Half those gains are probably an illusion, however. The latest results from the math and science tests administered by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the respected international testing agency, show gains of only 0.8 percent of a standard deviation yearly between 1995 and 2011. Further, another respected international assessment of student performance, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), found gains of only 0.5 percent of a standard deviation annually for U.S. students over roughly the same time period. (For specifics, see page 19 of our full report, Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance [PEPG, 2012].)

In other words, NAEP has been identifying gains that are somewhere between two and three times as large as those recorded by two respected international testing agencies that do not have a political stake in showing rising levels of student achievement in any particular country.

For some time, analysts have been wondering whether NAEP tests have become easier. Those who construct the main tests that NAEP administers frankly admit that they have adapted questions over time to meet the changing curricula offered by contemporary schools. NAEP has also introduced special accommodations for those who say they are in some way disabled and need additional time or other modifications of the standard testing protocol. Have testing changes and administrative innovations softened tests so that they now indicate higher levels of student achievement than would be the case if older practices had been retained?

It is well known that when measuring economic change it is critical to adjust for inflation so that real growth is not confused with nominal growth in prices. An entire bureau within the U.S. Department of Labor is devoted to measuring the extent to which prices for the same commodities are rising or falling. With that information ready at hand, economists can ascertain whether the economy is actually moving forward or whether nominal growth in the GDP is simply the result of inflation.

Nothing similar exists in education. The U.S. Department of Education does not have an agency that inspects NAEP tests or state tests to ascertain whether questions on the tests have been eased with the passage of time.

It is remotely possible that TIMSS and PISA have revised their tests so that they have become more difficult over time, thereby underestimating U.S. student gains. But few believe that any testing organization in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has actually made its tests more challenging over time. All the social and political pressures operate in the opposite direction.

We do know one thing for certain: U.S. students are not closing the international achievement gap. Our study shows that even when measured by NAEP criteria, the United States stands at the 25th rank among 49 countries in achievement growth. Similarly, the recent TIMSS data show the United States to be the middle-ranked country among the 11 for which the organization could fully track student performance since 1995. U.S. students are making middling gains that are keeping them on par with students in other countries. In comparative terms, the United States is not making any progress at all.

— Paul E. Peterson

In a matter of weeks, I went from delivering lessons to observing them. I was visiting classrooms, not managing them. My focus shifted from employing strategies that engage student learning to providing the tools for a new teacher to do the same. In short, this teacher had become a coach.

I wanted to experience the same level of success I had as a teacher in my new role as an induction coach, but I wasn’t sure what that would look or feel like. It was important that I obtain tangible evidence that my work was having a positive impact on teacher success and ultimately student achievement. What I have seen and learned so far has affirmed my core beliefs about teaching.

Effective teachers are reflective. Every time I enter Michaela’s kindergarten class, waiting on her desk is the composition notebook I gave her at our first meeting. While observing her teach, I read her thoughtful reflections and questions, and the joys and concerns she has taken the time to record. I respond with words of encouragement, advice, and questions of my own. When the children are packed up and on their way, we talk about the day’s lessons. She opens up about her students, her strengths, and her challenges. We analyze the data as a snapshot of her instruction but also discuss how they fit in the context of her overall professional growth. She exhibits a consistent willingness to examine her own practice and is guided by what she learns.

Teachers need support in order to take risks. Pam is a 3rd-grade teacher who didn’t take long to establish routines that help her classroom run effectively and efficiently. Recently I spent a morning scripting (taking notes on what I see and hear) as she delivered a reading lesson. After the students had left the room for lunch, we took the opportunity to look at my notes. Pam quickly noticed that the majority of her time was spent asking recall questions and seeing the same hands in the air. She was determined to increase student participation but was unsure about ways to do so. A discussion ensued about literature circles and the various ways teachers manage them. She decided to try a new approach that very afternoon and asked me to stay and offer feedback.

Teachers grow through collaboration. Professional relationships thrive when individuals share common experiences and learn from one another. I find this to be especially true when working with Amanda, a beginning teacher in a Developmental Learning Program. Given my limited experience in special education, supporting her work with three- to five-year-old nonverbal learners is a challenge. Week after week, I watch Amanda shine. And I learn, as she engages students in meaningful activities. Our work is often centered on communicating with parents, managing the teaching assistants and specialists working in the class, and advocating for her students. Recognizing one’s own limitations is a very uncomfortable place to be, but it is the underpinning for growth.

Having a coach and being a coach both present real challenges. The professional relationship may evolve over time, as roles are continuously redefined based on needs, circumstances, personalities, beliefs, and philosophies. But throughout, the goals and benefits of mentoring are clear: moving our profession forward with better-prepared and more-effective teachers in our classrooms.

Gino Sangiuliano teaches in Barrington, Rhode Island, and is supporting 15 beginning teachers in his second year as an induction coach.

Yet amidst the flood of words and images, we information consumers are adapting in a predictable, if unsettling, way: migrating toward sources that share our underlying biases and prejudices, which is leading to less real dialogue and inevitably to greater polarization.

At least that’s the evidence from media researchers, who call this phenomenon “narrowcasting.” As columnist Nicholas Kristof put it in the New York Times a few years ago, “We generally don’t truly want good information—but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.” Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch MSNBC. Liberals read the New York Times, while conservatives peruse the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Views become more extreme, as do the policies promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Is this happening in the education policy debate, too? Are proponents and opponents of reform having a spirited conversation, or are we not even listening to one another?

To find out, I downloaded the lists of people who follow Michelle Rhee and Diane Ravitch, respectively, on Twitter. This is a far-from-perfect indicator, to be sure; with its 140-character limit, Twitter debates are notoriously shallow. But like the wise fool who searches for his keys under the street lamp because that’s where the light is, I used Twitter because that’s where the data are. (But Twitter is one of the fastest-growing sources of information and analysis in today’s media industry, and everyone’s Twitter followers are publicly available.)

Following someone on Twitter is not a high-commitment decision, unlike, say, pledging to read the editorial page of a newspaper with which you often disagree. So, one would think, there should be a fair amount of overlap in the followers of these two most outspoken “thought leaders” in education.

Is there? In short, no (see Figure 1). As of October 2012, Rhee had approximately 39,000 followers, Ravitch about 37,000. Yet only 7,052 people followed them both, or 10.1 percent of the total universe (the people who followed at least one of them).

Click to enlarge

Still, it’s hard to know what to compare this to. How narrowcast is that? Ten percent sounds low to me, but is it? So I also looked at two figures in the broader political debate. I chose columnists Peggy Noonan, a conservative, and Eugene Robinson, a liberal. Like Rhee and Ravitch, they have roughly the same number of followers (about 55,000 each). And how many followers do they share? Just shy of 6,000, or 5.6 percent of their total universe. Now the Rhee/Ravitch overlap doesn’t look any worse than polarization more generally.

Another illuminating comparison could be with the overlap of followers of two people with similar views. To make the math work, I needed to find two pairs of education thought leaders with roughly the same number of followers. (Rhee and Ravitch have such massive followings that it wasn’t possible to find appropriate matches for them.) So I chose Jeanne Allen and Andy Smarick to represent “conservative education reformers” and Anthony Cody and Mike Klonsky to represent “progressive opponents of reform.” Each of the four has about 3,000 followers. Allen runs the Center for Education Reform; Smarick is affiliated with Bellwether Education Partners and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and served in the George W. Bush administration; Cody is a former Oakland teacher who blogs at edweek.org; and Klonsky is a former Students for a Democratic Society leader and an activist in the Chicago small-schools movement.

Sure enough, there’s strong evidence of narrowcasting. Whereas Cody shares just 6 percent of Twitter followers with Allen, and also 6 percent with Smarick, he and Klonsky have a 16 percent overlap. And whereas Allen shares just 6 percent of her followers with Cody, and 8 percent with Klonsky, she shares a whopping 24 percent with Smarick.

This narrowcasting isn’t just a matter of ideology. There’s something else at play in the education debate, too: a schism between the policy community on the one hand and practitioners on the other. Twitter users are asked to write short descriptions of themselves. More than 1,100 of Cody’s (3,000) followers use the word “teacher” or “educator” in their descriptions; for Allen, it’s just 400.

The bottom line is that there’s a whole lot of talking past one another in the education debate, though maybe less than in the political debate writ large. Want to be part of the solution? You might start by following on Twitter people whose views you abhor and staying open to the possibility that they might, nevertheless, have a few smart things to say.

Or you might follow Education Next; its followers overlap those of Rhee and Ravitch by roughly the same amount (11.7 and 10.8 percent, respectively).

In eastern North Carolina under Edwards v. Greenville City Board of Education, the Pitt County District has officially been under court supervision since the 1960s. However, in 1972 the federal district court removed the case from its active docket, subject to being reopened should a motion be filed to warrant it. For the next 34 years, there was no such motion. But the case groaned back to life in 2006 when a group organized as the Greenville Parents Association filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights objecting to the district’s use of race in student assignments. As part of their attack, the parents also asked the district court to declare the district unitary and dismiss the case.

In 2009, after court-mandated mediation, the parents and school board reached a settlement. The board agreed to consult with the parents on its future assignment plans and the parents agreed to withdraw their motion for unitary status. As well, the court ordered the school district to submit a report by 2012 detailing progress toward achieving unitary status so it could “relinquish jurisdiction” and “return full responsibility” over the district’s schools to the school board.

In 2010, the school board, in consultation with the parents, adopted a new attendance policy that emphasized several factors but most importantly students’ proximity to their school and student achievement. Instead of racial diversity, the goal was diversity of achievement. Nevertheless, one of the elementary schools it produced was largely minority and low-achieving, which angered another group of parents, the Pitt County Coalition for Educating Black Children. In 2011, this group asked the court to overturn the board’s new attendance policy on the grounds that it moved the district further from unitary status.

The court denied the request, but on appeal a Fourth Circuit panel overturned the district court in 2012, arguing that under Supreme Court doctrine any racial disparities in the district are still presumptively caused by prior discrimination. The court remanded the case back to the district court.

Louisiana has presented a more ironic case. There, in 2012 a public school–choice policy prescribed by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) fell afoul of the inherited judicial law of desegregation. To comply with NCLB, the Richland Parish School Board notified parents that the Rayville Elementary School was failing, but on the advice of its legal counsel it prohibited Rayville’s white students from transferring to certain other schools because of provisions “in the federal Richland Parish School desegregation case.” This referred to a decision of the Fifth Circuit in 1968, in a consolidated case involving dozens of school districts, that purported to prevent white students from making transfers under freedom-of-choice plans if the result would be to create “all Negro” schools.

If the Richland Parish case haunted the choice provisions of NCLB, it is likely to haunt as well a new statewide voucher program that Louisiana has launched for low-income students who attend underperforming schools. Will white students in schools covered by the court order be able to take full advantage of the vouchers?

Even though we are far beyond the wrenching upheaval of forced busing during the 1970s, the antagonisms of desegregation linger. School districts and courts would be wise to take steps to officially close cases that are decades old but which frustrate the resolution of current disputes when their long-dormant wounds are reopened.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Students need a learning environment that encourages success, but how can a teacher create such a place? In thinking about this question, I explored how the physical layout of my classroom, our academic schedule, and my behavior in class affected my students’ ability to succeed. I also investigated how teachers around me set their students up for success or failure.

Just as a store owner must lay out his store for maximum sales, a teacher must set up her classroom as an effective learning environment. The structure may vary with the teacher’s style of teaching and her students’ needs. A teacher who typically introduces a lesson and then instructs the students to work individually might arrange desks in a “U” shape. The teacher can present a topic with minimal distractions and easily monitor students while they work independently. Students with diverse academic abilities might warrant “clustered” or “grouped” seating instead. Seating students in heterogeneous groups maximizes the learning environment: weaker students see how stronger students learn and approach problems, while stronger students gain a deeper understanding of the subject by teaching it to others, creating a “technical success.”

It is important to think not only about where students’ desks are located, but also about what’s on top of them. Does one student always color on his desk? Maybe he focuses better while doodling. I can help him out by covering his desk with oversized paper and replacing it when necessary. Who knows, maybe he will grow up to be a famous illustrator.

Classroom practices should provide students with the path of least resistance to academic success. Facilitating students’ cooperation, independence, and ability to focus is the key. Consider common technical failures in the classroom, such as asking students to “think hard” right after lunch or recess or to listen quietly when they have a lot of energy. A teacher faced with these challenges can allow students to read independently or write in a journal after lunch or play an educational game that the students can get excited about.

A teacher concerned about students who finish assignments early can create a “must do/may do” chart. This chart can be student-specific or for the whole class, but the idea is that students complete “must do” activities before beginning those in the “may do” column. Students take responsibility for their own learning and time management. Most important, it prevents the technical failure of students who complete their work early and sit idle or, worse, distract students who are still working.

Imagine that we are reviewing last night’s homework assignment and I ask, “Who has the answer to problem number two?” Several hands go up. I call on a student, who asks to go to the bathroom, effectively stopping the lesson. Or I call on one student for the answer and several others shout out, “He stole my answer!” These students may be left so frustrated that they find it difficult to focus. To avoid these technical failures, at the beginning of the year I teach my students a few basic signs in American Sign Language (ASL). If students want to go to the bathroom, they show me the sign, and I silently respond with “yes” or “no.” Likewise, students sign “me too” when they weren’t called on but want to demonstrate that they knew the answer. I acknowledge them verbally or with a thumbs-up. As a result, these students feel good. The use of ASL effectively eliminates student-initiated distractions, a clear technical success.

Rebecca Friedman teaches elementary-school and college students in Baltimore, Maryland. Chavi Abramson studies education at Thomas Edison University.

Anderson’s first year in Newark was marked by serious change—the beginning of a deep systemic overhaul, financial and pedagogical.

Scene: Large corner office, 10th (and top) floor of an old downtown Newark office building. Nice navy-blue sofa, very large desk, executive-style conference table, framed pictures and posters on the walls, floor-to-ceiling windows on two corners, and doors that open onto a rooftop deck.

“This is a super office,” I exclaim, asking Cami Anderson, the new superintendent of Newark schools, to tell me a little bit about it.

Sitting a bit stiffly on the sofa, Anderson winces. “I hate it. My ideal would be to take one of our old, gorgeous schools and make it a place of bustling collaboration and activity between adults and children,” she says. “That would actually look and feel quite different than our corporate tower here.”

This California blond is clearly not your ordinary educator, which could be the best thing that has happened to the perennially failing Newark Public Schools (NPS) since—well, perhaps, ever. The state took over the district in 1995, to little effect. With 75 schools and almost 40,000 students, Newark is the largest district in New Jersey, and with graduation rates hovering just about 50 percent, one of the most troubled. Enrollment is down some 9,000 students since 2001. As the New York Times reported when Anderson took over, in June of 2011, “Cami Anderson faces the monumental task of rescuing an urban school system that has long been mired in low achievement, high turnover and a culture of failure, despite decades of state intervention.”

It was, said the Times, with exquisite understatement, “the ultimate high-risk opportunity.”

Even with the popular and smart Newark mayor Cory Booker on her side and a $100 million gift from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, she’ll need all the help she can get. As even Chris Christie, the take-no-prisoners Garden State governor, said at the press conference announcing Anderson’s appointment, “It took us a long time to get to where we are now [in Newark], and no leader, no matter how good, is going to be able to turn this around overnight.”

It would have been hard to find anyone disagreeing with the blunt-spoken governor on that one.

“Judge me by my actions,” Anderson said at the time. “Let me roll up my sleeves and dive in. Then we’ll talk.”

And talk we did, last May, just as Anderson was finishing her first year on the job. “The first year of anything is tough because you’re saying, ‘Trust me. Trust me. Trust me,’” she said. “But you haven’t really had time to,

‘Show me. Show me. Show me.’”

Shaking Things Up

In fact, Anderson showed her stuff immediately.

“I had to make some very important leadership decisions,” she recalled about those first days on the job, “right then.” And since Anderson’s “theory of change” is about “great school leaders,” she “ran around to as many schools as possible to try to get a sense of the quality of our principals, most particularly those who I’d heard deep concerns about or had heard were awesome and were approaching their tenure date.”

The result? Seventeen new principals when school opened the following September. Major shakeup. Indeed, Anderson’s first year in Newark was marked by serious change—she closed six schools, reorganized her central administration team, cut 120 jobs—and marked the beginning of a deep systemic overhaul, financial and pedagogical.

So far, so good. There have been the fights over the school closings and the upset of a system being (rather quickly) turned inside out, but as friends predicted, Anderson’s engaging personal style won many people over. She did not arrive with an agenda, but she did have a clear vision of where to start—even before the principal shakeup.

“The first thing is to define success,” she said. “And that’s pretty simple. Every kid of school age in Newark is in a school that puts him or her on the path to graduate from college.”

That is, as Anderson recognizes, “a very lofty aspirational goal, considering that we have about a third of our kids reading at grade level by the 3rd grade, and that we graduate about 55 percent of our kids, and only 23 percent of those do so by passing high-stakes tests. And of those who graduate, 90 percent need remediation, which ultimately is a sure ticket to dropping out and having debt, right?”

Anderson is no pie-in-the sky reformer. “You have to be honest about the gap between where you are and your goal,” she said. And she and her new crew, which included Photeine Anagnostopoulos, a savvy former Morgan Stanley financial analyst who worked with Anderson in Joel Klein’s shop in New York City, have spent “a fair amount of time defining where we are.” It wasn’t a good spot.

They hired Educational Resource Strategies (ERS) to study the distribution of dollars across students in the district and discovered that “it was the most inequitably distributed set of dollars across schools they had ever seen, by far,” said Anagnostopoulos, who also found that 25 percent of the district’s costs were in building and maintenance. “It should be closer to 10 percent,” she said. Anderson wanted “a real and clear picture” of the health of the district, financially and academically. And she got it.

The Race Card

Many believed that Anderson would be waylaid by Newark’s famously polarizing racial politics.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” I told Anderson, “but you are white. And this is Newark.”

“That may be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard,” roared Anderson. “My entire life I have grown up in and participated in all kinds of cross-cultural conversations…. We’re going to have some tough conversations. But it’s something that I think is really important.”

Anderson’s partner is a black man (“a recovering corporate banker turned improv artist turned entrepreneur,” said Anderson), and they have a young son together. They moved to downtown Newark shortly after her appointment. Anderson herself grew up in a large, interracial family (more on that below).

And there’s Cory Booker, black mayor of Newark—and friend. When Booker decided to run for the top job in year 2002, Anderson was there. In fact, she took a leave of absence from her job as executive director of Teach For America-New York (TFA-NY) to serve as Booker’s director of policy and strategy. “Though school reform is my primary passion,” she said, “I have, throughout my life, become involved in campaigns where I felt like there was a game-changing candidate.” It would appear that Booker has been that (see “Home Is Where the Heart Is,” features, Fall 2006). And the added benefit of working on his campaign, said Anderson, was getting to know Newark.

“I made lots of friends during that campaign.”

The Perfect Reform Leader

Cami Anderson may just be the perfect choice for leading Newark Public Schools to a postracial promised land.

She has degrees from the University of California at Berkeley (BA in education and anthropology) and Harvard (MA in public policy and education). She has been a classroom teacher, in theater arts and in a Montessori school. She was chief program officer for New Leaders for New Schools (2002‒05), overseeing the training of new, reform-minded principals. While she was there, the organization was recognized as one of the most successful nonprofits in America by Fast Company magazine and Harvard Business School. At TFA-NY (1997‒2002), she increased funding by 300 percent, overseeing the training and performance of over 500 teachers in more than 90 schools.

When Christie tapped her to run Newark’s schools, she was one of a handful of education reformers in the country who had made the transition from the entrepreneurial side of the business to managing full-bodied traditional systems in transition. She had just completed a four-year stint as one of Joel Klein’s top lieutenants, as senior superintendent in charge of alternative high schools and programs, which served 30,000 students under 21 and 60,000 students in correctional facilities, suspension centers, and drug treatment centers in addition to students seeking a GED, career/technical education, and teen pregnancy services.

While it is tempting to trace Anderson’s operations and systems management expertise to Harvard and her public policy and education degree, the true source of her proficiencies in those areas can probably be attributed to growing up in a family of 12 children. “I don’t even remember the sequencing of all of us,” she laughed. “But basically, from the time I was 3 until the time I was 12, there was someone who came to our family through adoption just about every year. And at the very end, my mother had my youngest blood brother. So there were two blood siblings, nine adopted, and then Brock came at the very end.”

This kind of family might also explain why, when I asked Anderson who her education heroes are, she said, without hesitation, “My mom.” Her mother was not a traditional educator, but “she has an uncanny ability to zero in on the feedback that you get even from your greatest enemy. Her basic philosophy in life—she calls it the One Percent Rule—is that in every situation you personally have an impact on the outcome, whether it’s 1 percent or 100 percent.”

Her parents came from working-class families in the Bay Area of California and became “activist types” in the 1960s. They moved to L.A., where her father enrolled at the University of Southern California, then worked at the Watts Labor Action Community Committee, then for Mayor Tom Bradley.

“For many years, mom was working in parent training, family support work, and through that had done a lot with young people who were being transitioned into foster homes or into adoptive families,” Anderson explained.

“And there were lots of cases where kids were deemed hard-to-place, for a host of reasons that we all find horrible, either because of physical handicap or age.” Anderson’s mom brought many of them home, nine permanently.

She describes it as “a do-it-yourself household. We all had kitchen night, laundry night, daily jobs, weekly jobs, work wheels, coupons. This is why I’m a systems person.”

Mission Driven

And that is how Anderson is making over Newark Public Schools. She says she has never been a long-range planner. She is more mission-driven than career-oriented. She fell into teaching and “only worked with kids who had been suspended or kicked out of their classroom.” She was always creating “a strong culture, creating rituals, creating shared responsibility,” as her mom had taught her. “My principal would say, ‘This is brilliant.’ And I thought, ‘Well, yeah, this is pretty much my house on a Sunday.’”

Anderson believes that education is a way of leveling the playing field. “I never thought, ‘One day I’m going to be a lifelong educator,’” she said. “I thought, ‘One day I’m going to be part of a generation of people that fundamentally changes the relationship between poverty and race and the American dream.’”

If it’s not yet an entire generation, Anderson sure has the qualities to lead others to the dream.

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

Whether you look at retail, gaming, finance, marketing, or health care, the inventive use of data is redefining the landscape of choices. Amazon’s finely developed suggestion engine and Pandora’s choices about what to play next work because companies can make increasingly accurate predictions of what you will “need” next by analyzing large amounts of information.

“Big data” has now arrived for learning.

Historically, learning experiences generated little empirical data; with online learning, possibilities for the humble transcript are changing dramatically. In K–12 education, a traditional transcript might hold 120 bits of information. Let’s compare that to a primitive online system that stores the grades for every lesson every day. Say 10 items per lesson are graded, and each needs 8 bits for the grade; that’s 80 bits per lesson per day. If we assume 5 lessons per day, 180 academic days in a year, we’ve now collected 72,000 bits per year, compared with 120 bits in the “old school” method—that’s 600 times the data!

Modern learning systems can track “clickstreams,” following a student’s mouse as it clicks on various links. If we assume that a student spends three hours using the screen each day, the system might store about 3,000 bits of data per day and 540,000 bits of data each year. If even half of the roughly 50 million U.S. K–12 students were working on such a system, in theory, we could be capturing a seemingly astounding 25 terabytes of data each year. Combining things like Common Core formative assessment results with clickstream data, we could amass enormous data sets to explore.

This data flood isn’t just theory. It’s lapping at our shores, waiting for us to wade in. Education providers are generating more data than ever before and using it in new and highly productive ways. Students view Khan Academy’s online videos and do its online exercises and assessments millions of times each month, and Khan is building algorithms that run tests with the resulting data to improve its offerings. New high-volume online higher-education providers like edX, Coursera, and Udacity are talking about ways to mine the data from their interactions to improve learning.

Simply collecting data can give useful insights. For example, Kaplan (where I am chief learning officer) possesses a huge amount of data—billions of records—from people taking practice tests over many years as they prepare for exams like the MCAT. Analyzing these data, we recently found that while students believe that organic chemistry is the hardest topic and most important to study for the MCAT, physics is actually harder for most students, and more important for the exam. That knowledge has changed how we guide students as they prepare for the exam, and as they take the exam, we can watch to see whether the changes we made have an impact on their results.

Once we have fast access to “big data,” we can move beyond passive data analysis. People at Facebook, Zynga, Google, and Amazon run many empirical tests every week to determine whether ideas translate to measurable changes in performance.

This approach works for learning, too. We recently completed a set of studies within our virtual Kaplan University (KU), which has more than 50,000 students working online, with technology-delivered materials and with faculty. We tested the impact on learners of applying evidence-based learning science—from such sources as Ruth C. Clark and Richard E. Mayer’s e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning—to courses: we altered the instructional design, how we collected and used evidence about the motivation of learners to guide faculty intervention, how we trained the faculty and what role they had, how we guided the grading, and more. A controlled trial of approximately 1,000 students across three courses over a six-month period confirmed that these changes led to statistically significant differences in student success: whether students mastered critical objectives and passed the course and stayed on for their next course (see Figure 1). (Brenda Sugrue presented the results at the April 2012 American Educational Research Association [AERA] conference in Vancouver.)

Within and across education organizations, the opportunity to build “pipelines” of controlled trials to compare different instructional approaches is vast. With enough students and data about their characteristics—before and during the current learning experience—analysts can identify the interventions that work best for particular student subgroups. This means providers can approach such groups of students with confidence that there is a route that can get them to their goals.

So floods of data can be of great benefit. Floods can also be overwhelming. As Education Next editor Frederick Hess and I explain in a forthcoming book about learning science, technology, and education leadership, to make the best use of data we need to take a “learning engineering” approach. This means being deeply engaged by data and evidence, from both our own research and research elsewhere, without losing track of the task: building affordable, usable, effective, scalable, efficient solutions for the range of learning challenges.

Students, families, and policymakers experience a raft of data-driven products and services every day. Companies know what we like, what we buy, what we look at online—and they use these data to connect us with more things we will like and hopefully buy. Similar data streams can reveal what we know and how we learn. Thoughtfully generated and creatively employed, these data can make the learning experience more effective, more efficient, and potentially much more enjoyable.

As chief learning officer at Kaplan, Inc., Bror Saxberg works to help systematically improve learning by applying what’s known about learning and evidence from Kaplan’s own learners.

Even if the states are, in the theory of federalism, separate and sovereign entities, they have never enjoyed much encouragement from the Supreme Court to resist grant-in-aid conditions through litigation. In its few rulings on the subject, the Court has refused to draw a line on where coercion might lie, and concluded that states were not coerced into cooperating but acted voluntarily in response to financial inducements.

Still without defining a line, the Court ruled 7 to 2 in late June that the Medicaid provisions of the Affordable Care Act impermissibly crossed it. Wherever the line might be, the Affordable Care Act was “surely beyond it.” Without invalidating the Medicaid provisions, the Court ruled that the states could choose whether to embrace them.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote that the act was a “gun to the head” of the states, an act of “economic dragooning.” By threatening the states with the loss of all of their Medicaid grants unless they agreed to a major expansion of Medicaid that would cover the health-care needs of the entire nonelderly population with incomes below 133 percent of the federal poverty level, the act compelled them to accept not a mere revision of Medicaid but an entirely new program. The financial stakes were large. Medicaid spending accounts for more than 20 percent of the average state’s total budget, with federal grants covering from 50 to 83 percent of what the state spends. Federal grants would increase with the new program and cover 100 percent of the added cost through 2016, but would gradually decrease thereafter to a minimum of 90 percent.

It was the size of the stakes that enabled the Court to distinguish Sebelius from South Dakota v. Dole (1987), a grant-in-aid case in which it had sided with Congress. Under scrutiny then was a federal law that threatened to withhold 5 percent of a state’s highway grant if the state did not raise its drinking age to 21. The funds at issue constituted less than half of 1 percent of South Dakota’s budget. The Court concluded that the new condition was not “so coercive as to pass the point” at which pressure turns into compulsion.

The Court’s new ruling has the potential to change the intergovernmental balance of power in all grant-in-aid programs, including those in education. But will it? In the health-care case, it immediately became clear that with freedom comes a heavy political and economic burden of choosing. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that if the states are to be separate and independent sovereigns, as the Court posited, “Sometimes they have to act like it.” But in the real world of politics and policy, they are rational actors, calculating the costs and benefits of federal grant laws. If history is a guide, they weigh the benefits of federal money heavily and hope the costs of the conditions can be avoided or adequately compensated for by political support from constituencies within the state.

In the field of education, states and their local school districts have in recent years chafed under the burdens of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). If Roberts’s decision had already been rendered, perhaps at the time of enactment or in later negotiations with the Department of Education (ED), the states would have been in a stronger position. Members of Congress and ED officials might have paused longer to ask if there were limits to what they could get away with.

The Court’s ruling invites states to sue. Emboldened by it, perhaps many will, with results that are hard to anticipate. But we believe that their first line of defense in grant programs will remain political, not legal and constitutional, and history says it is not very strong. One of the reasons NCLB passed so easily was that it promised more money to the states.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

A film directed by Daniel Barnz

As reviewed by Andrew Kelly

The parent trigger is American education’s latest “it” reform. It’s a simple, powerful idea: if a majority of parents in a failing school sign a petition, the district must implement the parents’ preferred turnaround model. The notion is so intriguing it has captured Hollywood’s attention. The parent trigger has come to the silver screen in Won’t Back Down—a big-budget film that chronicles a fictional turnaround effort. Starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, and Holly Hunter, the film bills itself as “inspired by actual events.” Gyllenhaal plays the mother of a dyslexic child desperate for a way out of her struggling neighborhood school, and Davis the once-great teacher who joins Gyllenhaal’s trigger campaign. Hunter plays the union boss who tries to stop them.

The phrase “inspired by actual events” is a bit generous. Sure, four states currently have a law in place (watered-down versions in Indiana and Connecticut don’t count), and the U.S. Conference of Mayors pledged a vote of unanimous support for the policy. But at the time the movie was made, there had not yet been a successful petition drive, let alone a trigger-driven turnaround.

In the battle for hearts and minds, though, the fictional effort in Won’t Back Down may be more important to the future of the parent trigger than its track record on the ground. Produced by Walden Media, the same folks who backed the high-profile 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman, this feel-good film has already courted controversy. After its two-and-a-half-minute trailer was released, the antitesting, anticharter activist Parents Across America declared that “corporate reformers are once again turning to Hollywood to sell a version of school reform that parents reject.”

But lumping the two films together is a mistake. Won’t Back Down is a very different project, one that reflects frustrations with Superman’s limited reach. Davis Guggenheim’s film was not made for mass consumption, but for the art-house crowd—educated elites and true believers in education reform. And even within those circles, Superman was limited by what many (even sympathetic) critics saw as a simplistic, anti-union tone.

With its all-star cast and classic underdog story, Won’t Back Down is clearly built for a wider audience. Whereas Superman debuted in 4 theaters on opening night, Won’t Back Down opened in 2,100.

The question for reformers is whether the film presents a convincing case for education reform to the mass public. Judged by this measuring stick, Won’t Back Down does a fine job of sketching out the problems with the status quo—a lack of quality options, unresponsive bureaucracies, entrenched interests—in a way that resonates. But when it comes time to propose a solution, the film falls short.

The movie is most compelling in its first half, when Gyllenhaal’s struggle to find a better education for her daughter exposes the obstacles that plague dissatisfied parents. She starts small, asking the principal to switch her daughter from the abusive, lazy teacher she currently has to the marginally better one across the hall, but eventually moves on to other options, including a charter school lottery with too few seats. Her search ultimately leads to the central office, where a kindly receptionist informs her that walk-in appointments are impossible before inadvertently telling her about the parent trigger. Every step builds a sense that the entire system is designed to protect the interests of its employees and frustrate change. But the film’s strength is that it does not lecture the audience, relying on the story to expose the obstacles rather than spoon-feeding through the voice of a narrator. The mounting frustration sets up the eventual epiphany: parents cannot get what they need unless they take matters into their own hands.

Won’t Back Down is also notable for its remarkably even-handed look at the conflicted relationship between the unions and the rank-and-file teachers they represent. Make no mistake: union management is clearly the villain here. We see the dirty political tricks, personal threats, and steadfast opposition to change that you’d expect in a reform-minded film.

But the film makes it clear that many teachers recognize the problems in the system and feel conflicted about the role of unions. The filmmakers use “Mr. Raymond,” the school’s young, zealous, Teach For America (TFA) alum, to explore a teacher’s perspective on unions and reform. As Gyllenhaal’s love interest, he serves as a counterpoint to her frustration with the union, reminding her of the legitimate job protections that unions provide to teachers. For most of the movie, the TFA teacher articulates the “reform unionism” view: parents should work with the union rather than going around it. It’s Hollywood, of course, so he ultimately comes to believe that the union’s interests stand in the way of school reform, but the discussion along the way adds depth that is often missing in education debates.

Unfortunately, the film gets less realistic as it comes time to solve the problem. First off, the writers modify the parent trigger law to fit the story’s narrative arc. In the Hollywood version, a successful petition requires not only a majority of parents, but a majority of teachers as well. This change allows director Daniel Barnz—who describes himself as “extremely pro-union”—to place teachers at the center of the reform effort.

But in the rough-and-tumble world of education politics, requiring teacher buy-in would effectively negate the parent trigger. Teachers would hold veto power over parents, and union threats could keep risk-averse teachers in line. Such a provision would so sabotage the parent trigger that the California Teachers Association tried (without success) to write such a “poison pill” provision into the California law.

What’s more, Won’t Back Down may lead audiences to imagine that line-dancing, hand-holding parent-teacher collaboration will be enough to transform awful schools. The narrative allows the filmmakers to avoid the frank but controversial reality that the parent trigger will most often be used to bring in new operators to take over failing schools.

The big problem, though, is the film’s implicit suggestion that the parent trigger is a solution in and of itself; if parents and good-hearted teachers can only wrest control away from the bureaucracy and the unions, the schools will improve. Charter school conversions, which typically require majority teacher support, are perhaps the closest analogue to the film’s version of the trigger. But while high-profile conversions like Green Dot’s turnaround of Locke High School have shown promise, the limited research on charter conversion suggests that the process is far from a panacea. And Chicago’s experiment with local school councils suggests the limits of relying on parent input. By the mid-1990s, sociologist Anthony Bryk and his colleagues found that, at best, one-third of the councils had undertaken a coherent reform effort that led to improvement. More than 20 years later, the councils can’t attract enough parents to serve; in the latest election cycle, just over 2,000 candidates had signed up for nearly 7,000 slots by the filing deadline.

It’s not that efforts to promote parent empowerment are naive or misguided. On the contrary, the recent spate of parent activism will help build a lasting constituency for school reform. But the parent trigger is simply a lever to push for school-level reform, not a solution. At the end of a successful petition drive, parents will still have a struggling school to turn around, and even the most engaged will need continued help to do so.

Unfortunately, Won’t Back Down leaves this part out, skipping from the pivotal state school board vote approving the trigger to a cheerful image of a school transformed. The film should inspire some moviegoers to look more favorably on reforms like the parent trigger. But increased attention also raises the stakes of making those reforms work, and happy endings will require much more than passion, protest, and petitions.

Andrew Kelly is a research fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Students sign up through Facebook or Grockit’s web site. Some dive into solo mode, working through questions and receiving relevant tips from tutor-recorded videos on “Grockit TV.” But most enter group mode, studying with friends on Facebook or in virtual study groups that Grockit sets up.

Throughout the experience, students receive real-time feedback on how they are doing, the chance to review old concepts, and score predictions that show their improvement based on their learning progressions.

At the third annual Education Innovation Summit at Arizona State University (ASU), the 800 attendees—among them leading education entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, private-equity funders, foundation officers, policymakers, and others—were abuzz, or perhaps “atwitter,” about this hot and emerging space called social learning into which Grockit, among others, has blazed a trail over the last few years.

Conversations at the event and across the broader education sector reveal a mixture of excitement and nervousness as to whether the purveyors of tech-enabled social-learning experiences will develop sustainable business models and whether the experiences they create will bolster student learning or be just another education fad.

Either way, social learning is sweeping through education circles. To be fair though, despite Facebook’s recent stumble into public ownership, if you place the word “social” in front of nearly anything these days, you can get a meeting in Silicon Valley. It’s not just educators who are excited about the possibilities.

Social learning, if understood as people gleaning information from one another, has of course been alive and well for as long as humanity itself. As Farb Nivi, founder of Grockit, said at the ASU event, it was the dominant way learning occurred before the industrialization of education in the mid-to-late 1800s. Social learning as a distinct sector in the world of education technology is a more recent phenomenon. Here, technology brings teachers and learners together in a vast network to create and share information online.

Building off the craze around social media—and social networking giant Facebook’s success in generating high user engagement—education entrepreneurs are increasingly weaving social components into their online learning innovations. For educators, the enticement is the opportunity to increase student engagement and enable students to learn from other students, teachers from other teachers, and students from teachers around the world. Of course, just as many people worry about the accuracy of articles on Wikipedia, there are concerns about the quality of the information students might receive from their peers. But the goal is clear: for every online learner to have access to personalized, tutorial-like experiences on demand.

How these trends will develop is anyone’s guess, but the reigning vision of online learning as a solitary experience will likely be quickly replaced. Social is hot, and just as it has radically altered how we operate in our personal lives, it will transform how we learn as well.

Grockit arrived on the scene toward the end of 2007 and is now expanding from test prep into K–12 and higher education. As it does so, it is bringing in motivational elements from other fields. For example, students earn badges—a staple in the “gaming” world—as they make progress in Grockit.

The company’s solution is built around its central belief that group study is the most effective way for students to learn. Some outside research hints that group study can be fruitful. Richard Light, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has reported that students’ ability to form and participate in small study groups influences their success in college more than multiple other factors, although many of us also know that study groups are not always helpful, and the research remains anything but conclusive.

Grockit reports that students engaged in its social learning experience study longer, answer more questions, and get more questions correct. The company employs several researchers who conduct studies on everything from learning outcomes to time spent on task.

When in 2010 Facebook unveiled its “Open Graph,” Grockit was one of two education companies among the 60 initial partners. Open Graph extends the “social graph” (individual members and their connections) to include among members’ visible Facebook activities the various interests they pursue online via third-party applications (reading articles, listening to music, and recipe browsing, for example), and allows students to study with their friends and to show off their learning progress.

Obstacles remain, however. Many schools bar their students from using Facebook in school, and some bar teachers from communicating with students through the social networking site.

Enter Edmodo. Founded in 2008 by two technologists working at schools in Chicago, the company aims to help educators harness the power of social media to customize the classroom for every learner. Edmodo provides teachers and students with a secure place to connect and collaborate, share content and educational applications, and access homework, grades, class discussions, and notifications.

Edmodo looks a lot like Facebook, complete with third-party applications. And it has grown virally like Facebook, too, at least by education standards; more than 8 million teachers and students around the world use the platform. It doesn’t hurt that it is free to use—just like Facebook. Teachers have flocked to it to engage students, connect with their peers, share and store content, track and measure success, and access online professional development.

Open questions include whether Edmodo changes the instructional paradigm in a meaningful way. With its focus on the teacher, Edmodo to some extent reinforces the traditional one-teacher-to-many-students classroom structure. What is promising, however, is that Edmodo appears “disruptive” relative to many other learning management systems: initially it was limited in its ability to help a teacher organize a full course, but because it is free and cloud-based, and therefore more convenient and simpler to use than most such systems, it gained rapid adoption and continues to improve. All this suggests that Edmodo could play a role in a student-centric digital learning ecosystem. Whether the company will be able to find enough consistent revenue sources to stay viable remains to be seen.

Another company to offer social learning opportunities free of charge is Sophia Learning, which was founded in 2009 and incubated out of—and recently acquired by—Capella University, one of the nation’s online universities. Sophia is a social teaching and learning network. In the company’s words, “It’s where you can teach what you know and learn what you don’t.”

Sophia Learning looks far more like the Khan Academy than Facebook, as it provides thousands of academic tutorials for students. The critical difference is that these tutorials are taught in a variety of ways by a variety of people, and the site offers math, English, science, and more.

These are far from the only players. Among competitors in the K–12 market are Schoology, a learning management system and social network that makes it easy to create and share academic content and recently hit 1 million users; ePals, a social network optimized for K–12 learning with more than half a million classrooms in 200 countries and territories signed up; Remix Learning, a customizable social-learning network for primary and secondary education that employs a subscription model for schools, nonprofit organizations, museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions; and Sokikom, which provides a social learning environment for web-based math games for primary-school students. A slew of other companies are engaged in helping students and teachers from around the world collaborate.

Will greater engagement, personalized learning, and peer collaboration give a much-needed boost to student achievement? That’s the hope among educators—and the challenge to social learning entrepreneurs.

Michael Horn is executive director of the education practice of Innosight Institute and executive editor at Education Next.

When I learned that I would be a participant in the Fulbright-Hays 2011 Summer Seminar in Mexico, a five-week program run by the U.S. Department of Education, I was eager to taste the cuisine in each of the eight states on the itinerary. It never occurred to me that I’d be eating bugs—at least not on purpose.

As a high school teacher, I’d always thought of cultural differences as opportunities to broaden my perspective. Yet there’s something about having to eat the culture that makes accepting cultural differences more personal and much more challenging.

When I teach literature, I talk about the importance of perspective in interpreting novels. Our way isn’t necessarily the right way; it’s just the way we know. With that credo in mind, I lathered my worm in guacamole, closed my eyes, and swallowed.

The trip awakened me to other cultural misconceptions as well. When visiting San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, I toured San Juan Chamula, a Mayan community. Our guide, archaeologist Chip Morris, began at the graveyard, which frankly resembled the outskirts of a garbage dump. Empty plastic soda bottles littered the areas around headstones. I saw this as a sign of disrespect. Morris set me straight: in the Chamula tradition, he explained, the dead must be remembered and honored. Having graveside parties and leaving bottles show that the family is meeting its obligations.

Travel regularly yields such epiphanies.

Travel is also a great way to discover and reflect on the sometimes surprising interactions between cultures. Morris next took us into the church in the town’s central square, where we saw a significant blending of ancient Mayan practices and Catholic influences. Chickens are sacrificed, as the statues of Catholic saints look on. Posh, a homemade rum drink, is offered by families who want to invite others to witness their audible prayers. And so is Coca-Cola.

Coke as a Mayan ceremonial beverage?

It’s true. In the 1960s, Coca-Cola made local Mayan leaders partners in the distribution of their beverages. By the 1970s, community leaders agreed that Coke and other soft drinks could be substituted for posh, deemphasizing the use of alcohol during religious ceremonies. The billboard on the road coming into Chamula shows a man in traditional festival dress celebrating with a Coke. Whatever one might think about Coke—and it has a checkered record in Latin America—it has played a significant role in reducing alcohol abuse in Mayan communities.

By the end of the trip, I had even come to have a better understanding of the Mayan practice of human sacrifice. After visiting Chichén Itzá and other Mayan sites, I came to see that these sacrifices involved not only enemies, but also what was most important to the Maya. They sacrificed their bravest soldiers during wartime. They sacrificed children and women, who shed the most water in tears during times of draught. In short, they sacrificed not because life was cheap, but because it was precious and their gods deserved the best of who they were.

I choose seemingly outrageous examples because they best illustrate why teachers must travel. We rightly insist that students share different points of view, but we often don’t demand the same of ourselves. And until we are out there “eating” another culture, we might not be scrutinizing our own misconceptions about place, people, and history.

Elaine Griffin is the English Department chair at the University School of Milwaukee.

“With all due respect, Governor,” the black man started, a bit hesitantly. “How do you convince African Americans that they can trust a white man? A Bush?”

The former two-term governor of Florida and a 2012 presidential hopeful for many Republican Party stalwarts (Bush endorsed Mitt Romney on March 21) listened carefully, smiling at the allusion to his blue-blood family reputation—and white skin. Bush had taken his suit coat off at the beginning of the luncheon and engaged in easy banter with the visitors while noshing on a chicken-salad sandwich.

“It’s a common concern across the policy spectrum,” he said, “and not just in education.” The 58-year-old Bush, son of one president and brother of another, proceeded to tell the story of his opening the first charter school in Florida, in 1996. (He did not mention that the charter law was one he had helped push through the legislature.) “I teamed up with Willard Fair, whom I’m sure many of you know, and we started a charter school.” Fair is a black activist and head of the Urban League of Greater Miami. And most everybody knew something about the Liberty City Charter School, named after one of Miami’s poorest neighborhoods and scene (in 1980) of the worst race riots since the 1960s.

“We worked at it,” says Bush. “We had to build it first and we were sweeping floors together,” he told his guests. “We had 90 kids in K through 2—little dudes. We had to get the uniforms. It was an amazing experience. And this was Friday before the Monday we were supposed to open. I was walking out, it was maybe four o’clock, and it dawned on me that we didn’t have a flagpole. If we’re going to be a first-class school, we’ve got to have a flagpole. You’ve got to have the Pledge of Allegiance when the school opens. So it extended my workweek. We ended up getting the flagpole, buying the flag. And at seven thirty in the morning, when school was supposed to start, we had a little 3rd grader or 2nd grader do the Pledge with all these kids in uniforms with moms and dads and teachers. It was something else. Willard and I were close—we still are. I kid him: he’s my brother by another mother.”

The room melted. Sweeping floors? At a school for poor African Americans? Brother by another mother? This guy was the real deal.

The Florida Miracle

Florida students under Jeb Bush made some remarkable progress (see ”Florida Defeats the Skeptics,” Check the Facts, Fall 2012 (forthcoming)). Florida was the first state to start grading its schools, A to F, based on student performance; it stopped social promotion in 3rd grade; it paid teachers more if their students performed better; it gave parents more choice, with vouchers and charters; and it revamped the teacher certification process to let more people into the pool.

If you ask Bush the secret to his education reform success, he’ll say “hard work.” But one of the surprising pieces of advice Bush passes on to would-be education reformers is to “be bold.” One might think, for a governor who managed to get so much education reform passed in his state, that he would have suggested a more pragmatic, at least, incremental, approach.

“On the big things you’ve got to be impatient and you can’t accept compromise,” he insists. “You can accept consensus, but you can’t accept compromise, particularly if compromise yields mediocre results.”

Mediocre results, as Bush sees it, only embolden those who oppose reform and make the next reform effort harder. “Education reform needs to be focused on student learning,” he says. And it needs to be focused on the big picture. “You challenge people by pointing out that only a third of our children are college and/or career ready after a K–12 experience, where we spend more per student than any country in the world. If someone can come up with an improvement on that number with the current systemic flaws, then I’d be all for it. But I don’t think that’s possible.”

Bush, though out of office for nearly five years, continues to spread his reform ideas. He established his Foundation for Excellence in Education in 2008 “to ignite a movement of reform, state by state, to transform education for the 21st century.” Bush argues for “a suite of reforms,” based on his Florida success, that need to be “implemented faithfully and in a focused way.” That suite includes “public and private school choice,” which would be “a catalyst to improve the system”; better teacher training and evaluation; school evaluations based on student performance; and more digital learning. His ExcelinEd team hosts visiting policymakers in Miami, where Bush has his offices; he also sends the team around the country to advise and train education policymakers on these reforms. He organizes and supports a group of state education leaders called Chiefs for Change; and, with former West Virginia governor Bob Wise, he’s pressing another initiative, Digital Learning Now!

It’s an ambitious agenda, especially for someone who claims to spend most of his time attending to his business-consulting and real estate–development enterprises.

“I am motivated by looking over the horizon and seeing a country in decline,” says Bush about his education efforts. Sitting in a small office on the gorgeous grounds of the Biltmore Hotel estate (which once played host to Hollywood and European royalty), Bush is happy to be “a mile from home and ten minutes from the airport.” Pictures of his wife, kids, and granddaughter, along with mom, dad, and big brother, dot one wall; a large American flag hangs on another. “Education outcomes have always been important,” he says. “But now it’s critical, because it really does define one’s destiny over the long haul.”

Raise the Bar

I tell Bush the story of a social studies teacher in my district who advocated strenuously against the new “college-ready” push by the Obama administration because, as the teacher said, “Not everybody is made for college.”

“OK,” Bush laughs, “let me see a show of hands of people who think that we should spend more per student than any country in the world for 12 years and then say, ‘Well, OK, fine, you graduated but you’re really not college-bound or career-ready.’ What’s the point? What’s the purpose of school? We can babysit the kids if they’re not there to learn.”

Bush is adamant about giving every child the opportunity to say no to college; failing to prepare them for college is not an option. “I mean, how can you define success when someone gets a piece of paper that says, ‘You have graduated from high school, now please take remedial courses at your community college so you can go to college’? So for your social studies teacher who doesn’t think being college-ready is right,… I would argue that it is criminal to have low expectations for kids because it guarantees that they won’t achieve much of anything.”

Bush’s sense of injustice on this point is palpable. “Think of the huge economic cost of hundreds of billions of dollars nationally that go to redo what was not done. Community colleges in this country spend an enormous amount of time basically being a second high school. Is that what we aspire to as a nation? Are we comfortable with this? What I don’t understand is why, in a great country, where we excel in so many things, we accept mediocrity in something so incredibly valuable. Why wouldn’t we say, ‘Let’s try something different’?

“The level of expectations is what determines the results,” says Bush, who recalls his successful 1998 run for governor, when he visited 250 schools across the state. “I remember there was a 12th-grade kid who could not pass the—at that time it was called the HSCT, the High School Comprehensive Test. It was the graduation test, and Florida was one of the first states to have one. I saw this kid struggle with the question, ‘A baseball game starts at three and ends at four thirty. How long is the game?’”

At the time, Florida had the worst graduation rate in the nation.

One of the first things Bush did after assuming the executive duties in Tallahassee was to raise the graduation requirements to the 10th-grade level. “It’s still too low,” he says, “but the graduation rate has gone up. The percentage of students who did not graduate because they could not pass the test went down. That runs counter to what people inside the system believe.”

I suggest to Bush that those arguing that college is not for everybody, from a low expectations viewpoint, sound similar to those who argue that we can’t fix schools until we solve poverty. He laughs. “I didn’t even realize that people believed that until I read Paul Peterson’s essay on the broader, bolder bunch (see “Neither Broad nor Bold,” check the facts, Summer 2012). (Bush chairs the advisory committee for the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, run by Peterson.)

No Silver Bullet

Despite his many criticisms of the education system, Bush is quick to point out that “There are great people inside these failing schools…. There are very good people, very dedicated, and they overcome all the odds to assure the children learn. Those miracles happen each and every day. My focus and the focus of our foundation is on how you create systemic change so that more often than not learning happens.”

Still, he says, “there is no one silver bullet and that’s hard to take in a world of immediate gratification and a world of do something now…. This is a long-term struggle and it requires a multitude of things happening.”

Bush thinks his brother’s signature education legislation, No Child Left Behind, has taken some unfair hits and that the debate has been improperly framed. “It’s not local control versus federal control,” he says. “If you give control to school districts that are basically monopolies, that are insular, and where there’s no accountability that’s not going to yield a result that will equip the next generation with the tools they need. And if you say the federal government is the end-all and be-all and needs to use its economic power to drive policy, that’s not going to work either.”

Education improvement needs to be “a national priority,” Bush believes. “Parents, business leaders, political leaders, all of us need to be actively engaged to ensure that we protect our success as a nation by dramatically improving student learning. A national purpose is not a federal program … I actually think that the best way to do this is to use the federalist model. It has worked. Why would we abandon the federal system now?”

Bush calls attention to Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana, who pushed his state legislature to adopt “the most dramatic suite of reforms in one [legislative] session than anybody’s ever done.” This was not “imposed by anybody else, it’s not top-down-driven, and it’s not from Washington saying you have to do it this way,” says Bush.

But not everyone is Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush, I suggest.

This is where Bush sees the advantages of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top over Title I. “The first, he points out, “didn’t dictate an accountability system, just that states had to have one. And Race to the Top has had the effect of changing bad behavior in return for the money.” Race to the Top has “had a positive effect, particularly on states that had done nothing. Both of those [federal laws] had a positive effect in that they used the power of the purse to create a climate in which states would do things. It didn’t take state authority away. If it weren’t for No Child Left Behind, there would still be 30 states that had no accountability systems at all, maybe more.”

The Common Core and PARCC

Where does this put Bush with respect to the Common Core curriculum that has been adopted by more than 40 states and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), the consortium of states working to develop a common set of K–12 tests? Some conservatives have blasted these efforts as a thinly veiled national curriculum.

“Well, I believe that we’ve diluted standards to the point where we don’t have them in the states,” he says. “Yes, some states have very rigorous standards. But there’s a need for higher standards, whether they’re common or not. I think it adds value if they’re common, because it creates the chance to develop a rich array of strategies to achieve them.”

Can we trust the states or school districts to increase these standards or do we need a cop on the block? And is that cop going to be the feds?

“Well,” says Bush, “45 states have embarked on this journey. So I think we can trust states that have volunteered to improve their standards. The real challenge is going to be when there’s an awareness of—an awakening to—the fact thatwe’ve created a set of standards that only a third of our kids can meet. Then we will see real quick who will stay the course and apply these higher standards and have lower graduation rates than the phony ones we have today.”

The Road to Reformer

Born in Texas in 1953, Bush says the nation’s education slide began “at least two generations ago,” though he didn’t appreciate that until much later. At the time he was in high school at Phillips Andover and taught English as a second language in Mexico, as part of a Phillips Academy student-exchange program. While there, he met Columba Garnica Gallo, whom he would marry after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas (with a BA in Latin American studies).

While helping his father from time to time in his presidential bids, Jeb spent the next 20 years in business and finance, moving to Miami in the 1980s, where he became a successful real-estate developer. He was chairman of the Dade County Republican Party and served several years as the state’s secretary of commerce. It was in this job that he discovered education. “I went around the state asking, ‘What can we do to build a better business climate? How can we attract more industry, more businesses to our state?’ People had different ideas on a lot of things, but almost unanimously they said, ‘We need to make our education system a lot better.’”

Though he lost a close race for the governorship to incumbent Lawton Chiles in 1994 (the same year brother George won the Texas gubernatorial bid), Bush set up a nonprofit, the Foundation for Florida’s Future, which would keep him focused on public policy and education until the next election, in 1998, which he won handily.

Florida and Beyond

What Bush was able to do during his two terms at the helm of the Sunshine State is considered by some to be miraculous.

“We fought hard,” he says. “We fought with intensity. A lot of people want to hear that there was a Kumbaya moment where somehow people who were deeply divided about these approaches came together and held hands and sang pretty songs. There’s been a little of that, but there’s been more of just a constant push to yield better results. And as those results became clearer, then the opposition to the reforms that helped create those results subsided, and it allowed for the next conversation to take place.”

He also “reinvested those early successes back in reform. We created a sustainable environment for reform so that long after I left, it is embraced by members of the legislature and other governors.” And, of course, he’s got the improvement data to validate reforms.

“We’ve had pretty constant improvement,” he says. “It was a data-driven policy initiative and we had to hope that the data would prove that we had learning gains. And we did…. We went from the bottom of the pack to above the national average in 4th-grade reading.”

It’s not surprising that he has taken the show on the road. “If a state senator or head of an education committee has an idea about school choice, or digital learning, or a robust accountability system, the first step is to talk to the people who have already done it,” he says. “It takes away a lot of the mystery if you can share the experiences of, say, Florida on school choice.”

One of his major reinvestments in reform was starting Chiefs for Change.

“The experience of changing systems by changing laws is only one part of the journey,” Bush explains. “The other part is that you have to implement those laws and that’s the executive branch’s responsibility. And we found that that was the hardest part, because the resistance to change—you’re asking people inside monopolies to open up their systems and be held accountable when they never have been. It’s difficult.”

Bush reached out first to Tony Bennett, education chief in Indiana; Eric Smith, former education commissioner of Florida; and Gerard Robinson, then secretary of education in Virginia. He offered support services for meetings and best practices so they “can act as one on the things that they have in common.” Today, the group has 10 members.

“It requires intensive efforts to cooperate, to cajole, to encourage, and to understand the challenges,” says Bush. “So, governors and state school officers really matter, because without their active involvement and their empowerment to execute effectively, the best ideas that become bills and then become laws can be killed by a thousand cuts or be implemented in the wrong way.”

Bush hatched his latest initiative, Digital Learning Now!, after reading Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class. “I found it very compelling,” he says. “We need a more customized learning experience, where students, once they master subjects, aren’t held back and aren’t pushed along if they haven’t mastered it. We need to use technology, which really didn’t even exist five years ago, as a tool, to make content interesting and relevant for students, particularly in the high school grades.”

A Kafka Moment

I can’t leave without asking how this man with such huge sway in the Florida legislature lost the parent trigger fight last February. Bush had lobbied for it, even writing op-eds urging legislators to pass a bill that would give parents the power to turn a failing school into a charter.

“Well, the parent trigger defeat was not about the parent trigger,” smiles Bush, ever the political strategist. “It brought back memories of the last days of other legislative sessions—and I had quite a few—where people’s emotions were high. We had 21 votes for the bill, but 1 of those votes backed away because he wanted to get another bill heard. But because the leadership in the senate refused to take it up, he said, “‘Well, I’m not voting for the parent trigger bill.’ I mean, that is how sausage is made.”

In fact, the trigger should have been a perfect example of interest paid on previous reform investments. “It wasn’t as if this was some major radical departure from what people generally want, which is parental involvement,” says Bush. “The bill simply said that parents could petition the school district, if their school received an F, to give an advisory opinion about which alternative the district would embrace. That’s all.”

But it was a big deal to the teachers union and the plaintiffs’ bar, the League of Women Voters, even the PTA, all of whom opposed the law. Says Bush: “Only in a Kafka novel and the Florida legislature would the PTA oppose giving parents a voice.”

He smiles. It’s clear that he enjoys the political arena and is comfortable in the dust stirred up by the struggles. He excuses himself, then rushes off with an aide to shoot a couple of commercials for an education reform group.

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

While Title IX makes no mention of athletics and was hardly noticed during congressional debates, this provision of the Education Amendments of 1972 has become most famous, and controversial, for the effect it has had on athletic opportunities for females. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in 1979 created a three-pronged test to determine compliance with the law. Schools receiving federal financial assistance could prove their compliance by 1) providing athletic opportunities for both sexes in numbers substantially proportionate to their numbers in the student body, or 2) showing a history of increasing opportunities for the underrepresented sex, or 3) demonstrating that the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex have been fully accommodated. Most schools have focused on complying with the first prong since it provides a clear standard that they can meet. But over time, the OCR regulations have been elaborated to address many aspects of equal treatment, including scheduling of games and practice times.

Initially filed in 2009, the parents’ claim hinged on the fact that nearly 95 percent of the boys’ basketball games were scheduled for Friday or Saturday nights, while 47 percent of the girls’ games were scheduled for Mondays through Thursdays. According to the plaintiffs, this resulted in smaller crowds for the girls, caused greater difficulties for students to finish homework, and created feelings of inferiority. The school district responded that its athletic director, Beth Foster, had tried to schedule more girls’ games in prime time but could not because she “can’t get anybody to come play us on those nights.” The school district asked for a summary judgment, which the district court granted, saying that the disparity in scheduling was not significant enough to have denied girls’ teams equal athletic opportunities.

On appeal, however, a Seventh Circuit panel reinstated the parents’ lawsuit and said that case should go to trial. The court held that the possible harms caused by disparate scheduling “are not insignificant and may have the effect of discouraging girls from participating in sports.” Of particular concern to the court was the possibility that the disparate scheduling could create feelings of inferiority. The court started its decision with the image of a typical Indiana Friday-night game: “A packed gymnasium, cheer-leaders rallying the fans, the crowd on their feet supporting their team, and the pep band playing the school song.” Without similar support from the community, the court speculated that “girls might be less interested in joining the basketball team because of a lack of school and community support, which results in the perception that the girls’ team is inferior and less deserving than the boys’.” As a result, girls might feel like they are “second-class.”

Whatever the precise outcome of the case after a trial, we hope that judges will forgo psychological speculation. With their presumption that girls were at risk of being made to feel inferior, the appellate judges seemed to be very close to announcing a right to have large crowds cheering them on. But courts cannot compel attendance, much less vociferous cheering and players’ consequent gratification, at high school basketball games, whatever the gender of the players. If lack of fan support can make a female athlete feel second-class, what if the school schedules more girls’ games in prime time and the fans still don’t come? Or don’t come in the same numbers they do for boys’ games? One glance at the Nielsen ratings for women’s and men’s NCAA tournaments would suggest that this could occur.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Filing in 2008, the plaintiffs in Lynch alleged that Alabama underfunds education in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids racial discrimination in federally assisted programs, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Essentially putting Alabama’s history on trial, the suit maintained that racist motivations color every aspect of the state’s school-funding system. While most litigants contend that school finance relies too much on local property taxes, the plaintiffs in Lynch argued that localities should be able to rely more on property taxes. Alabama raises only 5 percent of its school revenue from property taxes, with the rest coming from income and sales taxes.

According to the plaintiffs, Alabama’s constitution of 1901, and amendments in the 1970s and 1980s, placed racially motivated limits on property taxes that prevent poor, primarily black communities from raising sufficient revenue to adequately fund education. In addition to capping the millage rate, the state created differential assessments for different categories of property. This meant, for example, that forested land, which comprises 70 percent of the state, was taxed at a significantly lower rate than other property. The plaintiffs asked the court to eliminate all limitations on property tax rates and all differential assessments.

The state contended that its constitution, as amended in the era of civil rights, is not racially motivated and that the current tax regime does not unfairly burden black students. It also argued that if granted, the plaintiffs’ remedy would all but destroy the real estate market and lead to economic “calamity.” Alabama’s forest industry, taking a keen interest in the case, said that taxes on forested land would increase 1,000 percent without differential assessments.

After a trial in 2011, district court judge Lynwood Smith issued a sprawling 854-page opinion that agreed that Alabama inadequately funds education but nevertheless concluded that “like it or not,” because of Supreme Court precedent, Alabama’s property-tax system is constitutional. In Rodriguez, Smith said, the Court “faced similar facts” and found no constitutional violation. Even though the 1901 constitution was a “misbegotten spawn” obviously “perverted by a virulent, racially discriminatory intent,” he concluded that amendments from the 1970s and 1980s modifying the offending portions of the constitution were not obviously motivated by racial animus. Smith also asserted that the funding system does not have a racially discriminatory effect, pointing out that “Alabama’s black students actually fare better in terms of yield per-mill per-student than do white students.” As a result, the plaintiffs had proved only that there are disparities but not “along racial lines.”

Smith went out of his way to show displeasure at having to rule against the plaintiffs. Alabama’s education system, he said, is hamstrung by “two unfortunate realities”: “mankind’s self-serving nature” and “Supreme Court jurisprudence.” Because of the first, a majority of the state’s voters are unwilling to vote for services that do not directly benefit them, leaving rural black and white students to suffer. As to the second, he argued that the “Court’s rulings on education since the 1970s mirror its decisions [such as Plessy v. Ferguson] from the late nineteenth century” and have “allowed unequal and inadequate school funding to evolve.”

Such tendentious moralizing aside, Smith’s opinion indicates that Rodriguez poses a high, but perhaps not insurmountable, hurdle for school-finance advocates in lower federal courts. A less-conflicted judge confronting similar facts might find a way to side with the plaintiffs. But the Supreme Court, which has expressed increasing skepticism about the desirability of judicial oversight of schools, seems unlikely to overturn well-established precedent and thrust lower courts into the quagmire of school funding and tax policy.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

As a policy wonk, I push for high academic expectations for all students. I know that American competitiveness requires excellence in subjects such as math and science that our schools do not teach very well. As a father, however, I find that what matters most to me is that my daughters are happy in school.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, academic expectations are extremely high. Our school district aims to teach math, for example, in a rigorous way. I appreciate this goal, but to date “increased rigor” has primarily meant that some students skip grade-level math classes and enroll in classes meant for older kids. Basic skills that are taught and reinforced in the grades being skipped are often given short shrift. In 2nd grade, my daughter brought home worksheets on probability before she had any real understanding of the concept, or even a strong foundation in simple division. Her frustration with probability, and consequently math, grew as we substituted times-table drills for play dates. Last year, to my horror, she said that she hated math. This year, which has included an increased focus on math facts and an inspiring teacher, math has become her favorite subject.

With my policy hat on, I know that a teacher’s academic background is critical. As a father, however, I want a teacher who manages a calm, safe, and fun classroom, and who loves children. One of the best teachers my children have had is our regular babysitter, who speaks English as a second language and never graduated from high school.

Of course, there are some gems at our school (thank you, Ms. Bederman, now retired) who are knowledgeable, skilled, passionate about learning, and passionate about children. To a father, Ms. Bederman was a gift from heaven; to a policy wonk she is the Holy Grail. Why can’t we identify and train more of these treasures? Why wasn’t every teacher in our school crowded into Ms. Bederman’s classroom to witness her magic? Why didn’t the principal require every teacher to crowd into her classroom?

As a policy wonk, I believe that student learning flourishes in classrooms that include students with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds. As a father, I want my daughters to appreciate diversity of all types. But I also want them to be surrounded by children who come to school ready and eager to learn. These goals come into conflict when some students are constantly disruptive; the policy wonk must preach patience to the father who wants the class disrupter out.

My daughter’s kindergarten class included a troubled boy who was going through the foster-care placement process. He is exactly the type of child that can benefit most from an excellent education, but he regularly disrupted class. One day, when I was in the classroom, the teacher—talented, but inexperienced—spent more than half of her time trying to keep this boy on task.

I feel for children like him; my company works with schools and districts to improve outcomes for these kids. But I was angry. The other children were clearly uncomfortable. His disruptions reduced learning time for my daughter, and seemed to steal some of her innocence and excitement about school.

The tension between my understanding of good education policy—driven by a deep commitment to equity and the belief that an outstanding education can transform lives, and this country—and what is right for my daughters makes me both a better policy wonk and a better father. The tension also illustrates why school reform is so difficult.

Scott Joftus is the president of the education-consulting firm Cross & Joftus.

In a nutshell: cheating is rampant, national test scores are abysmal, school policy is set in Washington, and teacher tenure is on its last legs. That’s the image implied by the 250-odd education stories published by leading news organizations last year, according to an analysis my team and I did for Education Next. Let us take a closer look.

As declared by the press, 2011 was “the year of the cheating scandal.” (See Greg Toppo’s year-end story in USA Today, “Schools flunked inquiries into suspicious scores in 2011,” or Dorie Turner’s AP roundup, “2011 marred by test cheating scandals across U.S.”) And sure enough, the media covered the story extensively, with 18 articles published by the national outlets (see Figure 1).

And how could they resist? Cheating on standardized tests is one of those perfect issues for the press. Not only does it involve immoral behavior and attempted cover-ups on behalf of the perpetrators, it also raises questions about public policies supported by the high and mighty—test-based accountability and teacher evaluation systems in particular. Are the cheating teachers the villains, or the victims? What a great meme!

What’s not clear, however, is whether cheating on standardized tests increased this year, or was it simply discovered by a few enterprising reporters? (Toppo and his colleagues were the first on the case, with a long article about testing irregularities in Ohio and elsewhere in March. Reporters nationwide soon followed suit.) Did the press break the story, or create the story?

If cheating represented fresh meat for the press in 2011, lousy NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores played the role of “oldie but goodie.” The major papers published 16 stories on NAEP exams last year, covering subjects that included reading, math, science, history, and geography, plus special results for two dozen urban districts.

And the headlines were almost uniformly negative. “National science test scores disappoint.” “Students stumble again on the basics of history.” “Geography report card finds students lagging.” Only deep in the stories would readers learn that the country has made a great deal of progress in several of these subjects, at least for some students and in some grades. (For instance, in 2010, African American 4th graders scored two grade levels better in U.S. history than they did in 1994.)

Another proclivity of the national press is to obsess about federal policy. Once could argue that, thanks to George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top, Uncle Sam is driving education reform; the media are simply following along for the ride. Still, education remains a state responsibility and a local activity, but you wouldn’t know that from following the major outlets, perhaps because they are located in Washington and New York City. Consider the treatment of the Obama administration’s plan to waive portions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, aka NCLB). The administration got three bites at the media apple, with widespread coverage in June (when Secretary Arne Duncan first floated the idea), August (when more details came out), and September (when the president made the formal announcement). The national reporters turned in 19 waiver stories altogether.

The press also covered every twist and turn of the (stalled) reauthorization of ESEA. This is reasonable enough; following deliberations on Capitol Hill is a core component of the job of national reporters. But the 14 stories on the topic created the false impression that Washington is the center of legislative activity on education.

When the national press corps did turn its attention to state-level policy, it was mostly around teacher issues. The clashes in Madison, Wisconsin, and Columbus, Ohio, between Republican governors and teachers unions received a good deal of coverage, as did the broader issues of collective bargaining and tenure reform (for 19 articles in all). As former secretary of education Rod Paige once explained to me, the news media are in the “conflict business.” And there was conflict aplenty on the teacher-effectiveness front.

But what about another highly contentious subject: school vouchers? The Wall Street Journal editorial page decreed 2011 “the year of school choice” (sorry “cheating” fans), yet the issue remained almost invisible in the national press (including on the news side of the Journal itself). The only account we could spot was an August AP story, “School voucher bills flood GOP-led statehouses.” These developments weren’t worth noting in the Times or the Washington Post?

The press has long been accused of traveling in a pack. Maybe this year the hordes will discover private-school choice.

Education—or, as economists refer to it, “investment in human capital”—is a cornerstone of every model of economic growth: if our children are not well educated, innovation and productivity will wither away. In other words, our long-term collective quality of life depends on the quality of our schools. And, by most measures, they are inadequate to the task. What are we doing wrong?

My view is that many problems in education are economic in nature. By this I don’t mean that more funding will solve the problem. I mean that the way we run public education violates virtually every basic tenet of economics. We have constructed a public school system that seems intentionally designed to provide the wrong incentives to administrators, teachers, and students.

Take teacher tenure. Job security with few conditions allows teachers to settle, to become lazy and professionally static. Tenure creates a strong disincentive to innovate or work harder. Tenure attracts to the profession security-seekers rather than risk-takers and provides no upward mobility for the ambitious few.

Now imagine a job where one not only cannot get fired, but where one receives automatic raises simply by being there. Even for the most conscientious teachers, there is no incentive to do more than the minimum, because no matter how hard those teachers work, they cannot be paid more. There are no cash bonuses, no rewards for performance. After working many (truly exhausting) years, few teachers could be faulted for either shifting into a lower gear or moving on.

These are hardly the only disincentives to becoming a teacher. When, at age 37, I started teaching high school, I began, in both salary and rank, as a “first-year” teacher. Despite my having worked in intelligence, diplomacy, and business, I was treated like, and earned essentially the same salary as, a 21-year-old teaching second grade. And, like my first-year peers, I was subject to the seniority system’s stubborn adherence to a last-in, first-out policy.

It doesn’t take the sharpest imagination to understand why this would be a disastrous way to run an organization. If I were, say, managing a pharmaceutical company, would I pay someone with 15 years of experience in pharmacological research the same salary as the new undergraduate intern simply because they were both new hires? Could I expect the same outcomes from both? The same productivity? Of course not. Then why would I pay them identically or fire the last one hired, regardless of performance? This is nonetheless the norm in public education.

When I first thought about teaching, I called my county school system. I explained my professional background, including graduate degrees in international affairs and, later, in international economics. They told me to apply immediately. Then I found out that, despite my background, according to the state of Maryland I was not qualified to teach history, political science, or economics. Until I completed 29 credit hours of teacher training and became certified, I would be employed as a “long-term substitute,” a job with full hours, low pay, no benefits, and the real possibility of my being released at the end of the year.

State-mandated teacher certifications (backed by No Child Left Behind–based rules) are preventing highly qualified candidates from becoming teachers. I was an all-too-rare exception. At the time, my wife and I were in a secure enough financial position that I could take two years off without any income to become a teacher and then earn around $45,000 a year once employed. How many experienced professionals, especially those with families, could do that? Why should they have to? I had the academic background and pedagogical skills I needed to be a teacher before expending all that time, money, and effort on a graduate degree in education.

Teacher quality is the key to improving public education in the United States. Nonetheless, we systematically dissuade highly capable people from becoming teachers. If we are to improve our educational system, we must instead create economic incentives that draw the best people to the profession and keep them there.

Vann Prime teaches Advanced Placement (AP) economics, AP European history, and international relations at Mount Hebron High School in Howard County, Maryland.

A) give districts money?
B) deny districts funds?
C) subject districts to tight regulations?
D) force districts to compete for federal dollars by promis­ing to improve?
E) tell the truth while insisting parents be given a choice of school?

Policymakers have responded to this, the nation’s most challenging multiple-choice education quiz, with four different wrong answers. Now, with the release of the Koret Task Force report, policymakers have a chance to get it right, as they consider the reauthorization of the federal education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

President Jimmy Carter chose the first answer, swelling the federal share of education spending to an all-time high. Yet according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, high-school seniors perform no better today in math, reading, or science than they did when Carter held office.

President Ronald Reagan curtailed the share of K–12 education spending paid out of the federal treasury. That did not lift student performance either.

With the passage of NCLB, the George W. Bush administration subjected failing schools to sanctions if test performance did not improve. Notable gains were made, as Eric Hanushek points out in his provocative analysis of the benefits of the school accountability law. But NCLB’s complicated regulations proved to be unworkable and ineffectual.

Now, the Obama administration has sought to boost school improvement through Race to the Top by getting states and districts to compete for some federal dollars with promises to execute needed reforms. Not surprisingly, state and district promises are more easily made than kept.

Four strategies. Four failures. What should the federal government try next?

Why not do what the federal government has always done well? Collect the facts about schools and student performance and let the data speak for themselves. When the original Department of Education was founded in 1867, its main task was to collect school statistics on such fundamentals as student enrollment, dollars spent, and numbers of teachers hired. Gradually, the federal government acquired the capacity to compile a sophisticated battery of information on the state of American education. Indeed, the only reason we know that America’s schools have not improved much over the past 50 years is that the federal government has collected the information.

So why not use the power of the federal government to collect even more specific information on student learning? A giant step in the right direction was taken with NCLB’s original passage. When it is reauthorized, further steps need to be made so that accurate information on knowledge gained each year in each classroom is available to every parent.

And to receive federal dollars, districts must give parents the freedom to use this information to select the school of their choice—traditional public, charter, or private.

That is what the Koret Task Force has recommended. It’s the right answer to the nation’s multiple-choice education quiz.

- Paul E. Peterson

In the first round, the state supreme court in 2004 struck down a statewide voucher program enacted by the legislature for the benefit of students in low-performing districts. The plaintiffs alleged, and the court narrowly concurred, that the program violated a provision of the state constitution that school boards “shall have control of instruction in the public schools of their respective districts.” The court held that to require school districts to turn over some locally raised money to private schools, as the law did, offended that provision.

This seemed to suggest that a program adopted by a local school board might survive, and a test recently emerged. Suburban areas with high-performing school districts have shown little support for vouchers, so it was surprising to have the first locally enacted voucher program come from Douglas County, a Denver suburb with one of the highest median incomes in the country. School choice advocates, however, had targeted the district in school board elections. As a result, the normally nonpartisan elections turned partisan in 2009, when the Republican Party endorsed a slate of four candidates and handily defeated candidates endorsed by the teachers union.

Those efforts bore fruit in March 2011 when Douglas County’s school board unanimously approved the Pilot Choice Scholarship Program. Through this plan, any student who had been enrolled in district schools for at least one year could apply for a voucher of approximately $4,600, equal to 75 percent of state per-pupil funding, to attend a “partner” private school, with the school district keeping the other 25 percent. Religious schools would not have to waive admission requirements to participate, but would have to offer an exemption for voucher students who wished to be excused from religious services. Of the 19 initial partner schools, 14 were sectarian. The school board capped the program at 500 students but expected it to expand. As the third-largest district in the state, Douglas County serves more than 61,000 students.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), along with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sued, citing a host of constitutional offenses, including violating the ban on support for private schools and churches (the state’s Blaine Amendment), the ban on religious tests, the guarantee of religious freedom, the uniformity requirement in the education clause, the prohibition on support for private institutions, and, for good measure, the guarantee of local control. After a three-day hearing in August, state district court judge Michael Martinez granted the ACLU’s request for a permanent injunction. Clearly alarmed by the religious instruction that would occur at religious schools—“not only is the risk of religion intruding into the secular educational function great, that risk is inevitable and unavoidable due to the very structure of the Scholarship Program”—Judge Martinez accepted nearly all of the ACLU’s claims.

Voucher supporters lined up to assist Douglas County in defending the program. The Daniels Fund, a well-regarded and influential foundation in the Rocky Mountain region, pledged $530,000 for legal expenses. In addition, the libertarian Institute for Justice filed an appeal on behalf of several families whose children were granted vouchers.

While the ACLU obviously has a grab bag of provisions at its disposal going forward, one risk is its reliance on the state Blaine Amendment. If state courts rule that the amendment requires that religious students and institutions be treated differently than secular ones, as Martinez’s ruling seems to imply, it could potentially raise a federal challenge under both the First and Fourteenth Amendments as a violation of free exercise and equal protection. The most promising outcome for Douglas County would be for Mickey Mouse to meet the U.S. Constitution.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

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

When former governors Jeb Bush and Bob Wise strode to the stage at the 2011 Excellence in Action National Summit on Education Reform in San Francisco last October, Sal Khan had just shown the 750 attendees his vision of the digital future.

Khan is the former hedge-fund analyst turned education rock star who started Khan Academy, a nonprofit that reaches millions through its free online lessons and assessments. Tools like these, said Khan, can catapult education from its time-based roots toward a competency-based model in which students progress upon actual learning—mastery—instead of seat time.

At the same conference a year earlier, the two former governors, cochairs of Digital Learning Now!, released “10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning.” This year, Bush and Wise said they had evaluated each of the 50 states against the elements and explained the assessment methodology they had used: states were judged against 72 individual metrics. (Disclosure: I was one of many who provided feedback on how different states ranked on the criteria and serve as a “digital luminary” for the Digital Learning Now! effort.) Rather than announce where the states fell in the ranking, the governors gave the crowd a preview of their “Roadmap for Reform,” a guide to help states navigate different paths toward changing their online education policies (see sidebar).

With the road map in place, one might assume that moving into the future will be a straightforward exercise: the pieces are all there and model legislation is forthcoming, so state policymakers just have to enact the 10 Elements.

Of course, things are never so simple, and many questions remain.

Some questions reflect legitimate disagreement over Digital Learning Now!’s recommendations, even among those who agree with its broad vision. An obvious flash point will be the idea that states require students to take at least one college- or career-prep course online to earn a high school diploma.

One argument in favor of the requirement is that the outcome from taking an online course—gaining the skills to succeed in a digital environment and perhaps become more self-driven—is valuable in a world in which postsecondary education and workforce training are increasingly done online. Yet some see this as yet another input-based requirement in a system already overburdened with mandates, and in conflict with the spirit of digital learning: if the experience is so important or compelling, won’t students naturally flock to online learning, particularly given Digital Learning Now!’s recommendation that dollars follow students to the online course of their choice?

Another consideration is that elementary-school students don’t take courses—at least in the sense that high-school and middle-school students do—and so ensuring that elementary-school students have access to online learning at the course level seems to miss some fundamental principle. According to the state report cards, though, several states have achieved their goals at the elementary-school level, which only raises more questions.

Many of the pieces that Digital Learning Now! casts as critical to the endeavor are not yet in place, and therefore no one actually knows how they will work in practice. For example, Digital Learning Now! has hitched its wagon to the enactment of the Common Core standards and accompanying next-generation assessments that should be in place by 2014. Whether these assessments will facilitate a competency-based learning environment unburdened by time—or lock in today’s system—is yet to be seen. States may abandon the digital effort when they see the up-front costs of implementing an online assessment system. And if they do, what will that mean for a plan that rests on paying for achievement instead of seat time? Valid, reliable, authentic, on-demand, and independent assessments are critical to moving to a system based on student learning outcomes. What about those courses that don’t fall under the Common Core? Does an outcome-based funding system require extending the Common Core to all subject areas, or will states create unique standards for subject areas other than math and English? Could entrepreneurs develop competency badges for their students that the public would recognize as legitimate? How would such competency measures be accredited?

A number of operational challenges need to be worked out as well. Utah, for example, passed in the spring of 2011 Senate Bill 65, based on the 10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning. Utah state senator Howard Stephenson declared that the bill ends the “tyranny of time and place” in education by allowing dollars to follow high school students to their online course of choice. The legislation calls for the state to withhold 50 percent of the provider’s fee until the student successfully completes the course.

Not surprisingly, the devil has been in the details. Crafting a viable funding model for online courses that makes sense for districts and providers alike has not been easy. Even more challenging is helping schools and districts transition to a world in which students still need some of the services they provide but take most of their courses online. How does funding work in this model? How do schools create the flexible schedules and offer the critical services—many of which may be nonacademic—to accommodate students’ varying needs? How do they transition to this service—or community center—model?

A related set of issues plagues the funding model from the state’s fiscal perspective. If students progress based on competency instead of cohort, the state should presumably reward schools and providers that help students progress faster. And Digital Learning Now! suggests that it should reward those providers that help students make the most growth. Set aside for a moment the demands on state data systems created by an outcome-based system that rewards growth and the fact that these systems are not in place today. If this policy were in place, the state would be on the hook for paying for a student who masters, say, 20 half-semester courses in a given year, rather than a more conventional 12 or 14. How will states deal with this fiscal uncertainty? Holding back students seems like a poor choice, as does punishing schools that can educate students faster with less revenue.

And what if a student masters the high school curriculum by the time she is 15, as many students undoubtedly could? Does she go to college? Does she take time off? Or does she stay in high school with her friends but take college courses? If so, who pays?

Suggesting that a road map document could tackle such complexity isn’t fair. But a glimpse into the exciting— and uncertain—future presented by Digital Learning Now! does raise many legitimate questions. That’s no reason to delay implementing its recommendations though; innovation is never perfect right out of the box. Iteration in practice is critical. With the “Roadmap” coming on the heels of Khan’s conference presentation, surely some in the audience wondered whether innovations yet to come might even clear away many of the familiar roadblocks.

Michael Horn is cofounder and executive director of education at Innosight Institute.

New Jersey’s supreme court in May restored $500 million in added spending for the state’s poor, urban schools, known as the “Abbott districts” (31 out of 591 districts in total), which particularly benefit from nearly 40 years of its constitutional rulings. Otherwise, a divided court left intact school spending cuts in the budget of Republican governor Chris Christie, an outspoken critic of the court, who promised to abide by its decision.

In deciding how to rule, New Jersey’s court was guided by earlier decisions on behalf of the Abbott districts, stating, “Like anyone else, the State is not free to walk away from judicial orders enforcing constitutional obligations.” We are guessing that other courts that receive petitions asking for restoration of funds will attempt a similar approach and will seek to defend positions staked out on grounds of equity or adequacy, but will avoid picking fresh fights with governors and legislatures if they can.

Budget cutting has precipitated another issue: the pension rights of public employees, among whom are this country’s heavily unionized teachers.

In June, the Florida Education Association (FEA), the state’s teachers union, filed suit in a circuit court in Tallahassee against the governor and other officials on behalf of the more than 550,000 state employees, among them 140,000 FEA members, who participate in the Florida Retirement System (FRS), charging that changes in the system made by a Republican legislature violated Florida’s constitution in three ways: They impaired the employees’ contract with the state, took private property without compensation, and impaired the employees’ right to bargain collectively.

Participation in the FRS is mandatory for state employees. Underlying the union’s complaint were revisions that would take effect on July 1, 2011. Although the FRS was created in 1970 as a contributory system, it had been noncontributory since 1974. The legislature now returned to a contributory plan under which 3 percent of a member’s pay would be deducted monthly and credited to an account with the FRS. A second change addressed provisions for cost-of-living adjustments following retirement. Under the plan of 1974, retirees were to receive an annual cost-of-living increase of 3 percent without regard to the number of years of credited service or when the service had occurred. Under the revised plan, the 3 percent adjustment would be subject to a fractional reduction for years of service after July 1, 2011. The union’s petition objected that these changes had been made unilaterally rather than having been the subject of collective bargaining. It asked for temporary and permanent injunctions, and that the funds at issue be segregated and placed in an interest-bearing account until the lawsuit was settled.

“This pay cut was used by legislative leadership to make up a budget shortfall on the backs of teachers, law enforcement officers, firefighters, and other state workers,” FEA president Andy Ford said. “It is essentially an income tax levied only on workers belonging to the Florida Retirement System,” he added, apparently hoping to cast as hypocritical Republicans who are opposed to tax increases.

Florida is one of only five states with a constitutional protection for collective bargaining rights, though the language is strangely ambiguous. Without specifically granting the right, the law guarantees against its abridgement. This invites discretion from a supreme court that has a pro-union past but today is composed of a narrow majority of Republican appointees.

More or less simultaneously with the filing of Florida’s suit, state district judges in Minnesota and Colorado threw out public employees’ suits against governments that had reduced cost-of-living adjustments to their pensions, ruling that they were not contractually protected. The Florida plaintiffs, citing both statutes and the constitution, assert such protection. The state, citing past supreme court decisions in support of its position, asserts that the FRS is entirely prospective and must allow for modification of future benefits by the legislature.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

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 called “the flipped classroom.” While there is no one model, the core idea is to flip the common instructional approach: With teacher-created videos and interactive lessons, instruction that used to occur in class is now accessed at home, in advance of class. Class becomes the place to work through problems, advance concepts, and engage in collaborative learning. Most importantly, all aspects of instruction can be rethought to best maximize the scarcest learning resource—time.

Flipped classroom teachers almost universally agree that it’s not the instructional videos on their own, but how they are integrated into an overall approach, that makes the difference. In his classes, Bergmann says, students can’t just “watch the video and be done with it.” He checks their notes and requires each student to come to class with a question. And, while he says it takes a little while for students to get used to the system, as the year progresses he sees them asking better questions and thinking more deeply about the content. After flipping his classroom, Bergmann says he can more easily query individual students, probe for misconceptions around scientific concepts, and clear up incorrect notions.

Counterintuitively, Bergmann says the most important benefits of the video lessons are profoundly human: “I now have time to work individually with students. I talk to every student in every classroom every day.” Traditional classroom interactions are also flipped. Typically, the most outgoing and engaged students ask questions, while struggling students may act out. Bergmann notes that he now spends more time with struggling students, who no longer give up on homework, but work through challenging problems in class. Advanced students have more freedom to learn independently. And, while high-school students still occasionally lapse on homework assignments, Bergmann credits the new arrangement with fostering better relationships, greater student engagement, and higher levels of motivation.

Once Bergmann’s and Sams’s lessons were posted online, it wasn’t long before other students and teachers across the country were using the lessons, and making their own. Across the country in Washington, D.C., Andrea Smith, a 6th-grade math teacher at E. L. Haynes, a high-performing public charter school, shares Bergmann’s enthusiasm, but focuses on a different aspect of the flipped classroom. Smith, who has taught for more than a decade in both D.C.’s public charter and traditional district schools, immediately saw the benefit for students, but says she was most captivated by the opportunity to elevate teaching practice and the profession as a whole. As Smith explains, crafting a great four- to six-minute video lesson poses a tremendous instructional challenge: how to explain a concept in a clear, concise, bite-sized chunk. Creating her own videos forces her to pay attention to the details and nuances of instruction—the pace, the examples used, the visual representation, and the development of aligned assessment practices. In a video lesson on dividing fractions, for example, Smith is careful not to just teach the procedure—multiply by the inverse—but also to represent the important underlying conceptual ideas. Like Bergmann, she makes it clear that the videos are just one component of instruction. She’s keen on the equivalent of a motion picture’s “director’s cut,” where a video creator might explain the reasoning behind the examples chosen and how she would extend those activities into class time.

“Flipping” is rapidly moving into the mainstream. Bergmann and Sams have completed a book, are in high demand across the country at educator conferences, and even host their own “Flipped Class Conference” to train teachers. The chief academic officer at Smith’s school, Eric Westendorf, is taking the tools he has piloted at the school and building them into a platform for teachers everywhere to create and share videos. Most notable, though, is the emergence of the Khan Academy, an online repository of thousands of instructional videos that has been touted by Bill Gates and featured prominently in the national media.

Given education’s long history of fascination with new instructional approaches that are later abandoned, there’s a real danger that flipping, a seemingly simple idea that is profound in practice, may be reduced into the latest educational fad. And, in today’s highly polarized political environment, it also runs the risk of being falsely pigeonholed into one of education’s many false dichotomies, such as the age-old pedagogical debate between content knowledge and skills acquisition.

But the ideas behind flipping are not brand new. For over a decade, led by the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), dozens of colleges have successfully experimented with similar ideas across math, science, English, and many other disciplines. NCAT’s increasingly impressive body of practice shows that thoughtful course redesigns lead to improved learning. Carol Twigg, NCAT’s president and CEO, says there is no magic: course redesign is “a hard job.” She’s not assuming students love homework. But redesign offers an opportunity to reengage students and improve their motivation, while setting proper expectations and monitoring to “push school to the top of the list.” And while many course redesigns focus on incorporating more project-based learning opportunities, Twigg’s experience leads her to quickly dismiss pedagogical extremes: “If you don’t have basic math skills, you can’t do an interesting physics project.”

There is also some danger that the flipped classroom could be seen as another front in a false battle between teachers and technology. Yet Bergmann and Sams emphasize that the “only magic bullet is the recruiting, training, and supporting of quality teachers.” And while Khan Academy’s prominence engenders fear of standardization and deprofessionalization among some critics, Bergmann, Sams, and Smith see instructional videos as powerful tools for teachers to create content, share resources, and improve practice. Smith admits that if such tools were available when she first started out, she “would have run to this every week when planning.”

It seems almost certain that instructional videos, interactive simulations, and yet-to-be-dreamed-up online tools will continue to multiply. But who will control these tools and whether they will fulfill their potential remains to be seen. As Scott McLeod, one of the nation’s leading thinkers on educational technology and the director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education, observes, the “reason Sal Khan is so visible right now is that nobody did this instead. It would have been great if the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics had been doing this, but someone from the outside had to fill the vacuum.” His guidance to educators: “Start making!”

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

My classmates complained that her class was too hard.

One of my other instructors spent class sessions badly summarizing the readings, instigating awkward and often one-sided class discussions, or trying to explain the homework assignments and projects she thought up. When she assigned one of her own articles for us to read, it became clear that despite having completed a doctorate at our university, she could not write a coherent academic article.

Desperate for a more challenging academic experience, I increased my course load for the second semester and handpicked my instructors. I actually enjoyed most of my classes that semester, but it was at this point that I began to deeply question the university’s approach to preparing future teachers.

It baffled me, for example, that I could get a master’s degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) after having completed only one rudimentary course in linguistics and one in English grammar. Almost all of my classmates struggled greatly in these two courses, leading me to wonder whether perhaps the admission requirements might also need refining. A class in adolescent development was useful, but the program offered no course in child development, despite the fact that my certification would be for grades K–12. It seemed that they were skimming over the important topics while bogging me down with courses in “theory and practice,” which did little to make me feel prepared to begin teaching on my own.

The focus of the third and fourth semesters was student teaching. My first placement was in high-school foreign language, for which I was also receiving certification. I was fortunate to work with a relatively strong supervising teacher; the infuriating aspect of this first placement was how I was evaluated. A supervisor from the university observed me during three lessons over the course of the semester. After each observation, she completed a write-up and made a few minimally helpful suggestions. During the final observation, she leaned over to my supervising teacher and casually asked, “So, what grade would you give her?” No criteria for evaluation, no request for a report on what I needed to work on. Fortunately, I did receive some valuable feedback from my supervising teacher that semester; I cannot say the same about my English as a Second Language student-teaching placement the following semester.

The final task I was asked to complete for the program was an “individualized project,” which sounded to me like a dumbed-down version of a thesis or capstone project. I have to confess that I took the easy way out. I knew I wasn’t going to get the kind of academic support I would need to complete an actual thesis, so I settled for designing a unit based on what I was already working on with my ESL students. After meeting with the professor a few times and receiving some vague suggestions, I handed in a project that earned me the last of a full transcript of easy As, with a friendly note on the cover and not a single comment or suggestion for how the unit could have been improved.

After observing and teaching in a variety of classroom settings over the course of my graduate studies, I have concluded that good teaching depends on three things: mastery of the subject, a keen understanding of how children learn, and an ability to maintain a disciplined yet positive learning environment. It is hard for me to express how disheartening it is to have spent two years and more than $80,000 in student loans on a program that did justice to none of those objectives.

The author earned a masters degree in education at a private university in the Northeast. Julia Harvey is a pseudonym.

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.

Like some other states, such as Vermont and Texas, Kansas has responded to school finance litigation by limiting how much school districts can spend. Following a 1991 trial court decision in Mock v. State invalidating an existing plan, the legislature under a state judge’s supervision enacted a sweeping reform that met his standards for equity yet made a concession to wealthier districts with provision for a local-option budget. The state would provide a base level of funding per pupil but allowed districts to levy additional local taxes up to a cap of 25 percent of their base. By 2010 the cap had risen to 30 percent or, with approval of district voters, 31 percent.

In the wake of the recent economic downturn, the state reduced its base payment to all districts. Noting Shawnee Mission’s nearly $20 million in budget cuts over two years and plans for school closures, the plaintiffs asked the court to enjoin the local cap.

The plaintiffs asserted that the cap violates several constitutional guarantees. Citing Supreme Court decisions in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which held that the liberty guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause includes a right of parents to control the education of their children, the plaintiffs charged that the local cap infringes on that right. As well, by forbidding additional taxes it limits their right to use their property as they wish. Still more inventive, they invoked the First Amendment right of assembly, saying that the cap prevents voters from expressing their collective wishes at the ballot box. These violations together, they contended, constitute a denial of equal protection of the law.

In the 2008–09 school year, at $4,701, Shawnee Mission was 265th out of 296 districts in state funding, receiving $2,643 less per pupil than the average. At $12,174 per pupil, the district’s spending was almost $500 below the state average. That a rich district could perversely become poor is explained by the fact that the base amount provided by the state is subject to complicated weighted increases that favor sparsely populated western and urban eastern districts while disfavoring suburban eastern ones such as Shawnee Mission. The local cap prevents districts from closing the difference.

In making their novel legal claims, which they summarized with the phrase “collective political freedoms,” the plaintiffs were assisted by high-powered legal talent from Kansas City’s Shook, Hardy & Bacon, famous for cutting its teeth in defense of cigarette makers; Washington, D.C.’s boutique firm Massey & Gail; and Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe, who as special consultant to Massey & Gail signed the district’s brief. This talent, however, could not secure a favorable decision. In March 2011, U.S. District Court Judge John Lungstrum dismissed the case. The school district, as an entity of the state, he said, has no right to tax beyond what the state allows. Nor could the local cap be severed from the rest of the school funding statute. Striking it down would require striking down the entire school finance structure, an option Judge Lungstrum was unwilling to entertain.

The parents have said that they will appeal. But if the local cap cannot be severed, federal courts will likely remain reluctant to wade into the state’s school funding choices. Given the problems generated in Kansas and elsewhere by school finance litigation, federal judges might reasonably doubt whether courts are suitable venues for resolving such disputes. Late in 2010, 63 Kansas districts, including Kansas City, filed a class action against the state charging that it is violating the state constitution by failing to fund schools adequately. It remains to be seen whether the Kansas courts will embrace one more round of battle in a state with a long history of finance litigation and growing signs of legislative resistance, including a revived interest among the Republican majority in amending the state constitution to discourage future school-finance litigation.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Richard was considered a home schooler at the time, but “hybrid schooler” would have been more accurate: He took classes from an online provider, a small private school, and a performing arts program.

Richard made the team, and by midseason lots of new baseball buddies were hanging around our house on weekends. Soon we discovered that Richard wasn’t the only “hybrid student” on the ball club that year. Leon’s first baseman spent his mornings taking online courses through the Florida Virtual School, the knuckleball pitcher was taking a “dual enrollment” English class through the community college, and the left-handed pro prospect had enrolled in a financial management course at a local college (in case he was drafted).

Moreover, one of Leon’s outfielders had figured out an ingenious way to get a music education few families could afford out of pocket. This kid took mostly music classes at Leon by day and then several online courses at night and during the summer. He ended up being a four-time All-State musician and getting a college offer from Juilliard.

When I first encountered all these hybrid students, I figured there must be something in the water at Leon High. But I came to realize that many of these unconventional schooling options were the by-product of reforms former governor Jeb Bush had initiated, especially the creation of the Florida Virtual School.

The rise of hybrid schooling bodes well for students whose needs, gifts, interests, and learning styles do not align with the factory school model of the 20th century, and for parents who know that no school can maximize the potential of every child every year in every way. (There is a Magic School Bus, but no magic school.)

Customized education is good for all kids and not just for academic reasons. Several years ago, Richard entered a local talent competition structured much like American Idol. Different singers would perform at big community gatherings and then people would vote for the ones they considered the best. Richard kept advancing week after week, until on the night of the finals, one of the organizers took me aside and said, “I don’t get it. You guys just moved here a year or so ago, and yet Richard seems to have a really strong base of support.”

As Richard’s proud papa, I wanted to tell this guy, “Of course, Richard’s got lots of support—he’s the best one.” But I knew what this guy was getting at, so I explained, “See that guy over there? That’s Richard’s drama teacher at Young Actors Theatre. He gets all his thespian friends to vote for Richard.” Then I said, “See that family over there? They know Richard from baseball. Those kids over there took classes with Richard at the classical Christian school. The college students way back there know Richard from Young Life youth ministry. And those kids over there are in the AP classes Richard is taking at Leon.”

The contest organizer realized that Richard’s social network was far larger than he’d expected. What I marveled at was how diverse his friendship network was. Gay. Straight. Christian. Non-Christian. Jocks. Thespians. Nerds. Cool kids. Richard’s friends reflect the diversity of his hybrid-schooling life.

Now, I’m not so naive as to think that hybrid schooling will eradicate high school cliques or classroom bullying. But customized schooling can offer kids a far richer, and more varied, social experience than they might otherwise get. And when you add these social benefits to the educational advantages of customized schooling, you can see why I’m glad that Jeb Bush and other reformers had the Hank Greenberg–like chutzpah to change the way that Florida does education.

William Mattox is a resident fellow at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Florida.

Of course, state courts have yet to weigh in on all the new legislation, and in the past they have proved an even greater obstacle than state legislatures. But in the court of public opinion, vouchers are waging something of a comeback, according to results from the Education Next-PEPG Survey released in this issue.

In the past, our annual poll has been nothing but “Bad News Bears” for vouchers. Over the four years between 2007 and 2010, support for vouchers slipped from 45 percent to 31 percent among those who were asked whether they favored or opposed “a proposal…that would use government funds to pay the tuition of low-income students who choose to attend private schools.” Those expressing opposition to such a proposal increased from 34 percent to 43 percent over that period of time. Each year, the news got worse for voucher enthusiasts. It seemed as if Milton Friedman’s idea was going the way of the buggy whip.

But in 2011, voucher support among the general public revived noticeably. Thirty-nine percent now say they support vouchers, an 8-percentage-point reversal from the 31 percent support the idea received just a year ago. Opposition to vouchers slipped by 5 percentage points.

The news from the Education Next poll had become so bad we were accused of asking an unfriendly voucher question (it referenced the “use” of “government funds to pay the tuition”), so we agreed to split our respondents into two equivalent groups and ask the second group a “friendly” voucher question instead: “A proposal has been made that would give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition.” The idea conveyed by the two questions is essentially the same, but the wording—“wider choice,” “government helping”—is more positive than the wording in the “unfriendly” question. When the question is posed in a friendlier manner, vouchers, even on their darkest day (2010), gathered support from another 8 percent, with 39 percent in favor and just 32 percent opposed.

So which question tells us the truth about public opinion? Both, probably, if you look at trends over time rather than at the percentage in any given year. When the public was asked the friendly question in 2011, support for vouchers climbed to 47 percent, 8 percent over the previous year, the same amount of gain revealed by the unfriendly question.

So both questions show an 8 percent turnaround for vouchers. Rather than continuing to head downhill, vouchers are the “comeback kid.” We suspect vouchers gained in public favor because Republicans are in a better position to promote the idea, just as Obama’s opposition to vouchers had probably induced the slide in support between 2008 and 2010. In 2011, the shoe switched feet.

— Paul E. Peterson

If this sounds alien to you, clearly you haven’t signed up for Twitter. This five-year-old phenomenon allows individuals to dash off short comments to their friends, families, professional colleagues, and whoever else might be interested in their stream of consciousness. The technology has already been credited with bringing down oppressive regimes and creating whole new ways of reporting breaking news. It’s a truly open marketplace of ideas, with no editors, gatekeepers, or quality control. So what does it mean for the education debate?

The first thing to understand about Twitter is that most of its messages amount to, “Hey, check this out,” followed by a link to a newspaper article or blog post. It’s a handy device for telling the world (or at least the people in your own world) about news or columns that you find compelling. It’s also a form of self-promotion; quite a few tweets announce posts the tweeter herself has written.

But in the hands of a gifted provocateur, Twitter can be so much more. Take scholar-turned-reform-apostate Diave Ravitch, who according to Klout.com is the most influential tweeter in the education policy space (see sidebar). As Alexander Russo, a freelance writer and blogger, remarked sardonically, “a 72-year-old grandmother has won the Internet.” She’s done it not only by linking to columns and articles she agrees with, but by offering bumper sticker–style statements that tend to set the web aflame. For instance, “Accountability is only for teachers and principals, not for students, families, elected officials, district leadership.” Or: “Last places to go to find out how to ‘reform’ schools: Congress/State Legislature/US Dept of Education.”

Want to follow the top tweeters in education?
Twitter lists made up of the Top 25 Education Policy/Media Tweeters and the
Top 25 Education Tweeters may be found at the Education Next Twitter page.

This might not exactly be H. L. Mencken, but it surely provides raw emotional relief for educators and others who feel besieged by the modern-day reform movement. They “retweet” Ravitch’s rants and, thanks to the multiplication effects of networks, soon tens of thousands of people receive them. In fact, Ravitch’s tweets are so influential that an anonymous someone has created the Twitter handle “@NOTDianeRavitch” to argue the positions held by the education historian before she changed her mind on most education policy issues.
Not that reformers don’t have their own Twitter heroes. Former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is within striking distance of Ravitch’s influence and serves up a steady diet of can-do reform truisms. Tom Vander Ark, an entrepreneur formerly of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, offers an optimistic take on the burgeoning field of online learning. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan promotes his administration’s policies via @arneduncan. And @EdTrust offers its patented progressive take on education and social justice.

It’s hard to know whether all this tweeting adds up to anything significant. Of course, much the same was once said of blogs; now it’s well-accepted that a well-written blog post can be just as influential as a newspaper op-ed. Twitter offers a nonstop stream of views, ideas, opinions, and emotions; get yourself in the flow or be left behind.

Not that it’s easy. If I had a dime for every time someone said, “Oh that must be a piece-of-cake job,” or “I would love to sit at home all day,” I would be a wealthy teacher.

However, for this full-time virtual teacher and mother of three, it works. My day begins at 6 AM, a quiet time in my house. I spend the early hours working on grade books. I teach 6th- and 7th-grade math to 90 students. Parents and students go online to the grade book to view the student’s progress. My goal is to give each one of them the productive, positive, and personalized feedback that will enable the student to turn mistakes into learning opportunities.

FLVS provides the curriculum, so I don’t have to plan lessons or develop tests and can easily individualize instruction. I can personalize my classroom via the announcement page, which works like a virtual bulletin board.

By 8 AM, grading is done and overnight e-mails are answered. I view my calendar, noting any scheduled meetings and appointments. I sit down for breakfast with my youngest son, nine-year-old Camron, to prepare him for his day. Camron is enrolled in the FLVS full-time virtual instruction option for elementary school students and follows an accelerated curriculum for gifted students. I make sure he has his assignments organized before he traipses off to his own virtual world. Being able to oversee his schooling is a major benefit of working as a virtual teacher.

I jump back to the computer and my morning call list. My students vary in how much one-on-one instruction they need. Some students I speak to weekly, others less often, but at least once a month. Whenever students do not understand a concept, they can pick up the phone and call me for help. If their questions require that they be able to see what I am talking about, we have two options: We can use the “whiteboard,” where they can see what I am doing and talk to me on the phone at the same time. Students can write on the whiteboard and go step-by-step through a problem so that I can see where they are making mistakes. We can also use the web-based program Elluminate to work through problems together using a microphone instead of the telephone.

Navigating through FLVS courses is easy for students. Tabs enable them to move around the site at the click of a button. The lessons tab is where they learn the content, see examples, and work on practice problems. The assessment tab is where they submit their assignments for grading. If they want to, students can go to the grade book to reset an assessment and do the assignment again for a new grade. They can interact with each other in the discussion board area.

Before I know it, it is time for lunch, and I can step away from my computer to enjoy some quality time with my son: eat a sandwich, go for a walk, or play a video game. Pretty soon, it’s time to get back to work.

This afternoon, I’ll be taking my job on the road. Camron plays travel baseball for Gatorball Academy in Gainesville, an hour’s drive away. I make a call list: Who needs a welcome call? Monthly call? Do any of my students want to go over an assignment? I pack up my computer, grab my list and cell phone, and out the door we go. For the next few hours, I make good use of my cell phone, calling my students, answering their cries for help, letting parents know how wonderfully well their child is doing.

Once we’re home, I make a few notes for tomorrow. The day is done.

Is this a typical virtual teacher’s day? Will tomorrow be the same? There is no telling. What I can say, and what my students know, is that together we have the tools and the flexibility to meet whatever challenges the day brings.

Karen Faucett taught middle-school math in a traditional school setting for 13 years before moving to virtual education.

In every school in America, in three-ring binders and file folders, sit lesson plans—the recipes that guide everyday teaching in the classroom. Like the secrets of talented cooks, the instructional plans of the best teachers have much to offer their creators’ colleagues. But while the plans are increasingly digital, they are still not easily shared across classrooms, nor, especially, across districts or states. Even when these plans are accessible, they are often not organized in a way that makes them easy to use, understand, or customize.

Now, a host of new web sites, from A to Z Teacher Stuff to Lesson Planet to Lessonopoly, are trying to solve that problem and make it easier for teachers to share, find, and make better use of lesson plans and accompanying materials. One, TeachersPayTeachers, a sort of Craigslist for educators, says it has paid more than $1 million in commissions to teachers, who have sold everything from classroom hand puppets to lesson plans on the Civil War. The site even hosts a “lesson plan on demand” auction, in which teachers advertise for, say, 4th-grade materials on Texas history and other teachers bid to fulfill the request.

But context matters. Teachers want to know whether something will work with their instructional style, in their classroom, and for their kids. Trust matters, too. While the sites offer ratings by users and rankings of the most popular items, these may not identify the highest-quality offerings. So how do novice teachers, who lack experience developing lessons and stand to benefit the most, know that a lesson plan will actually be effective? The answer may not lie in cyberspace, but in real communities.

One of the most promising new entrants to the growing online market of lesson plans is BetterLesson, a small Cambridge, Massachusetts, company started by former educators that has been called the “Facebook for teachers.” Any teacher can join for free, manage her lesson plans, organize teaching materials, and share (or not) with her school, a wider professional learning community, or the entire world. As with Facebook, the site’s technology and user interface are sharp, and users can easily register a positive reaction, in this case by clicking “Helpful.” But more important, BetterLesson shares Facebook’s initial focus on social networks and trusting relationships that already exist. While the site is currently open to any teacher, the company wants to leverage existing communities—school networks, alumni groups, and grade or subject affinity groups—that already share an identity and language around teaching.

BetterLesson’s Intranet package targets existing school networks. One early adopter, Achievement First, the highly regarded network of public charter schools in Connecticut and New York, is tailoring BetterLesson to extend the work of its instructional coaches and teacher learning communities. A coach working with a teacher can share concrete examples from the lesson plans and videos of effective teachers. “Remember what we were talking about at our last professional development session?” she can say. “Well, this is what it looks like.”

Since the examples are drawn from schools with similar cultures, expectations, and records of achievement, they are more likely to be trusted and used. As of February 2011, Achievement First had logged 15,000 downloads. KIPP and Rocketship Education (see “Future Schools”) have also signed on. In the first semester of use, KIPP teachers downloaded more than 20,000 lessons and related materials. But in the wider teaching community, BetterLesson has plenty of competition (see Figure 1).

Dan Cogan-Drew, Achievement First’s director of digital learning, emphasizes that the BetterLesson tools build on school cultures that are already collaborative. They are “an extension of the relationships that coaches are building with teachers,” he says, adding, “If it works for us, it’s because of the people and structure we have.”

Andrew Mandel, a vice president in charge of Teach For America’s Resource Exchange, a similar set of tools for TFA members, agrees with the importance of extending existing relationships. He says that TFA’s successful site is “not so much about the technology. [We’re] much more concerned with the user side.” This past fall, 75 percent of TFA’s 8,131 members downloaded materials from its site. And more than half of Achievement First’s 19 schools were active on BetterLesson in its first full year of use.

It is these real-world ties, along with recognition from their peers, that motivate successful teachers to spend the time and energy to organize and upload their materials. The site’s ease of use, as well as the tools to organize a teacher’s own lessons, is also critical. But sharing lesson plans is not just a one-way exchange. Teachers can also get feedback to ensure that their lessons are always improving.

There are other rewards, including one not normally associated with teaching but always possible on the Internet: fame. While teachers can keep their lessons within their trusted networks, they can also share them in such a way that they end up “going viral.” Alex Grodd, BetterLesson’s founder, former 6th-grade English teacher, and Teach For America alum, says it’s important for these networks to live on the same platform so that teachers can share beyond their individual networks, between districts and charters, and even across countries. The site can also offer outsiders a glimpse inside the classroom, notes Cogan-Drew; he says it lets prospective Achievement First teachers “step into our world.”

Just as Mastering the Art of French Cooking can’t magically transform a kitchen rookie into Julia Child, great lesson plans won’t turn novice teachers into experts. But the plans can help those novices lighten their load, allowing them to focus on other areas like classroom management and student engagement. As for the great teachers, they now have a way to capture tangible artifacts of what’s working and to spread them across hundreds of classrooms. And even the best chefs borrow recipes from each other. Highly effective veterans are constantly looking for ways to improve specific components of their instruction, such as opening up an explanation of quadratic equations. Perhaps sometime soon, we’ll see great lesson plans join the Star Wars kid, piano-playing kittens, and sneezing pandas as Internet sensations.

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

At a 2003 party, Swanson and other school officials took away a student’s gift bags because they contained candy cane–shaped pens with an attached card explaining the religious origins of candy canes. Swanson also forbade students from writing “Merry Christmas” on cards sent to retirement homes. At another school in 2004, the principal, Jackie Bomchill, prohibited a student from giving tickets to a Christian drama to her friends. She threatened to call the police when the same student asked to distribute pencils with “Jesus Loves Me This I Know, For the Bible Tells Me So” during her class birthday party. The principal also threatened to expel the young girl if she attempted to distribute “Jesus pencils” again. The principal did allow her to give out pencils embellished with a moon design. As a result of these incidents, parents sued, claiming that their children had been subject to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

The school district responded in 2005 by defining when such materials could be distributed: 30 minutes before and after school, at three annual parties, during recess, and throughout school hours, but only passively, at designated tables. This policy, except for a prohibition on distribution during lunch periods, survived in court, but the larger issue, officials’ claim of qualified immunity, remained to be decided.

The Supreme Court’s free-speech doctrine is relatively clear. The Court has said that government must be viewpoint neutral when regulating speech, meaning that it cannot restrict speech because of the motivating ideology of the speaker. Such restrictions are almost always found unconstitutional. But the complicating question here was, what free-speech rights do elementary school students have? The officials argued that the Supreme Court has never held that the Constitution prohibits viewpoint-based discrimination in elementary schools and they were therefore entitled to qualified immunity, which would free them from personal liability. School officials under this view could engage in all the viewpoint-based discrimination they wanted. Zoroastrian speech could be allowed, while Mormon speech could be suppressed. Pencils saying “Jesus Does Not Love Me This I Know” could be distributed, while those contending that he does could be confiscated.

Federal courts, so far, have not been sympathetic to this broad claim of arbitrary authority. Over the past two years, the Plano officials have lost their request for qualified immunity at trial and on appeal. A Fifth Circuit panel ruled that they should have known that under Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) and other cases like Good News Club v. Milford (2001), elementary school students have speech rights. Plano’s counsel apparently detected more ambiguity in these precedents than did the Fifth Circuit. Tinker, the court explained, allows for nondisruptive student speech, while Good News Club applied the free-speech clause to elementary-school-age students and prohibited viewpoint discrimination in the use of school facilities. Summing up, the court said that the officials had consistently argued “that qualified immunity should be granted because elementary school students do not have any First Amendment rights. No law supports Appellants’ novel proposition.” The Fifth Circuit has agreed to hear an en banc appeal of the officials’ claims, but we suspect they will not fare any better. Even if the school officials do manage to win qualified immunity and escape personal liability, courts will almost certainly never sanction the kind of discrimination alleged in Plano, leaving school districts solely liable for the conduct of their employees.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Opinion on this question is deeply divided. “The sage on the stage” versus “the guide on the side” is how the debate is often framed. Proponents of the former ruled the education roost throughout the 19th century, but in the 20th century a child-centered doctrine, developed by John Dewey in the gardens surrounding the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School, then refined at Columbia University’s Teachers College, gained the high ground, as “inquiry-based” and “problem-solving” became the pedagogies of choice, certainly as propounded by education-school professors. In recent years, the earlier view has staged something of a comeback, as KIPP and other “No Excuses” charter schools have insisted on devoting hours of class time to direct instruction, even to drill and memorization.

As an instructor myself, I’ve had trouble making up my mind. I can cover a lot of ground in classes where lectures consume about two-thirds of the time. But those classes get less enthusiastic student evaluations than some smaller classes where students are encouraged to solve problems through discussion. I, too, like those problem-solving classes. They require less preparation and are easier to teach.

So I can easily understand why progressive pedagogy has proven popular. It’s more enjoyable for all concerned, even if sometimes you worry that you are not teaching very much.

The question of which approach works best for student learning has seldom been a topic for careful empirical inquiry. So when Guido Schwerdt and Amelie Wuppermann of the University of Munich figured out a way to test empirically the relative value of the two teaching styles (see “Sage on the Stage,” research), it is worth trumpeting the findings. These analysts took advantage of the fact that the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS) not only tested a nationally representative sample of U.S. 8th graders in math and science, but also asked their teachers what percentage of class time was taken up by students “listening to lecture-style presentations” rather than either “working on problems with the teacher’s guidance” or “working on problems without guidance.” Teachers reported that they spent twice as much time on problem-solving activities as on direct instruction. In other words, U.S. middle-school teachers have drunk deep from the progressive pedagogical well.

To see whether this tilt toward the problem-solving approach helps middle schoolers learn, Schwerdt and Wuppermann identified those 8th graders who had the same classmates in both math and science, but different teachers. Then they estimated the impact on student learning of class time allocated to direct instruction versus problem solving. Under which circumstance did U. S. middle-school students learn more?

Direct instruction won. Students learned 3.6 percent of a standard deviation more if the teacher spent 10 percent more time on direct instruction. That’s one to two months of extra learning during the course of the year.

The students who benefited most from direct instruction were those who were already higher-performing at the beginning of the year. But even initial low performers learned more when direct instruction consumed more class time. Sadly, U.S. middle-school pedagogy is weighted heavily toward problem-solving.

— Paul E. Peterson

Cell phones are a significant feature in kids’ daily lives. According to Generation M², a 2010 Kaiser Foundation media study, nearly two-thirds of 8- to 18-year-olds have cell phones. Among 8- to 10-year-olds, 31 percent have their own phone, as do 69 percent of those ages 11 to 14. Eighty-five percent of teenagers 15 to 18 have them. A study by Mediamark Research & Intelligence found that most of the younger kids use the phone to contact their parents. Girls are more likely to use the phones for social uses, while boys are more inclined to play games or access the Internet.

The Pew Research Center in April 2010 released results from a survey that confirmed the ubiquity of cell phones among teenagers, some of whom manage to send text messages from class, even when the technology is banned in their school. While the Pew survey focused on texting, kids use their cell phones for all kinds of things. Along with brief calls to their parents and hours spent texting their friends, kids use their cell phones to listen to music, play games, and watch videos. Kids whose cell phones have cameras take pictures and send them to their friends. Older teens use smartphones like iPhones and Blackberrys to check Facebook and e-mail, get directions, and to obtain any other information they might need during the day.

Businesses have certainly caught on. Phone manufactur­ers and wireless carriers target their advertisements to young people. (Nearly all backpacks have cell-phone pockets.)

So have other groups. The New York Times has reported a rise in education apps, as they’re called. At a summer camp held at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, kids used smartphones and probes with Bluetooth capabilities to test and record levels of air pollution, part of a project run by New Youth City Learning Network. With other new mobile applications, students can take a picture of an insect or his­torical site, send it off, and receive a message back with full identification of the image.

Surely schools could make productive use of a technology that is relatively cheap, por­table, and already in the hands of the majority of U.S. schoolchildren.

The simplest use for students’ cell phones is keeping track of assignments. Rather than carrying around an assignment notebook, stu­dents could use their phones. The calendar and reminder functions can easily handle home­work and tests. Kids are much less likely to leave the phone at home, at school, or some­where else than they are a notebook.

A pilot program in North Carolina extends the cell phone’s reach far beyond keeping track of deadlines. Project K-Nect, a pilot program in Onslow County, uses smartphones as a learning tool in math classes, supplementing traditional math instruction with alternative teaching strat­egies. The project provides at-risk high-school students who lack computer or Internet access at home with smartphones. Teachers assign math problems for students to solve on the smart­phone. If students need help, they can connect with their classmates through instant messaging and dedicated blogs. If they still can’t solve the problem, they can access digital content through the phone. Project Tomorrow, which has evaluated the pro­gram, found improvement in student test scores, engagement and participation in class, and collaboration among students.

Cell phone use is typically forbidden in public school class­rooms. Teachers rightly object to phones ringing and students updating their Facebook profiles or texting during class. But educators could view cell phones differently. For adults, they are engaging, interactive tools—for communicating and for storing and accessing useful information. The same could be true for kids in school.

Rebecca Fortner teaches special education in Livingston County, Kentucky.

As standards of qualification, the law names possession of a bachelor of arts, subject-matter competence, and certification or licensure by the state. Importantly, it leaves standards of certification to the states.

California, like many states, has relied heavily on interns, such as members of Teach For America (TFA), to staff schools in poor areas. Public Advocates claims that it has been able to do this because a Department of Education (DOE) regulation fails to implement the law faithfully. The offending regulation provides that teachers enrolled in “alternative routes” to certification—which is government-speak for Teach For America and similar programs—may be found qualified if they are making satisfactory progress. Public Advocates, on behalf of Californians for Justice, the California chapter of ACORN, and individual parents of children in Title I schools, says that this creates an impermissible loophole in the law: that to be certifiable, enrollees must have completed their alternative route. About 10,000 teachers in California fall short of the standard that the lawsuit seeks to enforce.

The suit has followed a quixotic path. Initially, in 2008, a district judge held for the U.S. secretary of education, ruling that the department’s regulation did not violate the discernible intent of Congress. The plaintiffs appealed. On appeal, the federal government introduced the argument that they lacked standing because their case failed a test of “redressability.” Even if the court ruled in their favor, the secretary could not tell California how to define certification.

At first, the appellate court embraced the government’s claim, and remanded the case with instructions to dismiss for lack of standing. But one of the judges evidently had second thoughts, because the court granted the plaintiffs’ petition for a rehearing, and in September 2010 reversed both its own decision about standing and the district judge’s ruling about the validity of the department’s regulation. It found that the regulation does violate the intent of Congress.

Much of the discussion within the court centered on how California would respond to a decision for the plaintiffs, and how the  federal government might induce a response that would redress the alleged injury.

The court majority did not dispute that NCLB leaves certification to the states, but said that even if the secretary could not dictate California’s standards, he could threaten to withhold grants-in-aid from a state that is not in compliance with the law. The court seemed to think that this would be a viable course of action.

Beyond the federalism question lies the deeper issue, seemingly of less concern to the court majority, of where to find highly qualified teachers to staff classrooms in poor and minority areas. Even when reinforced by a court, Congress cannot solve this problem by decree. As Judge Richard Tallman said in dissent, California cannot order highly qualified but unwilling teachers into schools where they don’t want to teach. Teachers, he averred, “are human beings…not pawns on a chessboard that can be distributed at will.”

We very much doubted that the secretary of education would threaten the country’s most populous state, which teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, by holding back funds. Congress, under pressure from TFA and perhaps taking account of the severe disruption of schools that could result from the 9th Circuit’s decision, resolved this judicially created imbroglio by writing the DOE’s regulation into law. In typical congressional fashion, it added language to December’s continuing resolution to fund the government until March. The 9th Circuit, which is routinely overturned by the Supreme Court, can add Congress to the list of institutions dissatisfied with its legal judgment.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

A year previously, a group of us—Chester Finn, Jay Greene, Marci Kanstoroom, and I—decided the country needed a new education journal, one free of all connections to institutions with a vested interest in the status quo. We also agreed that good design and good writing were as important as good ideas.

Either the timing was perfect or we were dumb lucky, most likely both. The Hoover Institution had just launched its own education initiative, the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, and both Hoover and its task force lent the undertaking their vigorous support. We asked the Smith Richardson Foundation for a small grant to help set up shop. Our draft proposal placed all four of us in charge of the journal. At that, Phoebe Cottingham, the foundation’s officer, simply laughed, shrewdly refusing to release monies until an editor-in-chief had been named. When all fingers were pointed at me, I accepted, with the proviso that a managing editor be someone upon whom I could depend. Shortly thereafter, several other foundations made major grants, a manuscript editor and a designer were found, and the first issue arrived only three months late.

All of this seemed too good to be true. And it was. No sooner were we launched than a small consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, filed a lawsuit, complaining that our journal, Education Matters, had stolen its name. It was tempting to fight for the moniker, but, as Mark Zuckerberg concluded more recently, we decided that time and resources were better devoted to substance, not lawsuits. And so we are Education Next.

Over the decade, we have witnessed—perhaps contributed to—the advance of school reform: the proliferation of school choice from vouchers to tax credits, charters, and online learning; the evolution of accountability’s focus from schools to teachers; renewed attention to national standards; and a more realistic understanding of the uncertain connection between educational expenditures and school quality.

Space is too short to highlight every noteworthy feature, but here are a few that have stood time’s test: E. D. Hirsch’s placement of progressive education within the Romantic tradition (first issue), Joel Best’s skeptical view of school violence (2002), Michael Podgursky’s discovery of the well-paid teacher (2003), Bruno Manno’s and Bryan Hassel’s takes on the charter movement (2003), Brian Jacob and Steve Levitt’s technique for catching teachers who cheat (2004), Barry Garelick’s jeremiad against progressive math (2005), Frederick Hess and Martin West’s exposé of school “strike phobia” (2006), Roland Fryer’s identification of “acting white” (2006), Clay Christiansen and Michael Horn’s vision for virtual learning (2008), and Milton Gaither’s authoritative look at home schooling (2009).

This past year a cornucopia of outstanding pieces have emerged, including James Guthrie and Arthur Peng’s crisp analysis of rising school costs, the inside story of charter authorizing by Terry Ryan and his colleagues, and Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood’s eye-opening research on middle schools.

Key to our success have been the journal’s photos and graphics—from the first issue’s bird-sphinx to the cartoons depicting Margaret Spellings, Michael Bloomberg, and Michelle Rhee; from the Magritte-style school teacher to the haunting, Hopperesque truancy hangout; from the Woodish portrayal of the public to the New Orleans reconstruction photo.

Let me not forget the journal’s annual survey of public opinion, which celebrates its own 5th anniversary this summer. Thank you, readers, for your support over the decade.

— Paul E. Peterson

Then, in the 1990s, New York City introduced CompStat, and this equation changed forever. The NYPD compiled and continuously updated reams of crime data, which were used to identify hot spots and problem areas. In weekly meetings, precinct commanders were held accountable for quickly addressing crime spikes. Suddenly “management by results” became possible—not just in the Big Apple, but in police departments nationwide.

But something else also happened in the ’90s: video cameras were installed in thousands of patrol cars all across the country. The rationale was simple: people who got pulled over could be told that they were under surveillance, making dangerous behavior during traffic stops less likely. Moreover, if cops knew that they, too, were being observed, they would be less likely to engage in brutality or unjust searches. Maybe their supervisors couldn’t ride along with them, but video cameras could serve as partial surrogates.

Wilson also pointed to schools as prime examples of coping organizations. “A school administrator,” he wrote, “cannot watch teachers teach (except through classroom visits that momentarily may change the teacher’s behavior) and cannot tell how much students have learned (except by standardized tests that do not clearly differentiate between what the teacher has imparted and what the student has acquired otherwise).”

As with police, education reformers have spent the last two decades trying to change these assumptions. On the “managing by results” side, there has been the big battle over the use of test data for accountability purposes (CompStat for schools), culminating in the fight over value-added measurement of teacher performance. Perhaps now we can finally “differentiate between what the teacher has imparted and what the student has acquired otherwise.” Yet even advocates acknowledge the imperfections of this approach. What if a teacher gets great results in student learning, but does it by “teaching to the test,” or, worse, cheating? What if she ignores important parts of the curriculum that aren’t easily assessed? Or, on the flip side, what if her value-added scores show lackluster student progress, but it’s due to factors completely outside her control?

Understandably, teachers and their unions don’t want test scores to count for everything; classroom observations are key, too. But, as Wilson pointed out two decades ago, planning a couple of visits from the principal is hardly sufficient. These visits may “change the teacher’s behavior”; furthermore, principals may not be the best judges of effective teaching. Some just aren’t much good at that.

So why not put video cameras in classrooms, and use the recordings as part of teachers’ evaluations? That’s a question Tom Kane has been asking. Kane, an education and economics professor on leave from Harvard University, leads a massive initiative supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that is developing new approaches to evaluating teachers, with high-definition, 360-degree cameras at the center. Three thousand teachers in six cities are participating; for doing so, they receive stipends and lots of feedback from experts.

“There are a number of huge advantages to video,” Kane told me. “One is it gives you a common piece of evidence to discuss with an instructional coach or supervisor. Second, it will prove to be economically much more viable because you’re not paying observers to drive around to various schools to do observations.” Furthermore, he contends, “If a teacher doesn’t think that their principal is giving them a fair evaluation because of some vendetta, they can have an external expert with no personal ax to grind watch and give feedback.”

The Gates project is focused on using video only for teacher evaluation, not regular monitoring. Teachers are videotaped only four times a year, not every day. But why not go further? “That right now for us is a bridge too far,” said Kane. “When the camera rolls out of the room, teachers know it’s rolled out of the room.” And in many places, including Washington, D.C., collective bargaining agreements explicitly restrict the use of “electronic monitoring equipment.”

But it feels like just a matter of time. Already one company—WatchMeGrow—sells Internet video-streaming services to child-care centers; parents can log on to their computers at work and watch little Johnny or Cassie all day long. (Cameras are placed in classrooms, on the playgrounds, and in other common areas.) It’s not hard to imagine these parents wanting the same opportunity once their kids graduate to kindergarten and beyond. And think about the possibilities for curbing school violence or guarding against child abuse.

Teachers may scream about infringements on their “professionalism,” but effective teachers will have little to fear. Already, their expectation of complete autonomy—that they close their doors and do what they want—has been undermined by standards, tests, and other reforms of the modern era. Why not watch teachers in action? Sooner or later, that little video camera, always on, will just fade into the background.

The darling of reformers, data have clear potential to help educators make better decisions. But however much they are touted, most data initiatives remain far from realizing their potential. Historically, the collection of data has been top-down, designed almost exclusively to show compliance with state and federal regulations. And while the amount of data collected continues to grow—Texas school districts respond to 104 data collections by the state each year, costing the districts in excess of $300 million—their quality and usefulness are questionable. Thus many state data systems function as de facto data morgues, used more often in autopsies of failed programs than to help educators and policymakers improve existing ones.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that while Texas is data-rich, it is still information-poor. A 2008 TEA study found it likely that some state data are erroneous, even if the same data are accurate in the district systems. It also found that districts must constantly reformat their data to meet state requirements, adding to the cost and to the opportunity for introducing errors.

More important, once districts submit data, they receive little if anything of instructional value in return. Much of the information the state collects, such as the number of 7th graders eligible for Title I funds at a particular school, governs the flow of dollars, but it is not on its own useful for improving school operations or performance. Other data, such as Lubbock’s results on state assessments, could be useful. But that information arrives at the district office late each summer on computer disks, and it must be integrated with the district’s own system for storing student information, along with a third system that houses interim assessment results. By the time school personnel are able to compile reports for teachers, the information is “already cold,” says Kelly Trlica, Lubbock’s chief academic officer.

Because of experiences like Lubbock’s, when it came time to update the state’s 25-year-old data system, officials decided to make some big changes. Instead of gathering a group of technicians in Austin, state education officials talked to 2,200 educators and administrators across the state about the data they needed. Overwhelmingly, they said that the information had to be directly accessible to and relevant for educators. Middle-school teachers, for example, need access to special education identifications, test results, and other information to create appropriate instructional groupings and interventions. And they need that information well before school starts. Principals, for their part, want data to evaluate the many instructional software and intervention programs that are purchased each year. Moreover, frequent educator use is an important means of preventing, or catching and correcting, data errors. If those people closest to the data—teachers—are actually using the data, they will update class rosters and other student information on a regular basis.

To enable schools, districts, and state officials to more easily share and use data, the TEA is developing a more flexible information-system platform. The platform will offer smaller districts a shared, state-sponsored student-information system. It will also make it easy for districts with existing systems to connect to a new data platform that will serve as the hub for district-specific data, feeding relevant student, classroom, and campus information directly to educators and enabling seamless reporting of compliance data to the state. For example, the district might enter attendance data just once. That information would then be available to teachers and counselors, in real time and in dashboard formats, where it would flag students with potential problems. That same attendance data would be automatically reformatted for easy transmission to the state. If successful, the new system will not only reduce costs and streamline the existing accountability process, but will also equip educators with relevant information they can use to help their students.

Building a student-centric system that serves the diverse needs of the state’s 1,235 local education agencies, which range from districts with fewer than 500 students to those with more than 150,000, will not be easy. But this year, educators in Lubbock’s five high schools are getting a start. They will be the first to test-drive the early-warning dashboard, a tool that provides easy access to student attendance, assessment, and credit attainment records, as well as other data that will allow educators to quickly identify potential dropouts and get them back on track.

More than 160 educators are serving as advisors to ensure the system delivers what teachers need. And, true to the spirit of TEA’s new open approach, the public can read the specifications, make recommendations, and watch the system unfold at www.texasstudentdatasystem.org.

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

Americans tend to think their local elementary and middle schools are much better than those of the nation as a whole. The problems with schools, people seem to believe, are found somewhere else: Schools are dreadful in the inner city, perhaps, or in other parts of the country, maybe. My local schools are just fine.

On some measures, they may be right. Yet schools across the country fall short when it comes to challenging the best and brightest. In this issue’s cover story (“Teaching the Talented”), my colleagues and I find that schools in 29 countries are doing a better job of lifting students to the highest level of accomplishment in math than are schools in the United States.

In honor of W. E. B. Du Bois, I like to refer to the students who can reach the highest levels of accomplishment as the “talented tenth.” Du Bois, renowned scholar, activist, and founder of the NAACP, believed it would take a small group with exceptional talent to lift his fellow African Americans out of poverty into the mainstream of American society. His vision has been proven more right than wrong by the many outstanding black scholars, educators, entrepreneurs, musicians, and community leaders.

Du Bois’s insight applies as much to countries as to ethnic minorities. It takes some portion of the total community who have exceptional talent to sustain an increasingly productive national economy. That portion is not fixed at 10 percent, however. The percentage of a generation who are of high accomplishment can be as little as 1 percent or as high as 25 percent. It depends very much upon how they are educated.

Unfortunately, the United States educates only a little more than 6 percent of its students to an advanced level in math according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a small percentage when compared to the proportion in many other countries that score at a comparable level on the international PISA test. The countries that do better spread from just north of the 49th parallel (Canada) across Europe (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) to nations crossed by the Arctic Circle (Finland, Iceland, and Sweden) to the farthest reaches of Asia (Taiwan, Korea, and Japan) to just short of the South Pole (Australia and New Zealand).

Some people blame the state of the American school on a rising immigrant population or the black-white education gap. But the picture does not change much when one looks only at white students (only 8 percent of whom score at the advanced level) or at those who have a parent with a college degree, only 10 percent of whom are advanced. Even for these more-advantaged groups, achievement in math is well below what many other countries are doing for all of their students, regardless of ethnicity or parental education.

Countries with good schools become more productive and watch their economies grow, while those with poor schools eventually pay the price. If the United States is ever to pay off its vast and rising public debt, as well as the growing deficits in its teacher pension accounts, it will have to fix not only the nation’s schools but local ones, too.

–Paul E. Peterson

In March 2010, to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Joel Klein’s chagrin, a New York State trial judge stopped the planned closure of 19 chronically failing schools in New York City. As a result, 19 demonstrably dreadful schools will remain open for at least another school year.  Yet the case and its aftermath show that school districts can, with sufficient effort and creativity, partially maneuver around such judicially imposed obstacles.

Klein, who has sought to close underperforming schools as part of his effort to improve the lagging district, had announced that he would seek to both close the schools in December of 2009 and to recycle some of the facilities as charter schools. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) attempted to manufacture a political controversy over the closures by renting 50 buses to transport protestors to hearings before the city’s Panel for Educational Policy. In the final hearing, which lasted nine hours, the panel approved Klein’s recommendations. The UFT promptly sued and was joined by the local branch of the NAACP, which claimed, despite the dreadful education that the schools inflicted on pupils, that children’s rights had not been considered.

The lawsuit centered on the state legislature’s 2009 revision and reauthorization of mayoral control of the school district. The revised law set out the conditions that the city must follow when closing or significantly changing the use of a school. The requirement under dispute is that the city must provide an “educational impact statement” (EIS) for each school slated for closure. The UFT claimed that the city’s impact statements were insufficient. Naturally, the city thought that it had provided the requisite information, including the budgetary implications, effects on administrators and teachers, and the schools’ progress reports and graduation rates.

Judge Joan Lobis sided with the union. While admitting that “the statute does not specify the information that an EIS should include,” she nevertheless ruled that the city’s impact statements contained “boilerplate” and insufficient details. Significantly, Lobis’s ruling failed to explain what information the city would need to provide to satisfy the law. The city appealed but fared no better. In July, an appellate court, echoing Judge Lobis, ruled that the city had failed to meet its obligations by providing only “obvious” information.

While the city vowed to eventually close all 19 schools, Klein appears to have found a less controversial, if still partial and delayed, route around this judicial roadblock. The city announced in June, prior to the appellate ruling, that it was going to “transform” 11 of the district’s schools and dramatically overhaul or close 23 others under a $300 million federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. Eight of those 23 were on the original list of schools the district wanted to shutter. Under the grant program, the options for the 23 schools are established by the federal Department of Education. The district can impose one of three plans: turnaround, restart, or closure. The turnaround plan requires firing the principal and at least 50 percent of the teachers. The restart plan replaces the district school with a charter school. The closure plan’s consequences are self-evident. These reforms, though, will not be implemented until the 2011–12 school year. The transformation model, reserved for the 11 “least-worst” schools, involves replacing the principal, bringing in more support services, and making curricular changes. Opposing these measures would put the teachers union in an uncomfortable position since it would mean rejecting the federal money. So far the UFT has not announced plans to sue in the event that the district chooses to close or restart any schools, the two most likely options for the schools previously slated for closure.

In addition to sidestepping litigation, this grant program has helped the city convince the teachers union to accept a limited form of performance pay for teachers. Schools scheduled for transformation will be able to hire teachers with two new designations, master teacher and turnaround teacher. Teachers at both levels will receive 30 percent more in their base salary. To receive this designation a teacher must have demonstrated the ability to raise student test scores.

Since students in 19 schools will be subjected to at least one more year of educational mediocrity, this outcome is hardly optimal. But the city’s response shows that school districts and their long-suffering students do not have to be completely victimized by litigation.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

I was stuck between (F) the screech owl, because its call rarely approximates a screech, and (I) the long-eared owl, because its real ears are behind its eyes and covered by feathers. The passage explains that owls hear through holes behind their eyes, so the term long-eared owl seemed misleading. Then again, a screech owl that rarely screeches? That is pretty misleading, too.

According to the FCAT creators, each question on the practice tests corresponds to a specific reading skill or benchmark. Teachers are supposed to discuss test results in afterschool “data chats” and then review weak skills in class.

Here is a sample conversation from a data chat, as imagined by promoters of this idea:

First Teacher: Well, it looks like my students need some extra work on benchmark LA.910.6.2.2: The student will organize, synthesize, analyze, and evaluate the validity and reliability of information from multiple sources (including primary and secondary sources) to draw conclusions using a variety of techniques, and correctly use standardized citations.

Second Teacher: Mine, too! Now let’s work as a team to help students better understand this benchmark in time for next month’s assessment.

Third Teacher: I am glad we are having this “chat.”

Here is a conversation from an actual data chat:

First Teacher: My students’ lowest area was supposedly synthesizing information, but that benchmark was only tested by two questions. One was the last question on the test, and a lot of my students didn’t have time to finish. The other question was that one about the screech owl having the misleading name, and I thought it was kind of confusing.

Second Teacher: We read that question in class and most of my students didn’t know what approximates meant, so it really became more of a vocabulary question.

Third Teacher: Wait … I thought the long-eared owl was the one with the misleading name.

At this point, data chats often turn into non-data-related gripe sessions.

When I interviewed teachers for See Me After Class, the unintended consequences of high-stakes tests came up most often among language arts teachers. They know that answering comprehension questions correctly does not rest on just one benchmark. Separating complex skills into individual benchmarks may well work in math class. Symmetry and place value, for example, can be taught independently of one another, and benchmark-based data may indicate which of these skills needs work.

Reading is different. After students have mastered basics like decoding, reading cannot be taught through repeated practice of isolated skills. Students must understand enough of a passage to utilize all the intricately linked skills that together comprise comprehension. The owl question, for example, tests skills not learned from isolated reading practice but from processing information on the varying characteristics of animal species. (The correct answer, by the way, is the screech owl.)

Unfortunately, strict adherence to data-driven instruction can lead schools to push aside science and social studies to drill students on isolated reading benchmarks. Compare and contrast, for example, is covered year after year in creative lessons using Venn diagrams. The result is students who can produce Venn diagrams comparing cans of soda, and act out Venn diagrams with Hula–hoops, but are still lost a few paragraphs into a passage about owls. When they do poorly on reading assessments, we pull them again from subjects that give them content knowledge for more review of Venn diagrams. Many students learn to associate reading with failure and boredom.

It is difficult to teach kids to read well if they don’t learn to enjoy reading. It is impossible to teach kids to read well while denying them the knowledge they need to make sense of complex material. Following the data often forces teachers to do just that.

Roxanna Elden is the author of See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers. She teaches high-school English in Miami, Florida and is a National Board Certified Teacher.

How do people evaluate their local schools? Are their ratings based on reliable measures of effectiveness? Or do they base their evaluations on other kinds of information? With this issue of Education Next, we can now answer this question. Using an innovative technique made possible by Internet surveys and geo-coding technology, Martin West and his colleagues at Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (“Grading Schools,” research) were able to match each member of a nationally representative sample of adults to the specific elementary and middle schools that serve his or her neighborhood. As a result, respondents’ grades for their local schools could be compared to the actual performance of those schools on state math and reading tests. The analysts also collected publicly available information on the school’s average class size, racial and ethnic composition, and the percentage of students who were of low income.

From their findings, we learn that American citizens know quite a bit about the local schools. Indeed, schools that score high on statewide tests receive high evaluations from those surveyed. Within the larger population, parents turn out to be particularly adept at determining which schools are good and which are not—welcome news, indeed. And despite all the hoopla over class size, citizens’ judgments about a school’s quality are unrelated to how large or small its classes are.

Critics of school choice often claim that parents ignore quality when evaluating schools and draw their conclusions on the basis of the school’s racial or ethnic composition. But this study shows that parents are indifferent to student race as long as a school’s pupils perform well. (They do, however, give higher marks to schools with fewer low-income children.)

Citizens are less impressed with their local middle schools. Only 49 percent were willing to give them an A or B, and they were almost twice as likely to assign middle schools a D or F than they were elementary schools (12 percent vs. 7 percent). In the second research study in this issue (“Stuck in the Middle,” research), Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood show that judgment is also right on target. Their analysis of student achievement in New York City middle schools confirms parents’ conclusion that children learn more if they stay in an elementary-school setting through grade 8 than if they move to a stand-alone middle school.

That finding called to mind what it was like when I was introduced to junior high school in 7th grade many years ago. Suddenly, bells rang, kids ran around, teachers shouted, lockers banged, and no one learned a thing. Not at all like the tranquil elementary school I had previously attended.

A final caveat. Parents tend to compare their local school to others within their own state. Those living in parts of the country with lower-quality schools apparently have little idea that schools in other states are, on average, a lot better. Could such provincialism be corrected by grading all schools on a common, nationwide scale, such as national standards advocates propose? Or are all school judgments inevitably just as local as streetwise politician Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill said of all politics?

In February 2010, for the first time, a state judge overturned a school district’s choice of a high-school math curriculum. In May 2009, the Seattle school board in a 4–3 vote adopted the “Discovering” math curriculum. The Discovering series, which the Seattle district already used in elementary and middle schools, allegedly allows students to learn math principles on their own through “inquiry-based learning.” The texts and methods discourage “direct” instruction in which teachers teach students the best method for solving problems. Instead, students “discover” mathematical principles on their own through “cooperative learning groups” and by playing with objects. Students, no doubt to their delight, also begin using calculators early in elementary school as part of the series’ emphasis on using “technology to build conceptual mastery.”

When considering the curriculum, the board received conflicting evidence about the effectiveness of the Discovering series. The Washington State Office of Public Instruction ranked the series second out of four competing curricula, while a report from the Washington State Board of Education called the series “mathematically unsound.” The board also heard criticism from parents and expert reports about the series.

In response to the board’s decision, three plaintiffs—a retired high-school math teacher, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, and a mother of a high-school student—filed suit, calling the Discovering series deficient and dumbed down. The plaintiffs argued that the curriculum would widen rather than narrow Seattle’s achievement gap between minority and white children. One of the plaintiffs, Professor Cliff Mass, wrote in his blog, “Seattle Public Schools picked high school math books that are not only bad for everyone, but they are PARTICULARLY bad for the disadvantaged who don’t have extra cash for tutoring or whose parents don’t have the time or backgrounds to help their kids.”

In February 2010, Judge Julie Spector agreed with the plaintiffs in a terse three-page opinion devoid of any analysis. She simply asserted that the district behaved arbitrarily and capriciously and that there was “insufficient evidence for any reasonable member of the board to approve the selection of the Discovering Series.” The decision surprised both plaintiffs and the Washington education community. During the litigation, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Keith Scully, said winning seemed unlikely since “no judge wants to second guess the school board.” After the decision, the executive director of the state board of education, Edie Harding, said the decision was a “surprise” and that in Washington “the local board is always the prime decision-maker on curriculum.” Likewise, David Stolier, an assistant state attorney general, said that “the courts ought not to be making decisions about curriculum,” noting the state supreme court had ruled “it’s not the role of courts to be micromanaging education.”

There might be very good reasons to reject the curriculum. One can easily understand why parents wouldn’t want to expose their children to the faddish ideas afflicting the Discovering series. But there should be no mistaking what happened. The judge substituted her educational judgment for that of the school board, and didn’t bother to give an explanation. Her ruling then was far more arbitrary and capricious than the school board’s decision, even if it might have salutary effects.

The dispute in Seattle is a small, but significant, skirmish, in a growing debate over the lucrative and controversial textbook market. The Seattle school district is appealing Judge Spector’s decision. Parents have filed a lawsuit against the wealthy Issaquah school district since its adoption of the Discovering series; the similarly wealthy Bellevue school district is also facing a possible lawsuit. No doubt other concerned parents around the country will be following Washington’s lead. Prior to the Seattle case there appears to have been only one unsuccessful Plano, Texas, lawsuit over a math curriculum.

Supporters of the Discovering series, including its publisher, are not immune to the temptations of litigation. When the Washington State superintendent of public instruction, Randy Dorn, dropped the Discovering series from the recommended list of textbooks, Key Curriculum Press, the publisher of the Discovering series, unsuccessfully sued the state claiming, naturally, that his decision was arbitrary and capricious.

Regardless of the efficacy of “direct instruction” or “inquiry-based learning,” such pedagogical disputes are beyond the courts’ proper constitutional role and institutional capacity.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

But as they confront their chaotic lives, kids in jail share the same goals as their peers in the world outside: get a high school diploma, secure a decent job, go to college, make something of themselves. These young men wanted their school, albeit a cramped space off a noisy prison corridor, to be a “real school.” Though beaten down by negative experiences as learners, they still set high expectations for themselves. My job was to prepare them for the state’s comprehensive and demanding English exam. Curriculum would be the key.

New York State allows individual districts to choose literary texts based on community demographics and students’ educational needs and interests. I designed a curriculum that would be engaging and relevant, yet honored the state’s standards. Students read Greek, Norse, and Aztec mythology and such works as August Wilson’s play, Fences; the poetry of Luis J. Rodriguez and Pablo Neruda; and Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy.

Although the readings hooked students as they came to identify with characters and situations, I knew we had to go beyond cultural relevance if they were to pass the state test. So we slowly assembled the skills they would need. Working with the “critical lens,” they learned how to respond to such statements as, “All literature must teach a lesson as well as entertain,” explaining why they agreed or disagreed. Students compared and contrasted readings. Two favorites were the urban classics Manchild in the Promised Land and Down These Mean Streets. They worked to identify and explain the use of foreshadowing, allusion, and conflict (something they felt well grounded in). I encouraged them to hone their facility with these concepts by applying them to situations they encountered on the cell block, the music they listened to, and the TV shows they watched.

My students not only discussed, they wrote. They wrote every day. They wrote persuasively—taking a stand on a current issue, as one young man said, “Like a lawyer in court”; informatively—gathering, organizing, and presenting facts on topics such as drug prevention and teen violence; and critically—analyzing a story, novel, or poem. Most hated writing, but they knew writing skills were crucial for their diploma. Instruction was a blend of mechanics and content development, confidence building and critiquing, as students learned to identify “audience,” establish “voice,” structure arguments.

Understandably, not every student mastered the skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis. No matter what progress they made, it was still jail. A kid might come to class with a bruised face from a fight on the block or be missing for weeks, put on disciplinary lockup. The temptation is to “dummy down.” Too many of my students had been shortchanged by that approach in the past, and they knew it.

Through all the disruption and turmoil, most of the young men managed to sustain their connection to school, even showing pride in what they were doing, be it organizing thoughts into paragraphs or discussing the role of institutionalized discrimination in Mark Mathabane’s South African autobiography, Kaffir Boy. Occasionally, some young man might even quip about his situation, to show what he had learned. One I recall in particular said, “It’s pretty ironic, Mr. C. Here I am locked up in jail, but finally going to school.”

He may have casually dropped that literary term into conversation, but the mischievous glint in his eyes spoke volumes about what he had accomplished.

David Chura is author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup and a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcerated youth.

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Charter schools don’t play by union rules. So when Harlem Success Academy, a charter group in New York, proposed to take over P.S. 194’s building after the school was shut down for poor performance, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the New York Civil Liberties Union took the obvious step: they filed a lawsuit claiming that the state pressed forward without proper consultation with local school boards.

Such resistance has dogged the school choice movement for years, producing a fog of politics cleared all too rarely by moments of forthrightness. Clearing some of the fog is The Lottery, a new documentary film by Madeleine Sackler that tracks four families hoping to enroll their kids in one of the Harlem Success charter schools. During the film’s 79 minutes, we watch UFT president Randi Weingarten on the Charlie Rose Show blurt out “No!” to Rose’s assertion that only 10 of 55,000 tenured teachers in the New York City school system were fired the previous year. (The U.S. Dept. of Education counts, precisely, 10.) We witness ACORN workers armed with megaphones fill the sidewalk outside a charter school meeting protesting the very existence of charters in the community. We hear again how the average black 12th grader performs as well as the average white 8th grader. On and on.

These familiar facts and events form a galling and sad backdrop for the real story of the film, parents desperate to find a better school. For them, it means a route away from poverty and despair, even prison. “I just want my daughter to have the best in life,” signs a deaf mother who dropped out of high school to help her grandmother. One father sits in a cell serving 25 to life. Tears in his eyes, he moans that if only someone had entered his life early on and steered him toward college, or had just given him some faith in his own intellect, he wouldn’t be there.

Harlem Success teachers do just that. That’s why so many families show up for lottery day. More than 3,000 individuals apply for admission, but the schools offer only 475 slots. Ponder those odds in light of Weingarten’s explanation to the New York Times for the P.S. 194 lawsuit blocking the expansion of Harlem Success: “Parents should have a voice when it comes to their children’s education, and by eliminating community schools without public hearings, the D.O.E. is taking away that voice.”

There you have the perverse logic of vested interests and power politics in public education. It would be laughable if it didn’t produce actual perversities such as the annual rite of charter school lotteries, which offer pathetically low chances of winning. That’s where The Lottery climaxes and where charter school advocates find their best persuasion. Observe these real people in tough circumstances attending the drawing with futures on the line. A little boy dons a shirt and tie, and his mother notes he looks like Barack Obama. “I feel a lot like him,” he replies. Another child prays to be chosen. Anxious families line up all the way down the block and file inside for the proceedings. New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein tells attendees, “Grow the options and let parents vote with their feet.”

Harlem Success administrators and teachers take the stand and the selection begins. Names roll out—and the heartbreak begins. “If they don’t call your name,” one mother mumbles to her son partway through, “it’s okay.” A father and son stare at the screen where names appear as they are called, their faces growing stony as the minutes pass and spaces run out. At the end, the father mutters, “You’re not in,” then he hesitates. He looks around as if the outcome hasn’t quite registered. “They didn’t call your name.” What else is there to say?

“Maybe my name’s gonna come next time,” the boy says.

“Yeah, next year. Not today. Next year.”

Watch and weep.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Even to the casual observer, this sudden celluloid absorption with schools seems less than serendipitous. Surely, there’s a master strategy at work? A clique of wealthy funders who have decided that reaching the masses through film is the next arrow in the school reform quiver? Clear evidence from other documentary successes, like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, that the movies are a great way to change public opinion?

So this intrepid analyst surmised, until I started digging into the back stories of these documentaries and found that what drove their development wasn’t a strategic plan but something much simpler: the creative impulses of the filmmakers themselves.

Take Kelly Amis, the writer, director, producer, and sometimes videographer of Teached, a forthcoming film about inequities in education. A former Teach For America corps member, Amis has spent most of her career in the education reform world, including a stint overseeing policy and research at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (one of the sponsors of Education Next and my employer). She wrote her documentary six years ago, “just had it on the shelf,” she told me. “Just over a year ago, the stars aligned.”

What motivated her was a fervent belief that film could reach new audiences beyond the policy elite—and with emotional storytelling that would be much more powerful than anything written on the printed page. “The information we know in the education policy world gets stuck in ivory towers. Even the way we discuss it keeps it in ivory towers.”

A similar sentiment drove Bob Bowdon, the writer, director, producer, and financier of The Cartel, an exposé of the teachers unions and other special interests in education. A television reporter-turned-filmmaker, he relayed moviegoers’ reactions to his film. “People all the time come to screenings and thank me. They tell me that everyone is afraid to say these things. ‘I had no idea that a janitor could make six figures. That superintendents could make 470K. Thirty-million-dollar football fields.’ Or, ‘really, there’s a teacher that reads on a 4th-grade level but worked for 17 years? I had no idea this could happen!’ It feels like I’m changing minds.”

Yet convincing reform-oriented foundations that moviemaking is a worthy investment has been a tough nut to crack. Bowdon shot his whole film, entered a festival, and even won an award before getting a dime of outside help. Amis managed to raise a modest amount to help cover her direct expenses, but has volunteered her own time for the better part of a year.

But the reason that these funding woes haven’t been deal breakers is because the cost of shooting a documentary has plummeted in recent years. “The quality of high-def video cameras has gone up as fast as the prices have gone down,” Bowdon said. But that’s not all. “When I first got into TV, people would rent these editing rooms with big leather couches and fancy equipment. Nowadays you can find college kids who sit in apartments and work on laptops and edit films. That has changed the gatekeeping equation such that the quality of an idea is the determiner of a project rather than fundraising ability.”

But even though the funders weren’t enthusiastic supporters of projects like Bowdon’s at the outset, they are starting to climb on board. The Gleason Family Foundation, for instance, is now helping to distribute The Cartel nationally. Tracy Gleason explained that movies fit well with her foundation’s focus on marketing school choice. “This is a very neglected area of the movement. We have no trouble connecting with the elites. But with average people we are sort of pathetic.”

Education Reform Now, a spin-off of the well-funded Democrats for Education Reform, has also seen the light (of the theater projector). It’s currently helping to promote The Lottery, which follows four families as they try to get their kids into one of the Harlem Success charter schools (see “Luck of the Draw,” cultured), with special screenings for targeted audiences. (It will likely do the same for Waiting for Superman, a big-budget documentary by An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim.) Van Schoales, the group’s executive director, reiterated the potential for reaching beyond the “usual suspects.” His group will aim for “low-income families that are most affected by terrible urban schools, suburban/urban (mostly moms) that are for the most part satisfied with their schools, and, finally, business leaders,” he said. “Each of these audiences will be critical in building a broader-based education reform movement that goes beyond the wonks, advocacy groups, and charter folks.” Plus, as he pointed out, documentaries like these will soon be available to tens of millions of home viewers through various on-demand services.

But for all this enthusiasm for transcending the “echo chamber,” what’s the evidence that movies can actually do so? Everyone points to the success of An Inconvenient Truth in creating a sense of urgency around the global warming issue. But, as Rick Hess (an executive editor of this journal) wrote on his blog recently, that film had little long-term impact on public opinion. NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls found that about one-quarter of respondents in 1999 agreed that “Global climate change has been established as a serious problem, and immediate action is necessary.” It went up to about one-third of respondents after the film came out in 2006, but returned to one-quarter by 2009.

Still, with the expense of producing full-length documentaries at a fraction of the cost of sophisticated research studies, expect to see more philanthropic support for these efforts in coming years. They might not transform public opinion writ large, but even if they energize a few thousand activists, they will be worthwhile investments.

Charter schools are created under state statutes, but they often retain a private character. Can they qualify as “state actors” for a plaintiff’s purpose of using Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U. S. Code, which is the main gateway for achieving relief? In the case from Arizona that the Ninth Circuit decided, the answer was no, and the claims of the plaintiff were dismissed.

The plaintiff, Michael Caviness, had been employed for six years as a teacher of health and physical education and a track coach at Horizon Community Learning Center, a nonprofit corporation that operated a charter school in Phoenix. A female student filed a grievance charging that he had crossed “the student-teacher boundary.” At a hearing, Horizon’s governing board learned that the student had a “crush” on Caviness and that the two had been communicating by telephone. The board concluded that he had exercised questionable judgment and kept him on paid administrative leave until his contract expired. When he applied for a job in the Mesa Public Schools, Horizon’s executive director declined to evaluate him, and Caviness claimed that what the director said to Mesa was “purposely false and incomplete” and intended to harm him. He further claimed that some Horizon employees had defamed him by falsely calling him a pedophile.

Caviness filed a complaint under Section 1983 alleging that Horizon had, without due process, deprived him of his liberty interest in finding work, in that it had not granted him a hearing to clear his name. To establish that the school was a “state actor,” he made five arguments: that Arizona law defines a charter school as a public school; that a charter school is a state actor for all purposes, including employment; that a charter school provides a public education, a function that is traditionally and exclusively the prerogative of the state; that a charter school is a state actor in Arizona because the state regulates the personnel matters of such schools; and that it is a state actor because charter schools, unlike traditional private schools, are permitted to participate in the state’s retirement system.

The district court granted Horizon’s petition for dismissal for lack of federal jurisdiction. It found no evidence “with respect to [Caviness’s] specific employment claims, that Horizon acted in concert or conspired with state actors, was subject to government coercion or encouragement, or was otherwise entwined or controlled by an agency of the State.”

Three circuit judges concurred that the actions that Horizon took or failed to take were all connected with its role as Caviness’s employer, and that what it did as such did not constitute “state action.” State action, it said, “may be found if, though only if, there is such a close nexus between the State and the challenged action that seemingly private behavior may be fairly treated as that of the State itself.”

Caviness failed because he did not establish the close nexus. It was not enough to argue that under Arizona law all charter schools are state actors. Without facts to show that Horizon was acting as “the government,” Caviness had no federal case.

While the Caviness case could be a harbinger of more cases to come, we would be surprised to see federal litigation lead to a broad characterization of charters as private actors. Charters will likely increase in both number and federal financial support under President Obama, and with federal aid comes the force of laws emphasizing charter schools’ public character. Charters are explicitly obliged to abide by federal statutes prohibiting discrimination, for example. And while no federal law applies, the Department of Education’s guidance has made clear that charter schools must be nonreligious as well. Balking at either constraint would put charters at risk of losing not only federal aid but also their status as public schools, which has been critical to the charter movement’s success.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter saw it another way. In his view, it is in the nature of markets that good producers “cre­atively” destroy firms of the middling variety, then are elimi­nated themselves by still better competitors. Few doubt that the public school today is a troubled institution. If school districts were firms operating in the marketplace, most would quickly fall victim to Schumpeter’s law.

Yet Ravitch sees no hope for choice and competition in education, asking us to leave public schools alone apart from articulating voluntary national standards without holding any­one accountable for meeting them. She blames the sad state of affairs on events occurring long after schools had stagnated: a federal law, No Child Left Behind, enacted in 2002; mayoral governance recently instituted in a few cities (see “Palace Revolt in Los Angeles?”); and a small number (4,638) of charter schools that—despite steady growth—still serve less than 3 percent of the nation’s students.

According to a 2009 Education Next survey, the public approves steady charter growth. Among African Americans, those favoring charters do so by a four-to-one margin. Even among public school teachers, the percentage favoring char­ters is greater than the percentage opposed.

A school can have short-term popularity without being good, of course. The best studies of school quality are randomized experiments, the gold standard in both medical and education research. Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby and Harvard’s Thomas Kane have organized randomized experiments that compare students who win the charter lottery with those who applied but lost. The students lucky enough to win the lottery and be admitted to a charter school subsequently scored higher on math and reading tests than did those who lost the lottery and remained in district schools.

What makes charters so important today is not so much their current success, on average, but their long-term poten­tial to innovate. When RCA sneered at transistor radios, Sony captured the audio market by first putting out tinny pocket transistors for teenagers, then expanded its base with steady technological improvement. In a decade or two, RCA fell vic­tim to Schumpeter’s law.

Educational opportunity is about to be revolutionized by powerful notebook computers, broadband, sophisticated cooperative and competitive game playing over the Internet, curriculum in three dimensions, and the open-source develop­ment of curricular materials. If American education remains stagnant, the innovations will spread slowly, if at all. But if the charter world continues to expand, the conditions ripen for competition among charters, districts, and state virtual schools that can be truly transformative. It is “in the nature of markets” that those who make the best use of new technologies will become dominant—to the benefit of us all.

Alternative East High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, was modeled after the famous Parkway alternative school in Philadelphia. From 1971 to 1983, Alternative East drew students from Philadelphia and the surrounding suburban school districts of Abington, Cheltenham, and Springfield. The principal, Gisha Berkowitz, took the job after first becoming known as an “active parent.”

At Alternative East, students could create their own courses. As long as the course met college entry requirements, students could develop it, find a faculty member to teach it, and then advertise the class on a poster. If 15 students expressed interest, they could register for the course during master scheduling days held twice during the year. Students seldom sat in classrooms all day. Instead of looking at slides, for example, an art class piled into a van to visit local galleries.

Alternative East was continually evaluated and received positive reviews. Berkowitz carefully kept the budget from getting “out of balance.” So why did the school close?

As is often the case, the answer at the time was money. In 1983, Abington’s school board, in a 5–4 vote, withdrew the district’s participation, forcing the school to close its doors. Nevertheless, minutes from board meetings praised Alternative East and its programs, which included production of a children’s play at a local mall and learning activities in genetics. The board justified its decision by saying that district schools had “highly skilled, highly paid people, and we should be able to provide for the needs of these [students].”

The underlying causes were probably more deep-seated. Times had changed. When the school opened, according to Berkowitz, students were politically alienated by the Vietnam War, racial segregation, and traditional schooling. There was a passion for hands-on, personally relevant education. But by the 1980s, Berkowitz explained, the students at Alternative East were “less interested in exploring.” The teachers weren’t as enthusiastic either, and that sapped energy out of the school. “The political milieu has to be [there]—everything has to be ‘right’…and unfortunately, [that] doesn’t happen enough.”

Even the storied Parkway Program, which in 1970 Time magazine called “the most interesting high school in the U.S. today,” fell victim to the changing political climate. Parkway was known as the “school without walls,” because students learned about journalism at local newspapers, auto mechanics at auto shops, and art from museum historians. I spoke with Dr. Leonard Finkelstein, the second director of Parkway, who said that as a concept, Parkway was “magnificent.” But reality did not always match up to its promise. Some students thrived in the loosely structured environment, while it became a “free-for-all” for others.

Dr. James Lytle, Parkway’s first principal, said that by the late 1970s and early 1980s the middle-class students angry at the system had disappeared. Parkway became a safe alternative to the neighborhood schools and had to recruit “very aggressively” to maintain a diverse student population.

In 1990, the district asked Ms. Odette Harris to become Parkway’s principal. For more than 30 years, Harris had been the principal of William Penn, a large, traditional urban high school. Her style and Parkway’s had little in common, and she remained principal long enough to alter most things alternative. As Ms. Catherine Blunt, Parkway’s union representative at the time, put it, the school changed “because we were in the district.”

As districts like Philadelphia seek to “turn around” their public schools, let’s not forget the lesson of the lost alternative schools. Inventive programs, even when successful, are easily swept aside and replaced by standard fare.

Lynne Blumberg is an ESL and English instructor and freelance writer.