I will not pretend to be an expert on teaching, but as a school board member I confess to deep and continuous agita over the system’s inability to do the right thing; rather, its amazing ability to deny reality, which is the prime directive for institutional entropy. (It is not just the reality of good research that is ignored, it’s the reality of crumbling schools and generations of untaught children.) I had a veteran teacher pull me aside one day and almost shout, “They keep giving new names to the same tired and unworkable ideas. Why don’t they just let me teach!”

Since reading E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, celebrating its 25th year in print, I have watched American educators do somersaults to avoid the obvious need for rigorous, fact-based curricula. In fact, the two denials—the effectiveness of direct instruction and the value of content knowledge—go hand in hand and together probably account for most of the national educational malaise. You name it—Clark et al say it goes under various names, “including discovery learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning, experiential learning, and constructivist learning”—our educators are locked on to bad ideas and ineffective pedagogies like cruise missiles to their preprogrammed targets. “Each new set of advocates for unguided approaches seemed unaware of, or uninterested in,” write Clark et al, “previous evidence that unguided approaches had not been validated.”

As my friend Barry Garelick writes about the new Brookings report on the effectiveness of instructional materials:

The report makes this common sense observation and recommendation: “There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning-effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness. But whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming, making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick.”

That makes so much sense that it will either be ignored, or the snake oil purveyors who sell Investigations, EM, CMP and the like will claim “We agree! And our products do just that!”

One need not be that cynical about the situation, but willful ignorance is a phrase that often comes to mind when watching such “common sense” prescriptions for change go unheeded. Obviously, those who have been schooled in such notions as discovery learning and are getting paid for using it have little incentive to read the research, much less tell their colleagues about it. And, by the same token, there is no incentive for school boards to change when the money keeps rolling. My colleagues on my school board are education preservers not reformers. Even though their acts serve to reinforce failure, their first instinct is to dig in, to resist change. Why? Well, why not? Over lunch the other day, a board colleague ticked off her list of ideas for creating a good school, including creating a “culture of high expectations.” When I asked, how you go about doing that, she was stumped; rather, she didn’t like the answer, which was to hold teachers and administrators accountable for student performance. She preferred, “It’s the parents.” And so it goes.

Even when angry citizens come to the board, as several did a few weeks ago, their complaints seem to fall on deaf ears.

“We hear all the time, `Don’t rock the boat,’” said one of those complaining parents. “But I can tell you, we are strapped in, and the boat has turned over.” The problem: the kids are drowning, but not the educators.

Complacency is how Hirsch, who tends to see the problem as “bad ideas” rather than “bad people,” explained the problem in an essay two years ago in the New York Review of Books:

The root cause of [the public education] decline, starting in the 1960s, was a by-then-decades-old complacency on the part of school leaders and in the nation at large. By the early twentieth century worries about the stability of the Republic had subsided, and by the 1930s, under the enduring influence of European Romanticism, educational leaders had begun to convert the community-centered school of the nineteenth century to the child- centered school of the twentieth-a process that was complete by 1950. The chief tenet of the child-centered school was that no bookish curriculum was to be set out in advance. Rather, learning was to arise naturally out of activities, projects, and daily experience.

Paying little attention to the results of the “anti-bookish, child-centered viewpoint,” as Hirsch writes, the nation slept while it experienced “a steep decline in twelfth-grade academic achievement between 1962 and 1980, after which, despite vigorous reform efforts, reading and math scores on the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress have hardly changed.”

And now, as Hirsch warns, we are trying to yoke the child-centered anti-intellectualism to our new testing and accountability fetish. “This contradictory and self-defeating situation,” says Hirsch, has lead to even worse practices:

…drills in how-to skills that will prepare [students] to pass tests. Many of the weekly hours that are assigned to language arts in the early grades are now being devoted to practicing reading strategies such as `questioning the author’ and `finding the main idea.’ [Diane] Ravitch describes in detail a highly touted reform in New York City and San Diego called `balanced literacy,’ which requires students to spend a lot of time practicing such reading strategies but does not prescribe any particular books, poems, and essays to practice them on.

The good news is that we have two trends that are gaining ground on the monster that is our education system:  a renewed appreciation for content (and that is not, as some would have it, a sudden love of “nonfiction”) and the new market mechanisms (i.e. choice) that incentivize innovation and renewal. If we can keep our eyes on the prize of the former, we will sort out the problems of dumbed-down instructional materials and vapid instructional techniques.

As for the latter, David Brooks set out our choices nicely the other day in an essay about our “two economies.”   One economy is that of the free market, which Brooks says has a “creative dynamism” that is both “astounding and a little terrifying. Over the past five years, amid turmoil and uncertainty, American businesses have shed employees, becoming more efficient and more productive. According to The Wall Street Journal on Monday, the revenue per employee at S.&P. 500 companies increased from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2011.”

Public education, for the most part, still lives in the second economy: “a large sector… that does not face… global competition.” Its leaders do “try to improve productivity and use new technologies, but they are not compelled by do-or-die pressure, and their pace of change is slower.” Why?  Because there are no widespread threatened layoffs. No guillotine focusing the mind.

Brooks understands the “conflicts between those who live in Economy I and those who live in Economy II” and how “choice-oriented education reforms” might terrify those clinging to their monopoly guarantees as they face the prospect of an education sector “as dynamic, creative and efficient as Economy I.”

Though most of the public education sector still does not see the “urgent need to understand the interplay between the two different sectors,” there are signs that even in education, increasing numbers of leaders of Economy II are finding ways to make our schools not only responsive to good ideas but to the educational needs of their children. And they are not afraid to light fires of accountability—no more teacher tenure, more value-added evaluations—that mimic the incentives that characterize Economy I. Once parents are untethered from the overturned boat, those not wanting to rock it, like my board colleagues, will understand that they better stop worrying about the weather and start doing what’s needed to stay afloat. Shouted the coxswain: Row!

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

…curtail teacher tenure protection, tie instructors’ compensation and superintendents’ job security to student performance; shift hiring and firing power from school boards to superintendents; create new paths to open charter schools; and establish a statewide program that uses the public-school financing formula to pay private-school tuition for certain low-income students.

It was anything but a cakewalk for the Jindal reform package, as teachers descended on the Capitol to fight the bills and Democrats charged the second-term Republican governor with strong-arm tactics reminiscent of former political tough guys Huey Long and Edwin Edwards. “I make no apologies for having a sense of urgency,” said Jindal. “I was elected to help lead our state. I was not elected just to hold an office.”

Even Diane Ravitch made a trip to Louisiana to cheer-lead the anti-reform troops. As she recounts on her Bridging Differences blog, headlined “Bobby Jindal v. Public Education,” the Louisiana governor is…

….in a race to the bottom with other Republican governors to see who can move fastest to destroy the underpinnings of public education and to instill fear in the hearts of teachers. It’s hard to say which of them is worst: Jindal, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, or …. There are so many contenders for the title, it’s hard to name them all. They all seem to be working from the same playbook: Remove any professionalism and sense of security from teachers; expand privatization as rapidly as possible, through charters and vouchers; intensify reliance on high-stakes tests to evaluate teachers and schools; tighten the regulations on public schools while deregulating the privately managed charter schools. Keep up the attack on many fronts, to confuse the supporters of public education.

Thankfully, an increasing number of parents and voters are not fooled by the rhetoric. And, tellingly, Ravitch leaves off the list of bad guy governors Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, who has proven himself a champion of education reform. Though there have been many fits-and-starts in the reform movement over the last decade, despite Ravitch’s attempt to portray it as a right-wing conspiracy, one of the more noticeable themes has been that movement’s bipartisanship.  Love it or hate it, No Child Left Behind was a bold cross-the-aisle reform hug and there has been a long line of Democratic education reformers, from Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson and Chicago mayor Richard Daley, to Democrats for Education Reform to Chris Cerf, the New Jersey education chief who worked in the Clinton administration, to President Obama and Arne Duncan. Adding Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to the list and, as Lyndsey Layton reported last month in the Washington Post, you have “several Democratic mayors in cities across the country—Chicago, Cleveland, Newark and Boston, among them—who are challenging teachers unions in ways that seemed inconceivable just a decade ago.

There is much to work out on the implementation front in Louisiana (and the AP is reporting many battles to come over vouchers), but Jindal’s new superintendent, a Teach for America veteran who cut his reform teeth under Joel Klein in New York (see my story on White here), is well-prepped for the challenge.

Says White,

This is a momentous day for the families of Louisiana…. All students deserve a fair chance in life, and that begins with the opportunity to attend a high-quality school. These policy changes are aligned with that central belief, and Gov. Jindal and state lawmakers have demonstrated a clear commitment to prioritize the educational rights of Louisiana’s next generation above all else.
Congratulations to Louisiana.

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

Folks are genuinely looking for opportunities to make peace and not war….  And I think that’s terrific. But someone has to make war.

Who better to lead the troops than Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Eva Moskowitz, three of the most aggressive education reformers of the last decade, or, if you prefer, as Phillips has it, “some of the most well-known and polarizing figures in public education.”

A triumvirate of kumbaya they are not.

And what they have now done is form a group that intends to raise $10 million annually for the next five years to lobby the New York State legislature to protect the reform initiatives launched by Klein and his mayoral boss Michael Bloomberg in New York City, promote reform throughout the state, and, as Phillips writes,

…neutralize the might of the teachers’ unions, whose money, endorsements and get-out-the-vote efforts have swung many close elections.

Bloomberg’s third (and this time final) term expires at the end of next year. Says Phillips,

[T]he campaign is beginning while advocates of reform have an ally in the mayor. But their eyes are focused on 2014, when a new mayor—most likely one who is more sympathetic to the teachers’ union than Mr. Bloomberg has been—enters office.

In fact, the law to renew mayoral control over Gotham’s schools expires in 2015 and may pose an interesting early challenge for the group: What if, as Phillips suggests, the new mayor is not a friend of education reform?

The group, StudentsFirstNY (no webpage yet) has a bunch of hedge-funders and venture capitalists (not named by Phillips) involved and will be lead by Micah Lasher, the barely 30-year-old “magical wunderkind lobbyist,” as Gotham Schools dubbed him a couple of years ago, when Bloomberg sent him to Albany as the city’s lobbyist.

Let the games—er, battles—begin.

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

The Times called it a “coveted endorsement”—and indeed it is, no matter how much fun Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich had at poor Eric Fehrnstrom’s expense. (For the record, that same day Fehrnstrom, a longtime Romney advisor, gave a televised interview in which he said “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign…. Everything changes [when he’s running against Obama]. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”)

Jeb Bush, who has been a tireless education reformer since the mid-nineties, is no Etch A Sketch. (Photo by Rex Sorgatz)

Jeb Bush, who has been a tireless education reformer since the mid-nineties, is no Etch A Sketch. And by coincidence I was lucky enough to spend some time with the popular two-term Florida governor (1999—2007) just last week as partEducation Next’s “Conversation” series with important education reformers (see my conversations with John White, Whitney Tilson, and Chris Cerf). You can read a summary of what he accomplished in Florida here; examples include instituting an A—F school grading system, ending social promotion, rewarding school success with both more funds and more flexibility, and creating a tax credit scholarship program. And it has worked. The state’s fourth graders—a majority of whom are minorities—went from ten points below the national average NAEP score on reading in 1998 to six points ahead of the national average by 2009. Florida’s Hispanic students are now reading as well or better than the statewide average of all students in thirty-one states and its African-American students are reading as well or better than the statewide average in eight states.

It is easy to see why The Economist ran a lengthy story on Bush just a couple of weeks ago, under the headline,

The Floridian school of thought: Inspired by Jeb Bush, more Republicans want to transform the classroom

Through his four-year-old nonprofit, Foundation for Excellence in Education, Bush remains an outsize presence in education reform circles. (Bush had also launched the Foundation for Florida’s Future after losing the 1994 race for Governor. It went dormant while he was Governor and then started up again in 2007 when he left office. It currently lobbies the Florida Legislature, the governor’s office, and the Florida Department of Education on education reforms to build on and protect the policies that were passed while he was in office.)

I watched Bush entertain a delegation of visiting legislators from North Carolina during an informal luncheon at his Coral Gables headquarters, an incisive and expert hour-long primer on building better school systems. What’s the secret, I asked Bush.  “Hard work,” he says. “And you have to be bold.”

Bush’s new foundation is a powerhouse in Florida education reform circles, thanks in large part to a veteran staff directed by Patricia Levesque, Bush’s deputy chief of staff for education while he was governor. And as The Economist suggested, the foundation’s reach is nationwide. (I recommend The Reformer Toolbox.)

As Alyson Klein reported on her Education Week blog,

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the godfather of the reformey-minded Chiefs for Change and an education force in statehouses around the country, has endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for president. That news may be the biggest unsurprise ever to education folks who have been following the campaign.

She notes that former Florida Board of Education Chairman F. Philip Handy is a Romney education advisor and on the board of Bush’s foundation. And Margaret Spellings, President George W. Bush’s former secretary of education, is also on Romney’s team. I guarantee you that if Mitt only half-listens to George W’s brother, the nation’s education prospects will be greatly improved.

- Peter Meyer

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

Minority students across America face harsher discipline, have less access to rigorous high school curricula, and are more often taught by lower-paid and less experienced teachers, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

The report, part of the annual Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) survey, included data from 72,000 schools serving 85 percent of the nation’s students and found, among other things, that black male students “are far more likely to be suspended than their peers.” In fact, it reported, though black students make up 18 percent of the students in the sample, they accounted for 35 percent of the students suspended once and 39 percent of the students expelled.

When I read this, I yawned.  It matches perfectly the statistics in my school district.  But just as my district pays little attention to the academic environment that these “bad” kids swim in, so too the ensuing national melee over OCR data didn’t mention curricula and teachers.  Everyone wanted to talk about “discipline” practices, school “safety” and “racism.”

Wrote Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal,

The Obama administration’s sympathies are with the knuckleheads who are disrupting class, not with the kids who are trying to get an education. But is racial parity in disciplinary outcomes more important than school safety?

No mention of the knuckleheads inflicting inferior academic standards and teachers on black kids. Or the connection between the three. In my experience, by the time kids start acting out seriously—fourth and fifth grades—they are so frustrated by their ignorance (vis lousy curriculum and inexperienced teachers), that they use their fast-maturing cognitive abilities to ask, “what’s the point of paying attention?” And let’s throw poverty into this brew: if you’re learning little and have parents who aren’t so hot and your chances of getting mugged while walking to the bus stop are one in five—well, Mr. Riley says it best,

This is yet another argument for offering ghetto kids alternatives to traditional public schools, and it’s another reason why school choice is so popular among the poor. One of the advantages of public charter schools and private schools is that they typically provide safer learning environments.

Safer—and smarter.

I have been working on a major Fordham report on successful high schools for the poor and minorities in Ohio and have discovered that discipline, academic rigor, and devoted teachers go together. In fact, all of these black-majority schools are safe because, as staff and students testify, “we don’t have time to get in trouble.” Curriculum matters. Good teachers matter. School culture matters.

I urge everyone to read the OCR report in the context that it was presented. It is hardly a rigorous study, but it definitely is, as Secretary Duncan put it, “a wake-up call to educators at every level” to “address educational inequities.”

What this report tells us is that schools matter. And they matter in very old-fashioned ways: as institutions of learning. Do that right, as kids of all color know, and we won’t have to try to fool them into thinking that the prison they are attending is a school.

-Peter Meyer

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institutes Board’s Eye View blog.

This means that we have to do this in public, a welcome window-opening in a system of baroque halls and closets. The New York Times, one of the media outlets that had sued to gain access to the Teacher Data Reportshan (TDR), made the data available and issued an invitation to teachers to “respond to your data report.”

In fact, surprising many, Michael Winerip, the On Education columnist for the Times and normally no friend to education reform, had it about right:

At first, when I heard that news organizations were going to publish the list, I was angry, but that has passed. Good has come of this. People have been forced to stop and think about how it would feel to be summed up as a 47, and then have the whole world told.

Winerip’s would be a near-perfect conclusion if it weren’t such a reluctant one. If only he could bring himself to provide some context: that this imperfect new system is an attempt to right a terrible wrong, the failure to hold public schools accountable for failing to educate our children. As Winerip predicted, the controversy has produced a wonderful array of rich thinking on the subject—and some not so rich. (I have a short list of “further reading” at the end of this post.) In fact, Winerip was back on track a couple of days later, rounding up the “victims” of the new system:  “Hard-working teachers, sabotaged when student test scores slip.” And the Times ran a moving story by one William Johnson, a special education teacher at a Brooklyn high school. Johnson, who says he was rated “a bad teacher in a good school,” tells a story that will sound familiar to most experienced educators:

As you might imagine, my job can be extremely difficult. Beyond the challenges posed by my students, budget cuts and changes to special-education policy have increased my workload drastically even over just the past 18 months. While my class sizes have grown, support staff members have been laid off. Students with increasingly severe disabilities are being pushed into more mainstream classrooms like mine, where they receive less individual attention and struggle to adapt to a curriculum driven by state-designed high-stakes tests.

And, of course, the punchline:

On top of all that, I’m a bad teacher. That’s not my opinion; it’s how I’m labeled by the city’s Education Department.

Is he a bad teacher? How does one know? According to Johnson,

Dozens and dozens of teenagers scrutinize my language, clothing and posture all day long, all week long. If I’m off my game, the students tell me. They comment on my taste in neckties, my facial hair, the quality of my lessons. All of us teachers are evaluated all day long, already. It’s one of the most exhausting aspects of our job….  The truth is, teachers don’t need elected officials to motivate us. If our students are not learning, they let us know. They put their heads down or they pass notes. They raise their hands and ask for clarification. Sometimes, they just stare at us like zombies. Few things are more excruciating for a teacher than leading a class that’s not learning.

It’s a compelling argument except for one thing. What if the students are not learning? Do our students get an A for effort? Of course, but is it the only grade they get?

Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp weighed in on the TDR release in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. She thinks it’s a bad idea:

So-called value-added rankings—which rank teachers according to the recorded growth in their students’ test scores—are an important indicator of teacher effectiveness, but making them public is counterproductive to helping teachers improve. Doing so doesn’t help teachers feel safe and respected, which is necessary if they are going to provide our kids with the positive energy and environment we all hope for.

The release of the rankings (which follows a similar release last year in Los Angeles) is based on a misconception that “fixing” teachers is the solution to all that ails our education system.

That too is a compelling argument. But it misses the point and the context as well: we currently have a system that rewards bad teachers. And the release of the data is not based on a belief that “fixing” teachers is all that matters. Indeed, it would be nice if all teachers were as conscientious and hard-working as Mr. Johnson and all administrators adept at making teachers feel safe and respected. Unfortunately, the system is not perfect; nor are the people running it. How do we make it more perfect?

Eric Hanushek, writing at Ed Next, had it about right:

Nobody would ever advocate making personnel decisions through public posting of evaluations in the newspaper. The public release of value-added scores for 18,000 New York City teachers last week should not be taken as a model for how to run the human resource departments of the schools.

But that is not what is going on there. The public release of these ratings—which attempt to isolate a teacher’s contribution to his or her students’ growth in math and English achievement, as measured by state tests—is one important piece of a much bigger attempt to focus school policy on what really matters: classroom learning.

To understand why the release of this data makes sense, you must step back and see the intense, broader battle underway all throughout the nation.

The fight is between those who want to improve the schools and those who like the system as it exists today. Those who want to preserve the status quo have historically had the upper hand. For generations, they have been able to control policy change by focusing attention on the adults in the schools through the contract bargaining process, through labor laws in the legislature and through a supportive media environment.

Finally, my friend Catherine Johnson, who runs a savvy education listserv in Westchester County, just north of New York City, offers this insight:

[A] core problem here, the reason we **have** a value-added movement in the first place, is that parents don’t choose their kids’ teachers. Parents choose their kids’ doctors; parents choose their kids’ piano teachers; parents choose their kids’ tennis instructors. We don’t choose our kids’ teachers. Instead administrators choose our kids’ teachers — and they choose from a pool that has been artificially limited by credentialing laws passed with union support. Parents don’t get to choose teachers at parochial or private schools, either, but at a good private or parochial school you’ll find (some) teachers with Masters degrees and even PhDs in the subject they teach. They’re unhireable by public schools because they don’t have education school degrees. Public schools are a closed shop.

Meanwhile administrators know that some of their teachers are ineffective, and yet they must assign children to classrooms where children will learn less than they would inside another teacher’s classroom. In fact, I think I own a book written for administrators that includes an entire chapter on the ‘ethics’ of deciding which students to assign to weak teachers.

If parents were making the decision, nobody would face that ‘ethical’ dilemma, and we wouldn’t need a value-added movement —- !

As Johnson and some of her listserv discussants also note, the value-added movement is also a response to labor laws backing lifelong tenure for teachers and last-in-first-out layoff rules—laws that all but negate the good intentions and efforts of the Mr. Johnsons and Ms Kopps. The new teacher evaluation system in New York is far from perfect. But it is necessary. And it is best to have the debate in public—at least until we have a system that proves itself capable of providing good education from behind closed doors. As Justice Kern put it:  “This information is of interest to parents, students, taxpayers and the public generally. Although the teachers have an interest in these possibly flawed statistics remaining private, it was not arbitrary and capricious for the DOE to find that the privacy interest at issue is outweighed by the public’s interest in disclosure.”

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

————–

Further Reading

With thanks to Tyson Eberhardt, this list is highly eclectic and in no particular order. It is meant to give students of the value-added evaluation suggestions food for thought.

• As Education Week put it, the New York City education department released value-added data that “purport to estimate a teacher’s impact on his or her students’ standardized test scores.” Purport?
• Much of the value-added controversy revolves around the question of certainty and much of it reminds me of John Glenn’s comment about his famous trip around the globe:
  

  I guess the question I’m asked the most often is: “When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel?” Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts—all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

• Starship Enterprise Captain James Kirk: “Risk is our business.”
• Nobody raised hell when Education Week ran a story last month called “‘Value Added’ Proves Beneficial to Teacher Prep.”  As Stephen Sawchuk reported then,
  

  The use of “value added” information appears poised to expand into the nation’s teacher colleges, with more than a dozen states planning to use the technique to analyze how graduates of training programs fare in classrooms.  Supporters say the data could help determine which teacher education pathways produce teachers who are at least as good as—or even better than—other novice teachers, spurring weaker providers to emulate those colleges’ practices.

• Bill Gates made a splash, with a “Shame is not the Solution” op-ed in the Times. And RiShawn Biddle objected for much the same reason Bloomberg did:
  

  High-quality data on all aspects of education — especially teacher performance — is critical to helping families become real consumers and lead decisionmakers in education. It is also key in causing the kind of disruptions that have helped begin the first steps in systemically reforming American public education. And this is what Gates (whose own fortunes were made thanks to consumers making informed choices about computers, software, and operating systems) and other reformers should want.

• As I suggested last week in a post about the new “independent validators” scheme for assessing teachers, our search for an “impartial” or objective assessment is an elusive one.
• Eric Hanushek is interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about why teachers’ value-added scores should be made public.  He has more to say about a larger strategy for boosting teacher quality in “An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom,” which appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Ed Next. See also Hanushek’s “Valuing Teachers: How Much is a Good Teacher Worth?” which appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of Ed Next.
• All you can read (and more) here.
• Emily Richmond of the National Education Writer’s Association profiles criticisms of publishing teacher ratings for the Atlantic.
• Matt Di Carlo argues that the way the ratings were published was misleading.
• NYC mayoral hopeful and public advocate Bill De Blasio accused Michael Bloomberg of being on a “jihad against teachers” for releasing performance ratings.
• New York State lawmakers are considering changing state law to shield teachers from having their ratings released to the public.
• Best headline goes to the Shanker Blog for “New York’s Rein of Error.”
• Good reporting from the New York Times: Fernanda Santos and Sharon Otterman and  Santos and Robert Gebeloff.
• Stephanie Banchero in the Wall Street Journal. She quotes Michelle Rhee:
  

  If we truly want parents to be taking a seminal interest in their kids’ education and understand fully what type of education they are getting, then we need to be ready to give them all the information we have…. You can’t say we want parents involved and then limit their access to information.

• According to Gotham Schools UFT president Michael Mulgrew found “universal opposition” among his teachers.
• Whitney Tilson and Steve Brill exchanged emails on the subject (my conversation with Tilson for Ed Next is here and a good review of Brill’s book by Nathan Glazer is here.)
• The Times, which was part of the lawsuit which forced the release of the data, said that it had, “with SchoolBook’s partners at WNYC, … developed a sophisticated tool to display the ratings in their proper context, a hallmark of our journalism.”

“Teachers will be right in feeling assaulted and compromised,” declared Merryl Tisch, chancellor of New York State’s Board of Regents, just after New York City released some 18,000 teacher evaluations to the public last week.

“The arrogance of some people to say that the parents don’t have the ability to look at numbers and put them in context and to make decisions is just astounding to me,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg shot back. “This is about our kids’ lives. This is not about anything else.”

That pretty much set the tone for the debate: another assault on teachers versus the public’s right to know. And it turns out that the best window on to the question is the January 11 New York State Supreme Court decision itself, a sleek nine pages in which Judge Kern said her only job was to decide whether the city education department’s decision to release the teachers’ names with the Teacher Data Reports was “arbitrary and capricious under the law.” Did it have a “rational basis”?

It is possible that in a different era, a court might very well have concluded that releasing teachers’ names was quite insane. But while this lower court decision (there are, in New York, several higher courts) will not prove to be a major marker in educational jurisprudence, it does show how far we have come in righting a long-listing ship. The issues it addresses are quite fundamental to the governance of our public schools and Judge Kern’s concise ruling is a nice primer on the question of privacy rights in a public school context. So the question, as Kern put it, was the Tisch question: did the release of the teachers’ names in the context of this evaluation program constitute an “unwarranted invasion of privacy”?

According to Kern’s interpretation of New York’s Freedom of Information Law, the only thing excluded from public view was “employment, medical, and credit histories, information that would be used for solicitation or fund-raising purposes, information that would result in economic or personal hardship or simply personal information that is not relevant to the work of the agency.”

The list of exclusions is not comprehensive, said Kern, but the “proper test” of whether release of the personal data was “unwarranted,” quoting a higher court’s earlier decision, is a test in which “the `privacy interests at stake’ are balanced against the `public interest in disclosure of the information.’” The introduction of the “public interest” here is, of course, key. It is the Bloomberg argument: it is “about our kids’ lives.”

But how would one decide the question? Here Kern trots out the tried-and-true “reasonable [person] of ordinary sensibilities” standard. It has always amazed me that so much of our legal heritage hangs on such a slim thread of unscientific, nonobjective reasoning—but it is a fact of American life that our education policymakers would do well to consider. And it is here we recognize the importance of the debate these last twenty years.

According to Kern, “ordinary sensibilities” in the case of Teacher Data Reports would conclude that “release of job-performance related information, even negative information such as that involving misconduct, does not constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy….The public has an interest in the job performance of public employees, particularly in the field of education.” And even though then-Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf, when he was negotiating the evaluation procedures with then-UFT president Randi Weingarten, in 2008, had written a letter promising to work to keep the names secret, Kern again quoted an earlier court ruling that “as a matter of public policy, the Board of Education cannot bargain away the public’s right to access to public records.”

It is quite refreshing to see Kern’s high regard for “the public’s right to access.” Too often—far, far, far too often—education decisions are made behind closed doors or in rooms sealed by professionals and the mystique that professionalism has thrown around them. Dozens, if not hundreds, of decisions are made far from the madding crowd in the course of a day at a normal school. And too many educators prefer it that way. As David Matthews pointed out in his brilliant 2006 book Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming our Democracy, “[A]dministrators, battered by interest groups, become guarded, convinced that `You can’t just pull together a group of people from the community to tell educators what to do.’ The perception that the public has nothing to offer is apparently widespread. One veteran educator of twenty-five years confessed to me, `I was trained to counter influences from outside my classroom, not to work with the public.’”

I recall meeting with a room packed full of teachers to present the results of a district task force on student performance that made 50 recommendations. “Are they research-based?” was the cat-call. I laughed. “Is everything you do during a day in school research-based?” The question caught them off-guard, but the encounter suggested to me the amount of hubris—and arrogance—within the system. In fact, a major cause of the enfeebling of our $600 billion public education system is a faux-perfectionist standard. Education needs what the law has: the reasonable person standard. Reasonable people make mistakes and mistakes are part of the public dialogue. Concluded Kern:

The UFT’s argument that the data reflected in the TDRs should not be released because the TDRs are so flawed and unreliable as to be subjective is without merit. The Court of Appeals has clearly held that there is no requirement that data be reliable for it to be disclosed.

This is a hugely significant point in the battle for the high ground in the education reform war. It supports the democratic ideal: that opinions, whether factual or not, whether buttressed by scientific evidence or not, have validity. It is a welcome reminder that our country values opinions as much as, if not more so, than scientific proof and that science and professional opinion must share the arena with the citizen, including parents of students. It is more important to air the opinions of the many than to sequester them behind closed doors monitored by the few. Next post I will explore what some of those opinions are.

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

Sure, we have plenty to worry about when it comes to the role of the federal government in our lives. The current cover story in the Economist is about an “Over-regulated America,” smothered by a wave of “red tape” that may crush the life out of America’s economy. It sure seems to have already crushed much of the life out of America’s public education system.

Coming at the question from a different direction, David Brooks recently suggested that the United States is just as freighted by central government as the Europe is; we just do it differently—and not so well. Our economic briar patch, says Brooks, is in the tax code.

There should be a lesson here for our education policy-wonks and -makers: instead of getting hung up on which government agency is making the rules, let’s dig a little deeper into the question of red tape, at all levels, and find out exactly which ties are binding so firmly to mediocrity and entropy. Chris Cerf in New Jersey has a team going through every Garden State education rule and regulation with an eye of stripping away unnecessary restraints.

The point is, this isn’t a federal problem; at least, not exclusively.

But what worries me about the reasoning of some of the anti-Common Corers (see Jay Greene) is that they seem to confuse a popular national trend with nationalism. The problem was on fine display last week in an exchange between Jay and W. Stephen Wilson, a mathematician who defends the Common Core standards in the current Ed Next forum. When Jay wrote that Wilson saw the Common Core “as a first step toward developing stronger national standards that would be comparable to those of our overseas competitors and better than all previously existing state standards,” Wilson shot back,

Never said that. Anyway, that’s politics, and I try to stay out of politics. I’m a content sort of guy. Also, although technically I’m the pro-Common Core person, the questions don’t actually ask me to be pro-Common Core. Thus I could answer all the questions without taking a political stance, unless being pro-math is political.

This is a fascinating reply by Wilson and I would recommend reading the full exchange between the two. There is, as I read it, some welcome concession on the part of Jay that the Common Core standards can indeed be evaluated for their content not their commonality—but even that is a far cry from a nationalized curriculum.

In fact, a national curriculum is great; a nationalized one is not. And there’s a difference. Here’s what New York State Commissioner David Steiner told me last year when I asked him for the argument for a common curriculum:

[T]here’s every argument for it.  First of all, there’s an equity argument.  We have students in this state who are, through no fault of the teachers, but just because of the history in that school, or the training and preparation of those teachers, or the lack of resources or whatever it may be–those teachers are teaching material that is one year, two years below (in content sophistication) what it needs to be.  That’s an equity problem.

Second, there’s a resource problem.  By having multiple different and fragmented curricula, we can’t get the quality we could otherwise get from a really, superb curriculum that has online, that has multimedia, that creates internal assessments for students that enables the teachers to get data about performance.  All of that is much too expensive for an individual district, still less a school to be able to produce.

And third, we’ve never had a common set of standards before that have been back-mapped from college and career readiness, which is what the Common Core standards are.  And so, for the first time we can say we have a ladder to college and career readiness.  It’s time to build that curriculum on that ladder.

There is no doubt that our educational governance system needs overhaul. But let’s not begin by throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Let’s at least hang on to the good that we have (remembering, of course, that good need not be perfect) and start knocking down the barriers to improvement.

-Peter Meyer

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

At first, I was taken aback, but, as we chatted, I realized that he saw it as a zero-sum question. He had nothing against Shakespeare; he simply wanted his plumber to be a good plumber and considered the Bard a distraction.

I understand. We want our auto mechanics to know the difference between a brake line and a muffler, our carpenters to appreciate the importance of a plumb line and the use of a hammer—oops, nail gun.

But it is not a zero-sum game. And knowing the foibles of Macbeth does not mean you must be useless with a soldering gun.

And therein lies the conundrum. Had I posed the question this way—Would you like your plumber to be as quick in thought and as creative in action as Shakespeare?—he may have had second thoughts about his “No.” Would he want his plumber to be able to identify the lead pipes in his 1850 house? To know that his cranky fifty-year-old copper pipes can be replaced with plastic? To know that the state legislature was considering a bill to ban PVC?

This is the skills dilemma.

I attended an economic development seminar recently and listened to the CEO of our local hospital, one the largest employers in the region, talk about the lack of skilled workers. She didn’t mean doctors and nurses, though. She meant janitors and bed-pan assistants. “Our biggest problem is finding people who can read and write and show up on time,” she said.The Washington Post suggests that our manufacturing resurgence is being hampered by the lack of “skilled workers.” What skills?

I think it’s time to bring back reading and writing, history, science, art, and music. That way kids at least know how to recognize a job opportunity when it presents itself. Mark Bauerlein’s essay, the Mimetic Classroom, is apt here.

Think of it on the sports analogy. What sport is mastered simply by playing the sport? None of them. To improve in football or baseball or tennis or soccer, you lift weights and stretch daily, even though weightlifting and stretching are not practiced on the playing field. The principle is simple: at least part of training involves exercises not repeated in the game. One doesn’t hear football players in the weight room complaining, “Man, why do we have to do any more curls—this isn’t football!

A friend of mine, a Princeton history grad who went on to become a homebuilder and now teaches carpentry at a VocEd school, says he constantly lectures his would-be hammerers about the importance of basic math and communications skills. And he notes that VocEd, which has been “a dumping ground for dumb kids,” is changing. At his school, they have introduced three new standards for admission. First, a student must write a short essay about why he or she wants to be in a particular class. “You’d be amazed how many kids that eliminates,” says my friend. The school is also looking at a student’s reading scores and discipline record. “These won’t disqualify you, but the flags go up,” he explains. “And we deal with them. But these three things have been a huge step forward.”

We need more flags and we need to reconsider our definitions of skills. We can no longer afford to see VocEd as a refuge for the academically unprepared, because today’s economy—including its industrial sector—is far too dynamic and demanding. The point of a liberal arts education—and I include math and science in that education—is to teach some eternal verities so that, when the surface world changes, as it tends to do, we have citizens that possess the most important skill of all: the ability to adapt. As old Willie would say, “Now all the youth of England are on fire, and silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies: Now thrive the armourers, and honour’s thought reigns solely in the breast of every man….” Including the lathe operator?

- Peter Meyer

This post also appeared in Fordham’s Education Gadfly Weekly

So, with education. Want a convenient scapegoat for our problems? Poverty. It’s there, it’s handy.

I sat through an hour meeting of our small school district’s budget committee last week, most of it devoted to bemoaning our fate as a “poor district” (over 60 percent of our kids qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, the standard definition of “poor” for schools) in these recessionary times. State aid has been nearly flat and the Governor punched through a two percent local property tax cap. Woe is us. There goes sports. Not mentioned was the fact that we spend over $22,000 per student!

Diane Ravitch has been hitting the poverty gong for some time, most recently in Cleveland, where, she says, “the level of urban decay is alarming.” I was just in Cleveland and, while I can appreciate the sentiment, I fail to understand how she gets to the next sentence: “Yet its municipal leaders have decided that their chief problem is bad teachers.”

Huh?

I visited a couple of successful Cleveland public schools during my visit—successful in educating poor children—and while principals in each of those schools said they could use more money, neither said that money—or their students’ lack of it—was their major challenge. Getting good teachers was. In fact, at one of those schools both the principal and the assistant, in separate interviews, said that having to employ less than competent teachers was the biggest drag on the school’s continuing success.

Poverty is a hard thing. I have seen my share of it and written about it, as have others at Fordham. And one thing is certain: poverty’s connection to education is largely in the eye of the beholder and that eye is often shielded by some kind of rose-tinted (or magic mirror) glass.

It was this feeling I had while mulling how to react to Sabrina Tavernise’s front-page New York Timesstory from last week, “Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor,” a story which generated a great deal of attention. As Tavernise pointed out,

[A] body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.

That the rich do better than the poor in school is a compelling comment. But to turn an effect into a cause—at least, to offer up a delicious non sequitur—is what so often bedevils the discussion. Bad educational practices, such as the poverty of pedagogy or misshapen human resource policies in inner city schools, does not enter into the discussion.

Tavernise does allow a quick dissent by University of Chicago economist James Heckman, who argues, she writes, that “parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before children start school.”

This was the point made by Tavernise colleague David Brooks, in his “Materialist Fallacy” column yesterday. It’s not the lack of money that is causing the deterioration of the social fabric, Brooks argues, it’s “disrupted communities” where citizens “lack the social capital to enact…values.”

As has been pointed out often enough, and as Tavernise’s opening sentence says,

Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults.

So why have we given up on the idea that education can be the “great equalizer”? The answer, I believe, is that we have accepted the “materialistic fallacy.” We have taken results of our education ineptitudes—more poverty—and made them the cause of them.

As I suggested the other day, in discussing E.D. Hirsch and reading, insights about cognitive, knowledge, and community deficiencies in early childhood, if recognized, can be compensated for.

That Tavernise ends her story quoting think tanker Douglas Besharov, saying that “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare” is indeed bizarre.

Shouted Whitney Tilson:

What?! The cupboard is NOT bare! In fact, over the past decade it’s been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that very high quality schools, filled with very high quality teachers, in a culture of high expectations, no excuses, etc. (i.e., KIPP and similar schools) can overcome the effects of poverty and that the great majority of even the most disadvantaged kids can achieve at high levels.

Let’s resolve to quit blaming the poor for the poor education they are receiving.

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

The core problem of literacy in middle school is you’re transitioning from learning to read, to reading to learn.

Wrong. The problem of literacy is that the transition from decoding skills to comprehension should happen long before middle school.

Thomases means well. And he’s trying to clean up the anti-academic middle school mess that has persisted for far too long (see my Ed Next story).  But like far too many educators (including the authors of No Child Left Behind, who wrongly set reading up as a skill divorced from content), he misunderstands the nature of reading.  As Hirsch writes in his second, and arguably more important, book about education, The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them,

While the process of decoding from letters to language is the foundation of reading, it isn’t the essence of reading, which is the comprehension of written language.

Hirsch puts the transition from learning-to-read to reading-to-learn “after second or third grade,” but even then emphasizes that “early oral language masteries” and “speaking and listening competencies” are “primary,” which means that children can have language and vocabulary deficiencies upon entering school, even before gaining the “ability to turn the black marks on paper into words.”  That is significant, but as Hirsch points out,

Small incremental changes in early language learning can produce enormous consequences later on. Young children who arrive at pre-school with a very small vocabulary, and a correspondingly limited knowledge base, can fortunately be brought to an age-adequate vocabulary by intelligent, focused help, and from that base they can continue to perform at grade level.

Emphasis here on “early” and “intelligent” interventions. Too many educators, like Mr. Thomases, think that it’s all about decoding and that you can wait until middle school before providing content. Says Hirsch,

[E]vidence from a variety of sources indicates that when this language and knowledge deficit is not compensated for early, it is nearly impossible to reach grade-level skills in later grades, despite intensive remediation.

Emphasis here on “knowledge deficit.”  The problem is that our schools, focused narrowly on decoding, lose sight of the importance of “an understanding of an ever-growing number of word meanings as used in context…

Word meanings are not formal structures like grammar and syntax. They are symbols that represent ranges of knowledge and experience. They cannot be gained without learning what educators disparagingly call “factoids,” for they include words such as “birthday,” “George Washington,” “tree,” “1492,” “gravity,” and “Kwaanza.”…  [S]ince words stand for concepts and schemas—that is, for knowledge—to read at grade level also means mastery of words that represent knowledge. There is no accurate way to describe reading ability as a purely formal skill, or to remove from it the information-based knowledge disparaged as “factoids.”… The notion that reading is a mechanical skill divorced from domain-specific knowledge is as great a mirage as the idea of formal “thinking” skills.

It is a shame that in 2012 educators continue to ignore the importance of background and domain-specific knowledge as the essence of reading—and of a good education. History. Literature. Art. Music. Geography. Science. Math. These are some of the domains in which our children will find the knowledge essential to becoming truly good readers—and great students. But that knowledge must be transmitted long before a child enters middle school.

-Peter Meyer

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

An amazing story from Erik Robelen at Education Week begins…

Overriding the governor’s veto, New Hampshire’s Republican-led legislature has enacted a new law that requires school districts to give parents the opportunity to seek alternatives to any course materials they find objectionable. The measure, approved this month, calls on all districts in the state to establish a policy for such exceptions, but sets two key conditions. First, the district must approve of the substitute materials for the particular child, and second, the parents must pay for them. Although at least a few states, including New Hampshire, already have laws giving parents some explicit recourse in particular subjects, such as sex education, this policy appears to be more expansive in its potential reach.

Robelen quotes Fordham’s curriculum guru, Kathleen Porter-Magee, leaning toward parents: “I don’t think it’s crazy to say parents should have a say in what their kids are learning, especially when it affects issues about their faith and belief system,” Ms. Porter-Magee said. “The problem is that the bill is written so broadly.”

This is certainly not the first shot fired in what will be a prolonged battle to decentralize education, but it surely brings the fight to the curriculum trenches.

***

Teachers really really do count. Kudos to Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times for appreciating the stakes of the debate over the Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff study called The Long-term Impact of Teachers.

Kristoff called it, “a landmark new research paper [that] underscores that the difference between a strong teacher and a weak teacher lasts a lifetime.”

For those of us who have seen teachers in action—the good, the bad, and the ugly—the research confirms what we all know. It is now up to our policymakers, as it has always been, to provide us a system of governance that gives us great teachers.

Here are a few things that I think we need to do:

• Revitalize teacher education, including eliminating regressive certification laws.
• Get meaningful teacher evaluation rubrics, with significant attention to student learning outcomes.
• Abandon Last In First Out rules for teacher retention as well as kissin’ cousins like transfer rights within a district.
• Give principals the duty – and autonomy – to create a school environment that encourages excellence and collaboration—and compensates good teachers accordingly.

It is not enough to sing the praises of great teachers. Our policymakers must do the heavy lifting that will train them and retain them.

***

Michelle Rhee is pretty smart. Though this video by a DC group of parents and teachers is unabashedly anti-Michelle Rhee (“the sad legacy under Rhee”) and meant to “contradict her simplisms,” it did lead me to this exchange between Rhee and Ida Lieszkovszky for State Impact Ohio:

Q:  One of our listeners wants to know what impact on a student’s success or failure in school does their home environment and socio-economic status have? Or do you think that a student’s success or failure in school is entirely the teacher’s responsibility?
A:  A kid’s success in school is not entirely contingent upon any one factor; it’s actually both. When you have the home and the family working in concert with the school and the teacher, that’s the best-case scenario, when everyone’s on the same page. And so we should try to do everything we can to try to incent and encourage more parental and familial involvement in schools. Can teachers overcome all of the ills of society? Absolutely not. Can they make a big dent in the potential life outcomes of kids if we’ve got great teachers in the classroom? One hundred percent.

Seems a very un-simplistic statement about a complicated issue.

***

A curriculum tussle in Tucson. And, finally, another curriculum tussle pitting local interests and state authorities. According to this Associated Press report, “Arizona’s schools chief ordered that a portion of a Tucson school district’s state money be cut off after he issued a decision Friday that the district’s ethnic studies program violated state law.”

Apparently, Tucson’s sin was to create a Mexican-American Studies program, which an administrative law judge, supporting the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal, ruled against because the classes were designed for one ethnic group and, according to the AP, “promot[ed] racial resentment and advocat[ed] ethnic solidarity instead of treating students as individuals.”

The case poses existential governance questions, but they are nothing new. As someone once said about America, “E pluribus unum,” which, roughly translated, means, let the fight continue.

-Peter Meyer

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

“[Y]ou simply cannot fix America’s schools by `scaling’ charter schools. It won’t work. Charters schools offer proof of the concept that great teaching is a huge difference-maker, but charters can only absorb a tiny fraction of the nation’s 50 million public schoolchildren. Real reform has to go beyond charters – and it has to include the unions. That’s what Brill figured out.”

Wrong. Like many education establishmentarians, Nocera makes the mistake of confusing pedagogy and governance. The former—e.g. great teaching—is a hard nut to crack and Nocera is right to suggest, as does Brill, that there perhaps aren’t enough great teachers in the pipeline (or in charter schools) to educate all 50 million public school students.

But there is certainly no such impediment to `scaling’ charters. Every public school in America could be a charter school tomorrow if policymakers would allow it. Would that “fix” America’s schools? Not necessarily. But it would help.

The other problem with the scaling argument is that it assumes that big is beautiful—that no matter how successful you are, if you can’t replicate your methods of success, then your model won’t be useful to the American public school system. That is true only if you assume a governance structure like the one we now have: a system managed from above. The monolith that we now call public education is dominated by special interests, including unions, that are able to dictate education policy by keeping their hands on a few levers of control (mainly on Capitol Hill and in state capitals).

It is not so much that “reform has to go beyond charters” as it is that real reform must embrace choice—choice at the individual level. In fact, scaling up is really about scaling down.

The new MDRC study of New York City’s small schools seems to make the point perfectly. To quote from the document,

During the past decade, New York City undertook a district-wide high school reform that is perhaps unprecedented in its scope, scale, and pace. Between fall 2002 and fall 2008, the school district closed 23 large failing high schools (with graduation rates below 45 percent), opened 216 new small high schools (with different missions, structures, and student selection criteria), and implemented a centralized high school admissions process that assigns over 90 percent of the roughly 80,000 incoming ninth-graders each year based on their school preferences.

At the heart of this reform are 123 small, academically nonselective, public high schools. Each with approximately 100 students per grade in grades 9 through 12, these schools were created to serve some of the district’s most disadvantaged students and are located mainly in neighborhoods where large failing high schools had been closed. MDRC researchers call them “small schools of choice” (SSCs) because of their small size and the fact that they do not screen students based on their academic backgrounds.

And, according to MDRC, these schools worked. Graduation rates were nearly 10 points higher in the small schools. And the positive effects were spread out to all subgroups, including minorities and the poor.

“Are these small schools perfect?” writes Joe Williams in a New York Post op-ed. “Of course not. In fact, the MDRC report adds to the growing evidence that, while New York City is graduating students at a higher rate than a decade ago, most of these kids are still not ready for college…. Bloomberg and his would-be successors should read the MRDC report from the vantage point of those whose job it is to drive change.”

Williams is right to call out “those whose job it is to drive change.” But that change, as the dramatic restructuring of the system that MDRC studied in New York City shows, must be bold. And it suggests that the question we must ask is “How do you `scale up’ small?”

- Peter Meyer

This post was originally published on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View

We shall see tomorrow night, but this is already looking to be the Year of the Education Governor. With NCLB being pummeled from left and right and Race to the Top in suspended inanimation, the feds seem unusually quiet, if not on the run.

In an essay this morning in The Hill, Juan Williams, who is hosting a new video documentary about how Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is “risking his political life by fighting the city’s teachers’ union to improve schools,” says “there is little urgency [about education reform] in the halls of Congress.”

And New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip, also this morning, calls attention to the incredibly difficult work of figuring out how to evaluate the 175,000 teachers in New York State, 79 percent of the state’s total teacher population, who will be subject to the new RTTT-driven rules. He points out that the state education department, its budget slashed by 40 percent in the last few years, won’t be able to do much, according to state commissioner John King, except “provide guidance and models.” Concludes Winerip, “the ultimate responsibility for monitoring would be left to principals, superintendents and school boards.”

Kathleen explored the implementation challenges for the Common Core last week, remaining cautiously optimistic that “states are taking CCSS implementation seriously and that they are working to reorient their education systems to the new standards.”

The point seems to be that, ready or not, education reform is coming back to the states.

I’ve covered Andrew Cuomo’s bold moves in New York. And RiShawn Biddle is of the opinion that governors can make a difference: “No matter what happens, Cuomo is showing, as outgoing colleague Mitch Daniels has done in Indiana, that governors without direct oversight of education can actually foster and sustain reform.”

Here is a quick list of links to some of what the nation’s governors are saying about education:

• Louisiana. Bobby Jindal is shaking things up in the Bayou State. See Biddle’s essay referenced above and his State of the State address here. (Also, here.)

• Virginia. Governor Bob McDonnell released his education agenda (press release /Washington Post), including proposals for earlier school start dates and ending tenure. Valerie Strauss blogged her opposition.

• New Jersey. Chris Christie says that he can increase education spending while simultaneously reducing taxes in the Garden State. (Also, see here.)

• Florida. Rick Scott called for $1 billion more in education funds in his State of the State address.

• Kansas. Governor Sam Brownback proposed giving high schools $1,000 credit for every student who earns a technical education certificate.

• Colorado. It looks like the Rockies will take on teacher tenure reform.

• California. In his State of the State address, former “Governor Moonbeam” Jerry Brown, facing a huge budget deficit, called for reducing standardized testing and the federal and state role in local education.

• Wisconsin. Scott Walker proposed ed reforms focused on teacher evaluation and improving literacy skills, but his attentions may be turned to winning a recall vote.

It promises to be an exciting year.

- Peter Meyer

This post was originally published on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View

This is a guy who has an astute appreciation for the challenges of education reform, and relishes them. In fact, the 57-year-old Cerf has been an avid wilderness camper since leading student canoeing expeditions near Hudson Bay in the 1970s. The tall, athletic, gray-suited father of three was appointed Chris Christie’s education czar for New Jersey in January 2011 and now oversees the Garden State’s 2,500 public schools, 1.4 million students, and 110,000 teachers in more than 600 school districts. New Jersey’s is a complex and troubled public school system: although the state ranks in the top 5 on most nationally normed tests (NAEP, SAT, ACT), it has one of the worst achievement gaps in the country—50th out of 51 in 8th-grade reading, for example. The mandate from Christie was to close it. And Cerf, fresh from a stint as a deputy chancellor for Joel Klein in New York City, has a rather straightforward plan. As he says, “Rather than working to change the organization, you shut the old organization down and transfer relevant parts into the new organization that you’re building and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

The Mission

The drive from Trenton to Newark was the third part of an interview that began in downtown Newark several days earlier, in a large, bare office that looks out over Jersey’s troubled largest city. Cerf uses it as a transit station, a temporary office while on his way to or from meetings in the state’s more populated eastern counties, his home in a northern suburb, or across the Hudson in New York City. I had caught up with him for part two of our interview in his official Trenton office, 50 miles to the south and west, where the state’s education department is headquartered and where he has lively paintings drawn by schoolchildren on the walls.

A lawyer who has argued two cases before the Supreme Court and served as a White House counsel in Bill Clinton’s first term, Cerf exhibits an appreciation of big ideas and broad trends as he explains the road forward. “I say straight out that there are many, many interests at work in public education,” he explains. “There are the interests of children, of course, which everyone talks about. There are the interests of employees, who have a perfectly legitimate set of interests to guard against arbitrariness and get as much economic benefit out of their work as is possible. There are commercial interests, like vendors and publishers…. The 600 districts in New Jersey have their interests as well: in expanding their power, their authority, their institutional permanence…. But the great myth of public education is that the Venn diagram of those interests is perfectly intersecting. There are areas of substantial overlap, but many areas do not. I represent the interests of the children of New Jersey, pure and simple. When there is a conflict between interests, and you would be amazed at how many issues come my way where you actually have to make a call between one interest and the other, I’m with the children. And I make that clear.”

Anyone who has dipped his or her toe in the waters of school reform knows the hazards, the rocks, of siding with the children. And Cerf did not live through the Klein years without suffering the slings and arrows of unions and their friends. “Cerf devised a cockamamie plan to reorganize the NYC school system,” wrote Class Size Matters director Leonie Hamson in a lengthy Huffington Post attack not long after he took the reins in New Jersey. “Clearly, the man cannot be trusted; and Cerf’s persistent proclivity towards prevarication, political smear campaigns and the privatization of public schools shows that he is not fit to run New Jersey’s education system.”

Cerf is neither rattled by such attacks—he certainly doesn’t like them—nor defensive. “One thing you have to have in this business is a very thick skin. But you also must be willing to be almost righteous in your pursuit of your objective.” Cerf brings to the reform task a keen awareness of political necessities. “The second thing you need is a sense of what you are trying to accomplish. American public education has been extremely unclear about what success looks like, and I think that’s one of the sources of confusion and division.”

Cerf lists some of the prevailing notions about the purpose of an education: “to facilitate the melting pot, advance democratic values, educate the masters of the universe and their heirs to continue to run the world, and to have everybody else get enough of an education so they could go on to some kind of trade—and so on.” And to explain his own motivating principle, he cites the much-maligned No Child Left Behind Act. “One of the extraordinary powers of No Child Left Behind,” he says, “is that it attempted to articulate a vision that this is about every child getting a sufficient education.” That is his goal in the Garden State.

Up for the Challenge

If there is a model for the perfect modern education-reform leader, Christopher Cerf surely qualifies as that person. After a career that includes stints teaching high school history, vetting nominees for President Clinton’s first presidential administration, running a couple of businesses (Edison Schools and Sangari Global Education), and helping Joel Klein reinvent New York City’s education system, he is arguably one of the most seasoned education-reform leaders in the land. Smart, tough, tenacious, and impassioned, Cerf seems to be enjoying himself. “It’s a job I didn’t need,” he says. “It’s a job I can’t afford. I’m at a certain point in life where having the title is not particularly meaningful to me.”

Cerf spent his early years in Washington, D.C., where his father, with a Yale Ph.D. in political science, worked for a foreign policy organization used by Congress before joining the Kennedy administration as a deputy assistant secretary of commerce for international relations. His mother became a homemaker to raise Chris and his two brothers.

“My father, who has been gone now since 1974,” says Cerf, “was a child of the Depression, grew up in a very lower-middle-class environment in Chicago and Milwaukee, like so many people of that generation.” He was the first of his family to go to college, which was cut short by World War II, where he served as a Navy pilot. After the war, he worked as a secretary for the newly organized Central Intelligence Agency, in Germany, where he met his future wife, a translator for the agency. Both were 22. “This was right after the war,” says Cerf. “At the time, the late 1940s, the CIA was more like the Peace Corps. What do you do when you come out of college and need a job? You get an entry-level job with the government and you see foreign countries, which my father described as about as glamorous as counting freight cars.” Cerf’s mother had already had something of a glamorous life; at least she had “a really extraordinary father,” recalls Cerf of his grandfather. William McGovern was, by training, an anthropologist, by avocation an explorer and adventurer. “He was allegedly one of the very first non-Asians to go to Lhasa,” Cerf recounts. “He was lost in the Amazon for a year. He spoke seven languages. He ran naval intelligence for FDR during World War II. He was a Buddhist monk for part of his life. He was a very quirky guy, lived out of a suitcase growing up.”

After Kennedy was killed, Cerf’s dad took a job running a Boston foundation, and for middle and high school the young Cerf attended “a funky little private school called the Commonwealth School. It was extremely diverse, not only racially but also socially.” It was at Commonwealth that Cerf fell in love with history and the big ideas that have energized it, and decided to be a teacher. He sailed through Amherst, then headed to Cincinnati Day School, where he he taught AP U.S. history and government, modern European history, and one middle section (“to keep me humble,” he says). Nurturing his other passion, and taking a page from his grandfather’s playbook, Cerf led trips to remote regions of northern Canada. “Two of us would take a group of 10 or 14 kids and literally not see another human being for 40, 45 days. This is some of the most empty terrain left on the planet, with wolves and caribou and moose. It’s a very influential part of who I am today.” And Cerf certainly recognizes the similarities between white-water canoeing and education reform. “If it was a straight shoot, it wouldn’t be very interesting,” he says, “so the ability to advance a policy agenda in an environment that is entirely set up to thwart it is a real art form. It involves interpersonal engagements. It involves political judgments. It involves designing policies and selling policies and dealing with interest-group politics, dealing with people who are on your side but who may have a political focus that can get in the way of a policy objective.”

A Seasoned Leader

What got Cerf to the top of Christie’s education commissioner wish list was a remarkable record of top-drawer political, legal, and educational experience. He had given up his high school teaching career when his new wife decided to pursue a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Rutgers. “Well, I guess we’re married,” Cerf recalls telling his wife. “If you’re moving, I’m moving, too.” Cerf applied to a number of “Ivy” history programs and law schools and eventually chose Columbia’s law school. Several years later he had earned the prestigious job of editor in chief of the school’s law review. “That opened up lots of horizons for me,” says Cerf.

He spent his first summer in law school at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund doing civil rights litigation. He worked his second summer at a large Wall Street law firm, “and it took me about five minutes to realize that that was not a path that I had any interest in pursuing,” he says. But he didn’t have to make that choice right away because he was offered a clerkship with J. Skelly Wright, the judge who had overseen the post–Brown era school integration in New Orleans and Washington, D.C. The following year he was asked to be a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. He then took a job working for a very small D.C. law firm called Onek, Klein & Farr, a fortuitous choice since this was the firm of Joel Klein, an accomplished litigator and budding antitrust lawyer who, years later, would bring Cerf to New York City to help rebuild the nation’s largest school system.

In fact, Cerf found his own way to education reform. After arguing two cases before the Supreme Court (one win, one loss), he joined Bill Clinton’s campaign team, then went to work in the White House counsel’s office. “It is an extraordinary experience to drive your car into the West Wing parking lot every day, work in the White House, have meetings with the president and with all the people who are in the newspapers every day,” he says. He left just before the end of Clinton’s first term, wooed away by a brash former magazine publisher (he rescued Esquire magazine in the 1980s) and entrepreneur to help start an education company. Cerf ran Edison Schools for six years, shepherding Chris Whittle’s revolutionary idea into more than 150 schools in dozens of cities across the country.

“Not to rise up in defense of an organization which I haven’t been with in five years,” says Cerf, “but Edison absolutely succeeded. It was the point of the spear in the school reform movement. We had very, very high standards and we were on the leading edge of data-driven decision making…. And if you cut through the blather on the achievement record of Edison Schools, you’ll find that it was materially higher than other comparable schools in their districts, including in Philadelphia.” And it was with Edison that Cerf learned “the power of politics to thwart the effort. I’m not just talking about the unions, but there is a tremendous and deep resistance—here we are in the center of capitalism, right—there is a very deep resistance to the private sector that’s embedded in the culture of public schools.”

A Bold Vision

Cerf was to see that deep resistance up close and personal when he came to New York City as Joel Klein’s chief transformation officer. He and Klein had a similar view of the world, which Cerf explains this way: “We need to be brutally honest about the depth of the issues that are confronting us. That we live in a nation where equality of opportunity is what differentiates us from all that came before.” He sees education reform in broad nation-making, moral terms. “The great vision of the American experiment is that you could transcend your birth circumstances to become someone different from your parents, and public education is meant to be the catalytic agent of that central ideal.” But that ideal, says Cerf, “is a great big lie if you are born into economic disadvantage…. It is deeply distressing to me, as it is and was to Joel, that we tolerate this. At a fundamental moral level it’s just deeply wrong, and we need to shout from every mountaintop the wrongness of that.”

Translating that moral challenge to real reform, on the ground, is what has eluded so many education-reform efforts. “Government is organized to block change rather than advance it,” says Cerf. “At every level, someone can sweep into a meeting and put a wrench in the spokes.” Thus he is spending time establishing the process by which he will dismantle, then rebuild, New Jersey’s education system. He has been “incredibly explicit,” he says, about “the definition of success for us, [which] is that we dramatically increase the number of children, regardless of birth circumstances, who graduate from high school ready for college and career.” He has set out four pillars on which to build the new system: accountability, talent, high academic standards, and innovation. Cerf threw out the organizational chart at headquarters, which employs only about 800 staff, shut down some offices completely, and, in keeping with his new pillars, created jobs for a chief talent officer, a chief accountability officer, a chief academic officer, and a chief innovation officer. His team is poring over the 2,000 pages of education regulation that Cerf believes thwarts change. He is building regional achievement centers across the state and moving a lot of people out of a “central function” to work with schools and superintendents “to build out” the capacity of the four pillars at the school level.

It is a bold vision for New Jersey schools. But Cerf seems to be the right person to run the reform rapids and bring the state’s low-achieving schools to safer waters. Stay tuned.

Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life Magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next

To a large extent, much of the story of American education over these last fifty years is a story of the failure to understand the complexity of our country’s relationship to race and the deep consequences of integration.  As Jefferson said of slavery, “[W]e have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”**

Unfortunately, on the ground, in classrooms all over the country, the interplay between justice and self-preservation has not had happy results for African Americans.

I once asked another friend of mine, an African American, who grew up in a small northern town, whether, given the choice, he would send his children to an all-black school that scored high on the state tests or to an integrated school with low test scores. And he said, “the integrated school.”  He voted for self-preservation; he knew that the white kids, though less educated, would grow up to run the town and he wanted his children to know them.

These are some of the Hobbesian choices we have forced on African-Americans since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.  The outcomes for African Americans have been modest at best; catastrophic at worst.  Not just because of Brown, but because the integration that Brown demanded coincided with what has been a prolonged period of educational deterioration.

And this is why I am fond of quoting Martin Luther King’s cautionary words, from 1959, about Brown:

I favor integration on buses and in all areas of public accommodation and travel….  I am for equality. However, I think integration in our public schools is different. In that setting, you are dealing with one of the most important assets of an individual — the mind. White people view black people as inferior. A large percentage of them have a very low opinion of our race. People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls.

When I first read those words, in a 2004 New York Times book review by Samuel Freedman, it was a Eureka moment – to know that the great civil rights leader appreciated not just the significance of an education but the dangers of partnering with an education system that was still very much a white-run institution.  The facile assumption on the part of far too many integrationists is that all blacks needed to do was rub elbows with whites to get a good education.  To put it succinctly, King was right to be suspicious.

It was E.D. Hirsch who first articulated the pedagogical dangers of this short-sighted notion in his 1987 classic, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Though he is one of the most misunderstood of our modern education theorists (most educators I know claim to have read him; few have), one of his great insights was the importance of the difference between a conservative education and the radical or liberal political outcomes that can flow from it.  As he wrote early in CL:

The claim that universal cultural literacy would have the effect of preserving the political and social status quo is paradoxical because in fact the traditional forms of literate culture are precisely the most effective instruments for political and social change.

This is one of the core findings of Hirsch’s impressive body of research these last twenty-five years.  And in those early pages of CL Hirsch proceeded with a wonderfully counterintuitive reading of The Black Panther, “a radical and revolutionary newspaper if ever this country had one.”  Indeed, after offering long excerpts from the paper, including a section from the Black Panther Party platform that quotes verbatim from the Declaration of Independence, though without attribution, Hirsch writes,

The writers for the The Black Panther had clearly received a rigorous traditional education in American history, in the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, the Gettysburg Address, and the Bible, to mention only some of the direct quotations and allusions in these passages. They also received rigorous traditional instruction in reading, writing, and spelling. I have not found a single misspelled word in the many pages of radical sentiment I have examined in that newspaper.

One can find many allusions to classic American and ancient texts in King’s own writing, testament to the “good” education he received.

Many years before I met Hirsch (for a Life magazine story I wrote in 1991), I stumbled upon a collection of essays by Richard Stern, a professor of English at the University of Chicago. (Pity the person who had to be in the same department as Saul Bellow.)  The collection was titled, The Books in Fred Hampton’s Apartment, after a short and brilliant essay on page 70 that recounted Stern’s visit to the Black Panther leader’s apartment just after he was gunned down by Chicago police in a predawn raid in December of 1969.  “Violent death does not make for good housekeeping,” Stern writes, “nor do lawyers, pathologists, tourists, and guides, but it was clear that this apartment had never been an idyllic place to either live or die.”   But Stern spotted the books, “scattered here and there in the apartment, some open, as if reading had been interrupted and were to be resumed the next day,” and noted, “to a bookish man the books changed almost everything.”  Stern writes,

The books in the Monroe Street apartment spoke of self-improvement, of purposive learning, of curiosity. Here are the titles I wrote down: Introduction to Embryology; Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance; James T. Farrell, The Face of Time; Hannah Arendt, Imperialism (a paperback selection from The Origins of Totalitarianism); Black Rage; Ashley Montague, The Direction of Human Development; Linus Pauling, No More War; Vertebrates; Calculus; Struik, The Origins of American Science; American Political Dictionary….

The list – and Hampton’s violent end – puts a sad exclamation mark on Hirsch’s sanguine observation about the Panthers and education.  But it also spoke volumes about King’s prescient observation about the perils of turning young black minds over to a system that was not only racist (overtly and covertly) but already in the throes of a new, anti-academic wave, one that would throw several generations of African-American youth under the school bus.

About the same period, and not far from where Hampton died, a group of black activists, under the leadership of the Reverend Arthur M. Brazier, was organizing around much the same premise: self-determination.  In his 1969 book, Black Self-Determination: The Story of the Woodlawn Organization Brazier writes,

History has shown that black people cannot rely on the moral integrity of organized white society to give power to black people voluntarily. It must be wrested from that society.

I was lucky enough to meet Brazier in 2010, not long before he died, at a thrilling Harlem Children’s Zone conclave in Manhattan, an event crowded with African-Americans, including members of a presidential administration led by a man who had, finally, wrested power from that white society.  It was enough to see the gleam in Brazier’s eye to know of his pride. And I was also honored that that introduction came from Charles Payne, professor of social work at the University of Chicago and author of So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. Payne’s book is brilliant and should be read by all education policymakers, but today, in honor of Martin Luther King, I want to call attention to the Epilogue (as I have done before), where Payne tells the story of William J. Moore, “grandson of a fugitive slave,” who opened a “first class elementary school” in West Cape May, New Jersey, for the black “yard men, delivery ‘boys’, dockhands, truck drivers, casual laborers, and factory workers” who serviced the white tourists of Cape May.   This was the late 19^th century and Moore ran his school for 53 years, a school his father attended. As Payne writes,

When I was a boy, I thought all Black men recited poetry and prose. When my father got together with his boyhood friends, it was not at all unusual for someone to start reciting Shakespeare and for someone else to follow that with some quatrains from the Rubaiyat, which might be followed by bits of Paul Laurence Dunbar or James Weldon Johnson.

As Payne concludes,

Mr. Moore and his school were a kind of counternarrative, daily giving the lie to the narrative of Black intellectual inferiority.  At first glance, the issues of contemporary urban education seem far removed from the world of William Moore and his children. I’m not sure that’s really true, though. The search for prescriptions can be dangerous if we let it, but I don’t know that all our work has given us a better model for educating children from the social margins than William Moore seems to have had in 1895. Give them teaching that is determined, energetic, and engaging. Hold them to high standards. Expose them to as much as you can, most especially the arts. Root the school in the community and take advantage of the culture the children bring with them…. Recognize the reality of race, poverty, and other social barriers, but make children understand that barriers don’t have to limit their lives….  Above all, no matter where in the social structure children are coming from, act as if their possibilities are boundless.

Unfortunately, too much of the story of school integration for blacks has been what King predicted: a feast of junk food served up by educators who have too little respect for the black race, much less “the mind” of their children.  It is one of the least-mentioned tragedies of King’s assassination – that he could not live to join the education reform movement and help stamp out the fires of mediocrity that have burned almost out of control these last 50 years.

In his Times review Samuel Freedman quotes W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in The Journal of Negro Education in 1935:

[T]he Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education.

As Don Hirsch told me when I asked how his famously content-rich curriculum would deal with students’ self-esteem challenges, he smiled, “The best way to teach children self esteem is by teaching them something.”

The best way to honor Martin Luther King would be to commit ourselves to delivering that rigorous, comprehensive, and, ultimately liberating education.  Indeed, it would be the best way to let freedom ring for future generations.

-Peter Meyer

This also appears on Board’s Eye View.

———–

*Said Helms in a 1963 television interview: ”The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that has thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic and commerce and interfere with other men’s rights.” See Kevin Sack, the New York Times.

**For those who have never seen this quote before, it may need some explanation. In short, the founders, as we know, lived in a slaveholding culture and many, like Jefferson, were themselves slaveholders. They live with the Hobbesian choice: to win freedom from England or throw the young country into a potentially catastrophic fight over slavery, one of the key economic bulwarks of the South. The proof of the rightness of Jefferson’s comment came when Lincoln let go of the wolf’s ear and the nation was thrown into the bloody catastrophe of the Civil War.

Peterson, director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard and Executive Editor of Education Next (of which I am a contributing editor), uses the Mac the Knife reference to suggest that loyalties can be bought “for a pittance.” In this case, it’s the National Education Association (NEA), which can, Peterson argues,

…collect multi-millions of dollars through a check-off system that generates revenues directly from teacher paychecks (unless a teacher specifically objects),” and, a la the villain of Mac the Knife, “invest in the work of less-advantaged non-profits that ostensibly have entirely different agendas. Even a little bit of money can produce a valuable ally somewhere down the line.

It’s a short essay, but is packed with evidence (from the Education Intelligence Agency) of NEA’s multi-tentacled reach, from a $250,000 grant to the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice (“which has migrated to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which received another quarter million in direct funding,” says Peterson) to $100,000 for Media Matters, “a group that attacks conservative groups and commentators” and $35,000 for “the anti-accountability group,” FairTest.

“The list goes on and on,” says Peterson, who suggests keeping it handy “if one wants to understand the interstices of the debate over school reform.”

What is also problematic about all this is that the list doesn’t even include the millions given directly to legislators and other policymakers. And therein is an existential problem that, despite the lull in the fighting in Wisconsin and Ohio, lurks in the background of most of the debates about unions: they use public money to influence public officials to write laws that give them even more money. As Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute told the New York Times last year (see my “Unions on the Run” post),

Public unions have had no natural adversary; they give politicians political support and get good contracts back…It’s uniquely dysfunctional.

Thus, as a public union, the NEA (so too the American Federation of Teachers), is, essentially, spreading around tax dollars, money over which the taxpayer has no control, an income redistribution effort that could easily be mistaken for a kickback or, in states where union membership and dues are not voluntary, a not-so-hidden and not-so-representative tax.

And it’s not just lobbying for higher pay that is the problem. As Terry Moe writes in his new book,Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools,

On the surface, it might seem that the teachers unions would play a limited role in public education: fighting for better pay and working conditions for their members, but otherwise having little impact on the structure and performance of the public schools more generally. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. The teachers unions have more influence of the public schools than any other group in American society.

Indeed, the battle about whether teacher quality is important to education outcomes is an important one. And teachers need a voice in the debate. But it should not be a voice amplified with funds from the public purse and used to silence other voices.

- Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Board’s Eye View.

Robert keyed in on a recent study in the journal Pediatrics that links “toxic stress” in early childhood to “to a host of bad life outcomes including poor mental and physical health, and cognitive impairment.” Among the bad things caused by such stress are those affecting learning capacities. It is an insight which, Robert argues,

[S]hould have a profound impact on educators and education policymakers.  At the very least, understanding the language and concept of exposure to toxic stress should inform the increasingly acrimonious, dead-end debate about accountability and resources aimed at the lowest-performing schools and students.

No one can quibble with the obvious – that a child’s environment has an impact on his/her learning capacity– and it should be equally obvious that the more research the better to “inform” the education policy debate. But here’s the rub: translating studies like the one in Pediatrics into policy ain’t easy.

It’s not a new rub, of course, and much of the acrimonious debate that bothers Pondiscio is about that translation. What does this look like in the trenches, where teachers teach and principals lead? Or policymakers make policy?

By coincidence, part of the answer came when another friend and colleague, James Baldwin, a superintendent of one of New York’s 37 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) , wrote an essay in a local paper that carries the environmental question foursquare into the policy realm. After saying that “[t]he struggles of poor children carry serious social, economic and political implications,” he gets right to the policy question:

There is no equity in New York’s system for public education funding. Data recently published by the Statewide School Finance Consortium demonstrates that wealthy districts in the State are often receiving more aid per capita than similarly sized poorer districts. There is no equity when residents living in poorer areas pay higher rates of taxes for a less robust educational program and when the range of annual expenditures per student exceeds $50,000/year in wealthy districts and is a fraction of that in poorer districts.

Case closed?

Hardly.

As Rick Hess writes in the introduction to one of his more must-read collections of expert essays (When Research Matters: How Scholarship Influences Education Policy, Harvard Press, 2008),

One frequent but ultimately unfruitful line of thought begins with the presumption that the primary goal for those concerned about the research-policy nexus is to keep politics from coloring the interpretation or use of research….The reality, of course, is that expertise and research are contested terrains in a democratic nation.

While Pondiscio may be right in hoping that the toxic stress study will have a “profound impact” on policymakers, it remains a long and arduous road – mined with a million ideologies – to get to a consensus on what to do. In fact, one of the more important governance questions is whether there needs to be a consensus.

Same with Baldwin’s suggestion that the funding equity fix “is not necessarily about spending more and more money” but about “deploying the resources we have more equitably and with greater return on our investment in the form of student achievement.” Nothing wrong with that.

Part of translating good research into good policy is, as Chris Cerf of New Jersey has said, making sure that we make the educational interests of children the political interests of politicians. That’s not easy. But it is, as Hess suggests, a necessary part of the democratic process; a process that includes a range of activities, from ivory tower research to grassroots mobilization.

One of the important questions for me is where the governing action should be located. Capitol Hill? K Street? State legislatures?  Regional alliances? School districts? Boards of education? Schools?

A few weeks ago Checker suggested that “we need to focus laser-like on the barriers that keep us from making major-league gains” in education improvement. He lists eight such barriers, from “archaic governance” structures to “dysfunctional” school finance systems.  His eighth and final barrier:

[O]ur preoccupation with “at risk” populations and with achievement gaps defined as the distance between demographic groups has led to the benign neglect of millions of kids, including but not limited to gifted students and high-achieving learners.”

There is still far too much mischaracterization of the “no excuses” school reformers for my tastes– and no doubt Checker will receive some pushback on this one (see Michael Goldstein). But we have to recognize that politics is the authoritative allocation of scarce resources and thus seek a method of prioritizing and distributing those resources in the most equitable, efficient, and democratic manner possible.

-Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Board’s Eye View.

Apparently, the Governor hasn’t noticed the work of Citizen Action and the Alliance for Quality Education on behalf of children and the community’s schools for well over a decade. Or the District Parent Coordinating Councils, PTAs, etc….  Part of the reason we struggle so hard for school improvement may be that he hasn’t “heard” clearly or loudly enough about, or from, us. See you next week, Sir. Oh, and we’ll be looking for that 4% and the CFE [Campaign for Education Equity] funding we fought for 12 years, were awarded, and the state reneged on…just saying.

Money seemed to be a theme of many of the protestors, but one of my favorites was the video retort, which you can watch below, from the president of the New York State School Board Association (NYSSBA), Tim Kremer, who was almost as strident as Cuomo:

Well, I have to respectfully disagree, governor. School board members are lobbyists for students. School board members are elected by their local communities. They spend countless hours working to improve public education for students. They give up nights and weekends, juggle day jobs and family responsibilities. And they are unpaid for all these efforts. Why do they do it? Because they believe in public education. They want to give back to their communities. And they care about their students….

A predictable response from an education establishment that has been rather defensive, at least since charters and the “consequential accountability” movement put student performance on the nation’s radar. (See Fordham’s recent seminar and Mark Schneider’s “The Accountability Plateau.”) And the protests seemed to help make Cuomo’s point: “the purpose of public education is to help children grow, not to grow the public education bureaucracy.”

In fact, most of the protesteths avoided the rather glaring fact, as Cuomo put it, that New York spends “more money than any other state but [is] 38th in graduation rates.”

Granted, as NYSSBA’s Kremer pointed out, “mandate relief” would help, and his organization (of which I am a member), like many of those who indeed have their lobbyists, claims to be a public school booster. But NYSSBA, like the others, has plenty of interests other than those which are good for students – it opposes charter schools, for instance, unless they are sanctioned by school boards. As New Jersey education commissioner Chris Cerf put it, during his  brilliant keynote address at Fordham’s  Rethinking Education Governance conference last December, “labor has entirely legitimate interests and they often coincide with the interests of children – that’s one reason education is so well-funded today. But the problem is that sometimes they don’t coincide.” (Minute 14:00 on the tape.)

As a school board member, I appreciate Kremer lauding us for the “countless hours” we work; unfortunately, however, most of those hours are devoted to mindnumbingly moving the deck chairs around (to avoid bumping into labor unions scrambling for seats), not what’s best for students. More money for teachers means better education for students is the message of the union’s television ads just before the annual budget vote every year. A message that changes pretty rapidly, when the test scores come out and the unions complain that poverty and bad parents tie their hands. A local radio commentator called Cuomo’s lobbyist comment hypocritical because, as everyone knows, he cut education funding, which hurts students. Of course, this was the same rant the commentator has been delivering for years, most of those years being marked by increasing funds and decreasing student achievement.

The best recent elucidation of the parameters of this debate came from Chris Cerf. And his address should be seen by policymakers and educators alike, whether of the reform or establishmentarian persuasion.  (The quotes below come, generally, from minutes 5 through 14 of the address and I will give a specific minute in parens where appropriate.)

Cerf first notes, as many have, that we have thrown billions of dollars and lots energy at the school reform wall, but nothing seems to have stuck. And he describes a “taxonomy of why this is so hard” with three possible answers:  1)The problem is unsolvable, 2) We have to keep doing what we’re doing, but do it better, and 3) the system is organized to produce the results it is producing.

He dismisses the first two, though not without some persuasive arguments – number 1 can’t be true because people are doing it, number 2 won’t work because it hasn’t worked – and suggests that, indeed, we’re getting such lousy results because of “the system organized to produce” them. “So we really shouldn’t be surprised by the outcomes.” And this is where Cerf details what the New York governor said was the needed “paradigm shift.”

You can’t color within the lines – you have to actually redraw the lines. Almost all the reform we engage in takes place within a set of assumptions and boundaries and parentheses and constraints about how the world is meant to operate. And it seems to me that if you’re not willing to attack those boundaries themselves, then the potential for an enormous amount of self-delusion is possible. All hard problems are multiply-determined. (10:00)  Poverty, culture, money. All play a role.  Anyone who says that money doesn’t matter is crazy.
But the most significant contributor to our long and frustrating inability to move forward is, in fact, the way we are organized…. Look at the way the governance structure of public education has compromised our ability to execute the most basic strategies common to any high performing organization….

Cerf describes a system constructed with “elaborate political bulwarks against any kind of meaningful change” in the essentials of education, especially the people who in the system. Work rules like LIFO [last in, first out], the difficulty of imposing a meaningful evaluation system are two components of the current system that “get in the way of the common sense notion of getting the best and the brightest [teachers] and keeping them working on behalf of children.”(13:20) In fact, “these limitations,” argues Cerf, are the result of the success of “labors’ agenda.” And here’s the answer to the Who’s the lobbyist for students? question:

Labor has entirely legitimate interests and they often coincide with the interests of children – that’s one reason education is so well-funded today. But the problem is that sometimes theydon’t coincide.  (14:00)  If you draw up the venn diagram of the interests of children and the interests of employees qua employees, there are areas of non-overlap.  Take LIFO.  The rule in New Jersey, codified and enshrined in statute, is that you must, in the context of a layoff, you must fire a teacher who is demonstrably acclaimed as the best teacher in the universe and retain the job of someone who is universally understood to be inferior even to the point of being poor. You can defend that on the basis of lots of things – avoid arbitrariness, messes up the system  — but you can’t defend it as being in the best interests of children.  (14:50)

Cuomo gets it. And though there is much room for failure here, the new Empire State governor at least has proven himself a politician who can do what he says: “It’s about the students, and the achievement, and we have to switch that focus.” We wish him well in his new job of lobbyist for students.

- Peter Meyer

This also appears on Board’s Eye View.

Dillon explains how D.C.’s much watched Impact Plus teacher evaluation system (introduced by Michelle Rhee in 2009, but as a collaboration with the Washington Teachers Union) is working. “We want to make great teachers rich,” the district’s chief of human capital, Jason Kamras, tells Dillon.

And, in fact, Dillon offers some brief profiles of teachers – rated “highly effective” by the new rubric – who are getting double-digit percentage pay increases and five-figure annual bonuses. “Lots of teachers leave the profession,” says one of these teachers, who received a 38 percent pay increase in one year, “but this has kept me invested to stay… I know they value me.”

As Dillon writes,

Many districts have tried over the last decade to experiment with performance pay systems but have frequently been thwarted by powerful teachers’ unions that negotiated the traditional pay structures. Those that have implemented merit pay have generally offered bonuses of a few thousand dollars, often as an incentive to work in hard-to-staff schools or to work extra hours to improve students’ scores. Several respected studies have found that such payments have scant effect on student achievement; since most good teachers already work hard, before and after class, there are limits to how much more can be coaxed out of them with financial incentives.

But Washington is the leader among a handful of large cities that are seeking a more fundamental overhaul of teacher pay. Alongside the aggressive new evaluation system that has made the city famous for firing poor-performing teachers — more than 400 over the past two years — is a bonus-and-raise structure aimed at luring talented people to the profession and persuading the most effective to stick with it.

These are significant changes in creating a teacher corps that will begin to make difference. Congratulations to Washington.

- Peter Meyer

As it turns out, public schools in India, like many in the U.S., are apparently  lousy – “in many states,” write Vikas Bajaj and Jim Yardley about India, “government education is in severe disarray, with teachers often failing to show up.”  But unlike the U.S., where charter schools and vouchers have begun to offer alternatives, In India the poor have turned to a network of private schools to educate their children.  It is much as James Tooley described it in a 2005 story in Education Next (and his subsequent book, The Beautiful Tree), recounting amazing stories from around the world:

[T]he poor have found remarkably innovative ways of helping themselves, educationally, and in some of the most destitute places on earth have managed to nurture a large and growing industry of private schools for themselves.

Checker wrote about this phenomenon in India in 2008:

I confess: I was impressed–and slightly sheepish, too, considering I’ve lived and traveled in India and other “third world” countries over many years and worked in the education field forever. Yet, until now I had allowed my gaze to pass over signs of the presence of hundreds of these schools without really noticing them, much less seeking to understand how they work.

This thriving private school market probably has as much to do with the general lassitude of Indian education laws as it does with the human drive to better one’s lot, but what is so tragically familiar in the Times’ story is that India’s new Right to Education Act, which “enshrined,” says the Times, “for the first time, a constitutional right to schooling, promising that every child from 6 to 14 would be provided with it,” has a dark side for those motivated poor private schoolers.  As the Times notes,

Few disagree with the law’s broad, egalitarian goals or that government schools need a fundamental overhaul. But the law also enacted new regulations on teacher-student ratios, classroom size and parental involvement in school administration that are being applied to government and private schools. The result is a clash between an ideal and the reality on the ground, with a deadline: Any school that fails to comply by 2013 could be closed.

America, of course, went through its educational my-way-or-the-highway period in the early 1920s when states began passing laws requiring that all children go to public schools – a not-so-veiled attempt to shutter the Catholic education system.  It took a Supreme court decision, in 1925, Pierce v. The Society of Sisters, to declare unconstitutional an Oregon law that required public school attendance.

But it’s interesting to note that so-called progressive education practices and principles, like class size and parent involvement,  could kill off the private schools in India — and with it an avenue of choice, however decrepit that avenue is, to tens of thousands of dedicated parents.

Let’s hope India will learn something from the United States and create a system that not only educates the poor but does not deny them the chance to educate themselves.  But let’s also hope that the United States might learn something about the power of pent-up education demand among the poor — and the risks of too much top-down education rules and regulations.  One size doesn’t fit all, especially when that size is determined by just a few.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

So, this year, I simply Googled for “Education 2011” stories and found some good summaries of the year’s top education events—and Rick Hess’s predictions of next year’s important issues and trends. Without further ado:

The Condition of Education 2011

This is a fascinating report from the National Center for Education Statistics that, says NCES, summarizes “important developments and trends in education using the latest available data. The report presents 50 indicators on the status and condition of education, in addition to a closer look at postsecondary education by institutional level and control. The indicators represent a consensus of professional judgment on the most significant national measures of the condition and progress of education for which accurate data are available.” Some of the important indicators, which you might call perennials, include:

• Reading—Young Children’s Achievement and Classroom Experiences
• Paying for College: Changes Between 1990 and 2000 for Full-Time Dependent Undergraduates
• Mobility in the Teacher Workforce
• U.S. Student and Adult Performance on International Assessments of Educational Achievement
• High School Course taking
• Community Colleges
• U.S. Performance Across International Assessments of Student Achievement
• High-Poverty Schools
• Enrollment Trends by Age
• Preprimary Education
• Early Education and Child Care Arrangements of Young Children
• Enrollment
• Academic Outcomes
• Reading Performance
• Reading Achievement Gaps
• Mathematics Performance
• Mathematics Achievement Gaps
• Student Effort and Educational Progress
• Student Attitudes and Aspirations
• Time Spent on Homework

Best and Worst from the Left

From the Washington Post, this is The Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg’s take on the year. Among “the worst” trends/events in his estimation were “the misguided obsession with teachers unions” (see Wisconsin and Ohio, Terry Moe and Steven Brill) and the best, not surprisingly, “Ohio residents [who] repealed the wrongheaded attack on teachers.” Also on the best list were North Carolina voters who “backed a return to school integration in Wake County public schools.”  In the worst column for Kahlenberg was the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top program “encouraging states to lift charter school caps.” On the positive side, he says, were “some political figures”  who began to realize that we “need to stop demonizing teachers and their democratically elected representatives, and focus instead on what really matters: reducing poverty and school segregation.”

The Koret Task Force Best (5) and Worst (5)

The Hoover Institution’s well-regarded education policy movers and shakers (chaired by our own Checker Finn) provide a very straightforward list.

The Best:

1. Reinvigoration of school choice via opportunity scholarships and vouchers.
2. The rollback of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey, Idaho, and (temporarily) Ohio.
3. California State Board of Education’s rules that allow the “parent trigger” to operate.
4. Former DC chancellor Michelle Rhee’s teacher-evaluation system left in place by new mayor Vincent Gray without substantial change.
5. Indiana’s overall record of education reform.

The Worst:

1. The Atlanta cheating scandal.
2. Bungling of reauthorization of No Child Left Behind by a slowpoke Congress and a Constitution-oblivious president.
3. Postponement and delay by Race to the Top–winning states and weak oversight by the Obama administration
4. Governor Jerry Brown moving California from bad to worse.
5. The unions’ victory in Ohio in overturning Governor Kasich’s collective bargaining reforms.

Ed Week’s Top 10

The editors of the industry’s paper of record have “handpicked memorable articles from 2011.”

1. Obama Offers Waivers From Key Provisions of NCLB
2. Wis. Labor Bill Could Vex District-Union Relations
3. Federal Ed. Policy a Whipping Boy for GOP Hopefuls
4. Congress Chops Funding for High-Profile Education Programs
5. Budget-Driven Personnel Shifts Pressure Districts
6. Frustrated Educators Aim to Build Grassroots Movement
7. Jeb Bush’s Influence on Education Policy Spreads
8. In War of Words, ‘Reform’ a Potent Weapon
9. Race to Top Winners Work to Balance Promises, Capacity
10. Mixed Report Card for Education Stimulus After 2 Years

A Quiz on 2011

This neat variation on a top ten list comes from The Answer Sheet’s Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post (you’ll have to check in to see the multiple choice possibilities and the answers):

1) “Corporate education reform” refers to a set of proposals currently driving education policy at the state and federal level. What is not one of those proposals?
2) Teach for America recruits top college graduates, trains them and then places them in high-poverty schools. How much training do the recruits get before they start teaching on their own?
3) Because Congress failed to rewrite No Child Left Behind, what did the Obama administration say it would do to help schools dealing with the law’s onerous requirements?
4) Why did the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District field-test on students 52 different standardized tests?
5) What percentage of American children live in poverty, according to new Census Bureau data?
6) Who said this: “We’ve lost our competitive spirit. We’ve become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we’ve lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things.”
7) What did President Obama do on Friday, March 4?
8) President Obama disagrees with Republicans on:
9) Who said, “I’m beginning to think we are living in a moment of national insanity?”
10) What is the Opt-Out Movement?

BONUS QUESTIONS:

11)  True or false: In July actor and social activist Matt Damon addressed a rally in Washington D.C. to oppose the Obama administration education policies. Education Secretary Arne Duncan wanted to meet with Damon before the rally so much that he offered to pick him up at the airport and speak with him en route to the protest.

12)  The Obama administration’s key education initiative, Race to the Top, had a competition for states to compete for federal dollars for early learning initiatives. What was not included as a top priority listed in the Education Department’s criteria for applicants?

Rick Hess’s Top 10 for 2012

Finally, the infamous bad boy of education reform weighs in with his predictions for what “we’ll be reading in 2012” (starting with number 10):

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.’”

Finally, without any institutional bias intended, my nomination for the best prediction of 2011 was from our own Mike Petrilli, who wrote on Flypaper that Cathie Black would be gone by April (she was actually gone by February).

And because no one else would be so gauche as to propose it, my prediction for the next President and Secretary of Education are… in a sealed envelope on my desk.

Happy New Year.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

This weekend, Walt Gardner, who writes the Reality Check blog for Education Week, penned a letter to the Times editor that seems to sum up the anti-profit school of thought pretty well:

Agora Cyber Charter School [the K12 school that was the Times’ whipping post] serves as an instructive case study of what happens when schools are run like businesses. The profit motive always assures that the education of students takes a back seat to the enrichment of investors.

Nevertheless, free market advocates have managed to exploit the frustration and anger felt by taxpayers over the glacial progress of traditional public schools to advance their agenda. In the end, it will become clear that it’s impossible to provide a quality education and show a profit at the same time.

This is a brief but concise compilation of some of the misguided beliefs about business and education, and it reinforces a working theory of mine: that many education establishmentarians lean far to the left on governance issues other than those affecting education.  (See my post from last June.)  This is unfortunate.  E.D. Hirsch, a political liberal, was one of the first to call attention to the ideological split  in education between process and pedagogy: in his 1999 book The Schools We Need he noted that the respected 1930s Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci advocated a “conservative” education (facts and content) as the best way to avoid “perpetuat[ing] social differences.”  I do not want to put words in Hirsch’s (or Gramsci’s) mouth here, but there are plenty of well-meaning educators who seem not to appreciate that the way of producing great education outcomes in the classroom (content, content, content) is decidedly different than that of delivering great education to lots of kids (choice, choice, choice).

Regarding the latter, I would suggest that the fear of the free market leads to some bizarre statements; e.g. that “[t]he profit motive always assures that the education of students takes a back seat to the enrichment of investors.”

If this were true, Gardner would be attacking the current system, which is filled with for-profit motives: just ask the textbook companies, the bus companies, the testing companies, the consultants, the building contractors, the computer manufacturers.  Even the teacher unions, which do their best to ensure that their members are earning a living from the education system, are part of the for-profit school syndrome.  So, either Mr. Gardner is proposing a soup-to-nuts government-owned education system or he completely misunderstands the nature of the modern education beast.

Thus, before we can even discuss the impact of the profit motive on education outcomes, we need to understand how that profit motive affects what Gardner says is “the glacial progress of traditional public schools.”

Have free market advocates “exploited” taxpayer anger or have they done what good free marketeers do: offer alternatives?  And have those alternatives worsened children’s educational prospects or saved the education lives of thousands of children?

My friend Robert Pondiscio over at Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation rightly suggests that we should perhaps be debating de-regulation rather than profits:

What if education was essentially deregulated, and its quality was assured not by the Department of Education, but the Federal Trade Commission?  Would KIPP or Achievement First emerge as the Clear Channel of education, becoming the dominant provider?  Someone else?  Those who favor deregulation tend also to favor free markets and local control.

I’m not so sure I want the FTC running education, but Pondiscio is on to something here.  What would public education look like if it were de-regulated?

One thing is certain, the nation can ill-afford to continue to put up with the glacial pace (but is it backward or forward?) of our current system.  In fact, I would argue that it may be only because of the reform experiments and acceptance of standards of the last ten years — including accountability for student performance, charter schools, and online education – that we have not fallen further behind.  We need more reform, not less. More free market not less…..   ‘Twas the night before Christmas and not a creature was stirring, not even a de-regulating education reformer….

Merry Christmas.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

This is indeed a bold consolidation of power.  But the plan also calls for turning Indianapolis into a district of total choice, in which all schools would compete for students — a bold diffusion of power.  By combining mayoral authority and parental choice, as Paul Peterson suggests in his masterful 2010 book Saving Schools, The Mind Trust proposal would create “a marriage made in heaven”:

Theoretically, the excellence movement’s two central thrusts — accountability and parental choice — are complementary strategies designed to enhance school quality: information supplied by an accountability system can be made available to parents, who can then make intelligent choices among schools.

But Peterson warns that “when choice and accountability are pursued simultaneously, they operate on a collision course.” This tension is part of the reform dynamic, overcome, Peterson suggests, by “reconstruct[ing] it from the bottom up.”

This is essentially what the 155-page Mind Trust plan proposes. And having done some editing work on David Harris and Bart Peterson’s forthcoming book, Educating a City, I understand the need for wholesale reconstruction.  What David Harris, Mind Trust CEO, and Bart Peterson (no relation to Paul that I know of), former mayor, accomplished in Indianapolis while Peterson was Indy mayor (from 2000 to 2008) was something close to miraculous — they helped get the state to pass a charter school law and then created a stable of 16 charters.

Education Next called Bart Peterson “the Peyton Manning of charter schools.” (This was clearly before the Colts faded and Manning went on the active disabled list.) But Bart Peterson and David Harris’ school reform successes — including The Mind Trust, which was started in 2006 — were all the more remarkable because of the intransigence of the powerful local education establishment. The public school district, while refusing to improve, fought Peterson and Harris every step of the improvement way.

The current IPS Superintendent, Eugene White, carries on that tradition.  ”We are always looking for an easy fix to a complicated problem,” White told the Indianapolis Star after the new Mind Trust plan was unveiled over the weekend.  “They seem to think the report is very provocative. I don’t think it’s provocative at all. We’re doing most of the things in the report.”

This is what I call the possum defense; what perennially failing districts like IPS do when attacked: play dead and hope the reform enemy will go away. It has worked well so far — though not for kids.  As The Mind Trust report points out,

Only 45% of IPS students meet state standards on the math and English language arts portions of ISTEP+ [Indiana’s statewide tests]. The achievement gap between IPS and the state in English language arts is large in 3rd grade — 20 percentage points — and even larger in 8th — 29 percentage points. Only 58% of students graduate on time. Six of the seven most chronically failing schools in the state are in IPS.

In fact, “Indianapolis Public Schools exemplifies the problems of the nation’s worst public school systems,” RiShawn Biddle of Dropout Nation wrote last year:

This Midwestern district suffers all the faults of urban districts that aren’t involved in any reform effort, from bureaucratic incompetence to political intransigence to high levels of teacher absenteeism…. The district remains home to one of the nation’s most-comprehensive concentrations of dropout factories, with all but one of its high schools (a specialized high school) graduating fewer than 60 percent of its students. The graduation rates for black and white males (based on 2006 data) are tied with Detroit’s abysmal district for the worst.

Indeed, the Mind Trust report is provocative precisely because it knows that the possum is still alive and will not move without some definitive prodding. Mayoral control is no silver bullet, but for what ails Indy, it’s time.

And this is why some of the initial responses to The Mind Trust proposal from state legislators, who must approve the mayoral control plan, offer some reason for hope.  House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, told the Star, “it is perhaps an idea whose time has come.” And Rep. Bill Crawford, an Indianapolis Democrat, says, “It’s not as bad and as objectionable as some people anticipate…. It creates an obligation on the part of the political leader of the county. (School performance) becomes a record of his success or failure.”  It is, as Paul Peterson suggests, accountability through choice.

And as Fordham inaugurates the new era of education governance rethinking, The Mind Trust initiative represents the kind of comprehensive systemic change that promises to remake public education; for the better, we hope.

Mayoral control is not new, but it has become a popular way for larger school districts to upend the political patronage mills that too many school boards fall prey to — and usher in a pot-pourri of reform initiatives.

“In theory,” writes Columbia University Teachers College professor Jeffrey Henig, “mayors are better situated than school boards or superintendents to mobilize a broad constituency for educational investment and improvement and to find and develop positive spillovers between schools and the other work of other municipal agencies that host programs that can help families and youth.”

“It makes a difference,” Seymour Fliegel, a 30-year veteran of New York City’s school wars and a former deputy superintendent in East Harlem, told me while I was reporting my Education Next story on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s assumption of control of New York City’s schools, “that the same guy who can command the garbage trucks and police cruisers is talking about education.”

“Schools aren’t under my command,” Detroit Mayor Dave Bing told the Wall Street Journal in 2009, “they are run by a school board that is dominated by teachers unions. One of my goals is to have mayoral control of the school system.” (See Henig)

There are complexities, of course.  And As Rick Hess and Olivia Meeks warned in their recent paper for the Fordham/CAP conference,

Mayoral control and other popular remedies mistakenly focus on the faltering performance of school boards themselves and thereby fail to address the underlying dysfunction of an outdated Progressive approach to schooling.

But The Mind Trust initiative seems to get it, proposing a set of reforms – universal pre-K, shifting budget control to individual schools, giving all parents a choice, recruiting and paying great teachers—that anticipates the Hess and Meeks advice:

Transformative improvement must… begin by rethinking the district monopoly and take advantage of new providers and new technologies in systems organized around function, not geography.”

The Mind Trust’s proposal is indeed a must-read for any education policymaker—or anyone thinking of becoming one.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

A new round of the popular education board game, Poverty Matters, began last week with a New York Times op-ed by Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske, titled, “Class Matters: Why Won’t We Admit It?”  (Interestingly, the essay is really about poverty, not class, and the paper that Ladd wrote on which the essay is based is titled Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence.  See also Kathleen Porter-Magee’s The `Poverty Matters’ Trap from last July’s Flypaper.)

Ladd and Fiske’s essay was one of those broadsides that spreads through the teacher ranks like a brush fire. I received my email copy from one of our district’s veteran teachers, a hard-working, dedicated woman who rarely misses an opportunity to remind me that she and her colleagues would be doing a fine job were it not for unmotivated kids and their irresponsible parents.  And Diane Ravitch weighed in,  calling to mind, in tune with the season, the story of Scrooge and Tiny Tim, offering to “update this tale for today’s school reformers” by calling attention to Ladd and Fiske’s op-ed. (Ravitch says she uses Ladd’sEducation and Poverty paper in her post.)

What I don’t understand in all of this is who exactly is claiming that class (or poverty or parents or kids) doesn’t matter?  Ladd and Fiske spend most of their essay stating the obvious: that socio-economic circumstance matters to education outcomes. The evidence that our policymakers and reformers are in denial of this salient fact?

“No Child Left Behind required all schools to bring all students to high levels of achievement but took no note of the challenges that disadvantaged students face.”

Huh?

NCLB actually forced schools to pay attention to their poor and minority students by demanding disaggregated data; that looks to me like quite the note.  And plenty of schools that I have visited got the message.  But it’s not good enough for Ladd and Fiske, who argue that the law should also have helped schools “address the challenges [poor and minority students] carry with them into the classroom.”

Huh?

What happened to Title I?  What happened to free-and-reduced lunch? What about the dozens of adequacy and equity lawsuits that have redistributed billions of tax dollars to low-wealth schools?  And those are just the heavily subsidized income distribution anti-poverty programs directed at schools.  Outside of schools we have Medicaid, Section 8 housing, WIC (Women, Infants and Children food program), food stamps and a plethora of anti-poverty programs that should prove, if nothing else, how misguided the cure-poverty first folks are.

As Porter-Magee wrote last July,

“Of course, the link between student achievement and socioeconomic status is unmistakable….  But saying we need to fix poverty before we can fix schools is like a doctor saying that he’s going to wait until you get better before he treats you.  Education is the path out of poverty, not the consolation prize offered to children whose families have managed to dig their way out on their own.”

The only denial here is Ladd and Fiske’s: thirty years of “war on poverty” (vis Lyndon Johnson, 1964) and stultifyingly little school improvement to show for it. Several years ago I met a low-income housing developer who told me, “I once believed that cleaning up a neighborhood by building decent housing would improve education; it didn’t.”

Ladd and Fiske’s assertions are even more bizarre given the fact that an increasing number of reformers – not to mention generations of Catholic educators, to cite the best known of the private schools that educate the poor – have proven over and over again that poverty is an educational challenge for schools not a death sentence for their students.

But Ladd and Fiske twist these successes into pretzels of logic:   “If some schools can succeed, the argument goes, then it is reasonable to expect all schools to.”  Who makes that argument?  Reasonable?  It would be reasonable to expect such proven methods to work unless, of course, you’re part of a determined status quo which believes that hundred-page teacher contracts, tenure, single-salary wage schedules, and last-in-first-out labor laws are also reasonable.

As with Ravitch’s “miracle” argument (“the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny,” she asserted in the Times last May), Ladd and Fiske build mighty big straw men.  Bam! Slam! “[C]lose scrutiny of charter school performance has shown that many of the success stories have been limited to particular grades or subjects and may be attributable to substantial outside financing or extraordinarily long working hours on the part of teachers. The evidence does not support the view that the few success stories can be scaled up to address the needs of large populations of disadvantaged students.”

And what is the point?  If it isn’t going to work for everyone, it shouldn’t be tried by anyone?  What exactly is preventing poor public schools from receiving “substantial” financing (many of them, as we know, already do) or hiring teachers who will work hard?

Speaking of the devil (that’s just a joke, friends, no demonizing intended), Randi Weingarten is bringing the American Federation of Teachers version of the anti-poverty campaign to the county where it all began — McDowell County, West Virginia, the first place in the nation to receive food stamps – in what the Washington Post‘s Lyndsey Layton says is “an unusual effort to turn around a floundering school system… by simultaneously tackling the social and economic troubles of McDowell County.”  (Custer’s last stand comes to mind.)

Speaking from the same script as Ladd, Fiske, and Ravitch, Weingarten tells Layton, that “I’ve gotten so angry in the last couple of years when people who are new to our field decide that they alone, just by exhorting, will help ensure that geography does not become destiny for some kids….  A lot of the factors that confront kids — poverty, divorce, health care — are real obstacles. People can pretend to ignore them elsewhere, but no one can ignore those factors in McDowell.”

Pretend to ignore?

No matter how often  serious reformers repeat it – and I have heard it often – the status quo ante brigades that Ravitch and Ladd and Fiske and Weingarten represent so well refuse to hear it: poverty matters, class matters, parents matter, kids matter, and, what these new establishmentarians keep denying, schools matter. No serious reformer that I know of, as Ladd and Fiske assert, “den[ies] a correlation [between poverty and educational achievement].”  In fact, it is these reformers’ very embrace of those challenges that distinguishes them from the new establishmentarians and allowed them to, yes, “beat the odds.”

And even Scrooge got the message eventually – but it wasn’t the message Ravitch thinks is key to the Christmas Carol. The biggest sin of Dickens’ famous anti-hero is his monocular view of the world, his belief that caste and class were indeed so deeply imbedded in a person’s character that charity did not matter. Scrooge was the original determinist cumfatalist: since class matters there’s no point in reaching out. Not until he was visited by the ghosts of determinists past did he see the light:  Tiny Tim was redeemable! And in that redemption Scrooge himself would be saved. The lesson here, I’m afraid, is that schools, like Scrooge, can make a difference in children’s lives. And it is my Christmas hope that teachers and policymakers will be freed from their chains and see how much they can do to improve schools and the educational opportunities of our most needy children.

—Peter Meyer

This post also appeared on Flypaper.

For the last couple of weeks Gingrich has been tossing read meat to the liberal wolves in ways that only the Grinch who stole Christmas can.  He has also suggested that poor kids do janitorial work in school – and earn money doing it.  According to politico.com, the former West Georgia State College history professor told a Kennedy School of Government audience that. It’s worth an extended quote, because Gingrich needs context to make up for the  lightning-bolt phrases he drops in throughout:

This is something that no liberal wants to deal with… Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods, crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy. It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid. You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple model…. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising….  You go out and talk to people, as I do, you go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job between nine and 14 years of age. They all were either selling newspapers, going door to door, they were doing something, they were washing cars….  They all learned how to make money at a very early age… What do we say to poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Don’t do it. Remember all that stuff about don’t get a hamburger flipping job? The worst possible advice you could give to poor children. Get any job that teaches you to show up on Monday. Get any job that teaches you to stay all day even if you are in a fight with your girlfriend. The whole process of making work worthwhile is central.

Not surprisingly, Gingrich’s ideas were attacked as Dickensian. Blow called them “cruel.” Randi Weingarten called them “absurd.”

“Who in their right mind would lay off janitors and replace them with disadvantaged children — who should be in school, and not cleaning schools,” Ms. Weingarten said. “And who would start backtracking on laws designed to halt the exploitation of children?”

Newt’s never been known for soft-and-cuddly and he does make an easy target for bleeding heart liberals – a term that Gingrich’s new front-runner status may bring back to life – as he joins his Darwinian socio-economic observations with a delivery crisp enough to shatter good china.  The problem is, though, that he’s mostly right.

His “21^st Century Learning System” is worth considering. A sampling, from Newt.org:

• Empower parents to pick the right school for their child.  Parents had the right to choose the school that is best for their child, and should never be trapped in a failing school against their will.
• Institute a Pell Grant-style system for Kindergarten through 12th Grade. Per-pupil school district funding should go into each child’s backpack, and follow them to the school their parents wish to attend. Parents who home school their children should receive a tax credit or be allowed to keep the Pell Grant.
• Require transparency and accountability about achievement. Each state must set a rigorous standard that allows every student everywhere to master the skills they will need to be competitive, and develop a process for grading the effectiveness of every school.
• Implement a “no limits” charter system.
• All of the money allocated for student education goes directly to the school.
• The school manages its own staff, whereby it is exempt from laws regarding tenure, and need not unionize.
• The school defines its own curriculum, in line with the state standards and assessments.  Students in charters are not exempt from state assessments.  The schools are not exempt from reporting requirements, nor should they be.
• State law allows the school to “franchise” its model without limitation.  That means they need not apply for a new school every time they can build a new one.  If they have the demand, they must be able to serve it.
• The state has NO CAPS on the number of charter schools that can be approved, and the process for approving charter schools is smooth and efficient.

Oh, yes, he doesn’t suggest killing the federal Department of Education – just “shrink” it and “return power to states and communities. The Department’s only role will be to collect research and data, and help find new and innovative approaches to then be adopted voluntarily at the local level.”

Is it time for education reformers to pay Gingrich some more attention?

–Peter Meyer

Okay, I’m a dying breed. I carried the print version of the Winter 2012 issue around most of the last several days – scribbling in the margins, spilling coffee on the pictures, throwing pages on the passenger seat, breaking the binding back and perching the salt shaker on it at breakfast – I guarantee you this is a  Thanksgiving feast.  Even online! (Full disclosure, I am a contributing editor at the magazine, have a story in the issue (see below), and am biased.)

But I guarantee you, you won’t leave this issue hungry:

Play Ball! This June Kronholz cover story takes us curriculum afficianados to a new playing field. “There’s not a straight line between the crochet club and the Ivy League,” writes Kronholz, “[b]ut a growing body of research says there is a link between afterschool activities and graduating from high school, going to college and becoming a responsible citizen.”

This story sets us on a trajectory of common sense that is much needed in our polarized and partisan education policy world. I hesitate to use the word, but organic comes to mind. The whole child; more reason to move NCLB – and the reform movement – off its parochial ELA and math dime. A must read.

Do We Play Ball with the Unions? Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and here presents a compelling case for changing our approach to education labor and management relations: let’s collaborate, the way the Canadians and the Finns do it.  It’s enticing.

Thus three “social partners” – government, labor, and management – would frame social policy together, as equals.

Unfortunately, with all due respect to our social democratic neighbors to the north and east, that’s not how the world works in a free, heterogenius society, where government must celebrate, accommodate, and channel individuals.  This is one of the more persuasive arguments for collaboration – and the denial of nature! — and should be read.

Unions schmunions. What about the kids? This forum feature is a feast for our education gladiators: Spartacus Jay Greene v. Vercingetorix Richard Kahlenberg.  It is not a contest for the faint of heart.  But it’s worth pointing out that Kahlenberg does a lot of dancing around the central question – do teacher unions really help kids? – while Jay has to admit that “it is very hard to produce rigorous research on the effect of teachers unions on education.”  Bring on the lions.

Studying “teacher moves” This is perhaps the best story in the issue – and that’s because author Michael Goldstein, founder of MATCH Charter School and MATCH Teacher Residency, is such a voice of reason.

Teachers don’t trust research, and understandably so.  There’s a lot of shoddy research that supports fads. Experienced teachers remember that `this year’s method’ directly contradicts the approach from three years ago.

Goldstein is here arguing that the Gates-sponsored project to study “teacher moves” – what a teacher does in a classroom – will provide “a massive uptick in our knowledge of teacher moves” and that such research  might actually be useful to teachers. “Until that [research] exists,” he says, “I’ll see you at the 5^th-grade dance.” Go granny, go granny, go.

Our Best are Mediocre.  This little feature report, from Jay Greene and Josh McGee, should scare the pants off our country’s remaining education system boosters:

Even the most elite suburban school districts often produce results that are mediocre when compaired with those of our international peers.

So much for blaming poor, inner-city blacks for our dismal international test results. (And read the comments on this one.) Even American kids born on third base, conclude Greene and McGee, can’t hit home runs.  Take Beverly Hills, with a median family income of $102,611 and 85.1 percent white: math achievement of its average student puts the district at the 53^rd percentile relative to our industrialized nation students. Take that, you smug middle class parents.  But here’s a chance to see where your district stands compared to the World (at www.globalreportcard.org) .

This problem is reiterated by Sa Bui, Steven Craig, and Scott Imberman in a closely argued research report in the same issue, titled Poor Results for High Achievers. The research suggests that “students who are placed in higher-achieveing groups” don’t do all that well and, in fact, “can suffer psychological harm.”

What the best dressed countries can teach us.  This story by Carlos Astra-Anadon and Paul Peterson recaps the highlights of a unique conference sponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance: “Learning from the Inernational Experience.”  By sampling views of educators from different education success countries – such as Jari Lavonen of Finland and Gwan-Jo Kim of Korea – and different fields – e.g. Susan Patrick of the International Association for K—12 Online Learning and Shantanu Prakash of Educomp Solutions – we get great insight into what works and what doesn’t from those who know.

Chris Cerf of New Jersey and Gerard Robinson of Florida were also there, talking about what is working in America.  It’s a roundtable of some intelligence and might convince you, conclude Lastra-Anadon and Peterson, that American “popular culture shows little appreciation for the educated citizen,” that “a decentralized government arrangement with multiple veto points precludes rapid innovation,” and that “education policitics [in the United States] is marked by antipathy between teachers unions and school reformers.” But there’s more.

Parent Power. This story is called “Not Your Mother’s PTA” – and that is a perfectly apt way of describing the difference between the old-fashioned bake-sale parents and the radicalized mamas and papas of our reform era.  Go Parents!

Desert: Le Whitney Tilson.  I was honored to meet this crusader for education excellence. And I hope this story conveys some of the nuance – and passion — that makes him one of the most insightful and incisive education reform provocateurs of our day.  Why does he care?

I believe very deeply in the promise of this country, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But there is nothing more fundamental about what America stands for than equality of opportunity. That it doesn’t matter who your parents are or what color your skin is or what neighborhood you were born in—every kid in this country should get a fair shot at the American dream. And there’s nothing more important to that than getting a decent education.… The outrage comes from the fact that we have a public education system in this country that systematically delivers a massively inferior education to low-income and minority kids. The kids that most need a good education, to escape the disadvantages of the life they were born into, are systematically given a lousy education. That violates every sense of fairness, every belief I have about this country and thus the outrage.

Bon appétit. And be thankful.

-Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

Reading Thomas Friedman in yesterday’s New York Times, I couldn’t help but think of the Shel Silverstein classic, “Clarence Lee from Tennessee,” a 1993 poem suggesting that kids could trade in their parents for new ones.

Clarence Lee from Tennessee
Loved the commercials he saw on TV.
He watched with wide believing eyes
And bought everything they advertised

I used to read this to the kids whom I tutored in reading and also brought it with me to classrooms, to share with whole groups of students.  The poem introduced these youngsters to narrative rhyme — and  the ubiquity and charms of advertising:

Powder for his doggie’s fleas,
Toothpaste for his cavities,
Stylish jeans that fit much tighter.
Bleach to make his white things whiter
Spray to make his hair look wetter
Cream to make his skin feel better

It was a set-up, of course, to the punchline: parents were just like toothpaste: trade ‘em in for better ones. And, of course, it was funny because the kids Silverstein addressed actually loved their parents, despite the fact that they made them do things they didn’t want to do, such as go to school, read, do homework, take the garbage out.

But I eventually stopped reading the poem in my school, as I realized that its punch line — that the kids could trade their parents in for “’A brand-new Maw, a better Paw!” —  didn’t work for kids who really did have bad parents and insufferable homelifes.  For these kids It wasn’t funny.

New, improved in every way –
Hurry, order yours today!

If only.

It was not funny for kids whose parents weren’t there, who beat them up, smoked dope, disappeared for days – these kids really did need new parents. But it’s a complicated relationship.  Once while reporting a story for Life magazine many years ago (“Children of Poverty”), I recall walking down a residential street in an Ohio town, just behind a man and a young child. It was a Norman Rockwell moment until, out of the blue, the man suddenly slapped the child down.  I was stunned. And I watched in utter horror – and confusion – as the little boy got back up and rushed the man and clung to his leg, crying. “Daddy! Daddy!”

Anyone who has lived for more than 30 seconds understands the importance of parents – and the complicated relationship between them and their children.   It’s not surprising that the PISA study that Friedman cites (from our friends at the Organziation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) who develop the international test of 15-year-olds) concludes that the kids “whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.”

But it’s also not surprising that schools can’t remake parents — a fact that Friedman doesn’t mention.

What does a teacher – or a school – do in the face of the reality that parents make a difference?  The answer: teach the kids.  Schools can’t fix parents. They can — and should — educate (fix) kids.

The problem, as I pointed out last week, is that “the parent improvement movement is destined to become another responsibility for a system already freighted with the weight of the world – and the World Wide Web!” Parent improvement initiatives are not – and should not be – respsonsibilities of the schools.  Schools need to focus on teaching children what they do not know.  Schools need to do what schools can do – before saddling themselves with responsibilities that they can’t do; e.g. fixing parents.

Having said this, I encourage all parents – and teachers – to read Friedman and the PISA report. Be a good parent; read to your child. Be a good teacher, teach your student.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appeared on Flypaper.

It’s sunset over Manhattan, and from the 35th floor of a Park Avenue skyscraper the vista is pure gold. The soaring buildings are bathed in the deep rich colors of, well, money. As visitors take their seats in the sedately cavernous room, a slim, middle-aged man is pacing in front of a large projector screen with a picture of a black child and the words, “A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine School Reform.” (www.arightdenied.org)

If it is a jarring juxtaposition, it is meant to be. The slim man in the gray suit is there, at a meeting of the New York chapter of the Young Presidents’ Organization, to talk about something that many of these financiers and business people don’t often talk about because they can afford not to: fixing public schools.

“I’m Whitney Tilson,” he says, as if the 60-plus individuals in the standing-room-only meeting didn’t know. The 46-year-old hedge-fund manager (he has a Harvard MBA and is the founder and managing partner of T2 Partners LLC and the Tilson Mutual Funds) writes a regular column on value investing for Kiplinger’s, is a CNBC contributor, and in 2007 was named one of 20 “Rising Stars” by Institutional Investor. In his “free time” (his words), he has become one of the education-reform world’s most prolific gadflies, creator of an infamous and widely read e-mail shout-out about education reform. Tilson was also a cofounder of Democrats for Education Reform, is a board member of KIPP NYC, and is friend and champion of education reform glitterati from Joel Klein to Wendy Kopp.

With very little fanfare, and none of that introduction, Tilson launches into a PowerPoint presentation that might best be described as bringing rich people to the Jesus of school reform. It is at times riveting, at times scary. “Spending for education has skyrocketed,” he says, throwing a chart on the screen with lines running at decidedly different trajectories, “driven mainly by a tripling of the number of teachers.” But despite all this money, he tells his audience, our various performance indicators—he quickly explains NAEP, ACT, SAT—are all flat.

“We’ve stalled,” Tilson says. “Teacher quality has been falling rapidly. Our school systems are dysfunctional.” The “scary part,” Tilson tells them, is that “the longer kids stay in school the farther behind they fall.” It’s “terrifying,” he says. “Game over by age 10.” The audience is with him, transfixed, if unnerved, by one devastating fact after another. “We have spent trillions of dollars and we have almost nothing to show for it,” says Tilson, who moves through the show quickly, with a practiced gait. “All of this dysfunction comes with enormous costs and horrible consequences,” he says, “Over $260,000 is lost for each high school dropout.” These are numbers that this crowd gets.

All the News…

It is fascinating to see Tilson in action. His soft-spoken manner and easy smile bear little resemblance to the passion of his words, especially his e-mail blasts. “Hedge Fund Guy Single-Handedly E-Mails Obama to Victory” was a headline on Alexander Russo’s blog in September of 2008. “Reformy Cheerleader Sends Massive Emails” wrote Russo last year. Tilson’s e-mails, which began as something he sent to a few friends, now arrive in some 4,000 digital mailboxes two or three times a week, with 8 to 12 education-reform news items each. He is famous for his breathless “STOP THE PRESSES!!!” to announce good news, which means anything good about charter schools, vouchers, teacher evaluations, reform superintendents, mayors, senators, or presidents—as in “Mathematica just released the most comprehensive and rigorous study of KIPP ever…and the results are STUNNING!” (June 25, 2010). Or “GRADING THE TEACHERS: Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids?” (August 18, 2010). They get your attention, but there’s also plenty of substance behind these headlines. Tilson is as much a shrewd news aggregator as he is an opinionator. If the New York Times runs an education story, he will tell you about it, but not without also telling you exactly what he thinks about it. Tilson is education reform’s gonzo journalist; “Kooks” is a favorite term. As are “hatchet job” and “insane” (as in “what’s best for kids always takes a back seat to bureaucratic rules/imperatives, no matter how insane” [October 16, 2009]). Randi Weingarten is a preferred target (“Kudos to the Washington Post for holding Randi’s feet to the fire,” [February 3, 2010]), as is Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond. But no one has earned as much consistent enmity from Tilson as Diane Ravitch, to whom he has devoted a separate section on his A Right Denied web page called “Rebutting Ravitch.”

Maniac or Messiah?

“I’m often asked why I spend so much time on this issue,” says Tilson, in a recent post, writing about his education reform obsession. And he answers, “certainly not because I have any direct self-interest—no…I’m not profiting from my involvement in charter schools (in fact, I shudder to think of how much it’s cost me), and I have little personal experience with the public school system because I’m doubly lucky: my parents saw that I wasn’t being challenged in public schools, sacrificed (they’re teachers/education administrators), and my last year in public school was 6th grade; and now, with my own children, I’m one of the lucky few who can afford to buy my children’s way out of the NYC public system [in] which, despite Mayor Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Klein’s herculean efforts, there are probably fewer than two dozen schools (out of nearly 1,500) to which I’d send my kids.”

When I speak with Tilson, in person, I note that he talks almost as fast as he seems to write, though with fewer exclamation points. He is, after all, a Harvard man, though he should have been a Yalie. In fact, Tilson was born in the New Haven hospital where his father and grandfather were born, and would have been fourth-generation Yale had he not gone crimson. “Broke my grandfather’s heart,” he says.

But the crusading education gene is not hard to detect, as Tilson’s father, Thomas, took two years off after his junior year at Yale and joined the Peace Corps, where he met, at training camp in Hawaii, a graduate from the University of Washington. “My dad, Thomas, was 19, and my mom, Susan, was 20,” he says. “They fell in love and got engaged within three weeks of meeting each other…. [They] married in the Philippines, neither family having met the other.”

Tilson’s dad went on to graduate from Yale, then got his PhD in international education from Stanford, specializing in what were then called third world countries. His mother was a teacher until the kids arrived, Whitney and a younger sister. They lived in Africa, Central America, and various American towns until settling in Northfield, Massachusetts, where Thomas was academic dean at the prestigious and private Northfield Mount Hermon School, and where his son and daughter would get their world-class educations. (Tilson’s parents are now 69 and 70 and living in Kenya, where Thomas still consults on education.)

Whitney didn’t follow his father to Yale or into education; he graduated from Harvard with a degree in government, then got his MBA from Harvard Business School. But the times they were a-changing, and during his undergraduate days at Harvard, Tilson met a Princeton student named Wendy Kopp, who was then running an organization called the Foundation for Student Communication. Kopp, recalls Tilson, “organized conferences for Fortune 500 company CEOs to get together for a few days and talk with college kids from around the country.” When he later heard that Kopp was starting a nonprofit to bring Ivy League students into inner-city schools as teachers, he immediately volunteered to help. “Ordinarily, I would have said, ‘some pie-in-the sky, Birkenstock, fuzzy idea,’” Tilson recalls. “But I saw what Wendy did with those CEOs and knew that if there was one graduating student in the country who could pull this off it was Wendy.”

He also recognized the Peace Corps provenance in Kopp’s Teach For America (TFA) idea. “They’re very analogous,” he recalls. “A two-year commitment after college to try to make a difference in the world.”

Tilson spent several months in New York helping Kopp launch TFA, in 1989 and 1990. (“I take no credit for what TFA has become,” he says, “but I take full credit for identifying a great idea and a great entrepreneur.”) The rest is history, of course, and Tilson was there as TFA celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year.

Factors, Not Excuses

So what does motivate Tilson? “OUTRAGE!” he writes. “Almost every day, I read and hear stories that shock and infuriate me.” Interestingly, the “OUTRAGE” of his writings is not apparent when you meet Tilson. The passion is, however. He believes that “there is still no school district in America that is doing an adequate job of educating low-income children.” That doesn’t mean he thinks it’s easy to do so. Schools face “extraordinary difficulty.” But he believes that “the great majority of these kids, the vast majority of these kids, can be put on a different trajectory, so they have a really good shot in life, they can go to a four-year college and with that you have a pretty good chance in life.”

And why does he care? “I believe very deeply in the promise of this country,” he explains, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But there is nothing more fundamental about what America stands for than equality of opportunity. That it doesn’t matter who your parents are or what color your skin is or what neighborhood you were born in—every kid in this country should get a fair shot at the American dream. And there’s nothing more important to that than getting a decent education.… The outrage comes from the fact that we have a public education system in this country that systematically delivers a massively inferior education to low-income and minority kids. The kids that most need a good education, to escape the disadvantages of the life they were born into, are systematically given a lousy education. That violates every sense of fairness, every belief I have about this country and thus the outrage.”

He acknowledges “the massive deficits kids face outside the schools” and says, “I’m not a ‘It’s all the teacher unions fault’ guy. I’m very cognizant of how difficult it is to educate these children who come from poverty, single-parent households, little or no support from home.” But he doesn’t buy the argument that you can’t fix schools until you get rid of poverty.

“It’s exactly the opposite,” he says defiantly. “You can’t cure poverty until you have good schools.”

And do you think you can have good schools for poor kids?

“I don’t think, I know,” he says, “with 100 percent certainty, because I’ve been to dozens, if not hundreds, of such schools that are successfully educating these kids to a very high level. The most disadvantaged kids. I’m not saying it’s easy. It is incredibly difficult, but there’s no question that it’s absolutely possible. And it’s possible at scale, not just one classroom.”

That, Tilson admits, is not something he thought possible 15 years ago. And he’s bullish about the future.

Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life Magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next.

It’s hard to tell whether Joe Nocera’s op-ed essay in the New York Times last week, “Teaching With The Enemy,” is wonderfully nuanced or just silly.  That’s surely what some education observers might wonder about the notion that Randi Weingarten, former head of New York City’s teacher union and current head of the American Federation of Teachers, should be chancellor of New York City schools.*  In fact, Nocera notes that he himself “nearly fell out of my chair” when Steven Brill told him that Weingarten, who is “the enemy” of Brill’s new book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, threw him a book party.

This, of course, is vintage Weingarten, described by Nocera as “whip-smart” and “politically savvy.”  But the larger question is what happened to Brill, founder of American Lawyer and Court TV and a formidable presence in the New York media scene, on the way to the education repair shop?

Himself whip-smart and politically savvy, Brill made instant news when he took on the city’s teachers union in a 2009 New Yorker story about the city’s notorious “rubber rooms,” where bad teachers went to soak up full salaries while doing nothing.  In that story Brill described Weingarten as such a ferocious defender of teachers that she “would protect a dead body in the classroom.”  That was meant to suggest that teacher unions weren’t so good for our kids.

And indeed, in the ensuing book’s first 420 pages, as Nocera colleague Michael Winerip wrote of Class Warfare last August, Brill “bashes the union and its president, Randi Weingarten, is dismissive of veteran teachers and extols charters.”

So why does Brill “suddenly veer… in a different direction” at the end, as Nocera asks.  Brill gives a decidedly Diane Ravitch-like reply: “It’s called reporting,” he tells Nocera.  Of course, Ravitch changed her mind about reform over the course of several years — and after writing many books that helped define the historical record of shame that has helped give the reform movement its shape and energy. Brill managed the 180-degree turn in one book.**

What’s going on here?

On the silly side, one could argue that teacher unions have done more (teachers, please note the conditional: one could argue) to grease the wheels of American education decline than any other single organization and so it wouldn’t make much sense to make one of its most effective leaders a school chancellor, even under a  “keep your enemies closer” rubric.  In his book Brill quotes Mayor Michael Bloomberg saying, “It’s a really stupid idea… Never in a million years.” (The way things have been going for Bloomberg lately, the end may be nearer than he thinks.)

On the nuanced side, Brill attributes his change of heart to several people:

• Jessica Reid, a charter school assistant principal who “burned out before Mr. Brill’s eyes,” says Winerip, and quit her job;
• Dave Levin, co-founder of KIPP, who told Brill that there aren’t enough good teachers, with or without unions, to do what the good charters do;
• Randi Weingarten, who “really cares about this stuff” (Brill to Winerip).

All of this means that, as Nocera sees it,

[Y]ou simply cannot fix America’s schools by `scaling’ charter schools. It won’t work. Charters schools offer proof of concept that great teaching is a huge difference-maker, but charters can only absorb a tiny fraction of the nation’s 50 million public school children. Real reform has to go beyond beyond charters – and it has to include the unions. That’s what Brill figured out.”

In fact, most good reformers have figured that out too.  But one need not accuse reformers of demonizing Weingarten and her union, as Nocera says they do, in order to understand the situation.***

There is no doubt of Weingarten’s savvy nor is there any question that the unions’ don’t have a tight grip on our education system.  But there are some key educational practices that need to be addressed and that require a great deal of change  on the part of the education establishment, which includes Weingarten and her unions.  (For a fuller picture of Weingarten and a good account of the difference between political savvy and fixing our schools for kids, I suggest RiShawn Biddle’s profile in the American Spectator.)

The anti-reform movement has picked up some steam of late because it has successfully worked these false dichotomies –  e.g. because unions control public schools, our school children need them – into a rallying cry.  As a political slogan, it may work.*  Unfortunately, as a governance model, it still leaves a great deal to be desired. And we do have plenty of “proof of concept” on that one.

As to the question of scale, that too is a trick of rhetoric in this particular debate, relying on the age-old cum hoc ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this) fallacy to win rhetorical points: because we haven’t scaled up, we can’t scale up. So we shouldn’t even try to scale up?  Sure, we can’t fire all the teachers who are members of unions and sure we can’t run a school system that burns people out.  But just because we can’t turn the Titanic around on a dime, doesn’t mean we should embrace icebergs.  It surely doesn’t mean that union power which hobbles a school’s ability to educate children – with regressive tenure and seniority rules, for example – doesn’t need to be checked. And it surely doesn’t mean that teachers can’t be held accountable for student performance.

To paraphrase E.D. Hirsch, the problem with our education system is not bad people but bad ideas.  I probably wouldn’t go that far (regarding the bad people!), but as a general proposition it should remind us that “car[ing] about this stuff” is a necessary but not sufficient qualification for New York City schools chancellor.

–Peter Meyer

——————————-

*Please see Mike’s just posted post on “disingenuous teachers unions.”

**In her resolutely change-of-heart book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Ravitch writes, “I have a right to change my mind.”  But her explanation of the change presages Brill’s,that “my views changed as I saw how these ideas [she lists “testing, accountability, choice, and markets”] were working out in reality.”  And she quotes John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.”

***Can we stop with the “demonizing”?  Some very smart and dedicated reformers have taken a great deal of unearned demonization from the warm-and-fuzzy teacher union folks – and columnists who love the precision of the word.

This post also appeared on Flypaper

I know this may sound heretical, since anyone who has spent more than a minute in an inner city school or neighborhood (see my Ed Next story on two Chicago charters) knows the intensity of the social dysfunction – and no school is immune to its effects. But parenting is not a problem that educators are equipped to handle – they have a hard enough time agreeing on curriculum.  I think of a sixth-grade teacher in our small district who, on meet-the teacher-night, passed out no “parent contracts” and no  “student contracts” – both were then the rage — and gave no lectures about student behavior and the role of the parent.  He described what he was going to teach that year, what books the kids would be reading and then said to the assembled parents, “You don’t have to worry about a thing; I’ll take care of your kids.” And he did.  He had the same kids from the same bad families that every other teacher had, but he didn’t complain about them – and his classroom was quiet and orderly.  And because of that, his students will be better parents.

None of this is to say that parents don’t make a difference in a student’s life. Or that schools should pretend that it doesn’t make a difference.  It is to say that schools and parents have different responsibilities – and we need to appreciate the differences.

My own rule of thumb, as a member of a school board, is a variation on the Kati Haycock “no excuses” motto: “We can talk about parents after we get the buses to run on time.”  We can tell parents what to do after the school’s  drinking fountains are fixed and the potholes in the school driveway are plugged. We can teach parenting classes after we get our teachers to show up on time and our aides to stop yelling at children. We should instruct parents about being better parents after we start returning their phone calls – and after school board members stop bullying one another.  We can tell parents what to read to their kids after we get a written, taught, and tested curriculum.

In other words, once schools are doing what they should be doing, then they can start telling parents what they should do.  This sounds harsh and it doesn’t mean that schools shouldn’t encourage parent participation, but when you’ve seen school dysfunction up close and personal, you know you can’t afford to allow the “bad parent” problem into your school!  It will be used as a crutch or an excuse — or worse.

Sure, parents have problems; one of them is bad schools.

The irony here, with all due respect to the fine work of our sociologists who tell us how doomed kids from bad backgrounds and uneducated parents are, is that we have somehow turned public schools inside out. What used to be considered “the engine of social mobility” (see Fareed Zakaria in the new Time magazine), the incubator of productive and successful citizens (and parents), the school is now treated as some kind of barometer of caste and class.  Instead of a place to liberate one from ones background, to become better (at parenting and citizenship), school has become a mirror for reflecting that background back on students. We slice and dice kids to know their every “learning style” proclivity, dooming them to a suffocating stasis. As Joseph Campbell has said, “the first purpose of mythology is to pitch you outside of yourself.”  The history is obviously more nuanced than this, but as I read it, we created public schools in large part to get kids away from bad homes and bad parents and onerous social and economic circumstance and stigma. It seemed to work pretty well until about 50 years ago.  Now, we seem unable to teach kids unless their parents are educated saints and poverty is solved.

Mike isn’t arguing for any particular approach to the parent problem, but it is a slippery slope, especially for school reformers, to turn the discussion to one of parenting (or poverty) precisely because, as Kati Haycock would suggest, it lets schools off the hook.  In fact, the focus on parents and parenting lets entire communities off the hook.  In a district like mine, with high poverty and minority representation in the schools and terrible academic outcomes, it is an unfortunate given among those middle class people who have succeeded in school (or think they have) that the only reason that the district has such lousy test scores and graduation rates is “the parents.” Part of the point I was trying to make the other day, with my “More money to the parents” post, was that plenty of these parents, including poor parents, are a lot smarter than we – the system – gives them credit for and that if they had more choice (or the money to exercise those preferences) and fewer structural and institutional impediments to overcome, you’d see big changes in some of our slackard schools.  Even bad parents are not so dumb. (See Parent Revolution and Bruno Manno’s new Ed Next story, Not Your Mother’s PTA)

At another level, my worry is that the parent improvement movement is destined to become another responsibility for a system already freighted with the weight of the world – and the World Wide Web!  If you add up the time already spent on behavioral modification curricula and their spin-offs — anti-bullying, anti-drugs, anti-gangs, anti-teen-pregnancy, character, self-esteem, individualized education plans – is it any wonder that our kids are getting the socks beat off them in international academic competitions?  Academics?  What’s that?  Who’s got time for the parts of speech or the periodic table when you’re busy writing or reading poetry about your terrible life in the projects?

The good news is that part of the answer to the parenting problem is in Mike’s essay, when he suggests that much of what “healthy parenting” is about is “commitment, discipline, and practice.”  These are fairly fundamental character traits – and they can be taught.  It is the “grit” factor about which Paul Tough wrote a couple of months ago in the New York Times Magazine, “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?”  You need not go as far as a formal curriculum on character (in fact, I’m not a big fan), but there are plenty of ways of teaching grit in regular classes.  In other words, character traits like commitment, discipline, and practice can be taught (and practiced) while teaching history, math, geography, art, acting, science, and, yes, “reading” (in quotes because the subject has been so devalued in the last couple of decades).

Thus, the solution to bad parenting is fairly straightforward: teach kids to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent while they are learning the times tables, memorizing the Declaration of Independence, handing in homework, and paying attention in science class.  Oh, yes, and reading about the great philosophers, soldiers, writers, stoics, saints, despots, monks and martyrs who knew something of these traits – more, perhaps than your local mayor or teacher or even your inner self.  And, also, by sitting up straight when reading these folks, one might learn something of the discipline necessary to be a good parent.

–Peter Meyer

According to last February’s Bloomberg news report on List’s idea, it’s “one of the largest field experiments ever conducted in economics.”  List  – with the help of fellow economists Roland Fryer of Harvard and Steven Levitt, also of the UC — is following more than 600 students in several Chicago schools to “find out whether investing in teachers or, alternatively, in parents, leads to more gains in kids’ educational performance.” (See also here.) The experiment includes a “parenting academy” and scholarships worth up to $7,000 a year.  (A control group of 300 kids receive nothing.)  Local families with kids 3 to 5 years old were encouraged to enter a lottery and were randomly sorted into three groups.

Whether the List research will help in Newark, I’m not sure, but according to the Bloomberg report, “List says that his experiments will give policy makers, executives and investors much greater certainty about why students, donors and shoppers make the decisions they do” and “may show that the U.S. doesn’t spend enough on helping parents.”

“We have too many eggs in the kid basket,” List, himself a father of five, tells Bloomberg. “We need to spend much more time and many more resources on helping parents.”

There is, of course, a lot of running room in the “helping parents” field – a field littered with yellow flag penalty markers stretching back to the Great Society and the War on Poverty. (See just about anything Rick Hess has written or read his guest bloggers Melissa Junge and Sheara Krvaric last week: “Implementation matters.” Or see Chris Tessone’s post on a Fryer study of merit pay. Or Fryer’s study on Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem experiment: schools matter more than social services.)

As an education governance question, most of the debate has centered around “parent involvement,” a tired phrase that has been all too frequently abused by schools not wanting to shoulder responsibility for educating children: if we just had better parents.  In fact, as David Matthews of the Kettering Foundation has chronicled (Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming our Demcracy), educators don’t much like parents (or are afraid of them) and there has been little real effort to engage them in the educational improvement effort.  Journalist Katherine Boo (in a 1992 Washington Monthly piece) described the education reform movement of the 70s and 80s as something that “didn’t normally involve parents, let alone community members.” She said it was made up of people “paying lip service to the notion of citizen participation” while working “doggedly to keep the masses from messing with their plans.” (See Checker’s National Affairs essay “Beyond the School District” for a broader perspective on the dangers of professionalization.)

We are seeing hopeful signs from the new parent empowerment efforts of people like Ben Austin of “parent trigger” fame. And the List study should go a long way toward adding some research data to the parent question within a new and more hopeful system of choice.  In fact, educators, including their policymaking second-cousins, are living in quite  interesting times in large part because the walls of the school house doors are coming down.  And this is one reason Fordham is sponsoring a day-long event on School Governance in the 21^st Century on December 1.  Sign up today.

–Peter Meyer

*Believe it or not, I wrote this post, including the headline, before I saw Mike’s We have a parenting problem, not a poverty problem.

This post also appears on Flypaper.

Reading  the New York Times update on the progress of the $100 million Mark “Facebook” Zuckerberg donation to the Newark public schools this morning, I couldn’t help but think of the time our superintendent convened a meeting of parents to announce a $20,000 grant for a “Parent University” project.  Wow!  It might as well have been $100 million.  There were quite a few ooohs and awwws around the table.  And, of course, many congratulations to our leader for bringing home some bacon.  But the question was – as it is for Gregory Taylor, the president and chief executive of the Zuckerberg Foundation for Newark’s Future – How do we spend the money?  (Note to Jay Greene:  Close your eyes. This is not pretty.)

I can’t recall all the suggestions for our 20k Parent University grant money, but I do remember raising my own Milton Friedman hand and suggesting that we give the bucks to parents, in $100 and $500 scholarship grants.  They could use the money, I suggested, to buy books or computers or even hiring tutors and babysitters.  I did some quick math and figured that the $20,000, handed out this way, could help dozens of parents.

“Can’t do that,” said the super.  “The grant won’t allow us to just hand out money.”

What the grant did allow – and this is where the money finally went – was to pay for a community “play day” on the football field. Games, brochures, games, and brochures – and hot dogs. A couple hundred people came, played, ate hot dogs, and … Well, I have no idea what happened after that.  But I know that local tent-installers, food vendors, clowns, and the folks who do those blow-up bounce-around gyms were all happy.   And the money was gone.  Yes! Parent University!

Ah, philanthropy!

I recall another time, when a friend from the nearby community college called to say he had a million dollar “mentoring grant” and wanted me to help gather up parent mentors for the program.  “Neat,” I said, “Finally, the poor parents can get paid for their work.”

“No, no,” he countered.  “The parents have to be volunteers.”

I didn’t have to ask where the million bucks was going.

So, Mr. Gregory Taylor, with your $382,000 salary, what will you do with $200 million?  (The city of Newark is supposed to match Zuckerberg’s $100 million dollar for dollar and so far has gathered $48 million, according to the Times.) Pay a few people lots of money?  We know that the foundation has already given out $7 million (what could I do with that money!)  to 20 grantees to help start some schools, expand Teach for America, and establish a parent call center. And we know that you are going to present to your board suggestions for spending more money on, according to the Times, five “broad priorities: early childhood education, teaching quality/principal leadership, school options, community engagement and out-of-school youth.”

Okay. But my hand is still raised: Why can’t we just give it to the parents?  Pass it out, Robin Hood-style.  The district has 40,000 students – even if we give $100 million to the smart administrators, the other $100 million can be given to 40,000 students and is….. well, $2,500 per student.  Can you imagine what a parent could do with that money to help his or her child get better educated?  Buy a complete set of The History of US. Or What Every First- (Second, Third, etc.) Grader Should Know? The Illiad? The Odyssey? A math tutor – two math tutors!  A new computer!  Two new computers! And if only the poor kids – about 25,000 in Newark are free and reduced lunch – got these Zuckerberg scholarships, that would be almost $5,000 per student.  That’s a year in a good Catholic school. Not bad.

I like Mr. Taylor’s motto: “the urgency we have matches the urgency people have for their kids.”  But if that’s the case, get the parents the money. Pronto.  If we respect the urgency of their educational aspirations, let’s respect the wisdom of their educational choices. Let’s give them choices – the kinds of choices that their well-heeled suburban brethren have: the choices that money will buy.  (There are twelve charter schools in Newark, and theArchdiocese of Newark has 84 elementary schools and 32 high schools. A school voucher law for New Jersey is still in the works; it would provide even more choice.)

As I suggested in my Follow the Money post in August, “our philanthropist reformers” may just be “responding to what has been the outsized influence over the system exercised by private teacher unions, textbook and testing companies, and a web of high-powered lobbyists representing all manner of industry associations.” But the real reformers will do everything they can to effect a paradigm shift: from the oligopoly of top-down decision-making to the boot-strap choices made by thousands of concerned individual parents.

–Peter Meyer

I have been on the road for much of the last couple of weeks, much of that time spent visiting “poor” schools doing well.  You will, I hope, see the results of my road trip fact-finding in future Fordham publications, but for now I can confidently report that, despite economic challenges (which are real), good things are happening in the provinces (i.e. anywhere not on Capitol Hill or Maryland Avenue).  Whatever happens with ESEA reauthorization, I am convinced that the genie of education excellence is out of the bottle; administrators, teachers, aides, security guards – they are getting with the program.

In the meantime, catching up on my reading, I call your attention to a few recent stories worth pondering.

Rupert gets it right, sorta.  In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, called “The Steve Jobs Model for Education Reform,”** Rupert Murdoch leaps into the deep end of the argument over schools by proposing  that we’re not making adequate use of technology.  This is sensible. But one wishes that the media-mogul-turned-educator would dive a little deeper (or call Joel).  Murdoch says,

Just as the iPod compelled the music industry to accommodate its customers, we can use technology to force the education system to meet the needs of the individual student.

What exactly are “the needs” of a student? And who determines them?  Those questions should be answered before assuming that the “[t]he top-down, one-size-fits-all approach” is bad, as Murdoch suggests.  What exactly do we mean by “one-size-fits-all”?

Shouldn’t adults decide what kids should know?  Shouldn’t all our children know how to read and write, know how to find France on a map, know the difference between the Pythagorean theorem and the Periodic table?  Who decides?

We can agree that there has been a “colossal failure” to educate our children and that “the education industry bears a good part of the blame.”  But is it because we have already succumbed to the anarchy of the “child-centered” classroom?  We need to do a lot more reflecting about what exactly the “tired wares” of the status quo really are.  Is a textbook really “outdated the moment it is printed”?

As Ed Kaitz, Ph.D., of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, wrote in his letter to the editor about Mr. Murdoch’s comment:

It might be news to Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, Adam Smith and others on my syllabus that their writings have been outdated the moment they were printed.

***

Occupy the Classroom That was the headline above Nick Kristof’s brilliant column about the importance of early childhood education.  Indeed, while expressing sympathy for the wishes of the Occupy Whatever movement, Kristof says that “the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.”

I like Kristof, and not just because he grew up on an Oregon sheep and cherry farm not far from where I was growing up on a sheep and filbert farm.  He has reported extensively from depressed corners of the globe and has good truth-seeking antenna (farmers have to be astute readers of reality).  When he says that there is a “bigger source of structural inequity” in our economic system than billionaire tax breaks, we need to listen. And the bigger problem, Kristof says, is that “many young people never get the skills to compete. They’re just left behind.”

For this essay Kristof touches bases with Kathleen McCarney, dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education; David Deming, also at Harvard; and James Heckman at the University of Chicago.  “One common thread,” says Kristof, “whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty.  Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator.”

I continue to believe, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, that poverty, though a real challenge, has been used as a convenient excuse by too many educators; an excuse not to improve, not to seek changes in school organization and instructional techniques, not to raise expectations.  I have spent a lot of time in schools with poor kids – schools that are succeeding – and know that success is not some miracle, nor is it something derived from a Herculean effort. Hard work, yes. Commitment, yes. Focus, yes and yes.

Gap closers, unite: Occupy the classroom.

***

Equal opportunity in choosing a school A recent Wall Street Journal editorial had it right in criticizing civil rights groups like the NAACP for not jumping on the educational choice bandwagon since, as the Journal says, “reform’s main beneficiaries are poor and minority students in places like Harlem and New Orleans.”

The editorial cites a new study by the California Charter Schools Association which studied the state’s Academic Performance Index (API), which runs on a scale from 200 to 1000, and found that, according to the Journal,

[T]he average black charter student outscored the average black traditional school student by an average of 18 points over the last four years of publicly available data. In reform hubs like Los Angeles, the charter advantage was 22 points, in Sacramento 48 points, in Oakland 51 and in San Francisco 150. In San Diego, the other major urban center, traditional schools outscored charters by an average of eight points.

The irony here is that the education status quo that some of these civil rights groups support has not been good to African American adults either.  According to Arne Duncan, more than 35 percent of our public school students are black or Hispanic, less than 15 percent of teachers are black or Hispanic. “It is not good for any of our country’s children that only one in 50 teachers is a black man.” (See here.)

Concludes the Journal:

The education achievement gap remains enormous—even in charter schools, black kids in California are almost 150 API points behind their white peers. But the gap won’t get any narrower as long as civil-rights leaders oppose the reforms that are doing the most to bridge it.

***

A Tocquevillian education.  Finally, it was a happy moment to see Bill Evers recall the insights of that famous 19^th century French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville in warning of federal intrusion in educational affairs.  Writes Evers:

One of Tocqueville’s major insights was that Americans have benefited from popular participation in the large number of churches, charities, clubs, and voluntary associations in our country, as well as in state and local governments, which stand between the individual and the national government in Washington, D.C.

It is important to remember that the power of Tocqueville comes from the acuity of his observations.  He was first and foremost a reporter – and a good one.  And the genius of that reporting is proved by the accuracy of the conclusions he forms – one reason that his Democracy in America has withstood the test of time: not as historical artifact but as a valuable roadmap for today’s governance travelers. He got to the heart of the thing.

Evers has written a fine essay.  And its most important insight is in suggesting how far we have strayed from the days of the “school committee” which built and ran local schools to today’s Titanic bureaucracies.

Some people still have a romantic, out-dated image of school districts and local boards. Today, they are not the school committees that Tocqueville saw, but rather, to a large degree, creatures of the Progressive Era. If we want to change that and re-invigorate school boards, we will have to restore avenues for popular participation of the sort Tocqueville sought. For example, Indiana recently put school elections in November, when more people vote. Another new promising avenue for popular participation is Parent Trigger, whereby parents can petition to turn a regular public school into a charter school.”

It really is worth considering a trip back to the future.

–Peter Meyer

**The Jobs model, according to Murdoch, is derived from the famous 1984 Super Bowl ad for the Mac in which a woman throws a hammer through the television screen shouting, “We shall prevail.” “If you ask me,” says Murdoch, that’s “what we need to do in education.”

This post also appears on Flypaper

I was prepared for a rant against all things reform when I started reading the New York Times Q & A interview with Maria Velez-Clarke, the principal of the Children’s Workshop School in Manhattan’s East Village, about the school’s C-grade from the City.  The school is “one of several small schools,” said the Times intro, “started in the 1990s by people who had worked at the widely praised Central Park East School.”

Central Park East?  The school started by Deborah Meier, current scourge of standardized tests, charters, accountability, and just about everything associated with Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein, who initiatiated the school report cards program?  (See the Bridging Differences blog Meier shares with Diane Ravitch and this wonderful 1994 profile of Meier and her hugely successful Central Park East experiment written by veteran NYC educator Sy Fliegal.)  Children’s Workshop offers ballet and yoga, for heaven’s sake!

Instead of a progressive principal complaining about Gotham’s new accountability system squishing her student’s creative impulses, however, we hear an 18-year veteran school leader who was shocked by the C grade the school received in 2010 and determined to do something about it:

I shared it with absolutely no one because it was so devastating to me. I took it home. I sat with my husband and I said, “My God, do you know what this is going to do to morale?” And he looked at me and he said, “O.K., you have the weekend: have a pity party and then move on.”

Velez-Clark actually went to the Transit Museum and bought “C” buttons (for the C train), brought them to school, sat down with her staff and said, “O.K., now what do we have to do here in order to get off the C train and get on the B train?”

She then took her staff on a weekend retreat, where they reviewed every child’s test scores.  And what is most interesting about the school’s response is that Velez-Clark seems unafraid to admit that she has learned something that may be good for her students.

When she and her teachers began to dig into the test scores, for instance, they discovered

….a correlation between attendance and a child’s score. So we worked on attendance. I didn’t always send a note home before, but now sometimes if a child is absent too much, I have to send a letter home saying “this could lead to A.C.S. [Administration for Children's Services] coming to visit your house” or “your child is at risk of being held over because of attendance.”

The school didn’t stop being progressive, it simply integrated cultural history into its ballet lessons and nutrition and science into its yoga classes.

This is how it’s supposed to work.  Congratulations to the staff and children of Children’s Workshop for their B grade this year – and showing that it’s okay to do well in tests.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper

As much as it pains me every time I hear Checker Finn say it, school boards may indeed be irrelevant.  And Checker’s new essay in National Affairs lays out a pretty persuasive case for why they will disappear; not, why they should go away, but why they will simply die on a vine that is no longer part of a healthy education system.  What is most unnerving about Checker’s argument, is that this will happen, somewhat counterintuitively, while making “education local again.”

In short, the new essay, “Beyond the School District,” is an ambitious rethinking of school governance, top to bottom, that weds the best of our past (true local control) with the best of our present (charters, vouchers, mayoral control, technology) to create a workable school system for the 21^st century.

And I hate say it, but from where I sit, on a local school board, it makes sense.

As Checker says, with an understatement that should require no argument, our current system isn’t working.  And his attribution of cause surely matches my experience: we have a “confused and tangled web” of local, state, and federal rules and regulation, not to mention a web of “adult interests” like teacher unions, textbook publishers, tutoring firms, bus companies, and the like, that has thwarted the best of reform intentions. Despite spending billions of dollars to fix things, the results continue to be lousy: “millions of children still can not read satisfactorily, do math at an acceptable level, or perform the other skills need for jobs in the modern economy.”

I surely see this dysfunction at the local level, where I sit on a school board that seems to have as much influence over our schools as the deck chair manager had over the direction of the Titanic. (I would temper that statement with one that I make to my local parents and stakeholders all the time: there is no law that says we can’t have a good school.  Unfortunately, the tangled web has a way of complicating that message.)  Checker helps explain the problem by taking us on a grand tour of American education governance history, from the hopeful sprouting of tens of thousands of locally-controlled (and funded) school districts through the “professionalism” wave of the Progressive Era of the last century, and the ensuing consolidation craze, which reduced the number of schools districts from 130,000 in 1930 to fewer than 14,000 by 2008.

Checker skips most of the recent federalism era, which, in this account, might be redundant. But the federal role is surely an issue that will need to be addressed in Finn’s future, since it has contributed mightily to the “tangled web.”  By the same token, as someone who has experienced first-hand the wonder of NCLB, which shined a light in to the dark corners of our schools, where the poor, the ethnic minorities and the disabled had been hidden from view, we will need to make sure that such abuse is not the result of unfettered local autonomy (rather than too much outside influence) and identify a federal responsibility to protect the constitutional rights of our children to equal educational opportunities; indeed, despite some wonderful people in my community, and though I know that Checker’s suggestions will go a long way to restoring “the good” of local control,  not a day goes by that I don’t thank God – and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson – for our federal Bill of Rights.  We will also need to recognize the debilitating influence of federal micro-managing and decide what to do about it; indeed we are in need of a robust discussion about the good, the bad, and the ugly of federal intervention and in future posts I intend to argue, among other things, that keeping the feds out of the curriculum-writing business has only lured them into creating huge highways of waste and inefficiency in much less essential educational territory.

But there is certainly no disputing – or should be no disputing — the need to “restore a true sense of local education,” as Checker argues, because “families and communities—more knowledgeable about their own desires and their children’s needs—[have to] make crucial decisions about how to educate children, rather than leaving those choices to distant, scattered, self-concerned bureaucrats and adult interest groups.”

And as I read Checker, the answer is to untether the promising reform strategies now bubbling up all over the country from the multi-layered governance system that thwarts them. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!  We have plenty of talented people working within the system, Checker says, but “they seldom have the capacity to innovate, to make judgments about matters beyond their customary duties, or to stage successful interventions in failing districts and schools” (per the “tangle” described above).  Indeed, as Checker says, “new forms of local control have started to take root.”   Mayoral control is one of those new governance structures — and we need that direct connection not just in big cities.  My small school district, for instance is an amalgam of five local towns, none of whose mayors or legislative councils have anything to say about education. It is a disconnect between a huge part of their constituencies – parents and children – and a significant part of their economic health and well-being — education — which the local school district has little stake in.

Also, “less visible, but far more widespread,” says Checker, are the many alternatives to the traditional Local Education Agency (LEA) model: choice and charter schools, vouchers, magnet schools, virtual schools, homeschools, etc.  Says Finn: “it can accurately be said that slightly more than half of all American students today attend schools that they or their parents selected.”  Finally, there is technology, the invention that allows “local control…to be brought right into parents’ homes.”  As a member of a dysfunctional LEA (for all the reasons Checker suggests), I would welcome the opportunity to return our schools to a system of true local control, including spinning individual schools off to their own governing bodies.

So, these many reform vehicles add up to the “direction that the future of American education should point,” as Checker says. But how do you do it? What does it look like?   Here’s what he suggests:

• “Self-governing, charter-style schools should become the norm, not the exception.”
• States (the governor and legislature not some “independent” body) would “both increase and shrink their roles.” They would “authorize” every school and hold it accountable “for academic results, for complying with essential rules, for properly handling public dollars, and so forth….”  They would also ensure that there are “enough approved schools to accommodate all children.” But they would “back off from their customary micromanagement and regulation of the K-12 space….”
• Local funding of schools “as we know it would vanish.”  States would pay for schools – and this is one of Checker’s key proposals — through a “weighted student funding” formula in which “the amount of money devoted to a child’s education varies with his needs and educational circumstances and accompanies that child to the school of his choice.”

Again, I do worry about placing undo faith in states, whose leaders and legislatures have shown themselves to be plenty receptive to special interests, and I encourage more discussion of the federal role in thwarting monopolies, whether of private or public making.

We won’t find the answers to all our questions here, but “Beyond the School District” is a much-needed start to remaking school governance for modern times. It imagines a refreshing Tocquevilian system of free associations that would, concludes Checker, “endeavor to make education local again.”  And that, for America, is to make education whole again.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appeared on Flypaper

In the specific year when students move to a middle school (or to a junior high), their academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, falls substantially in both math and English relative to that of their counterparts who continue to attend a K–8 elementary school. What’s more, their achievement continues to decline throughout middle school. This negative effect persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores.

I found other research that supports the Rockoff and Lockwood findings — that grade configuration matters –  in my report for Education Next earlier this year.  I traced the history of the modern middle school movement, known as “middle schoolism,” which was born with a Cornell University speech by educator William Alexander in 1963.  It is a movement that came of age in an era in which the psychological society teamed up with the sociological one and together marched into into our schools, making a beeline for what was considered the most troublesome though forgotten age group, 11 to 14. The best way of treating those children (instead of teaching them?), many educators of the time believed, was separating them into emotional and behavioral holding pens while their horomones adjusted to maturity. (It didn’t help that academics was taking a nose-dive in all our schools.)

“I don’t know if it was deliberate or not,” Trish Williams, executive director of EdSource, a California nonprofit, told me last winter, “but I know that when my kids were in middle school, one of the best in California, one of the teachers told me that her job was to just hold them and keep them safe until they get through puberty. So there has been a philosophy in middle school which deemphasized academic outcomes….”

As Cheri Pearson Yecke documented with her 2005 study for the Thomas Fordham Institute, Mayhem in the Middle, middle school was “where academic achievement goes to die.”

While there is more emphasis on academics at all grade levels today and evidence that the middle school burden can be overcome (Williams and colleagues showed in a major 2010 study, called “Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better,” that an intense focus on academics can work), it is odd that Walcott would favor reforming middle schools instead of doing what the research suggests is better and easier — creating smaller, “elemiddle” (K–8) schools  – and what the trends are showing is happening all over the country  – as David Hough, managing editor of the Middle Grades Research Journal,  told me, “the trend is definitely away from stand-alone middle schools.”

Walcott promised to borrow instructional methods from successful middle school charters with this initiative, but even charter organizations like KIPP, which began by serving middle school kids, are having second thoughts about the challenges such isolation from other children create, and has been building “clusters” of schools that include early grades and high schoolers.  Indeed, it is one thing for the new chancellor of the nation’s largest school system to dial back the heated rhetoric that marked much of the Joel Klein reform era, but let’s hope Walcott doesn’t set the pedagogical time machine arrow to the 60s and 70s.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

It’s a worthy subject, but I was turned from the “unrelenting criticism” hokum by an email from New York City teacher Mark Anderson, with his announcement that “A new school year begins! Here is the third post in my series on curriculum, in which I advocate for a unified core curriculum.” His post is here and I read it with great joy, but I will get to that in a moment.

First, I must make mention of another welcome event; a trend, really, one reported on by Stephen Sawchuk in the current Education Week: “New Groups Giving Teachers Alternative Voice.” Sawchuk leads with the obvious question, “In times of great uncertainty for U.S. teachers, who speaks for them?” (The uncertainty is taking its toll: according to a blog post by Sawchuck, as many as 10 percent of teachers are now quitting after just one year.)

The answer to the question of who’s speaking for teachers is: they are. At least, they are starting to speak. Sawchuk describes a number of new teacher groups that are stepping outside the unions’ tight circle of money-and-work-rules agendas and working for better outcomes for students. He names four such groups: NewTLA (in Los Angeles), Teach Plus Policy Fellows (in Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, LA, and Memphis), Center for Teaching Quality (Denver, Hillsborough County, FL; Illinois; San Francisco Bay Area; Seattle), and Educators 4 Excellence (New York City). The head of the Center for Teaching Quality, Barnett Berry, tells Sawchuk:

There are so many teachers out there who want change and have great ideas, but they’ve had so few venues and vehicles to be heard, understood, and embraced…. They’re itching for the research knowledge to help them articulate the connections between policy and practice.

Mark Anderson is one of those teachers. And curriculum is one of his subjects. (Though a commenter pointed out, “it’s a lonely world.”) I met Mark, a second-year Teaching Fellow working in a fifth-grade self-contained special education classroom in the Bronx, last winter at a conference on teacher quality sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Education Writers Association (see my The “Great Teacher” Trap). He was one of the few teachers or journalists there who seemed interested in curriculum as something more than a teacher autonomy or political ideology (a la Pedagogy of the Oppressed) issue. And I was pleased to see him tackle the subject in a post on Gotham Schools the following June. What arrived in my mailbox a couple weeks ago was his third post on curriculum and he needs to be applauded for attempting to understand the question from outside the box of labor union politics – and poverty. While everyone is “busy focusing on external factors such as poverty, human capital mechanisms (hiring & firing), and accountability,” writes Mark, “we have been largely ignoring one of the most easily and cheaply modifiable components of education: the curriculum. And this is the component that has arguably the most immediate and direct impact on a student.”

While still struggling with some grad school language – “academic knowledge,” “core foundations,” “impelled the process” – Mark at least seems to have read E.D. Hirsch*:

When I introduced the Core Knowledge Sequence [first developed by Hirsch’s foundation more than a decade ago] this year to the teachers at my school at a faculty staff meeting as a potential reference to guide their curriculum mapping, I expected either a lukewarm or even resistant reception. On the contrary, however, teachers were overwhelmingly excited by the sequence and gratified to have a copy of it to refer to. Aides and preparatory teachers were snapping the copies up like candy, such that we ran out of copies for core content area teachers! I feel like teachers — just like students — are desperate for guidance, given the superhuman demands made upon their time and energy. Why would we deny such explicit and systematic guidance to them?”

Anderson gets it. As do the teachers in the trenches. The common core doubters need to dispense with the ideology and focus on what teachers – and students – need: a rigorous, comprehensive, and aligned (vertically and horizontally) curriculum. And, as a plus, the New York Times this morning reinforces Anderson’s colleagues’ instincts: with an op-ed essay by Hirsch himself. There is a longer version of the essay here, but it is another persuasive argument for teaching kids (rich and poor) content, early and often. Paraphrasing the famous New Testament chronicler, St. Matthew (“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”), Hirsch writes,

The Matthew Effect in language can be restated this way: “To those who understand the gist shall be given new word meanings, but to those who do not there shall ensue boredom and frustration.”

Amen, Amen, I say to you: Content counts.

–Peter Meyer

———————————-

*I once asked six different school superintendent candidates what they thought of Cultural Literacy and each launched into a high-minded speech about racial and ethnic diversity. It was clear that none knew anything about Hirsch, much less had read the book.

This post also appears on Flypaper.

• school board members (four major roles: representative, leader, steward, advocate),
• school boards (“four macro responsibilities:  set the district’s direction…, ensure alignment of strategies, resources, policies, programs, and processes with district goals, assess and account for progress…, continuously improve the district,“),
• board president (“leader of leaders,” “presider,” “communicator”)
• superintendent (advisor, executive, leader, manager, advocate, communicator)

…. but in the nitty gritty world where we lived, as the governance discussion proceeded, the big issues were “chain of command,” “being part of the team,” “being negative,” and one of the major themes of that first hour and a half was, as our facilitator reminded us, the board’s role as “overseer, not micromanager.” The board “should not second-guess” the administration’s recommendations “except in extreme circumstances,” we were told. It should “trust the professionals.”

That was my opening. “That’s exactly what we’ve been doing for ten years,” I blurted, “trusting the professionals. We were 83^rd out of 86 districts in the region ten years ago and we are 83 out of 86 today – by letting the professionals do their work.”

There was a slight silence, but not a heavy one. In fact, our facilitator rather quickly replied, “That’s the board’s fault.”

It was a revelatory, if head-spinning, moment.  And very briefly a light shone on the heart of one of the major challenges of school governance: getting a school board to do its job, which, as the hand-out rightly said, was to improve the district.  Easier said than done. To do its job it has to be able to sift through acres of dust stirred up by federal and state mandates and piles of policies, politics, herds of wildebeest unions, experts, professionals, rivers of “model” policies from our school board associations, and a chain-link fence of interlocking economic interests defined by major corporations, rich lobbyists, and willing legislators.  Anyone who has ever tried skiing — even walking — in a whiteout can appreciate what it’s like walking into a school board meeting.  Take charge?   Continuously improve the district?  You gotta be kidding.  Improving requires changing, which disrupts.  The system is set up to encourage the opposite: to not rock the boat, to continue on whatever road you’re on — or, the safe path, to do nothing.  Every once in a while we glimpse the truth: After suffering through endless lectures about leaving it to the professionals, we are told it’s all our fault.  Ouch.  But it is.

I have argued before (here) that school boards’ irrelevance – defined as their failure to improve education outcomes, whether they try or not — is a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself.  Our nation’s 14,000 semi-impotent school boards are an indicator species, their malignancies caused by environmental toxicities not of their making.  New York State alone had 10,000 school districts in 1900 – we need ask ourselves if the disappearance of 9,250 districts over the ensuing 50 years (there are about 750 school districts in the Empire State today) has been good or bad for education.

The problem is that we — local school boards — can’t wait around for the folks who have caused our cancers to cure them.

Last year in Education Week I argued that “School boards still have enormous power…, especially on the local level”; and that “my own battle is to get my board to acknowledge that power, and to re-engage itself in the task of educating children, to revive a sense of the relevancy of democracy itself. It’s a win-win. Not only do we get a better education for our children, but we also get a community that begins to feel that it can deliver that education.”

This rosy view, of course, must be tempered by the fact that school systems (per the blizzard described above) don’t do right by the kids, as far education opportunity goes.  And on this question it is fortuitous that Mark Osgood has a new post at Education Next calling out those who believe that the education gap is “the civil rights issue of our time” to demand that the courts step up to the plate on these education issues as they did in the last civil rights era. I would go a step further and send in the National Guard – which is why I remain a steadfast defender of NCLB (minus the warts), the educational equivalent thereof.)  As long as we have a public school system, school boards, in my experience, remain the last – if  increasingly tenuous – link to the democratic ideal: the peoples’ schools. But it remains a federal responsibility to ensure that local majorities don’t block the school house door to racial, demographic or socio-economic minorities.

At the heart of my school board’s recent governance retreat – Webster’s definition number 1 is appropriate here:  “an act or process of withdrawing esp. from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable” — was this mixed message: you’re responsible, but don’t get too involved.  In school districts that have all the gears running smoothly, that is the kind of creative tension that can work to keep the train on the tracks moving forward; in districts where the train has been off the tracks for years, it is a recipe for continued disaster.  I have seen the enemy and it is us.  Bring in the AYP!

Is that the answer?  What’s the question?  I recall walking with Tom Carroll,  founder of the successful charter school network in Albany (see my Education Next profile), after a couple of weeks of reporting on his Brighter Choice schools, which were knocking the socks off the traditional school competitors on test scores, and asking, “So, why are you able to do it and they aren’t?”

“Will,” said Carroll without hesitation. “Political will.”

If only, I thought. If only….  Whispering in my ear was the voice of the school board overlord, “Yeah, but….”

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

It’s a tough town.

According to the Times poll only 34 percent of New Yorkers approve of Bloomberg’s performance as the education mayor.  And Blacks and Hispanics, whose children make up 70 percent of the enrollment in the city’s public schools, says the Times, “expressed the most dissatisfaction, with 64 percent of blacks and 57 percent of Hispanics saying they are generally not satisfied, compared with 50 percent of whites.”

Though reporters Sharon Otterman and Allison Kopicki concede that “dissatisfaction with public schools in New York is longstanding” and that in the 1990s through the first few years of Bloomberg control “few residents were satisfied,” one thing is clear: the bloom is off.  The third term has been especially hard on the billionaire mayor, notably due to the loss of Joel Klein, who had worked closely with Bloomberg  in remaking the nation’s largest school district during his eight-year tenure as chancellor, and the bad stumble with naming publishing exec Cathleen Black as Klein’s replacement.

The crux of the issue may be that of fickle fates versus substantive reform.  Bloomberg did dismantle the old system, which no one seemed to like.  He  abolished the 32 patronage-laden community school boards and relocated the education department’s headquarters to City Hall’s back yard.  He broke up big schools, gave principals more autonomy, introduced a tough school grading system, doubled the budget, won the Broad Prize, and ushered in a golden era for charter schools.  There will continue to be skirmishes about the data – “graduation rates are at an all-time high and we are outpacing the rest of the state on test scores,” a spokeswoman tells the Times – and wrangling over issues like class size, cheating, and union constraints, but I doubt very much anyone would want to return to the old system.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

A 35-year-old former teacher, John White headed to New Orleans in late April to become superintendent of the Big Easy’s Recovery School District (RSD), quite an accomplishment for such a young man. But, with his bags barely unpacked, he found himself nominated by Governor Bobby Jindal to be interim chief of all of Louisiana’s public schools (thanks to the sudden resignation of Paul Pastorek, who had recruited White), in addition to running RSD. Newspapers claimed that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was calling members of the state’s school board, praising White as “an extraordinary leader [who is] committed to reform and is a great asset to the state.” Is your head spinning?

John White’s wasn’t. He told the press that he was flattered by Jindal’s offer, that he had come to the Bayou State to run the New Orleans schools, but if they wanted him in Baton Rouge, he’d be glad to help out. Cool. Calm. Collected.

“I’ve got more gray hair than I should at my age,” he says, smiling, during our interview in a first-floor chancellor’s conference room at New York City’s education department headquarters just a few days before he left for New Orleans. Tall, boyish, soft-spoken, White is cordial, even gracious, but never flip. When I ask if we should wave to the mayor, whose “bull pen” office windows were visible from where we sat, he responds that such proximity to the mayor is “a beacon for accountability and the priority that this mayor has placed on public education.” Accountability is a word White frequently used during our talk.

Where did this rising education star come from? The short answer is Teach For America (TFA). He is one of a growing list of wunderkind school leaders produced by this moon shot idea of Princeton University student Wendy Kopp (20 years ago) to put smart college grads in the nation’s worst schools. White, son of a lawyer and “private wealth advisor” father and television journalist mother, grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended the prestigious private St. Albans School, where he learned, he says, “that education starts with relationships between adults and students and among students, who then reinforce the high expectations that are held for them.” But he never thought of being a teacher. In fact, there was a time in high school when he wanted to be a naval officer. As he looks back, he says he was attracted to the military’s “faith to mission, the commitment to excellence because of the deep understanding that they cannot fail.”

Instead of the military (his younger brother and only sibling did become a naval officer), White entered the University of Virginia (UVA), where he majored in English and was aiming at journalism for a career until he discovered an interview of William Faulkner, who had taught at the school, describing Ike McCaslin, protagonist in Go Down, Moses. “There are three kinds of people in the world,” he recalls Faulkner saying. “And I’m paraphrasing. There are people who don’t know there’s a problem. There are people who know there’s a problem and choose not to do anything about it. And then there are people who know there’s a problem and say, I’m going to do something about it. And the power of reading that one night on my couch in my apartment in Charlottesville, Virginia, knowing that it had been spoken only half a mile from where I was living, and amidst this incredibly complex book and this incredibly complex writer and man, but the simplicity of that call literally was a life-changing moment for me. The next day I applied to Teach For America.” And he never looked back.

Into the Crucible

TFA sent White to Jersey City, to 3,000-student Dickinson High School, overlooking the Holland Tunnel, where he taught English for three years and learned that “there are a lot of challenges and we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The school itself was not organized to serve every child. It’s a huge school. Kids come and go. They oftentimes come and go without ever having formed a strong relationship with the adults who are supposed to serve them.” White met “heroic educators who were saving lives,” and he saw quickly “what an impact one teacher could make, and I thought, what an extraordinary thing it would be if we started creating groups of teachers and even schools and school systems that were doing this kind of thing.”

He gives TFA credit for “keeping me in the mission…. We all know each other,” he says of fellow alums like Michelle Rhee (Washington, D.C.’s superintendent at age 38) and Cami Anderson (who took over Newark’s troubled district at age 39), and “those are people who have fueled my commitment just as I hope that I fuel theirs.” After his teaching stint, White went to work for TFA in its New Jersey region coaching and mentoring the new recruits. He was then sent to Chicago to do the same thing. While there he met Arne Duncan. “I count Arne as a friend and advisor and mentor,” he says. “And he once told me, ‘If you want to lead and you want to lead change, just go find a place where it’s happening. Go find a school system where it’s happening and go do it.’”

“Part of the problem with the current system,” says White, is that “the schedule and the curriculum are organized around a time-based, space-based model.” Technology will help teachers meet children at their level and “move them to mastery.”

From the Big Apple to the Big Easy

That was 2006 and the happening place was New York City, where Joel Klein was four years into remaking the nation’s largest public school system. Klein immediately offered White a job on his portfolio planning team, which meant leading the process of closing bad schools and creating new ones, one of the bull’s-eye issues in the massive system’s turnaround efforts. “I was part of the team that was catalyzing change at a very rapid pace,” says White.

Several years later, when Pastorek called and invited him to audition to take over for veteran reform educator Paul Vallas, who was bound for the private sector, White was running the district’s Division of Talent, Labor and Innovation. One of the most important parts of the job was overseeing the Innovation Zone, a network of nearly 100 New York City schools focused on using technology as a catalyst to personalize education. “We wanted to organize schools around the needs of individual kids,” he says. “And I want to emphasize that last point. I think that it’s a question of providing an individual education for each child, which doesn’t mean education isolation, but one where literally every child is having a program daily that is tailored to his or her specific needs.”

As a UVA graduate, White is keenly aware of the groundbreaking work of E. D. Hirsch, who taught at UVA for several decades and is the intellectual godfather of the modern standards-based curricular movement. “Part of the challenge,” says White, “has been a standards-based education that has for too long meant that we don’t differentiate, whereas a child-centered education has meant that we, for too long, don’t hold children to standards.” White believes that “we can marry those two things…. You don’t water down the common core standards; in fact, you adopt them and you implement them.” He knows that technology is no silver bullet, but White believes it will help bring school systems “to where student progress is not being determined by whether he or she sits in a seat for 54 hours or 108 hours, but is instead seeing what each child is capable of achieving in the common core.”

His three years in the classroom at Dickinson High gives White a firm grasp of these fundamental teaching challenges, including trying to teach the same content to a room of children where the proficiency spread may be two to three grade levels. “It is, of course, every teacher’s goal to bring every child to a place of proficiency. On the other hand, we also need to make sure that we’re not holding children back from achieving something beyond proficiency…. Similarly, if a child is just really behind, limiting their education in that subject to 50 minutes makes absolutely no sense.” Part of the problem with the current system, says White, is that “the schedule and the curriculum are organized around a time-based, space-based model.” Technology will help teachers meet children at their level and “move them to mastery.”

White knows that the challenges of running New Orleans’s 70 Recovery District schools are great, despite Paul Vallas’s amazing progress in rebuilding a system that most educators agreed was among the worst in the nation before Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 80 percent of its 127 schoolhouses (see “New Schools in New Orleans,” features, Spring 2011).

“I think there are three critical challenges in New Orleans,” says White. “One, a system that has moved from tremendous problems to providing an adequate education for many kids still needs to provide a great education for all kids. Two, serving all children, including our hardest-to-serve kids: kids who are over-age, kids with severe learning needs, kids who have been out of school, kids who are moving back. Three, doing it in a way that understands the needs of family, of community, and of parents—that’s critical to being successful.”

A Leader and a Partner

New York—if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere—is certainly a great training ground for meeting and overcoming challenges. And White has the energy and intelligence and grit of a reformer. But as he sees it, the keys to success in the New Orleans RSD, where 37 of the 70 schools are charters, will be “communicating with parents” his “deep belief that parents need to be a partner in education,” that “they need to understand the options for their kids, and the need to make the best choice possible for their kids, knowing what the likely outcome is going to be.”

His responsibility “as a leader,” he says, is “to share information about the opportunities and the constraints that you’re facing. You need to be honest with people about what you can do and what you can’t do. You need to give them a rationale for why you’re doing what you are doing. You need to hear their opinion of the proposal. You need to consider it and you need to be honest with them when you come to a decision…. It’s when we either make promises that we can’t or don’t intend to keep, when we hide from people, when we don’t face the brutal facts, that’s when you know you’re not qualified to be a leader.”

And the one brutal fact that drives this young education reformer is that “without a great education system for all our children, we simply will not be the nation that we imagine ourselves to be.”

Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next.

Peter Meyer’s profile of John White appears in the Fall 2011 issue of Ed Next.

The Spring 2011 issue of Education Next includes an article by Jed Horne, “New Schools in New Orleans,” about the state of the schools in the Big Easy.

The intricate system of checks-and-balances that is a hallmark of our aging republic often seems more checks than balances. And the subject of Mike’s madness essay yesterday,  a court battle between State Ed and the state’s teacher union (round 1 to the union), sure seems worthy of an insanity verdict.  And today, as I read comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s decision, I would tend to agree with State Ed spokesman Johnathan Burman, who told the Times’ Sharon Otterman,

The comptroller has allowed political pressure to get in the way of vital technology that would help our students.

In this case, however, perhaps political pressure was a good thing.

Indeed, the $27-million Wireless Generation contract to monitor student performance is the result of a rather tangled web – WG was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in November, just after it announced it was giving Joel Klein, who had pushed the WG contract forward as the city’s education chancellor, a job.  Given WG’s sterling reputation (it was already running a successful data system for the city’s schools) and the exigencies of Race to the Top deadlines to get the performance tracking system going, the contract might have overcome the appearance of conflict in the Murdoch/Klein shotgun wedding (News Corp says Klein had nothing to do with the purchase of WG), but it couldn’t survive the smell of the hacking scandal.

The anti-Klein legions will no doubt pounce on the comptroller’s decision as vindication of their criticisms of the Klein reforms – just as the state’s new commissioner of education, John King, must be tearing his hair out over another Gotham misstep (did someone say cheating?) while he’s trying to keep the state’s fragile reform engine running.  In fact, the moral here may just be the obvious one: the system, ungainly as it is, works.

–Peter Meyer

The ruling was the result of a suit filed in June by New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), the Empire State’s famously powerful (it claims 600,000 members) teacher union. Though the decision received wide coverage (per above) and throws New York school districts a curve (they are supposed to have an evaluation policy in place by September 1), it’s not clear that the decision will have any major implications for other states that are considering linking teacher evaluations to test scores (except as inducement to make sure their regulations correspond to their laws). It is, however, a great window on to education politics in a large state, once-ruled by teacher unions, who hate student performance evaluations, in the reform era. This is power politics at its best.

To recap, thanks largely to Race to the Top incentives (a cool $700 million), a group of New York State reformers, including the state’s Commissioner of Education and its Chancellor (the head of the Board of Regents) had pushed for teacher evaluation reforms that included linking those evaluations to student performance. Thanks also to some shrewd lobbying on the part of Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform and Sunday bagel breakfasts hosted by NYSED Commissioner David Steiner, NYSUT agreed to go along (see my story in Education Next) with the changes. The result was state law 3012-c, passed in late May of 2010, just days before the RTTT deadline. It was pretty radical, by New York standards, ordering school districts to evaluate teachers using student performance data as one of the key measures of teacher competence.

After fighting every attempt at linking student test scores to teacher evaluations, NYSUT had given in at the eleventh hour and its president, Richard Iannuzzi, made a famously symbolic walk with NYSED Commissioner David Steiner and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, from the state ed office building to the State Capitol building across the street, to signal their joint support of several RTTT-induced state laws, including one that breached the “fire wall” between evaluations and student performance. Indeed, the reformers had won a historic victory.

But in the ensuing months, as NYSED worked to write the regulations that spelled out how the law would be implemented, it pushed the student performance piece of the law in directions that NYSUT didn’t like.

The law says that

(i) twenty percent of the evaluation shall be based upon student growth data on state assessments…. and (ii) twenty percent shall be based on other locally selected measures of student achievement.

Did the Regents get greedy? In their May meeting to pass the implementing regulations, with encouragement from Governor Andrew Cuomo, they voted to merge the “locally selected” with the state assessment, effectively making 40 percent of the teacher evaluation dependent on state assessments of students. NYSUT didn’t like it, and sued.

The Wednesday decision, by Judge Michael Lynch*, was limited to the issue of whether the NYSBOR and NYSED had exceeded their authority in issuing regulations implementing the new teacher evaluation law.

Lynch concludes that

There is no dispute that the first 20% component is based on `student growth data’ as measured by state assessments or comparable measures.

But he doesn’t think that “locally selected measures” can include those same state assessments. The reasoning is excruciatingly detailed (e.g. “the key here is the use of the qualifier `other,’” he writes), but Lynch would seem to be right in concluding that the legislature meant “other locally selected measures” to mean something different than the state tests. And it makes sense, as Lynch concludes, that the Regents regulations are “invalid only to the extent that the same `student growth measures’ utilized to measure the first 20% category…may not be utilized to measure the second category…. In short, to allow a single state assessment measuring student growth to determine 40% of the student achievement category… would contravene this multiple measures mandate.”

The larger point here, however, and the bigger problem for those trying to weaken the union grip on the process, is that both the “locally selected” 20% and the remaining 60% (classroom observation and professional growth), as Lynch concludes, “must necessarily be determined through negotiations” with the union. Districts still have to deal with the local teacher unions to get a decent teacher evaluation system. Good luck on that one.

Indeed, the Regents, who voted 13 to 3 in May to impose the more rigorous evaluation procedures (see here), have had their wings clipped by the Lynch ruling. And though the judge upheld other parts of the Regents regulations opposed by NYSUT, he also struck down a piece of the regulations that determined how teachers would be rated – ineffective, developing, effective, highly effective – based on the multiple measurement scale. Since a teacher had to score at least 64 points to avoid the “ineffective” rating, according to the Regents’ plan, it was conceivable, as the judge noted, that “the regulation allows for an `ineffective’ rating based solely on poor student achievement results (the first 40% category) without regard to the 60% evaluation category.”

Nice try, Regents. But NYSUT caught it and argued, according to Lynch, that such a scoring rubric was “contrary to the statute’s mandate that the composite score incorporate multiple measures of effectiveness….”

Where everyone goes from here is anyone’s guess. So far the popular new Governor, who had promoted the stricter evaluation measure, has been silent. Let’s hope he speaks up. And let’s hope that he pushes to amend the law to make it clear that student performance measures remain central to the evaluation criteria for teachers.

–Peter Meyer

*Lynch is a state Supreme Court judge, which, in New York, is a low-level judicial position. The highest court in New York State is the Court of Appeals, which would be the bench that would next rule on this issue, should NYBOR and NYSED appeal, as they promised they would.

“We won’t raise our annual [NCLB-mandated] objectives this year,” Juneau later told a group of school chiefs from ten rural states, Dillon reports. And “we’re not asking for permission.”

Dillon says that “half a dozen other states have joined the chorus in recent weeks, using less defiant language but still asking for relief from the testing mandates.”  But he quotes Larry Shumway, superintendent of schools in Utah, another breakaway state, sounding pretty inflammatory:

Pretty soon all the schools will be failing in America, and at that point the law becomes meaningless….  States are going to sit and watch federal accountability implode. We’re seeing the end of an era.

That may be how it looks to some failing states.  But the picture is far more nuanced than that; in fact, if you throw waivers and cheaters and union-busters into the debate, one might say that we’re experiencing a bit of an accountability brain freeze at the moment.  And the Republican-controlled House of Representatives seems content to do nothing about it.

But before wading into the politics of it, let’s recall the good news reported by William Howell, Martin West, and Paul Peterson in their recent public opinion survey. We don’t appear to be at the end of the accountability era:

Nine years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, the public’s appetite for standardized tests appears undiminished. More than two in three Americans believe that the federal government should “continue to require that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3–8 and once in high school,” whereas less than 10 percent actually oppose this requirement. Roughly three in four affluent respondents support the regular administration of tests, as do similar shares of African Americans and Hispanics. Only among teachers does there appear a nontrivial segment of the population that opposes existing testing practices. Even so, majorities of teachers support annual testing of lower-school students and a single test for high school students.

This suggests that the current revolt may not be as populist as it may seem, and that the new pushback against accountability may, in fact, be a lot like the original one: teacher unions and their deeply imbedded institutional allies doing what they do best. But as is usual in education debates, strange bedfellows abound. And the current swirl around accountability has a new twist with the states-rights revolt, as Dillon suggests, fanned by Tea Party sentiment — a threat to reform that didn’t exist in the early days of NCLB.

Last May, Rep. John Kline, who heads up the House Education Committee, told Education Week that “I think many of us would say maybe you don’t need to be accountable to the Secretary of Education….  Maybe you oughta be accountable to the local community, to parents” school boards, and states. Perhaps the Republicans in the House are waiting for the implosion Mr. Shumway predicted – if so, they are playing into the hands of the powerful unions. For better or worse, unions are at their most powerful at the state and local levels, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana notwithstanding.

The immediate  danger is that the new coalition might wound two of our more fearless reformers: Duncan and his boss.   Mike Petrilli urged the Secretary of Education not to be tone-deaf to the politics of ESEA reauthorization and Rick Hess says Duncan’s waiver gambit achieved “new heights of hubris.”

My only hope is that we don’t let education policy get hijacked (with due deference here to vice-president Biden) by the same partisan bickering that flavored the debt-ceiling standoff a couple weeks ago.  Our education system lost its AAA rating several generations ago.

–Peter Meyer

I am not one to blame the press for problems, but I do take seriously the founders’ belief that the democratic experiment won’t work without an informed public.  It is not about taking a stand for or against; it’s about reporting the facts — all of them, including those from dissenters, reformers, and researchers.  As the Fox News anthem has it, “We inform, you decide.” The problem is that even if the public is not informed, it still decides.  Scary.

Luckily, the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard and the editors at Education Next have been thinking about this question and last week they released their 5th annual survey of the American public’s views about education reform, which included several questions meant to tease out the value of information to a respondent’s opinion.  It is well worth immersing yourself in the story, co-authored by PEPG director Paul Peterson and professors William Howell and Martin West, as it provides a fascinating window on to not just the American public’s ideas about education reform, but also the state of the hearts and minds battle for that public’s attentions, a battle which the authors say is “far from over.”  (See also Peterson’s two essays about the results, one in the  Wall Street Journal and the other at the Education Next website, as well as Mike’s post about the survey, “The schools—and the deficits—we deserve,” which discusses Americans’ great ambivalence about education spending.)

You can take the survey yourself and see how your views on questions like tax credits, charters, vouchers, teacher compensation and tenure, and testing compare with those of the general public and survey subgroups like “affluent,” teachers, parents, African Americans, and Hispanics.

But here’s the real scary thing for me: only thirteen percent of Americans says it pays “a great deal” of attention to education issues and 22 percent says it pays “very little” to “none.”  This education abdication only magnifies the influence of the special interests.  (See Mike’s Podcast interview with Terry Moe, whose new book is called Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools.) And its significance is clearly visible in two of 28 questions on the survey.

When asked, for instance,  if “government funding for public schools in your district should increase, decrease, or stay about the same,” 59 percent of respondents wanted more funding. But when the question was posed with information about how much the local district was actually spending per child, only 46 percent favored more funding – a thirteen point information gap that could potentially have enormous impact on a legislature’s funding decisions.

The subject of teacher salaries worked similarly. When asked if salaries should increase, decrease, or stay about the same, 55 percent of the American public said give them more money.  But when told that the average annual salary for teachers is $54,819, only 43 percent of Americans wanted to give teachers more money.  Again, this is a huge difference, with serious policy consequences.

Indeed, the significance of information – the facts, m’am, and nothing but the facts — to the education debate can not be overestimated. And it is why the transparency and reporting provisions of the much-maligned No Child Left Behind law are so important.   It would be too simplistic to say that the difference between good schools and bad is in the quality of the information the public gets about its schools. But the swing in public opinion the size of that reported by the PEPG/Ed Next survey should be a wake-up call: get the information out.   If the founders were smart enough to see the value of a free press and embed it in the Constitution, let’s be smart enough to take full advantage of our freedoms and make sure that the public knows what is happening in its schools.

–Peter Meyer

And Winerip suggests that PDE’s initial response to the latest news “is not encouraging:

State officials have directed school districts and charter schools with suspicious results to investigate themselves.

This, of course, is another startling reminder of the inability of the system to police itself.  As Winerip points out, it took years of dogged reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before the state took the charges seriously.

But these cheating scandals appear to be the tip of a rather large iceberg, one which suggests (if I may change metaphors) that the line between bureaucratic indolence and criminality is indeed blurry.  Last fall, for instance, Winerip’s colleague Sharon Otterman reported that

[E]vidence had been mounting for some time that the [New York] state’s tests, which have formed the basis of almost every school reform effort of the past decade, had serious flaws.

And in February Otterman again wrote,

State and city education officials have known for years that graduating from a public high school does not indicate that a student is ready for college, and have been slowly moving to raise standards. But the political will to acknowledge openly the chasm between graduation requirements and college or job needs is new….

There is a difference, of course, between changing test scores and sitting on information that the tests had “serious flaws.”  But not much of one. I for one am not so sure that the latter doesn’t carry some serious malpractice implications, especially as the testing stakes increase.  As Winerip correctly observes,

Never before have so many had so much reason to cheat. Students’ scores are now used to determine whether teachers and principals are good or bad, whether teachers should get a bonus or be fired, whether a school is a success or failure.

The greater the stakes, the greater the responsibility of educators, at all levels, to ensure the integrity of the system.  Georgia finally got it right when the governor assigned “sixty of Georgia’s finest criminal investigators” to the case, as Winerip reported.  It is a shame that Pennsylvania’s Department of Education apparently did nothing with its July 2009 report on school cheating.  And they only dig the hole deeper, in the face of evidence of systemic malfeasance, by asking that schools investigate themselves.  Pennsylvania must follow Georgia’s lead if it is to restore credibility to its public education system.

–Peter Meyer

Charter Fights Move to the Suburbs Winnie Hu had a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times documenting a small trend in the charter movement to open more of the independent public schools in suburbs: about one in five of the nation’s 5,000 charters are now in the ‘burbs.  Not surprisingly, the story raises some existential questions about public education.  Mike calls attention to the article in his Myth of the “good” school post this morning, pointing out that “One person’s `good school’ is another person’s `bad fit.’”  But there is also a  financial question here, which is whether we can afford a good school, or even a good fit, for everyone. Is the computer the answer? Just as we citizens and taxpayers pool our resources to build common roads and “provide for the common defense,” our “public school system” has traditionally supposed that we get better education by having common schools. Traditionally, that has meant a central location. But if we don’t need bricks and mortar to educate, do we still need a there there?

Rocketship Takes Off One of the newest charter success stories, Palo-Alto-based Rocketship Education may provide some answers.  According to Vauhini Vara of the Wall Street Journal, the the four-year old organization, which operates four schools in Santa Clara County and whose donors include Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, “is known for a  hybrid approach. While students spend most of an eight-hour school day in traditional classrooms, they also bone up daily on their shakiest skills by playing educational computer games and getting tutored in small groups. Rocketship has a waiting list of about 500 students for its schools.”  With impressive academic achievement data for its mostly low-income students, Rocketship is looking to add  20 more charters in the Santa Clara school district.

Performance Pay – NOT in NYC.  Though Gotham’s merit pay program was suspended in January, today, according to Sharon Otterman of the Times, we understand that more than a bad economy killed the $56-million program: a RAND Corporation study concludes that the it didn’t improve student performance.  One of the interesting hypotheses by the researchers about why it didn’t work, writes Otterman, was that “all city schools are already under heavy pressure to raise student test scores, or else face sanctions, including closing.”  Carrot or stick?  Apparently, you don’t need both.

The Times op-ed on Atlanta It is good see that the Times editorial page still supports education excellence and accountability.  The paper of record opined on Sunday:

Test haters will inevitably blame the standardized testing mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind act for inducing this kind of misconduct. The tests remain a crucial gauge of student performance and an indicator of how much academic progress schools are making. It’s the cheats who need to go, not the tests. To restore integrity to the Atlanta system, which serves mainly impoverished children, state and city officials need to improve test security and make sure that those involved in cheating lose their teaching certifications and never work in classrooms again.

And Even Michael Winerip Gets it Right.  I must say, before reading Winerip’s story on the Atlanta scandal, I asked myself, “How far into it before we get comments from the `experts’ who blame NCLB and the tests for the cheating?”  Mercifully, Winerip uses his reportorial talents to good effect this time, and simply tells a great story about how the Georgia governor’s team of investigators “cracked the egg” and got people to talk.  Winerip without ideology is a wonderful thing.

Schools Matter – Even for Geoffrey Canada This could be a real shocker, especially for Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone: two economists studying the HCZ’s unique approach to teaching poor children, which combines full-service social services and good charter schools, are finding that good schools are enough.  According to Matthew Yglesias, a Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer,  in a new paper in the American Economic Journal, conclude:

Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an HCZ middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics. The effects in elementary school are large enough to close the racial achievement gap in both mathematics and ELA. We conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. Community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient.

Don’t Shoot the Parents In a major victory for proponents of the “parent trigger” law, California’s Board of Education last week, “after months of controversy,” according to the Los Angeles Times, “set out a clear road map…to allow parents unparalleled rights to force major changes at low-performing schools.”  The radical law – “the first in the nation to give parents the right to petition for new staff, management and programs at their children’s schools,” says the LAT – allows a school to be turned into a charter school if more than 50 percent of parents sign a petition requesting the change. But see also RiShawn Biddle, who cautions that  the NEA’s California affiliate, which has worked hard “to curb the expansion of charter schools and tie the hands of cash-strapped school districts,” will now try to  force trigger parents “to go through approval by half of [the union’s] rank-and-file members, which would effectively keep the schools under failed district management (and under NEA and AFT influence).”

Saving 4,100 NYC Teaching Jobs Finally, another dramatic tale, this one told by Javier Hernandez in the NY Times. It features tough contract negotiations between New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his administrators and teacher union bosses — “described as some of the most chaotic of Mr. Bloomberg’s tenure, agreements imploded abruptly, meetings erupted into shouting matches…”  It had a happy ending, if you consider the job-saving felicitous, but it’s worth reading and wondering, Does any of this really improve the education opportunities of our children?

–Peter Meyer

According to Stern,

On a battery of reading tests, the kindergartners in the Core Knowledge program had achieved gains five times greater than those of students in the control group. The second-year study showed that the Core Knowledge kids made reading gains twice as great as those of students in the control group.

This is no surprise to fans of E.D. Hirsch, whose research over the last 25 years (from Cultural Literacy (1987) to The Making of Americans (2010)), has shown that teaching children a wide-ranging but comprehensive content heavy curriculum actually improves reading more than teaching reading skills does.  As Robert Pondiscio of the Core Knowledge Foundation explains it,

Two large (and largely overlooked) problems remain at the root of the reading crisis:  a lack of a coherent elementary school curriculum, and a stubborn insistence on teaching and testing reading comprehension as a how-to “skill.”  Comprehension is highly correlated with general knowledge—the more you know, the greater your ability to read, write, speak and listen with fluency and comprehension.  Thus an essential component of reading comprehension instruction must be a focused commitment to build broad background knowledge in a coherent manner from the earliest days of schools–precisely what CKLA seeks to do.

Stern emphasizes,

Among Hirsch’s insights is that disadvantaged kids quickly fall behind in reading because of inadequate background knowledge; therefore, imparting such knowledge in the early grades is even more important than conveying basic reading skills.

Coincidentally, Stern’s Daily News op-ed was published at the same time as a front-page story in Education Week reported a new push to improve P-2 reading. Unfortunately, though, according to Catherine Gewertz’s account, the increased efforts in these lower grades seem to emphasize the same skill-oriented approaches that have proven so unsuccessful in the higher grades. Indeed, despite Herculean efforts and many millions of dollars spent to improve reading skills (drill-and-kill phonics, etc.), the National Assessment of Educational Progress 4^th- and 8^th-grade reading scores have been flat for 30 years – flat at very low levels. As Gewertz points out, the latest NAEP (2009) showed that “only one-third of 4^th graders scored at or above `proficient.’”

It is discouraging that our education system seems so blind to good ideas.  As Stern writes about the Gotham experiment, “Keeping this potential breakthrough alive would cost a mere $300,000 per year – which seems a far smarter investment than the $70 million paid in bonuses to teachers and principals who produced zero reading gains.”

Let’s hope that New York City will see the light.  More importantly, let’s hope that educators all over the country start to realize that planting healthy content seeds will a produce a bumper crop of good readers.

–Peter Meyer

Indeed, young Matthew Sprowl, “disruptive and easily distracted,” seems to be the poster child for what charter critics have long said is the unfair advantage that charters have over their traditional school counterparts: charters don’t have to take all kids, regular schools do. In his third week of kindergarten at Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy 3, Matthew was suspended for three days, writes Winerip, for “bothering other children.” The problems escalated and, with help from Harlem Success, Matthew soon found a regular public school, where he was later diagnosed as having “attention disorder” and, over the last three years, “has thrived.”

It’s an interesting story and Winerip tells it well – too well to make his argument against charters stick. He gives Moskowitz schools their due, pointing out that her “students earn top honors.”  Typically, that’s the setup for the skimming trap.  It didn’t work — Success 3 just has too many Special Ed and English Language Learners to make the charge stick.  Winerip makes another mistake (for his argument’s point of view) in allowing Moskowitz assistant Jenny Sedlis to explain what happened to Matthew. Even in the short space Winerip gives her, Sedlis makes the chase for charters, convincingly;  at least for these eyes and ears. In what Winerip says were “two voluminous e-mails totaling 5,701 words,” Sedlis writes:

We helped place him in a school that would better suit his needs…  His success today confirms the correctness of his placement. I believe that 100 percent of the time we were acting in Matthew’s best interest and that the end result benefited him and benefited P.S. 75, which now has a child excelling.

Though Winerip tries mightily to cloud the issue with statistics (cherry-picked?), this is exactly how choice is supposed to work.  Many children do not thrive in traditional public schools and now have a choice to “move” to one that might be a better fit.  If sometimes movement is in the other direction, will we accuse traditional schools of cherry-picking?  We should be applauding Matthew, his mother, and the educators that have given him this  opportunity to succeed.

–Peter Meyer