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

The winning course, given that families (e.g. taxpayers) across America have lost jobs and homes, and had to tighten their belts, is to recognize that things are tough all over and then protect kids and programs by optimizing spending, rethinking instructional delivery, or finding ways for adults to shoulder the load. (If you want suggestions, check out Stretching the School Dollar.) But let’s take a moment to discuss what not to do, using quotes from principals and superintendents in the PDK piece to flag four problematic habits of mind.

The first mistake: excuse-mongering. Quote: “I feel as though I am at a point where I have to say that it is OK for some kids to fail because we cannot provide the extra help they need.” When parents lose their jobs, or take a pay cut, they don’t say, “It’s now okay for my kid to go foodless.” When police budgets are cut, we’d be furious if the police said, “Hey, we can’t keep you safe.” Look, we all know that education is filled with vacuous declarations that “all children will learn.” It’s fine for educators to reject those banalities as a matter of course. What’s not okay is to use budget cuts as an excuse to accept mediocrity–to say, “Well, we used to think no one should fail, but now we’ve changed our mind.” Every leader, public or private, has good budget years and bad ones. Responsible leaders make it their mission to do the very best they can with the resources they have–that’s the mission and the vision they share.

The second mistake: imagining that progress only comes with new dollars. Quote: “You can’t push forward with new innovations without the funding to see them through.” That’s just silliness. The most innovative organizations in the world tend to be cash-poor start-ups. They rely on moxie, creativity, and elbow grease. In education, “innovation” has typically meant layering new dollars and programs atop everything that came before. So, districts didn’t rethink staffing or school libraries when they got classroom computers or internet connectivity, they just laid these atop everything that was already in place. This is why education is the only professional sector with which I’m familiar (possibly aside from health care) which seems to have seen a decline in measurable productivity since the introduction of the personal computer.

The third mistake: thinking that any budget cut will be debilitating. Quote: “It is impossible to make cuts in a district and not have it impact teachers and students. We cut a secretary and many tasks are now falling to teachers. This takes up their precious time to prepare for students. We cut a technology integration person, and now teachers are having to spend more time researching web sites and online projects. We cut a mail delivery person, and now secretaries and paras are having to do curbside pickup and drop-off of mail so the mail can travel on buses.” The underlying message is lunacy. By the speaker’s logic, no organization–not the U.S. military, not the postal service, not General Motors–can ever make cuts or trim personnel without compromising quality. Well, the reality is that a slew of organizations have made cuts that seemed painful but that ultimately seemed to boost productivity, strengthen the culture, and left them more effective. Obviously, cutting in dumb ways (like by zeroing out music, art, or sports to save negligible dollar amounts) has an adverse impact. But the challenge for leaders is to prune in smart ways, to use rough periods as a chance to cut back so that their organizations will emerge leaner and healthier. To deny that one can do that is to abdicate one’s responsibility.

The fourth mistake: countenancing rather than condemning unacceptable employee responses. Quote: “I was and continue to be surprised at how some people react. I had typically reasonable people telling me that they weren’t going to do their job… I feel we have taken a huge step backwards in our communication, trust, and cooperation. So, we have more work to do and are working together more poorly.” Surprised? Surprised?! The principal should have been livid, outraged, aghast. The employee reaction shouldn’t have been calmly related but offered up as a case of moral depravity. After all, those “reasonable people” were expressing an intent to shortchange children and waste public funds. Until that kind of sentiment routinely draws an appropriately furious, public reaction from edu-leaders–instead of the watery “you know how hard times have been on our people” that the public so often hears–it’s going to be tough for them to make the case that the public can be confident that new funds will be well spent.

For better or worse, I think I can safely say that this is one lesson that you’re unlikely to get in the nation’s educational administration programs.

- Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

As part of our ongoing effort to explore and promote citizenship education at AEI (see, for instance, here), we had the pleasure of convening an array of terrific charter school leaders and teachers in San Francisco yesterday. The topic: how they approach citizenship education and gauge their performance, and what steps might help to encourage or support such efforts.

A bunch of intriguing issues arose, and charter impresario Robin Lake will be exploring them in a white paper that we’ll be issuing this fall. For the moment, five particular points stuck with me:

First, I was pleasantly surprised by the admirable humility of the terrific charter school leaders and educators. I’d feared that this collection of educators would be dismissive of concerns as to whether they were doing all they could to develop moral character, civic knowledge, and engaged citizens. I need not have worried. In a conversation that included representatives from KIPP, YES Prep, Cesar Chavez High School for Public Policy, UNO, High Tech High, Basis, National Heritage Academies, Basis, and Democracy Prep, among others, participants talked bluntly about the need to do far better when it comes to developing character, cultivating citizenship, and monitoring their performance in these areas.

Second, the question arose as to whether parents actually care about whether schools are cultivating good citizens. One educator asked, “Do parents choose [us] because of the civic mission?” He answered his own question, “No.” That was the consensus. Another school founder observed that, generally speaking, “Our parents don’t give a [hoot] about democracy walking in the door. They come because of our academic performance, and because their kids will be safe.” That said, it also seemed true that schools which deliver academically earn the parental trust that positions them to move as aggressively as they wish on issues of citizenship and character; the question is what they do with that.

Third, charters are particularly well-suited to tackle these questions because they don’t have to wrestle with all the parental griping and constituency politics that hamper district efforts to establish strong codes of conduct, to encourage political participation, or to promote character development. Charter schools can make their civic vision an explicit part of their appeal, so that supportive families can seek them out, and others can go elsewhere.

Fourth, questions of citizenship are peripheral when it comes to charter authorizing. National Association of Charter School Authorizers president Greg Richmond pointed out that there are real, substantive disagreements over how to understand the civic mission of schooling. And, “when you can’t agree what to measure, it’s hard to focus on metrics”–so authorizers focus on less controversial measures, like reading and math scores. He also pointed out that public school officials long excused mediocrity by saying, “Maybe our kids can’t read or write, but we’re preparing them to be good citizens.” This abuse, he noted, resulted in “toxic backlash.” Today, Richmond couldn’t think of any authorizer that meaningfully incorporates citizenship criteria into its decisions. Seth Andrews of Democracy Prep raised the question of how educators might start to transform citizenship from a “soft skill” into a “hard skill.”

Fifth, the question arose as to whether schools serving disadvantaged students can or should actively seek to encourage students to feel an affection or attachment to the nation. Green Dot founder Steve Barr made the case that schools can’t simply expect to teach at-risk students to be patriotic, because these kids haven’t seen much from their nation that would incline them to love it–and that these kids need to build trust in the U.S. system before they can be expected to feel attached to it. He said, “When you’re around [intense] poverty and injustice, citizenship has a different meaning. Just shaking hands and getting along is a big deal. If you want more, it requires building trust.”

Finally, for what it’s worth, a few terrific lines really struck me during the day:

“One complication with encouraging student activism is it can burn them out. We had a kid who went to two anti-war protests and, when the war didn’t stop, he lost interest.”

“The best way to imagine what I want our grads to be like is, if I’m a criminal defendant, I want kids who graduate who I’d want to be on my jury.”

“Right now, [citizenship] just isn’t a priority. I’ve got five jobs, and that’s my fifth. I’m a history teacher, then an ELL teacher, than a dance teacher, then a 9th grade chair, and then the service learning coordinator. This means service learning is what I do Sunday night.”

“We don’t operate as a democracy [in the school], we’re preparing students to be citizens in a democracy.”

- Fredrick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The Brookings reviews were broadly positive, with assorted smart criticism and caveats. The policy scholars deemed the research and the argument fresh and interesting, but sensibly noted that the manuscript needed a lot of work. I revised it accordingly. Brookings published the volume, Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform, in 1998. It went on to have a nontrivial impact on the debate about urban schooling and reform, doing much for my career in the process.

This is not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part was the response from the six education professors who reviewed the manuscript for TCP and HUP. Unanimously, they declared the manuscript to be uninteresting, unimportant, mean-spirited, and undeserving of publication. They thought my characterization of popular reforms, like block-scheduling and site-based management, was uncharitable. They thought my interpretation of the institutional politics was callous, unduly harsh, and devoid of any new insights. The editors at TCP and HUP were apologetic, but said, essentially, “Hey, I thought it was interesting, but there’s no way I can go to my editorial board after this kind of feedback.”

A few years later, in 2001, I wrote a white paper for the Progressive Policy Institute titled, “Tear Down This Wall.” An unapologetic critique of teacher licensure and a recommendation for a dramatic overhaul of current practice, the piece gained favorable notice in the Washington Post and USA Today, was touted by then-Secretary of Education Rod Paige, and made me into a nontrivial presence in the teacher credentialing debate. It has since been widely cited in the scholarly literature. At the National Press Club event where the piece was launched, my friend David Imig, the then-president of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, declared that my arguments qualified not even as “old wine in new bottles” but just “old wine in old bottles.” He suggested that the University of Virginia (my then-employer) really ought to consider whether, given my skepticism about teacher education, I deserved to be employed at its School of Education.

Two years later, when I departed UVA for AEI, many of my ed school colleagues enthusiastically ushered me to the door, with my program chair taking care to tell me that he regarded my work as trivial and insignificant.

This all came to mind the other day when a colleague sent me the Teachers College Record review of my recent Harvard University Press book The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas. The review was penned by James Kauffman, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Virginia. I probably should’ve known what to expect: one more assertion that there’s nothing to see here.

The irony is that what HUP most liked about The Same Thing is that it provokes strong, complex reactions from serious readers in competing camps. (The rest of this paragraph feels ickily self-promotional, so skip if you’re willing to stipulate that some thoughtful people think the book has merit.) KIPP CEO Richard Barth was kind enough to say, “Sooner or later [Hess] challenges everyone’s assumptions. You probably won’t agree with everything he has to say, but this book will surprise you into thinking in completely new ways about what schools could be.” Deborah Meier generously offered, “Half the time I’m agreeing with every word Rick Hess says, and wishing I had said it myself. The other half the time I’m provoked, stimulated, and arguing with him. He’s got it both all right and all wrong. Read him, argue with him, take him very seriously.” In Washington Monthly, Johns Hopkins political scientist Steve Teles judged, “No one will be shocked that [Hess] has a lot to say that will infuriate liberal defenders of the educational status quo. The book’s real surprise is that he is perfectly willing to take on the sacred doctrines of conservative education reformers…Hess is a refreshing change from many other analysts who hold forth on the subject of education.”

So, what was Kauffman’s take on The Same Thing? He opined, “Many scholars besides Hess have noted that school reform is the same thing over and over… Metaphorically, if previous essays on school reform are the tomayto, this book is the potayto or, at best, the tomahto.” He explains, “Hess repeats the tired ideas of the earlier reformers he so justly criticizes.” (Though, it may be worth noting that the quote used to make this point is from page one.) Kauffman complains that the book never “focuses squarely on instruction” and “contains the same-old-same-old complaints about rut-stuck educational structures.”

There’s plenty more in this vein. Check it out, if you’re inclined. The insistence of ed school cognoscenti that I’ve nothing much to say, despite some occasional evidence to the contrary, has long puzzled me. I’m not sure what to make of it, but there it is.

- Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

While much of the debate around Teach For America (TFA) in recent years has focused on the effectiveness of its nontraditional recruits in the classroom, the real story is the degree to which TFA has succeeded in producing dynamic, impassioned, and entrepreneurial education leaders. From its inception as Wendy Kopp’s senior thesis project at Princeton more than two decades ago, TFA has sought to bring more teaching talent to some of the nation’s most disadvantaged communities and create a corps of change agents like Rhee, Feinberg, Levin, and Johnston. How well has TFA fared on that second score? Here, in a new line of research, we seek to answer that question.

Since its founding in 1989, TFA has placed more than 24,000 high-achieving college graduates in some of America’s neediest schools. This has produced an alumni network populated by impassioned former educators. TFA aims, proclaims the web site, to turn these alumni into “lifelong leaders for fundamental change, regardless of their professional sector.” Its efforts include keeping close connections with alumni and providing a variety of opportunities to volunteer at schools, join education-oriented political campaigns, advocate, and connect with a wide-reaching education network.

To date, the vast majority of research on TFA has focused on the classroom effectiveness of corps members and how long they remain in classrooms. Very little is known about TFA corps members who leave teaching but stay involved in education reform more broadly. In a recent study of TFA alumni, Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt (2009) argue that corps members are more likely to remain in education, whether in administration, educational policy work, or charter school management, than those who opt not to enter TFA or drop out of the program. This suggests that TFA has a lasting influence on corps members’ careers, but does not address the question of whether these individuals become the kind of change agents envisioned in TFA’s mission of eliminating “educational inequity by enlisting our nation’s most promising future leaders.”

We pursue that question here, as part of a larger analysis of organizations that successfully “spawn” education entrepreneurs. Examining the work histories of founders and top management team (TMT) members at nationally prominent entrepreneurial education organizations, we find that TFA appears more frequently in the professional backgrounds of these proven entrepreneurial leaders than does any other source in our sample. We don’t know whether it is the TFA experience, the criteria by which TFA selects its corps members, or institutional relationships that account for this. However, the research does find that TFA is producing a large number of entrepreneurial leaders. How and why this is so, and what might be learned from TFA’s success, are questions that deserve careful scrutiny.

Entrepreneurs Needed

The education sector has long struggled to attract and retain high-quality professionals. At the same time, stubborn achievement gaps, increased competition among school providers, and a heightened focus on performance have created an appetite for creative problem solving and scalable, transformational initiatives. In a world of online learning, school turnarounds, Race to the Top, and the Investing in Innovation Fund, there is room for leaders who are able to lever change by creating and expanding organizations of all kinds. Turning these opportunities into results requires people able to create and lead new, high-quality ventures.

With the proliferation of teacher residency and principal leadership programs, education has seen many efforts to recruit, develop, and retain quality teachers and administrators in recent years. However, there are fewer organizations aimed at developing leaders to direct reform initiatives outside the classroom or the schoolhouse. TFA is one among a small cadre of organizations that currently includes New Leaders for New Schools, Education Pioneers, and Teach Plus. TFA is particularly notable for its efforts on this score, as it engages former corps members through “Alumni Summits” and initiatives to advance alumni in positions of leadership as nonprofit board members, public officials, and leaders at the school and classroom level. It also supports alumni through partnerships with graduate schools and employers to help them transition to the next steps in their careers.

Recently, TFA started a new program, the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative, which explicitly promotes innovation and entrepreneurship in the education sector. The program facilitates connections between alumni interested in starting education ventures with established social entrepreneurs. The initiative supports TFA alumni who are applying for fellowships such as Echoing Green and the Mind Trust, provides tools for developing fundraising plans and grant proposals, and publishes a newsletter that includes information about funding opportunities and management strategies.

Today, there is a sizable network of TFA alumni who have become education entrepreneurs. We have already mentioned KIPP Academy cofounders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, who started a single charter school in 1994 that has evolved into one of the most well-known charter organizations in the U.S., with 99 schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia. TFA alum Chris Barbic founded YES Prep Public Schools, which has grown to serve 4,200 students at eight campuses throughout Houston. Sarah Usdin began New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) in 2006, after Hurricane Katrina devastated public schooling in that city. Before heading up the D.C. school system, Michelle Rhee established The New Teacher Project. Accounts sometimes suggest that these individuals are intriguing outliers. Our research suggests that they are evidence of TFA’s success at recruiting and creating change agents.

Research Methods

The methods used in this study mirror those applied in research on entrepreneurial spawning in other sectors, such as biotechnology. We first identified a group of entrepreneurial organizations within the education sector and traced their founders’ and TMT members’ work histories. We then identified organizations that appeared multiple times as previous employers across the sample and, hence, could be considered “spawners” of entrepreneurial leaders.

To create our list of entrepreneurial education organizations, we limited our search to nonprofit and for-profit organizations that were founded after 1989, TFA’s inaugural year; that focused on domestic, K–12 public education reform; and that could be considered nationally prominent. We drew on three distinct sources to identify organizations for our sample. The first was an electronic survey of 14 widely recognized experts in public school innovation. We asked participants, “From your perspective, what are the top 15 U.S. entrepreneurial education organizations that have emerged in the sector since 1989?” All 14 participants responded, and we identified 16 organizations that more than one respondent identified as a top organization. Next, we identified organizations supported by a donor clearinghouse of venture philanthropies and foundations whose mission is to support social entrepreneurship in K–12 public education across the nation. Finally, we conducted publication searches in popular and academic media using Lexis Nexus and Google Scholar. The searches were conducted in November 2009 and used the following search terms: Education, Entrepreneur*, Organization, and K–12.

These methods yielded a comprehensive list of 49 organizations; many are charter management organizations, some recruit and/or train human capital, and others offer supplemental resources to the public education sector, such as software technologies for data management and assessment or afterschool programs (see sidebar).

We then constructed a database of the work histories of the 49 organizations’ leadership members, comprising 71 founders and cofounders and 320 TMT members. We make the distinction between founders and other management team members in the event that there are noteworthy differences between those who start organizations and those hired to manage daily functioning, growth, and stability. Often, the organizations in our sample publicly listed the founders and members of the management team, along with their work and educational histories. When these data were ambiguous or not publicly available, we called the organizations to request the information.

We term the organizations that appear in founders’ and TMT members’ work histories “originating organizations.” To ascertain which originating organizations were the most prolific spawners of entrepreneurs, we identified those that had at one time employed a founding member of at least 2 of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations in our sample.

Entrepreneurship and TFA

Of all the originating organizations that appeared in work histories, TFA appeared the most frequently. Let’s look first at the 71 founders or cofounders of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations. TFA appeared in the work history of at least one founder of seven of these organizations, or about 15 percent. The next most-represented originating organizations—the San Francisco Public Schools, Newark Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, AmeriCorps, the White House Fellows program, McKinsey & Company, and the United States Department of Education—each appeared in the work history of a founder of two (or about 4 percent) of these organizations. In other words, the drop-off from TFA to these other large and/or esteemed organizations is stark indeed.

To get a sense of whether TFA’s outsized success is simply the result of its size or TFA is indeed punching “above its weight,” it’s worth noting the comparative size of these various ventures. TFA is today an organization with almost 10,000 employees, including 8,200 current corps members. But TFA’s size a decade ago was only about one-quarter of what it is today, meaning that the alumni pipeline is much thinner than its current size suggests. TFA estimates that it has produced more than 20,000 alumni. TFA is clearly smaller than organizations like the Chicago Public Schools, with around 41,000 employees, and McKinsey, with some 17,000 employees. TFA is dwarfed by the approximately 75,000 current AmeriCorps members and some 500,000 alumni (some AmeriCorps volunteers are also TFA corps members), but is far larger than the White House Fellows program, with 13 current fellows and some 600 alumni. In short, TFA has fared impressively for its relative size.

While many founders have participated in TFA, there is little evidence of their having had other work or internship experiences in common. One reason for this homogeneity may be that approximately 23 percent of the founders had only one job prior to starting their own venture. A lack of experience created fewer opportunities to build professional networks, making the large number of TFA alumni among founders all the more salient.

TFA stands out in the work histories of the TMT members at the 49 organizations on our list as well (see Figure 1). Fourteen of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations had at least one TMT member who was once a TFA corps member or employee, and 10 of these organizations had at least one member who had been a TFA corps member and worked for TFA national. Compare this to the next three highest-ranked originating organizations: 10 entrepreneurial organizations had at least one TMT member who had been employed by the New York City Public Schools, nine entrepreneurial organizations employed KIPP alumni, and the work histories of seven entrepreneurial organizations’ TMT members included Andersen Consulting.

A Look at the Spawners

Only two of the originating organizations that spawned at least two founders, the White House Fellows program and McKinsey & Company, operate outside the public education sector. McKinsey, a management consulting firm, is the only private institution on the list. When it came to spawning TMT members, McKinsey was joined by its consulting brethren Andersen and Deloitte. For TMT members, consulting was a common professional experience with about 10 percent of all TMT members having this practice in their backgrounds.

It is interesting to consider why experience in the consulting industry is not unusual in the career histories of TMT members. Members of top management teams, including chief finance officers, chief operating officers, and even those leading growth and marketing divisions, face complex challenges. Consultants are commonly hired to solve problems in these functional units in both the private and public sectors. Perhaps their skills translate well in the entrepreneurial world. Former consultants may be particularly adept at addressing tough management issues in entrepreneurial organizations in the education sector, where challenges arise both internally and externally, due to the complicated political and financial dynamics of meeting public education needs in the U.S. There may be certain functional roles on TMTs for which having a consulting background prepares leaders particularly well.

Additionally, consulting firms such as McKinsey are increasingly offering their services in the education sector. For example, McKinsey’s Social Sector Office supports an education practice that focuses on systems strategy and transformation, talent and performance management, administration and operations, and institutional strategy and innovations. Teams in McKinsey’s education practice regularly publish reports on the education sector, including a recent analysis of the economic impact of the achievement gap and strategies for attracting top undergraduates to and retaining them in the teaching profession. Such work may be exposing their employees to the overwhelming need in the education sector for solutions to challenging problems. That exposure, coupled with entrepreneurial aspects of the organizational culture, employee selection criteria, or institutional relationships may create an environment similar to TFA. Again, we cannot be sure at this stage what factors may be at play, but it is certainly an intriguing finding.

Another leading spawner of team members is KIPP. Nine organizations in the sample had at least one TMT member who had worked for KIPP’s national office or in a KIPP school. Given that KIPP was started by two TFA alumni, maintains close ties with TFA, and recruits many of its teachers from the TFA ranks, it is no surprise that five organizations in the sample had TMT members who had previously worked both for TFA and for KIPP.

Several school districts were also among the organizations that showed up most often in TMT members’ work histories. New York City appeared most often. Other districts were Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles.

Looking across all the spawning organizations, one returns to the question of why, given the many sources feeding into the education talent pipeline, TFA seems so prolific. It seems clear that explanatory factors include the criteria by which TFA recruits, the organization’s strong and purposive culture, the skills that corps members develop, and the opportunities provided to alumni. Just to take one example, by providing talented young college grads with classroom experience, TFA confers upon them a degree of credibility that opens doors that might open less readily for others. Sorting out the relevant import of these elements is far beyond the scope of our current effort, but it is an exercise well worth pursuing for those reformers eager to identify, emulate, and amplify TFA’s successes.

TFA’s Influence

Is there cause to suspect that there are any systematic differences between those education entrepreneurs who are TFA alumni and those who are not? Given their classroom experience, for instance, are TFA alumni more likely to wind up in instructional or curricular roles than are TMT members who are not TFA alumni?

To investigate this possibility, we looked at the 30 TFA alumni who are TMT members at organizations in our sample and identified the specific nature of their jobs. As seen in Figure 2, less than one-third of these TFA alumni are in administrative positions like operations or finance. Most are involved in human resources, such as hiring and training teachers or other support staff; academic affairs, such as developing curriculum for instructional programs or schools; or working to develop new schools or expand existing ones. This first cut suggests that entrepreneurial TFA alumni disproportionately take on roles more closely related to instruction and staffing. As mentioned earlier, it is not uncommon for TMT members in operations and finance to have consulting experience in their professional backgrounds.

Looking Ahead

The findings presented here on the leadership pipeline signal many avenues for productive future inquiry. First, TFA specifically sets out to recruit individuals with leadership potential. As TFA explains, it seeks college graduates who have demonstrated “past leadership and achievement…perseverance and sustained focus in the face of challenges, strong critical thinking skills…[an ability to generate] relevant solutions to problems, superior organizational ability…and superior interpersonal skills to motivate and lead others.” The TFA selection process consists of an online application, a phone interview, and a final interview, which includes multiple individual and group activities, plus a personal interview. Sorting out the impact of TFA acculturation and training from its success as a talent identifier will require additional research that examines the alumni’s career expectations and decisions over time, with an eye to their experiences during and after their corps engagement with TFA.

Second, we found that certain of TFA’s geographic regions appeared more likely to generate entrepreneurial behavior. TFA corps members with work experience in New York City and San Francisco seemed especially likely to become top managers in entrepreneurial organizations in education. Perhaps there is something distinctive about the TFA experience in these locales. Maybe, and more likely, there was something about the place at that particular time that worked in concert with the TFA experience to produce entrepreneurial leaders in a particularly effective way.

In the 1990s, when many of the entrepreneurial organizations in our list were being founded, San Francisco, and the Silicon Valley more generally, was a hotbed of entrepreneurial behavior, which included unprecedented levels of capital funding for those wanting to start their own ventures. At the same time, New York City, with its similar culture of entrepreneurialism and capital funding activity, was going through a period of political and educational reform that would lead to the era of mayoral control. This period of fl ux created opportunities for new organizations and programs to enter the education market. The combination of an entrepreneurial culture, access to funding, and openings within the education market may have made these cities particularly conducive to TFA’s mission of creating entrepreneurial leaders; indeed, the two cities were among the first to bring TFA teachers into their schools. Therefore, it may be useful to think about the TFA experience more expansively and with an eye to its place within a larger context of reform and opportunity.

Third, working for TFA at the national level appears to be a more common experience for those who end up working for an entrepreneurial organization, rather than founding one; TFA members who were founders of organizations were more likely to have been TFA corps members. This suggests that different TFA experiences may equip alumni for different roles. It raises a variety of important questions, most notably, what it is about the TFA experience that imparts to individuals the skills and desire to tackle certain challenges.

Certain kinds of organizations, such as TFA and KIPP, and professions like consulting may be especially conducive to producing educational entrepreneurs. It is worth asking whether there are particular jobs, roles, or work environments that contribute to the cultivation of entrepreneurial behavior.

Finally, our research suggests the value of rethinking how TFA and its alumni have been studied in education and also how we think about retention. Rather than assume that it is good or bad when TFA members leave classrooms or school systems, we focused on the role that TFA alumni may play in launching entrepreneurial ventures. While TFA members may not be retained as teachers, the findings suggest they may still have an impact in education, perhaps an outsized impact.

Another intriguing question is how to weigh the impact of a single Mike Feinberg, Mike Johnston, or Michelle Rhee. Is their impact equal to that of having 100 teachers stay another year? Of 1,000 teachers staying another five years? Is it worth having thousands frequently depart classrooms if it increases the likelihood that a single game-changing entrepreneur—a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates—will emerge? Conventional debates about retention and TFA teacher effects may start to seem trivial when we compare the potentially enormous impact of a few such individuals.

Monica Higgins is professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Career Imprints: Creating Leaders Across an Industry. Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and author or editor of several books, including Education Unbound and Educational Entrepreneurship. Jennie Weiner and Wendy Robison are doctoral students in Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Well, as of this morning, the Common Core battle has been officially joined. The notion that something this potentially momentous would unfold with no more than a bit of carping was always unlikely. Today, the anti-Common Core-ites fired their first organized response, in a manifesto titled, “Closing the Door on Innovation.” Organized by the Hoover Institution’s Bill Evers, Jay Greene of U. Arkansas and the Bush Institute, Greg Forster of the Foundation for Educational Choice, standards crusader Sandra Stotsky, and former Bush administration official Ze’ev Wurman, the document opposes “the ongoing effort by the U.S. Department of Education to have two federally funded testing consortia develop national curriculum guidelines, national curriculum models, national instructional materials, and national assessments using Common Core’s national standards.”

The 100+ mostly conservative signatories argued in a press release announcing the manifesto that “current U.S. Department of Education efforts to nationalize curriculum will stifle innovation and freeze into place an unacceptable status quo; end local and state control of schooling; lack a legitimate legal basis; and impose a one-size-fits-all model on America’s students.”

The signatories charge that current efforts “are against federal law and undermine the constitutional balance between national and state authority;” that “the evidence doesn’t show a need for national curriculum or a national test for all students;” that the “U.S. Department of Education is basing its initiative on inadequate content standards;” that “there is no research-based consensus on what is the best curricular approach to each subject;” and that “there is not even consensus on whether a single ‘best curricular approach’ for all students exists.”

(In a potentially related development, Whiteboard Advisors reported on Friday that its April survey of influential D.C. “insiders” showed an 18 percent drop since July 2010 in how “important” the respondents think it is that a NCLB/ESEA reauthorization address the Common Core. Of the sixteen potential NCLB/ESEA elements addressed, Common Core showed the second largest decline. Common Core was the only issue for which “insiders” indicated there was less support in Congress now than in July 2010.)

Bill Evers reports that “Closing the Door” was underway before the Shanker Institute’s recent manifesto on behalf of “common content,” but this document has clearly been shaped by what its authors term the Shanker Institute’s effort to champion “a single nationalized curriculum in every K-12 subject.” In short, the Finlandophile wing of the Common Core movement is accentuating the concerns of those who fear the exercise is a Trojan Horse for efforts to involve Washington more deeply in running the nation’s schools.

Signatories include legislators who chair or vice-chair education committees in Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, and Texas; state board members from Colorado and Alabama; two former general counsels at the U.S. Department of Ed; and a grab-bag of Republicans like former California governor Pete Wilson, former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, former U.S. House member Pete Hoekstra, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, and Spellings Commission chair Charles Miller. They also include William Estrada of the Home School Legal Defense Association; Bob Enlow, president of the Foundation for Educational Choice; the heads of a number of state-level conservative think tanks; and academics including Shelby Steele, U. Chicago’s Richard Epstein, Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, and, intriguingly, progressive icon Joel Spring.

It isn’t yet clear whether this document marks the emergence of anything more than scattered opposition, but it does signal that the Common Core effort is about to become more contentious. For those who remember the national standards imbroglio of the early 1990s, the fact that this pushback is taking on a conservative, partisan shape, especially in the run-up to a Presidential election and at a time when small government Republicanism is back with a vengeance, should prompt some anxiety. The presence of some politically potent signers, like the home schoolers and Grover Norquist, only ups the ante.

I’ve previously raised questions about the Common Core not to be nettlesome but because, done right, the effort could be a terrific boon to assessment, accountability, research, tool-building, and instruction. Done wrong, it may well unravel what leading states have accomplished on standards, undercut charter schooling and autonomous district schools, stifle online learning, compromise school accountability, and fuel a more destructive replay of the ’90s national standards fight. And, as I’ve said, I think it more likely that the enterprise will go wrong than that it’ll go right. This leaves me pretty conflicted, and agnostic, on the whole deal.

The challenge for Common Core-ites was never to win over Evers or Greene. They’re smart skeptics more attuned to the risks than the potential benefits of the effort. The challenge for Common Core-ites has always been to convince the mass of policymakers, activists, educators, and observers that the concerns are overblown. Core-ites need to hold centrist policymakers, reformers, and voters by assuring them that there are no hidden agendas, the effort is working to anticipate and address adverse consequences, and the Common Core is not morphing into a covert national curriculum or a dramatic expansion of the federal role.

Over the past twelve months, I’d say that Core-ites have done a mediocre job on these counts. Rather, they seem to have blithely accepted (or welcomed) an active federal role, largely ignored how their efforts might impact charter schooling or online learning, dismissed skeptics as ideologues and know-nothings, and done nothing to rein in those eager to charge from common assessments to something like a national curriculum.

Common Core-ites would do well to regard today’s blast not as a threat but as an opportunity to raise their game.

- Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The report offers an impressive seven-step model to help policymakers figure out how many teachers will be misidentified by different evaluation strategies under different sets of assumptions. “Misidentification” is meant conceptually, but, practically speaking, is discussed in terms of how the teachers in question fare on value-added calculations. The report also features new jargon like “tolerance” and “exceptionality” to characterize “how willing policymakers are to risk an error of over-inclusion” or “the cutoff in a teacher rank distribution that is used for decision-making.” The paper is clever, and fine as far as it goes, but leaves me concerned about the direction of teacher evaluation policy.

The exercise aims to inform efforts to evaluate teachers for whom districts can’t do value-added analysis, but the underlying thread seems to be the casual, implicit assumption that reading and math value-added are the “true” measure of teacher quality. This is hardly a unique take; it’s become the norm. The same stance characterized the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching report last winter, with its effort to gauge the utility of various teacher evaluation strategies (student feedback, observation, etc.) based upon how closely they approximated value-added measures.

The whole thing brings to my mind the collateralized debt bubble, in which incredibly complex models were built atop a pretty narrow set of assumptions and the simple conviction that assumptions could be taken as givens. In 2004, questioning underlying assumptions about real estate valuation would get an analyst dismissed as unsophisticated.

Edu-econometricians are eagerly building intricate models stacked atop value-added scores. Yet, today’s value-added measures are, at best, a pale measure of teacher quality. There are legitimate concerns about test quality; the noisiness and variability of calculations; the fact that metrics don’t account for the impact of specialists, support staff, or shared instruction; and the degree to which value-added calculations rest upon a narrow, truncated conception of good teaching. Value-added does tell us something useful and I’m in favor of integrating it into evaluation and pay decisions, accordingly, but I worry when it becomes the foundation upon which everything else is constructed.

When well-run public or private sector firms evaluate employees, they incorporate managerial judgment, peer feedback, and so forth, without assuming that these will or should reflect project completion, sales, assembly line performance, or what-have-you. The whole point of these other measures is to get a fuller picture of performance; and that would be self-defeating if these other measures were supposed to measure one underlying thing.

The one downside to having a slew of first-rate econometricians engaged in edu-research nowadays is that in their eagerness for outcomes to analyze, they tend to care less about the caliber of the numbers than whether they can count them. In the housing bubble, rocket scientists crunched decades of housing data to build complex models. Their job wasn’t to sweat the quality of the data, its appropriateness, or the real-world utility of their assumptions; it was to build dazzling models. The problem is that even the cleverest of models is only as good as the data. And it turned out that the data and assumptions were rife with overlooked problems.

Edu-econometricians love test scores because they can find increasingly sophisticated ways to model them. But if the scores are flawed, biased, or incomplete measures of learning or teacher effectiveness, the models won’t pick that up. Yet those raising such questions are at risk of being dismissed as unsophisticated and retrograde. (To be fair, sensible skepticism isn’t helped by the rush of union mouthpieces and carnival barkers eager to spout conspiracy theories, excuses, and ad hominem attacks.) So, the Brookings exercise is interesting and useful on its terms–but I’m growing more than a little concerned about those terms.

- Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

This all came to mind yesterday while I was over at the U.S. Capitol participating in a conversation on “Avoiding Déjà Vu: Lessons from the Federal Comprehensive School Reform Program for the Current School Turnaround Agenda.” Hosted by the Knowledge Alliance and WestEd, the discussion focused on the implications of Marty Orland’s new report on the findings from WestEd’s big evaluation of the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Program (CSRD).

First enacted in 1998, and wrapped into No Child Left Behind, CSRD required low-performing schools to implement eleven “school reform” components in return for federal funds. The eleven entailed: proven methods and strategies, comprehensive design, professional development, measurable goals, support from staff members, support for staff members, parent and community involvement, external assistance, evaluation, coordination of resources, and scientifically based research. Good stuff, right? Thoughtful, based on careful research, backed by new funding, yada yada.

The results? Dismal. Orland reports that “the CSR program did not yield comprehensively reformed schools.” While “states receiving CSR funds largely succeeded in passing them along to those schools most in need” (whoopee!!!), at the same time, “schools receiving CSR awards made little progress in implementing…the 11 mandated components.” Astonishingly, CSR schools were actually less likely to implement the various CSR elements than were matched comparison schools.

Orland proceeds, “Given these findings, it is not surprising that receiving a CSR award was not associated with improvements in either mathematics or reading achievement. Five years after initially receiving their CSR awards, schools receiving awards did not demonstrate larger achievement growth than matched comparison schools.” Just 12 of 262 CSR schools made “significant improvements in reading and mathematics over the next two years.” Moreover, Orland reported that examining particular cases pointed to “an often chaotic and sometimes irrational environment that can thwart the sustainability of hard-won gains.”

Adding to the poignancy of Orland’s account, these findings follow nearly a decade of policymaker frustration with the disappointing track record of NCLB’s once-heralded “remedy cascade.” Public choice, supplemental services, corrective action plans, and reconstitution have all been implemented limply and to little effect. For a collection of terrific analyses on this count, check out the volume No Remedy Left Behind that Checker Finn and I edited a couple years back.

So, you might expect some lessons from these experiences to be evident in the administration’s ESEA “blueprint.” Not so much. Rather, Duncan’s much-touted “loose-tight” proposal entails jettisoning NCLB’s overdone remedy cascade for most schools in return for a more prescriptive federal role in “turning around” schools that score in the bottom five percent on tested achievement. Currently, the blueprint calls for requiring those schools to adapt one of the four School Improvement Grant turnaround models: essentially chartering them, canning the principal and doing comprehensive reform, canning the principal and half the staff, or closing the school.

Color me skeptical. There’s little reason to think that chartering these schools works, and charter operators aren’t all that eager to take them on. The SIG transformation model looks to me a whole lot like CSR or corrective models that have never racked up much success. As for the “fire half of ‘em” turnaround model, I’ll just note that firing half your employees usually isn’t a one-time solution. Most well-run outfits, private or public, don’t fire half their folks in one big bonfire, replace them, and then enjoy a miraculous transformation. Rather, weeding out mediocrity is a natural, sustained part of how they manage their team. That’s not an option here. And school closure is swell if we think there’s plenty of room at terrific schools that will welcome these kids, and if it won’t disrupt those schools. Unfortunately, most of the targeted schools aren’t in areas flush with terrific, under-capacity alternatives.

There are absolutely a bunch of awful schools out there that need to do better. Nobody needs to sell me on that. It’s nice that folks in ED are aware of that and want to do something about it. But the trick is that not every problem in the world is susceptible to a policy solution. Sometimes, there’s nothing a policymaker can do to solve a problem. When it comes to something like school improvement, something that’s a matter of practice, fidelity of implementation, and on-the-ground commitment, the frustrating fact is that federal policymakers can’t really do much. What can they do? They can provide data and transparency, research and evaluation, and political cover that permits local leaders to act, and they can scour their books to strike rules that hamstring hard-charging principals and superintendents. But that may be it. As much as federal officials would like to do more, it may well be that dramatically improving lousy schools is simply beyond the purview of folks sitting in DC office buildings, no matter how smart and well-intentioned.

- Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

For those unfamiliar with the School of One, it allows teachers to customize what a student learns each day on the basis of what he has already mastered, does so with an eye toward the ways that student learns best, and organizes instruction to maximize the efficient use of school resources. The School of One manages these feats (currently, just for middle school math) by collecting data on which learning objectives students have mastered and how they like to learn, then assigning them each day to appropriate lessons–making use of traditional instruction, small group instruction, solo tutoring, online tutoring, computer-assisted instruction, and so on.

One of my favorite things about School of One is that it’s a solution that doesn’t imply new costs. It’s a way to optimize whatever dollars a school is spending on math instruction–to squeeze more juice from the orange–and doesn’t entail new outlays. As Bruno Manno and I note in our just-released book Customized Schooling, it’s a classic example of the kind of problem-solving that becomes possible if we can think beyond the strictures of whole-school reform.

So, what’s up? Here’s the deal. There were two ways that Rose could have grown the School of One–as a “captive” entity within NYCDOE or as a “noncaptive” nonprofit. The big difference: so long as School of One is a captive entity, the NYC chancellor has the right to name the board. This means a single disinterested or hostile chancellor could kill the whole thing. This possibility makes it a lot tougher to raise philanthropic investment. It’s also important to remember that the NYC chancellor’s only job is serving the kids of New York City–which promised to make any attempt to build a national provider inside the DOE a recipe for ongoing conflict. So Rose is leaving NYCDOE to build a new entity that will build a scaleable version of the School of One and then seek to delivery it nationally.

In leaving the NYCDOE, Rose will find it much easier to raise the capital needed to grow. Insiders estimate that he’s looking to raise $30 million over the next couple years and are confident the money will now be forthcoming. That said, there are all kinds of complexities. The intellectual property is New York City’s, so the new entity is going to have to work from scratch. (Of course, the NYC School of One model was built as a proof point and not with an eye to scale, so a lot of the technology has to be redone anyway.) Job one for Rose’s new entity is negotiating an agreement with NYCDOE that establishes a partnership which will permit Rose’s new entity to manage the three programs already in operation.

The situation poses challenges for NYC. The most immediate is i3. New York City won $5 million to open four new School of One sites this fall. Those new sites are now apparently scheduled to be delayed a year. Will be interesting to see how ED feels about that.

What’s more, working out the status of Rose’s new outfit has been complex, and makes clear just how the rules and regulations that apply to public systems make it so tough to take solutions to scale. For instance, I’ve been told that once an employee leaves NYCDOE they’re not permitted to discuss official business with any current employee for a year. This prohibits collaboration between Rose’s new effort and NYC’s School of One–and means his endeavor would proceed without any communication with DOE’ School of One team members, principals, or teachers, and would prohibit them from working with Joel as they pursue i3 implementation.

Addressing that requires a waiver from NYC’s conflict of interest board. However, such a waiver can only be requested once a negotiated agreement is in place–and such a negotiation is only permissible “at arm’s length” (e.g. it requires that Rose not be an employee). Thus, Rose quit to pursue such an agreement. Sources tell me that Rose has been working with DOE lawyers for over a year on this, but they weren’t allowed to delve into specifics (due to the “arm’s length” thing). Rose will name an interim replacement to run the DOE’s School of One, and insiders are hopeful that things will be worked out by summer.

If this all sounds confusing, it’s because it is. To sum up: Rose had to quit NYCDOE in order to negotiate the agreements that permit a waiver enabling his new outfit to do such basic things like talk with the DOE’s School of One team, manage NYCDOE’s School of One, and help DOE implement their i3 grant to open School of One in four more schools.

What are the takeaways? Two big ones for me. First, as I argue in The Same Thing Over and Over, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have 14,000 school districts each trying to do their own weak imitation of a model that someone else has figured out. So finding ways to seed this kind of disciplined problem-solving and then allow the designers to take it to scale with an eye to fidelity and execution makes terrific sense. The School of One story shows promising signs of how that can work. Former chancellor Joel Klein consciously sought to make NYC an alpha site for creative problem-solving. That attracted funding and talent, and spurred smart thinking. The DOE deserves credit and recognition for its role. However, delivering those advances more broadly requires, as Carnegie’s Tony Bryk has argued, providers with the ability and incentive to deliver those advances beyond their initial test site. Hence, Joel’s new outfit.

Second, it shows the limitations of depending on districts to serve as alpha sites. Geographically based districts funded by public dollars and overseen by local officials have little interest or incentive in delivering services more widely. They’re not rewarded for it, and they risk being savaged for directing time, energy, or funds anywhere other than local classrooms. Meanwhile, rule and regs crafted to guard against malfeasance make it hard to grow programs like School of One beyond a district’s confines or to deliver them intact. The result is lots of sharing of “innovations” and “best practices” that features clumsy imitation and shoddy execution. A serious transmission process for innovation requires much more attention to rewarding districts that serve as alpha sites (starting with philanthropic and federal research support), easing the transfer of new solutions from district hands to independent entities, and creating a culture where such a dynamic transmission belt is regarded as a good, healthy, and normal thing.

-Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

A few of the papers broached topics that never get seriously addressed. In perhaps my favorite piece, attorney/consultants Melissa Junge and Sheara Krvaric penned an eye-opening account of how federal language around “supplement not supplant” frequently stifles smart problem-solving and undercuts the policy goals of Title I. Junge and Krvaric offer possible responses, including a new allocation test and making the provision waivable.

Discussants including Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith and Department of Education big wheel Carmel Martin acknowledged the import of Junge and Krvaric’s take, and endorsed smart efforts to address them. How big a problem is this stuff? Junge pointed out that the struggle of districts to comply with “supplement not supplant” generates more business for her consultancy than anything else. “This is a great deal for us,” she wryly observed, “but spending a lot on lawyers may not be the best thing for the kids.” She also pointed out how often districts wind up locked by past decisions into dumb uses of Title I funds, out of fear that shifting those dollars will violate “supplement not supplant.”

CAP’s Raegan Miller and the New America Foundation’s Jennifer Cohen offered a compelling analysis of Florida that illustrated just how poorly today’s rules ensure that Title I dollars get spent where they’re supposed to. It became evident that there’s enormous potential for some kind of bargain which dramatically loosens restrictions on “supplement not supplant” in return for real data on spending comparability.

USC’s Patricia Burch, Harvard’s Karen Mapp, and Brenda Turnbull of Policy Studies Associates each penned papers that examined challenges with Title I implementation as it stands. Burch offered a slate of lessons from supplemental services, Mapp considered questions of parental involvement, and Turnbull explored challenges of state capacity.

Finally, Harvard’s Marty West and Jon Fullerton each wrote pieces that took up timely questions of productivity and how Title I impacts district management. West discussed the absence of any current attention to productivity in NCLB/ESEA and offered a number of strategies to start encouraging states and districts to pay more attention to cost effectiveness. Fullerton offered a lacerating look at the way Title I regulations today encourage timid, compliance-driven, input-oriented, and ultimately ineffectual district management. As he notes in the paper, “Title I fiscal requirements have created a series of management imperatives that are orthogonal or even contrary to the original intent of ESEA.” These include, in Jon’s words, “One cannot create substantial efficiencies in the delivery of K-12 education” and “School districts should use inflexible per pupil formulas to assign staff to schools.”

Together, the pieces show how little the 2001 NCLB reauthorization did to address the regulatory burdens that have sprung from Title I, and to offer smart, practical strategies for crafting a law that can fulfill its aims without ensnaring educators and local officials in a frustrating legal labyrinth.

- Frederick Hess

This post also appears at Rick Hess Straight Up.