

RH: What would say were your biggest disappointments during your tenure?
DS: I wouldn’t describe them as disappointments, but instead as work unfinished. The first is that we were not yet able to address the barriers of entry to the teaching and principal profession. I’ve become convinced that we need to look at how we recruit and how to generate the conditions that will try to ensure a stronger and stronger labor pool…In the end, it’s crucial to prepare the teacher candidates you have to the best possible level, but it’s also important to think about how you change policies to attract a stronger pool of teachers. Second, I’m a complete supporter of the need for high-quality assessments. In the end, the high-stakes test is the definition of what we think successful education stands for, for better or worse, and I think it’s still an open question whether the next generation of assessments will really match our aspiration to encourage rigorous, deep thinking rather than the rote-like product from the testing regime.

RH: What surprised you about the Commissioner’s job?
DS: You have to be very humble about the impact on the classroom practices of anything that you do because there are so many levels in between. It’s such a vast system, and one has to realize that just because you pull the lever in Albany it will not necessarily impact practice in district X or school Y. The second is there is an enormous investment in the status quo, even from those you would think would have an incentive for change. As soon as policy is fixed, people dig in around it and build their assumptions, practices, and professional life around it, and there is enormous pressure against moving the stake in the ground.

RH: Can you offer an example?
DS: When we think about the work we did in opening up teacher preparation to non-schools of education, inevitably the reaction was quite strong from the existing schools of education; but it was even cautious from some of those institutions that one might have thought would be less risk-averse. Sometimes I would look out from the offices in Albany and ask where the allies were. There didn’t seem to be a natural constituency for the reform work, and that remains a deep challenge.

RH: What are some of the challenges of running a state education agency? Any tips you might share?
DS: I would caution that the situation is different and unique in each state. The work that needs to be done to build trust and an effective working relationship with every stakeholder cannot be underestimated.

RH: How big a staff did you have to help you with this?
DS: The staff was large, but shrinking because of budget situations. Before I arrived the numbers were well over 3,000. By the time I left, they were closer to 2,700. We lost over a third of our state support because of the budget, and that has affected our overall funding. Uniquely in the state of New York, the commissioner is not only responsible for K-12 but higher education and a whole set of issues that normally would be outside the commissionership. It’s an enormous range of responsibilities with a declining number of employees.

RH: Were you able to offer the kind of pay you needed to attract the kind of staff you needed?
DS: The fact of the matter is that the Commissioner only has about five percent of the staff that is not civil service. Civil service schedules are what they are, and the discretionary hires are quite small in number. One of the things we did through the leadership of the Chancellor was to develop a private funding initiative to support Regents Research Fellows, a new group of invaluable policy experts who are working with the new Commissioner on developing policy initiatives around complex regulatory structures surrounding such things as accountability.

RH: One thing recently noted in our SEA report was the tension created by federal funding streams, and some of the challenges that created in trying to forge a coherent SEA culture. Any thoughts as to whether that rings true or not in your experience?
DS: I think there were some issues that were not so much anyone’s fault but just became striking. Because of federal largess, we had at some points in the agency over 40 experts in nutrition around the issue of school lunches. At the same time, we had one person who was an expert on science education because the federal funding was there for the nutrition experts, but we had to rely on state funding for the science curriculum expert. That wasn’t an intended consequence, but sitting where I did with the staff I had, you can imagine that may feel a little odd.

RH: How did you make all these reforms even in tight fiscal times?
DS: We had to battle through. No one is going to pretend it hasn’t hurt. However, we were able to assemble a leadership team that was capable of creating the reform vision and making it granular. First, second, and third is the caliber of the leadership team that you are able to put together and their capacity to engage the energies of good people.

RH: Finally, you’re now returning to your position as Dean at Hunter College’s School of Education. What are your plans there?
DS: First, I’ll be subject to my own regulations! I hope and intend that Hunter remains a leader in implementing the practice of high level guidance and mentorship and instruction in the complex practices of teaching, and developing research around it. We [as an education community] don’t have a sophisticated research base in terms of matching different teaching practices to outcomes, and I want Hunter to be a critical part of that work. I’m excited about building an institute in New York that will be a real center for discussion and debate of educational values and reform direction, and again hope to have a voice in national education reform.

-Frederick Hess

After all, edu-advocates don’t seem to have a clue as to what’s ahead. As the debt deal was getting resolved, the Committee for Education Funding–a decades-old alliance of 80-odd trough-snuffling universities, education associations, and assorted hangers-on–issued a hand-wringing letter that said, “We fear that education programs will face multiple rounds of cuts under the initial reduction in appropriated funds proposed in the [debt reduction] bill and from the joint committee’s plan or from sequestration.” No fear about it, gang, that’s exactly what’s ahead. Moreover, newsflash: Pre-K, K-12, and higher ed are in for years of tough sledding when it comes to federal funding. That was inevitable however the debt deal came out.

First, those in pre-K, K-12, and higher ed need to understand that it’s going to be mostly cuts and belt-tightening for a good long while. For all the debt deal pyrotechnics, the reality is that Uncle Sam is collecting about $2.2 trillion in taxes this year but plans to spend more than $3.6 trillion. Social Security, Medicare, and interest payments alone account for half or more of all annual outlays. You could slash defense spending by a third, adopt Obama’s preferred tax hikes on those making $250,000 and up, and scrupulously abide by the new spending caps, and you’d still be eyeballing a $1 trillion shortfall in 2012. Education, roads, research, and the rest are going to be squeezed out by Social Security and health care, unless we get serious entitlement reform or sizable across-the-board tax hikes (remember, only half of workers currently pay any federal income tax). Of course, taking on the seniors lobby or working families is a lot less fun for comfortable, self-impressed edu-advocates than issuing heartwrenching pleas for more cash.

Second, for all the hand-wringing, the “cuts” adopted in the debt ceiling deal aren’t real cuts. Instead, both the initial trims and those that will come out of the “supercommittee” represent nothing more than an agreement to modestly slow the rate of spending growth. Under the terms of the deal, it’s expected that the federal debt will be an immense $22 trillion in 2021, down only slightly from the $24 trillion projected before the deal. So, for all the anguished cries, all we’ve done is slightly slow the rate at which our spending it outstripping our revenues. Absent those entitlement reforms or new taxes, the real cuts are yet to come. In other words, the really tough part hasn’t even started yet.

Third, even those advocates who concede this reality may protest, “But we’re going to spend billions on school facilities and technology over the next decade; why don’t we at least accelerate the timetable so as to create jobs and get the benefits faster?” The problem is that seasoned observers have learned not to take these protestations at face value. As soon as the dollars in question are spent, it’s a certainty that the usual suspects will be back at the trough. In the face of such demands, Congress has proven itself to be a lot like your teenage son’s irresponsible friend; the one who emptied his college fund to buy a carpeted, pinstriped VW van with mag wheels and neon seat covers, and now hopes his folks will loan him money for insurance. A substantial number of Hill Republicans have decided the only way to deal with that kid is to just say “no.” Rather than issue petulant missives denouncing cuts, the ed community might want to start contemplating a new strategy for the challenges ahead.

- Frederick Hess

On Friday afternoon, in a hush-hush press call, Secretary Duncan and White House domestic policy honcho Melody Barnes told a handful of select national press more details about their scheme to offer conditional NCLB waivers. On the call, Duncan finally dropped his disingenuous (or ill-informed) insistence that NCLB reauthorization would happen this year. Like a forlorn groom finally conceding at dusk that his bride-to-be isn’t showing for their noon wedding, he acknowledged that reauth isn’t going to happen this year (as I’ve said before, it’s not going to happen next year either). Second, Duncan and Barnes said they’d be allowing states to apply for waivers in return for pledging fealty to elements of the administration’s NCLB “blueprint.” Apparently, the Department will pen a request for proposals, including various blueprinty requirements, and then convene some kind of “peer review” process to judge them.

ED’s press release explains, “The administration’s proposal for fixing NCLB calls for college and career-ready standards, more great teachers and principals, robust use of data and a more flexible and targeted accountability system based on measuring annual student growth. Barnes and Duncan said that the final details on the ESEA flexibility package will reflect similar goals.” I’m curious to see just what Duncan has in mind. Is he planning to condition regulatory relief on states agreeing to adopt the Common Core and associated assessments, or to require the use of value-added scores in teacher evaluation? If so, it’s going to be an interesting fall.

Three thoughts:

First, this all represents a pretty novel theory of waiver authority, one which turns waivers into something more like a statutory bypass. What Duncan and Barnes seem to have in mind is not insisting that states demonstrate that they’ll abide by the spirit of the law, or find other ways to comply with NCLB’s requirements, but letting states ignore federal legislation in return for promising to do other stuff that they like. I’d think that Obama would want to tread real gingerly here, as a Romney or Perry administration could use this play to wreak havoc on health care or financial reform.

Second, maybe it’s just me, but this whole plan for an RFP process and peer reviews sounds a lot more like a way to push desperate states to embrace the administration’s agenda than a way to provide regulatory relief from a law “forcing districts into one-size-fits-all solutions that just don’t work” (the Department of Ed’s own words in its press release). In fact, the whole scheme sounds more like the framing of a back-door grant competition than anything else.

Third, let’s remember that Duncan and Barnes are preparing to push states to embrace a blueprint that isn’t the law of the land and that hasn’t even been adopted by a single house of Congress–not even when the Democrats enjoyed two years of unified control. The administration’s stance is more than a little ironic, given the President’s repeated assurances that he’s not interested in expanding Washington’s footprint. Indeed, I remember candidate Obama’s compelling critique of the Bush administration’s creative efforts to expand executive authority, and his promise that things would be different in an Obama administration. Ah, well.

Oh, and just for good measure, in a gratuitous slap at House Republicans, the release quoted Barnes saying that the administration was forced to act because its “proposal to fix NCLB has been with Congress for 16 months” but had been sunk by “partisan politics in the House.” The funny thing is that the “partisan” Republican majority in the House (which has held sway for eight months) has passed elements of reauthorization legislation while the (presumably nonpartisan) Senate hasn’t passed anything. Ah, the vaunted Obama political operation at work. With this kind of velvet touch, it’s hard to imagine why the GOP hasn’t been more cooperative on the administration’s edu-agenda.

For what it’s worth, I see two ways this can play out. The happy version, if you’re Duncan, is that hard-pressed states are thankful for any relief, and Congress is too distracted by fights over the gas tax, the FAA, the super-committee proposal, and next year’s budget to pay attention. The alternative? Frustrated governors or irate Tea Partiers start to raise a fuss about this novel strategy for extending Uncle Sam’s reach, and it becomes a talking point for Bachmann and Perry during the GOP primaries. As for which way things will go, your guess is as good as mine.

- Frederick Hess

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

Today, though, I wanted to give you a quick head’s up on some terrific iPod beach fodder to fill some of those summer hours that you won’t spend slogging through my stilted prose. Here’s the deal: my pal, and Fordham Gadfly show co-host, Mike Petrilli has been conducting a series of provocative audio interviews for Education Next with authors of hot edu-books (you can find them here). The interviewees are a who’s who of edu-authors, and have so far included Daniel Willingham, Richard Whitmire on his Michelle Rhee Bee Eater volume, Rick Kahlenberg on his Al Shanker biography, John Merrow, and Alexander Russo on his colorful look at Green Dot’s Locke High School turnaround.

Mike is as quick and amusing as anyone in the business, and his interviews are as fun, lively, and incisive as you’d expect. Edu-geeks and grad students will find ‘em full of insights and insider tidbits, and a great way to catch up on noteworthy volumes. And, if you’ve already read the book, you’re going to get the kind of perspective and nuggets that usually only come when you’re chilling with the author over a quiet cocktail.

And the best part is that the conversations are fun enough that you can play them while splayed on the beach without wondering what became of your younger, fun-seeking self. They’re about as close as you can get in the edu-space to chocolate-coated vitamins. Happy listening.

- Frederick Hess

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

- Frederick Hess

Rick Hess: For context, can you say a bit about where the Danielson Framework came from?
Charlotte Danielson: It’s an outgrowth of work I was part of at ETS on Praxis 3 [in the late 1980s]. Praxis 3 was an observation-assessment of first year teachers for the purpose of a continuing license. In order to do that, ETS had to commission a lot of serious research as to what is good teaching. I got hired to be part of the project because they realized if you wanted to have live observations of teaching, you had to have trained observers. Which is a no-brainer, but I was the only person who had actually developed training programs.

I could see that there was a need for [observational evaluation] beyond first-year teachers. We’ve seen what happens when people get National Board certification–the preparation you do for it, it was valuable professional development. It struck me that the same philosophy could apply if we had clear standards of practice for regular teachers. That’s what caused me to write the framework… I wrote this book and didn’t have a clue that anything would ever come of it, I just did it because I thought there was a need. It came out of assessment but I didn’t see it as a framework for assessment, I just thought it was good for understanding practice. ASCD published it, and they made it a member book, and so it got sent out to about 90,000 people.

RH: When was this?
CD: It was published in 1996. And then I started getting emails and calls from teachers all over the world thanking me for writing the book, and saying, “Now we have our new teacher evaluation system.” And I had to break the news to them that actually they did not, because in order to have an evaluation system you needed a whole lot of other things–like procedures, training, and you need to make a lot of decisions. A system is more than just your evaluative criteria and level of performance. Before that, I’m not aware that anybody had created a rubric for teaching. We had rubrics for student learning, and we realized that if you’re going to assess student performance in complex learning, you needed a rubric–and it wasn’t going to be about right or wrong, but a continuum of performance. And I thought that’s teaching; it’s complex performance.

RH: When you work with districts employing your framework, what do you see that gives you confidence they’re using it well?
CD: Let me give you a story of when it’s not done well. I was contacted early on by a large urban district in New Jersey that…had a horrible evaluation system. It was top-down and arbitrary and punitive and sort of “gotcha.” And they developed a new one based on my book, and it was top-down and arbitrary, and punitive. All they did was exchange one set of evaluative criteria for another. They did nothing to change the culture surrounding evaluation. It was very much something done to teachers, an inspection, used to penalize or punish teachers whom the principal didn’t like…[and] I discovered that if I didn’t do something here, my name would get associated with things people hate.

So I thought about what it would take to do teacher evaluation well. And I discovered that doing it well means respecting what we know about teacher learning, which has to do with self-assessment, reflection on practice, and professional conversation. And when you do those things, you have enormous growth… [because] people appreciate the opportunities to talk in-depth about the challenges of practice, and it becomes a vehicle for professional learning instead of just a ritual you go through.

RH: In general, how faithfully have schools and districts applied your framework?
CD: I don’t have a valid answer to that question because I don’t know what goes in the numerator or the denominator. Up until now, there weren’t a lot of people who were just adopting this thing whole-scale without a lot of assistance from me or one of my consultants. So I think reasonable fidelity was pretty high because they had some good coaching. But now, I have absolutely no control over it and I don’t try to be a policeman–I’ve never thought that was productive. But, even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could. People need something, so they are grabbing something and this looks as good as everything else. So there is a potential for this to be used badly, absolutely.

RH: What can you do to help ensure that your framework is used thoughtfully?
CD: We do training. I’ve developed some online training programs with online vendors, so when people use those they at least hear me talking, but I don’t even know how well they implement those things. There are a lot of unknowns here.

RH: If states or districts are using these systems at scale, it creates an enormous need for people who can do these evaluations well. How big a concern is that?
CD: People evaluate teachers now, and we’ve found that it doesn’t really take any longer to do it well than to do it poorly. But it does take longer to do it well than to not do it at all. You do need boots on the ground to do this, but it doesn’t have to always be administrators–it can be department chairs or supervisors. For teachers in good standing, they don’t have to do a comprehensive, formal evaluation every year–they do it every other year, or every three years, and the other years teachers engage in rigorous, self-directed inquiry.

With video technology, you can do a lot of this remotely, and that’s very powerful. So there are other options, but it is labor-intensive. And to the extent that the public does not trust educators to do evaluation well–and it hasn’t always been well done, historically, and we have plenty of teachers not teaching well and schools not doing anything about it. So the policymakers have a point. But just more inspection isn’t the answer–it seems to me the answer is high-quality teacher evaluation. And that’s not impossible to do, we know how to do it, but there is a school-level capacity problem. It takes training, and in order to evaluate teachers well you need a good three or four days of training.

RH: Are you working at all on this question of ensuring that observers have the training to do high-quality, consistent observation?
CD: I’m doing some work with Teachscape. And we’re developing a proficiency test for observers, which is a requirement that has been written into law in a couple places, including Illinois and New York. They are saying, “If you’re going to evaluate teachers in this state, you’ve got to pass a test.” Now, they aren’t specifying what that test ought to be, but I don’t know anyone else trying to develop a test. But we are, and it’s far down the track. It should be available in mid-October.

RH: In places like DC and Florida, policymakers have required the use of observational evaluations to help make decisions about job security and compensation. What’s your take on such efforts? Do you have suggestions or cautions that apply?
CD: My experience with those issues is mixed. School districts have an absolute obligation to ensure quality teaching. The question is what counts as evidence, and how do you attribute evidence to the teacher. That’s why the assessment of teacher practices, we’ll always have to have that. Partly because it gives you diagnostic information–if things aren’t going well, if kids aren’t learning, then why not? But the net result is you have to have student learning.

On the question of observation and if it’s productive, how high are the stakes if a rating is given? A lot of the policy types, they want a number. And this stuff doesn’t lend itself to numbers. But the minute a teacher’s performance rating is a high-stakes matter, people are going to do whatever they have to do to be rated highly. And the things you have to do to be rated highly are exactly the opposite of things you’d do if you wanted to learn–you wouldn’t try anything new, you would be protective, you would be legalistic about the ratings, and you’d argue. None of that makes you open to improving your teaching. So my advice is to only make it high-stakes where you have to. If someone is on the edge of needing remediation, then that is high-stakes and you should use it. But if your main purpose is to say these 80 percent of our teachers are performing pretty well, so let’s use this process to get better, that’s a very different way of thinking.

RH: Right now, we’re see widespread efforts to use observational frameworks as high-stakes tools. Are you suggesting that that’s a concern?
CD: What I hope people guard against is, so long as practice is above a certain level, then it shouldn’t be high-stakes. If you aren’t going to fire the person, then what’s the point? Some people who are driving this policy have a “get rid of the bad apples” mentality, but I’m [not sure there are sufficient replacement teachers out there]. If we assume that most of these teachers right now are still going to be on staff in five years time, then the challenge is how do we get better? And that entails very different procedures and a different culture than it does if your goal is to smoke out the bad apples.

RH: If you have one bit of advice for those seeking to do observational evaluation well, what is it?
CD: The first thing to do is to arrive at consensus around what is good teaching…Having a shared and common understanding about what is good teaching is important. Ask teachers, what does this look like in my classroom? If you do nothing else but that, you’ll improve because a lot of other things fall into place. That is, if you know what good teaching is, then how will you know it when you see it? How do you evaluate it? But that conversation shouldn’t be shortchanged.

RH: What do you say to policymakers who fear that sounds like a recipe for foot-dragging?
CD: You pay a month or two to understand the instruments. Call it training. Call it whatever you want, it’s people understanding the criteria on which their performance will be judged. And that, of course, is a fundamental principle of equity, that you don’t evaluate people on something they don’t know. Having this conversation gets people on board, and I’ve never had it not work. A criterion of something worth doing doesn’t have to be that the teachers don’t like it! And to hear all these [reformers] talking, you’d think that was their criterion.

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

I had the opportunity to meet Agassi a few months back in Vegas and was terrifically impressed. I found him smart, thoughtful, humble, and interested in listening; in truth, I found him a whole lot more impressive than any number of education officials, experts, consultants, and professors that I’ve encountered. Having a smart, wildly successful, internationally regarded tennis champ pouring his passion into launching great schools would seem a terrific thing–and a uniquely American way to tap our strengths and resources.

Yet, in a revealing bit of irony, the Agassi-Canyon announcement came on the heels of another self-satisfied, big-ideas report from the National Center on Education and the Economy. Telling us what American education should look like, NCEE’s grandiloquently titled “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform” went out of its way to dismiss entrepreneurs and charter schools.

The NCEE report was another of these increasingly tedious “international best practice” reports that NCEE and McKinsey have made into a thriving little industry. You know the drill. NCEE’s authors identify a couple countries the size of Minnesota that seem to have good test scores, do a few school visits and talk to a couple government officials, cherry-pick some of the practices that the authors like, and then spin those into broad prescriptions for the U.S. The NCEE wish-list includes expanding the Common Core, improving teacher quality, and moving from local to state control of school financing.

(Quick aside: If the exercise were more cognizant of the scholarly and policy limitations, or was more interested in lessons and possible unanticipated consequences, I’d be more amenable. But it’s the arrogance of these exercises–the certainty with which they promulgate grand recommendations, brush past the shaky analytic underpinnings, and try to use “expertise” to stifle dissenting voices–that I find so problematic.)

The NCEE report asserts, “Neither the researchers whose work is reported on in this paper nor the analysts of the OECD PISA data have found any evidence that any country that leads the world’s education performance league tables has gotten there” by embracing charter schools and vouchers, the role of education entrepreneurs, or the use of student performance data to reward teachers. Today, let’s set aside the empirical foundation for the analysis and just go meta.

The whole McKinsey-NCEE “let’s-find-someone-to-mimic” industry is undoubtedly great at generating support from foundations eager for someone to tell ‘em “what works.” But, to me, it looks like a triumph of the bureaucratic mindset and disdain for American dynamism and heterogeneity.

I can’t help thinking how much I would’ve loved to see NCEE’s recommendations to the Founders back in 1787 if they’d been tasked with generating some recommendations for a Constitutional design. They would’ve identified a few countries that seemed to have high GDPs (’cause that’s all they could measure), and sent a few consultants or scholars to poke around and interview a couple folks. I can see the report now, “Honored sirs, none of the successful nations in question are republics–and it has been more than a millennia since the last successful republic. Rather than pursue an impossible dream, the Constitutional Convention would do well to emulate the British monarchy. We spent a week speaking with several members of the royal family and scholars at Oxford, and here’s what they recommend.”

Or, I can see the report to FDR in1940. “Mr. President, the data suggests that capitalist democracies are just not equal to the challenges. Based on measures of military and economic performance, the best-practice success stories are clearly Japan and Germany. We recommend an effort to emulate their practices.” Or, three decades ago, when every NCEE-style expert wanted the U.S. to do its best to mimic the Japanese industrial model, “We’ve seen what works, and it’s clearly Japanese-style central planning. There’s no evidence that entrepreneurial efforts can help the U.S. tech sector catch up.” (Of course, as Japan got mired in its “lost decade,” such calls tended to dry up.)

The WaPo‘s Charles Lane had a terrific piece on a related topic yesterday, in which he derided the current fascination with Germany’s economic “miracle” as another case of latching onto a “foreign flavor of the month.” He recalled the awed enthusiasm that the economies of “Japan, Inc.” and Soviet Union once inspired among the smart set, and noted that today’s German success is related to liberalization “that made the country a little bit more like…the United States.” Lane closes with some wise words: “[While] there’s plenty we can learn from the Germans, Japanese, Chinese, [and everyone else]…Americans need to identify our comparative advantages–social, cultural, political and economic– and exploit them, instead of worrying about copying the competition.”

Ah, well. Folks like things that seem certain. And NCEE is hustling, alongside McKinsey, to corner the market on “big” ideas that can still be peddled as safe. That’s their right. I just wish the press and policy community would evince a little more independence or skepticism when reacting to and reporting on this stuff.

- Frederick Hess

Rick Hess: So, you all recently issued a report tracking the first cohort of KIPP students. What prompted you all to do the research? After all, most middle schools don’t track the college completion rate of their alums.
Richard Barth: We’ve been committed to tracking–and these are, again, our original eighth graders–since the beginning. There’s been this commitment, starting back with [KIPP founders] Mike [Feinberg] and Dave [Levin], to make sure that we’re preparing our kids for success in college and in life. We’ve been tracking this data and a couple things made us say, “Is there something here that we should be sharing more broadly?” The accepted practice for tracking kids when it comes to college completion is six years out of high school; our first couple classes were hitting that mark. And we needed to tell that story internally because we have a huge wave coming. We have 1,000 KIPPsters in college today and will have over 10,000 in 2015. And we realized if we didn’t get the story of what we’re learning out to the KIPP network, we’d be deeply regretting it in 5 years.

RH: So what did you learn?
RB: First, our kids are outperforming national averages for completion. Of our eighth graders, a third are finishing with a BA degree in six years, versus 31 percent of all US students. So we’re outperforming all Americans, and [doing] about four times what’s expected for low-income kids, which is about eight percent. We also learned that over 80% of our eighth graders are going to college, but only a third are finishing. So while we’re proud of what’s going on, given what they’ve done relative to the whole population, we think we can do better. We think there are a few core things we can do to get us to our next goal, which is a 50% completion rate over six years.

RH: What are those key things you need to do?
RB: The number one thing is academic rigor. We’ve committed to going kindergarten through twelfth grade in KIPP schools across the country. The original cohorts that we just [reported upon] only got fifth through eighth grade. So [we're going to] start with our kids earlier and stay with them longer. The second thing is we’ve got to do a much better job of finding the right match when it comes to college. We are sending too many of our kids off to campuses that have low graduation rates. We know that even at each level of selectivity, there are schools that have a much higher graduation rate than others. So we’re convinced that one of the simplest and clearest things we can do is to form partnerships with colleges that are doing a better job of not just taking kids, but seeing that they finish. We also think we can do a better job of making sure our KIPPsters are better aware of the financial costs of college and are preparing for that. It is pretty clear that as the original KIPPsters went off to high school, they weren’t sure what it was going to take from a financial standpoint to get to college. We’re piloting a match savings program, so for every dollar a family commits, they can get a match dollar.

RH: What’s that entail?
RB: With a grant from Citigroup, we’re piloting a match college savings program in five regions. We want to [see] whether poor families, if given an opportunity to save with a match, will put money away for college. We’re also doing a partnership with the University of Chicago, they are doing a financial literacy program called “6-to-16″ and we’re rolling that out to 18 schools, and trying to build a powerful online curriculum.

RH: Regarding that 33% college complete rate, some critics have asked, “Is that really four times the comparable cohort, given that KIPP students have chosen to attend and then have completed KIPP schools?”
RB: Again, we welcome these tough questions. What the Mathematica research is showing is, in the case of academic readiness, our fifth graders are coming in really, really behind. They are coming in farther behind the students in districts in which these schools are located. Over time, our research is showing that our schools can make a big difference. And we’re incredibly proud of our outcomes.

RH: Once kids are in college, any thoughts about what KIPP can or should do?
RB: We need to make sure that once they are on campus, we’re doing things to help with their social and academic integration. We’re looking to get 25 pilots set up in the next 13 or 14 months with colleges to make sure that when first generation kids of color get on campus, the set-up is conducive to them not just starting, but finishing, college. One idea we’re working with is having upper classmen, as their work study program, being responsible for welcoming in a new cohort of freshmen. New students have to deal with admissions, with enrollment, with financial aid, and get their courses…While so many of us went to college knowing how that world works, for our [KIPP] kids, there’s no one in their family who had the experience before. So we need to make sure there is someone looking at it from their perspective, to make sure they get enrolled in the right courses.

RH: Any big takeaways as to what colleges may be doing wrong when it comes to serving KIPP alums?
RB: There are a lot of colleges that have very low completion rates. Does the public understand that on many campuses across the country, only one-in-three or one-in-four freshmen complete college? Why is that? Rigor is one. There are kids who get to college and end up in remedial courses and face this long uphill climb. [But] it’s more than the kids not being prepared. The way financials work for higher ed, they get paid during the first semester and then lose kids over the course of the year. A lot of institutions are like gyms–which advertise at New Year’s and again at the beginning of summer and then count on the fact that only one-in-three people will come in regularly, after they’ve taken your money up front.

RH: When you look at the outcomes, do you see anything that’s made you think you need to retool elements of the KIPP model if you’re going to equip kids to complete college?
RB: We have kids at far too many campuses given our numbers, and we haven’t been using good third-party information and our own experience to drive the counseling process. We have a little over 1,000 kids on over 300 campuses… If we could have 30, 40, 50, 100, or 200 kids on a campus, the social capital is huge. So we’ve made a mistake, and we would not have 1,000 KIPPsters on 300 campuses. The second thing is we made a mistake not recognizing that we’d need to get into the business of high schools. And we paid a price. We sent a lot of our kids to high schools that we thought would keep the progress going and they didn’t. Now we have 15 high schools across the country, so we’re getting into that business, but it’s too late for the original cohort. The third thing is to make sure that what we’re learning informs our schools and our kids. This is early stage, but the vast majority of our kids are going to college within 200 miles of home. On some level, it makes all the sense in the world, but the reality is some of those matches aren’t good fits. There are specific situations where helping our families understand that their child, if they have the option of going away to school, is a really good thing. Waiting to twelfth grade to cultivate that understanding is too late.

RH: Some observers have asked whether some of the established instructional practices at KIPP may not do enough to prepare kids for college-level work. What’s your take on that?
RB: I do think it’s worth examining. As we’ve gotten into the high school business ourselves, there’s been a really big push on writing, which we think is a proxy for critical thinking skills. And we’re trying to learn how to let go of the supports and scaffolding [so as] to let kids be more responsible for decisions on their own. Our middle schools are highly structured, and as we’ve gotten into high schools, we’ve realized we have to prepare them for a world with far less structure. We’ve got to get better at that.

RH: Transparency is always a complicated thing when it comes to edu-reform. For any successful provider, examining these long-term may complicate a seemingly happy story. That’s one of the reasons, I’d argue, we see few efforts of this kind. That downside is doubly true for KIPP, when you consider that you’ve got a big profile and skeptics who have been energetic when it comes to questioning KIPP’s record. Can you talk a bit about the costs of this kind of transparency?
RB: So the cons of doing this, externally, you’re doing research for the skeptics, you’re giving them the ability to come in and criticize, to say, “Look, only a third of their kids are getting a BA.” The upside is, first, it keeps everyone at KIPP–and we now have over 2,000 staff–aligned with the very real picture of what we signed up for and how difficult this is. Our teachers know from the beginning that this is the mountain we’re climbing. And second, we hope it plays a small part in helping people redefine success. One risk is we’ve learned “to college” is not “through college.” The whole country is focusing on high school graduation rates and getting kids to college. We’re shedding light on the fact that the difference between “to college” and “through college” is massive. And lastly, this is a topic that a lot of people are scared to talk about, what happens to first-generation kids of color who go to college. We want to make it safe to have a dialogue on this. And we want to make sure people understand that what we’ve done is an incredible accomplishment even if it’s short of where we want to go.

-Frederick Hess

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

The inattention to this question is really pretty astounding. As Podgursky and Olberg remind us, pension costs accounted for 15 percent of teacher salaries in 2010, and pensions probably amounted to more than ten percent of all school district spending last year. Big savings there could alleviate the need for so many of the difficult decisions with which supes, school boards, and school leaders are wrestling.

The authors examined six charter-heavy states–including giant states like California, Florida, and New York, and charter hotbeds Arizona, Michigan, and Louisiana. In California and Louisiana, where school participating in the pension system are free from participating in Social Security, the participation rates were 91%+ and 71%, respectively. In other words, nearly all charter schools chose to participate in the state pension system. In the other four states, where schools could opt out of the pension plan with no repercussions, between 23% and 41% still opted to join the pension system.

The authors find that charters which opt out of the state pension system most often offer teachers defined contribution plans (e.g. a 401(k) or 403(b)), with employer matches that look a lot like those offered to university employees or private sector professionals. Seventy-seven percent of schools that opted out provided a retirement plan with a match, nine percent offered a plan but with no employer match, and fourteen percent provided no alternative retirement plan.

The bottom line here is mixed, and intriguing. First, it’s clear that, as always, state statute and regulation play a huge role in determining what charters can and will do. Second, when given the opportunity to opt out of the state pension system without incurring new costs, a majority of charter schools take advantage of the opportunity–though a sizable number decline to do so. Third, charter operators have generally chosen to offer relatively attractive defined benefit plans, though these appear less costly and more flexible (for both educator and school) than the established state system.

Finally, though, this terrific study raises a lot more questions than it answers. How much can schools save by opting for alternative benefit plans? Why are so many charters opting to stay with the state system? How do teachers feel about these alternatives? How do these choices impact recruitment, retention, or talent management? What makes school leaders more or less likely to embrace cost-effective alternatives? And, finally, given that Minnesota enacted the first charter law twenty years ago, why has it taken this long for scholars to start to dig into the big questions about how and why charters are (or aren’t) seizing opportunities to rethink industrial era cost structures and staffing routines?

- Frederick Hess

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

Indeed, districts are prohibited from even considering costs when designing student education plans. The result has been a steady increase in spending accompanied by remarkably little attention to efficiency. That’s a losing strategy, given that special education spending has grown from 4 percent to 21 percent of total school spending between 1970 and 2005. Stretching the school dollar requires taking a tough look at the efficacy of special ed service delivery alongside other district operations.

State and local officials generally accept this diagnosis in principle. But, when I talk with them, they often want to know where to get started, and how to move forward without asking for legal headaches. Happily, Nate Levenson, the managing director of the District Management Council, has stepped into the breach to offer some guidance. Levenson, a former Massachusetts superintendent and an MBA, penned the new white paper, “Something Has Got to Change: Rethinking Special Education” (Full disclosure: the paper was published by my shop at AEI).

Levenson’s charge: “Districts must tackle the twin challenges of controlling special education costs and improving student achievement. In short, we are asking districts to do more with less.” He draws on long experience as a superintendent and special education consultant to offer a number of field-tested practices for taming out-of-control special education spending while serving students better. Specifically, Levenson offers four pieces of advice to schools and districts: focus on reading and integration with general education, rethink deployment of support staff, design more sophisticated metrics to gauge teacher effectiveness, and employ more strategic management structures.

Levenson shares experiences to illustrate the challenges and explain how superintendents and school boards can confront them. In his own tenure as supe, for instance, he oversaw a program that reduced special ed costs even as the share of special ed students achieving proficiency in a three-year trial program increased by 26 percent in English and 22 percent in math. A few of his recommended solutions:

• a relentless focus on reading, including clear and rigorous grade-level expectations for reading proficiency, frequent measurement, and early identification of struggling readers with immediate and intensive additional instruction, up to 30 extra minutes per day;
• rethinking what special ed students are taught in general education classes to avoid overplacement of special ed students in special classes and keep them in front of the best teachers;
• maximizing class time with content expert teachers.

Nate is also as quick to dismiss widely-held but misguided beliefs surrounding instruction for special ed. For example, he writes, “The largest portion of special education spending goes to special education teachers, who are trained in the law, know how to identify disabilities, and are steeped in theories of learning. They are not, however, trained in math, English, or reading, even though most of a special education teacher’s day…is spent providing academic instruction.” He flags one district where special ed teachers provided 100 percent of extra reading help even though only five percent of the teachers had been trained to teach reading.

Also in for some tough medicine is the practice of co-teaching, where a special ed teacher is paired with a general ed teacher in a regular classroom for students with and without disabilities. Levenson writes, “Co-teaching is like dieting. Lots of people want to lose weight and look good in a bathing suit, but actually doing so is hard.”

Levenson concludes with a handful of policy recs. These include focusing regulatory oversight on outcomes rather than inputs, collecting different and smarter types of data, and creating unambiguous standards for student eligibility and services. Anyway, check it out, if you’re so inclined. I’d say it’s interesting reading for most, but essential reading for school board members, supes, and school leaders trying to close budget shortfalls without compromising educational quality.

-Frederick Hess

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

To me, it looked like two key fault lines ran through the discussion. One was the notion of “reform unionism” and professional voice. The second was how to judge whether schools or teachers were doing well. Moe, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, thinks “reform unionism” is a pipe dream and that the only effective way to drive school improvement is by getting the system incentives to emphasize performance–which requires measures of student learning. Meier argued that collaboration has repeatedly proven successful, in locales such as New York’s district four, and that it has been management and policymakers who have squelched it. She rejected the notion that test scores measure learning in a useful fashion, and noted that Moe’s critiques of teacher evaluation or tenure all rest on the notion that test scores can usefully measure teacher performance. Harding praised Moe’s efforts to talk about union incentives and behavior, accepted the notion that test scores are useful measures of learning, and suggested we can all “put our heads in our hands over the state of [teacher] contracts.” But she also confessed to a “soft spot” for collaboration, expressed faith that districts and unions could collaborate to drive achievement, and cautioned that reformers eager to reduce the role of unions need to “be careful” about finding ways to “replace important protections” for teachers.

If you haven’t seen Moe’s 500-page tome, it’s worth a careful look. The result of a decade’s worth of scholarship, it assembles a wealth of data on teacher attitudes, collective bargaining, union influence on school board elections, NEA and AFT political activity, and so on. Yesterday, Moe sketched the book’s argument, saying, “Teacher unions are the most powerful force in American education…from the bottom up and the top down.” He said that fully understanding this dynamic is essential to making sense of why education policy “has been such a disappointment for a quarter century,” because schools are organized like they are largely due to the pressures exerted by teacher unions.

Perhaps Moe’s most intriguing assertion is that both union leaders and would-be reformers routinely mischaracterize union sentiment: union leaders when they say they’re seeking to protect students and would-be reformers when they charge that callous union bosses are ignoring the wishes of their membership. Rather, Moe argued, “Members expect union leaders to protect their jobs [and perks]…and union leaders need to do these things if they are to stay union leaders.” He said, “Leaders are going to protect union member job interests come hell or high water, even if these lead them to do things that are bad for kids or for schools.” This isn’t because union leaders are foisting an agenda on teachers, but because they are responding to teachers’ common, fundamental concerns. He noted that none of this means that union members or union leaders are bad and that, as individuals, they likely want what’s best for kids. But, he argued, the logic of unionization trumps those individual concerns. While he sees great value in “teachers having voice,” the “dilemma” is that when teachers organize to make their voice heard, it becomes “about job interests and not just voice anymore.”

Moe offered a bleak prognosis for “reform unionism,” deeming it wishful thinking. He said that those who put their faith in such reforms are “expecting cats to bark,” and argued that the logic of any collaboration is that union partners will try to “minimize departures from the norm.” He also argued that Republican efforts to curtail union power in the states are unlikely to make much headway. In the longer term, Moe sees two trends that will reduce union influence. One is the “ferment” in the Democratic party, with reformers like the Democrats for Education Reform “put[ting] unions on the defensive.” The second is technological change. Echoing a point that he and John Chubb argued in Liberating Learning, Moe said that technology will reduce the need for labor, that online learning will lead to teachers being more geographically dispersed, and that new tools will lead to a proliferation of new school options–all of which will cost unions members, dues, and influence.

Meier argued that Moe credited teacher unions with far too much influence. She argued that schools have always been infused by rules that stifle sensible practice, and that that these rules were historically imposed by management. She observed that in St. Louis, in 1950, a married woman could not teach and that, in Chicago, she could not have taught if she looked pregnant. She argued that unions have tried to address “the shameful history of how teachers were treated.” She argued that doctors are not regarded as a “special interest” but are listened to when they speak with professional consensus, and asked why the unions are treated any differently. Indeed, she said that “healthy civilizations respect seniority and age,” and argued that policies which advantage veteran teachers are defensible on those grounds.

She said she’s perplexed by efforts to cut teacher benefits. She said, “I’m a retired teacher, collecting two-thirds of my teaching salary [in a pension]. I run into people with 3.2 million dollar bonuses. To begrudge me my two-thirds of salary, that’s shameful. It’s what the middle class was supposed to be.” She also challenged Moe’s notion that others pay more attention than the union to the needs of the students. “Who puts the interests of the children first?” she asked. She said it’s not the nation, which “ranks at the bottom on child welfare.” She asked, “When we decided not to tax the rich the way they should have been, was that because they were thinking about American children?” And, she asked, what are we producing high schools graduates for, anyway? “There are no jobs,” she said. “Companies move locations, pick up a factory here and move over there without thinking about the children.”

There was plenty more, with Harding frequently occupying the ground between these two forceful voices. Ultimately, I think two clear patches of common ground emerged. One was agreement that schools have indeed been larded with destructive rules by pols and management. Moe happily conceded the point, noting that schools occupy the bottom rung of “a democratic hierarchy,” reminding the audience why he has long advocated for choice-based reform. He agreed with Meier that management has long been inept and unproductive, but argued that this has been due to incentives–and that he thinks that’s entirely consistent with his assertion that teacher unions are having the biggest and most destructive impact on schools today. Second, there was clear agreement about the value of teacher professionalism and voice, with Harding flagging the promise of new organizations intended to give teachers a voice in policy. The question was really about how that voice can and should be channeled.

Anyway, a lot was said, and space and time limit what I’ve been able to touch upon. If you’re curious, pop over here and check it out for yourself.

-Frederick Hess

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

Yesterday my colleague Whitney Downs and I released a new USCC report that seeks to provide a roadmap for those business and civic leaders tired of genteel gestures, aimless initiatives, and sitting on their hands. In “Partnership Is a Two-Way Street: What It Takes for Business to Help Drive School Reform” we argue, “Too often, business has put its good intentions to work in the service of ineffectual systems…If business leaders are serious about school improvement, they must play a more forceful role and drive harder bargains with state officials and school district educators.” To see how business can do better, Whitney and I closely examined three geographies–Austin, Nashville, and Massachusetts–where business has played an invaluable role to see what lessons might be learned.

In Austin, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce has worked with the Austin area’s 15 independent school districts on issues of data transparency and college enrollment, as well as providing expertise and sustained pressure for both goals. As a result, 64 percent of Austin area high school seniors submitted the Texas Common Application in 2009, up from 47 percent in 2006. FAFSA submissions are up 85 percent.

In Nashville, the district has established twelve academy high schools, each with its own specialty. There are 46 industry-themed academies at the twelve schools, and a total of 117 business-academy partnerships and six industry-based partnership councils with 22-25 business leaders meeting once a month. This academy model, with businesses as a committed partner to local schools, has led Nashville’s graduation rate to improve from 69 percent to 83 percent, as well as the percent of high schools in “good standing” under NCLB to rise from 41 percent in 2007-2008 to 53 percent in 2009-2010.

The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education has been a crucial policy advocate, in particular issuing an influential report that helped Massachusetts policymakers embrace the Common Core standards. “The fact that the report emerged from MBAE, which is seen as the guardian of education and a mainstream business group, [made it]…more effective,” said Massachusetts secretary of education Paul Reville. A number of sidebars in the paper further addressed such topics such as “generating research that has an impact,” “working with legislators,” and the importance of savvy leadership.

Five key lessons emerged from the cases:

Be a partner, not a pawn. Partnership is a two-way street. Working with school districts or policymakers doesn’t mean carrying their water; it means settling on shared objectives and pursuing them jointly. Drew Scheberle, senior vice president of education and talent development for the Austin Chamber, told us, “We had to have the moment when [Austin Independent School District] knew we were willing to walk away. We gave them a list of non-negotiables [and] said, ‘If you want [our support], then you have to do these things. If you don’t, we’re out.’”

Leverage the unique assets business brings. When business leaders work with state and school district officials on K-12 schooling, they need to keep in mind that they are negotiating not as claimants but as valued partners. Jay Steele, associate superintendent of high schools for Metro Nashville Public Schools, told us, “[Businesses] are organizing their lobbyists around things we have asked. They can get a lot of things done as business people that I can’t.”

Get in for the long haul. Businesses often have other priorities besides K-12 education, so it is vital to structure a role that allows business to sustain its involvement and not permit the effort to be an enthusiasm that comes and goes. Alan Macdonald, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, told us, “There’s a tendency of business folks to say, ‘Didn’t we already do that?’ The fact that MBAE would bring us all together and keep us focused is very important.”

Learn the issues and hire an expert point person. Effective engagement requires that business leaders invest time and energy to become acquainted with the issues and the local stakeholders. They should hire an expert who knows the ins and outs of education policy and can leverage the strengths of business to drive improvement. Mark Williams, Austin Independent School District (ISD) school board chair and former Dell executive, told us, “Sometimes chambers sit on the side and [occasionally] jump in. When it comes to school districts, you have to have a relationship. You can’t weigh in [periodically].”

Don’t shy away from policy and politics. Business leaders have a natural inclination to stay out of heated education debates. But school systems are public agencies spending public dollars to serve the public’s children. Serious reform requires changing policy, and that means political debate. Ralph Schultz, president of the Nashville Chamber, told us, “[The Nashville Chamber's school board PAC] is a lightning rod, no question about it. But the business community is adamant about the need to be in this game. It gets nasty sometimes.”

The actors in question shared a wealth of smart insights. So, if this seems interesting or useful, check out the whole thing yourself.

-Frederick Hess

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

Dale argues that teaching should be understood as a team effort. He argues, “Twenty-first-century teaching is about the collective work of effective teams of educators focused on the success of individual students.” If we take that seriously, and not merely as lip service, he writes, it should shape our approach to evaluation and pay. He cautions that incentivizing individual teachers via pay can easily miss the mark, if one accepts the team premise. Similarly, he observes, “while principals tend to be the instructional leaders in schools, a truly effective school has multiple instructional leaders working with the principal to orchestrate and facilitate exceptional teams of teachers.”

In place of the naive cash-for-scores merit pay plans that have been tried in places like Nashville and New York, Dale draws on his efforts in Fairfax to sketch a vision of differentiated pay which emphasizes the creation of “teacher-leaders,” who would take on new duties outside the confines of the traditional school day and year, and would receive a corresponding 10 to 15 percent increase in pay. Roles would include providing additional student learning time, collaborating within and across schools, and mentoring colleagues. Dale argues, “Teaching is no longer a ten-month job; teaching is a full-time, twelve-month job. We must recognize these expectations…[and] completely change our image and rethink the teaching profession.”

Dale highlights some of the early successes of this approach in Fairfax, where 24 public schools were chosen for a teacher-leader pilot program starting in the 2005-2006 school year for a four-year program. A third of the 24 schools were studied, showing substantial improvement in student achievement, AP participation, and school climate. If one finds this course appealing, Dale flags several of the key challenges that loom. One is ensuring that schools embrace a “purposeful” vision, in which clear expectations, duties, and functions yield concrete job descriptions, and not just vague notions that teacher-leaders will do more stuff. A second is how to create, support, and monitor teachers moving from traditional roles into new, twelve-month, teacher-leader functions. And a third is, especially in today’s fiscal environment, finding ways to realize savings as twelve-month contracts replace the stipends, per-diem pay, p.d., and assorted detritus of the conventional model.

My take? I don’t agree with everything Jack has to say. I think that there’s need for more differentiation of roles than he contemplates here, and I think there’s plenty of room for smart use of individual evaluation and pay within a team-oriented framework. But, I think he gets the big picture right, shares an invaluable take from the perspective of an accomplished district leader, and offers a terrifically sensible start for so many districts that are still seeking a way to take their first step beyond the widget-based teacher model. So, I think he has offered an enormously useful step forward, especially given that–unlike so many “reform” visions–it benefits from a practitioner’s imprimatur and sensibility.

-Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Porter et al. analyze the content of the Common Core using a process called the Survey of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) that Porter created a while back. It entails using a two-dimensional framework to compare how similar or different the Common Core’s topics and cognitive demands are to those of existing state standards. Porter and his team identify 217 topics in math and 163 in English language arts and reading, and five levels of cognitive demands, yielding 1,085 distinct types of content for math and 815 for English language arts. The question is how closely Common Core recommended content and grade-level progressions align with those in place today.

Porter et al. were able to draw on CCSSO analyses of the Common Core standards and of math standards for 27 states and English language arts standards for 24. The findings? Porter et al. observe, “The Common Core standards represent considerable change from what states currently call for in their standards and in what they assess.” Moreover, “[They] are also different from the standards of countries with higher student achievement, and they are different from what U.S. teachers report they are currently teaching.”

The alignment between the Common Core and state standards was 0.25 in math (where 1.0 would be perfect alignment and 0.0 would be no alignment) and 0.30 in reading. Because those low correlations could be due to the fact that the Common Core is just addressing material in a different grade than in a given state, the researchers then aggregated across grades 3-6 and 3-8. That boosted alignment slightly, to 0.35 in math and to 0.38 in reading.

The stark differences between state standards and the Common Core are partly due to differences in topics addressed, but also to the fact that the Common Core emphasizes somewhat different cognitive skills: devoting less time to memorization and performing procedures, and more to demonstrating understanding and analyzing written material.

Turning to existing state assessments, Porter et al. find the average alignment to the Common Core math standards is just 0.19 and 0.17 for reading. They repeated that analysis for the NAEP assessments, finding that the alignment for math is 0.20 in both fourth and eighth grade and for reading is 0.28 in fourth grade and 0.21 in eighth grade. In other words, the SEC analysis finds that the Common Core standards are real different from what’s on state and NAEP tests today.

Porter and his team devoted special attention to benchmarking the Common Core against the Massachusetts content standards–given that Massachusetts is the nation’s top-performing state on NAEP. The only grade level at which they had Mass data common across math and ELA standards was the seventh grade, so they focused there. The seventh grade math alignment between the Mass standards and the Common Core was 0.19. It was 0.13 for ELA. They report, when it comes to math, “The Common Core puts considerably more emphasis on operations, less on basic algebra and geometric concepts, and more on probability.” In English language arts, the Common Core places “substantially” less emphasis on memorization and “somewhat” less on performing procedures, less on reading and language study, and more on writing processes, writing applications, and oral communication. As Porter et al. note, “Whether these differences between Common Core and Massachusetts mean that Common Core represents a better curriculum is difficult to judge, although at least at grade 7 in [English language arts], there is a shift in the Common Core standards toward greater emphasis on higher cognitive demand.”

Finally, Porter et al. take a look at international comparisons, comparing Common Core math standards to the eighth grade standards for Finland, Japan, and Singapore. The alignments are 0.21, 0.17, and 0.13, respectively. The starkest difference in each case is that these countries place much more emphasis on “perform procedures” than do the Common Core standards. On language arts and reading, comparison with standards from Ontario, Finland, Sweden, and New Zealand yielded alignments between 0.09 and 0.37.

So, does this mean that the Common Core’s standards are better than what’s in place, or is this worrisome news? Porter and his colleagues make it clear that it’s hard to know for sure. The Common Core seems to represent “a change for the better” when it comes to “higher order cognitive demand” but the “answer is less clear” when it comes to topics. Ultimately, they make clear that, for good or ill, the Common Core represents not a modest technical exercise, but a serious overhaul of how states approach math and reading instruction. Whether that shift is a promising one is just the sort of thing that deserves an energetic public debate (like the one unfolding today), and that was scarcely evident when states were rushing to sign off on the Common Core in the heat of the Race to the Top steeplechase.

- Frederick Hess

Now then. In our little world, it’s well known that Alyson Klein and Michele McNeil’s “Politics K-12″ blog is heavily read. But how about after that? How much interest is there in school districts relative to special education, school sports, or school law?

Anyway, with the assistance of my uber-competent and indefatigable R.A. Daniel Lautzenheiser, I thought it’d be interesting to take a look. So, for the first four months of 2011, we tallied the average monthly page visits to each of the Ed Week subject matter blogs.

Here are the results (note: We couldn’t do “Rural Education” due to a web glitch):

The most popular subjects, by far, are politics and curriculum, each average more than 30,000 page visitors a month so far this year.

Those were followed, at a discreet distance, by the blogs that tackle teachers, research, and special education. These all averaged 15,000 to a little over 20,000 visitors a month.

Averaging 8,000 to 15,000 monthly visitors were the blogs addressing the states, school law, digital education, college, and language learning.

And, finally, drawing less than 8,000 visitors a month, were the blogs tackling district affairs, sports, early childhood, and “Beyond Schools.”

It is noteworthy that four of the top five blogs address questions of direct relevance to classroom teachers, while less than half of the others do. Topics that I might think would be big draws for parents and non-educators, like “School Sports,” “Early Years,” or “College Bound,” don’t generate as many visitors as I might’ve expected. (Which is probably why it’s best for all concerned that I’m not in publishing.)

Not sure what else to make of the results, or whether there’s any seismic meaning, but what the hell. Would be curious to hear what you make of it all.

-Frederick Hess