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

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

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

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

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

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

-Frederick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Any time a high school student takes a course from a district other than the one where they live, a portion of Utah’s state aid shifts from the home district to the district providing the course online.

A district with a brilliant slate of online suddenly has the chance to solve its fiscal problems the easy way.

I learned about the Utah experiment at a conference held at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and sponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. While the details of the Utah experiment were not discussed, the basic idea is certainly intriguing.

No longer must students in rural Utah be denied the opportunity to take physics, chemistry, computer science or an esoteric language simply because the local district cannot afford teachers for courses with small enrollments.

No longer must a student in Utah take a social studies course from a teacher the student finds boring and unhelpful.

No longer must a student who cannot attend school on a daily basis—either because he or she is sick, or pregnant, or feels bullied, or wants to train for an Olympic sport—be denied the opportunity to maintain a regular schedule that will lead to a timely graduation.

Some find the policy unfair to smaller school districts, which lack the resources to create online courses.  To keep the playing field level, they say, each district should be allowed to provide online courses only to their own students. That way state aid would continue to flow to the district bearing the expenses associated with facilities management, extracurricular activities, transportation, the school lunch program, the guidance counselors, and much more.

If only a few students take just one or two online courses, the new policy may not pose too heavy a burden, but if student demand for courses outside their own high schools escalates rapidly, the inter-district competition could prove to be seriously disruptive for some districts.

One solution would be for the state to fund online courses outside the home district at something other than the full amount—perhaps at the 50 or 60 percent level.  The remainder would go to the home district. If Utah is not doing that already, it might consider an amendment along these lines.

If small districts want to keep all of their state aid, they should be able to save on upfront costs by contracting their online courses offerings out to other providers.  Florida Virtual School is already marketing such courses nationwide, and both commercial and university providers can be expected to follow, if they are compensated for each course taken.

Of course, there could be a race to the bottom, as each district looks for the cheapest provider.  If tests are easy, some students might be tempted to take a course no matter how poorly it is constructed.

Clearly, some kind of industry or state vetting of courses is needed if online learning is not to become the latest fad to go wrong.

Exactly how Utah is solving these problems is something I plan to share with you in a future post.  For now, I simply want to herald the idea of inter-district competition in the online world.  Whatever problems it may pose for some districts, it is hard to see why district needs should be put ahead of student ones.

If digital learning is to advance beyond the pilot stage, it needs to work within the current system of public education, not against it.  Public school districts have a legitimacy unrivalled by any other institution in American education. Whether digital learning is blended into the classroom or offered online, or both, districts have to be part of the action.

The solution is to put districts into competition with one another within an overall framework that maintains course quality.  If that is done, then it will only take two or three entrepreneurial districts to convince the remainder that they need to adjust if they are to keep their students from slipping away, one by one, course by course.

I shall report later on the specifics of the Utah experiment.  For now, I simply want to herald the general concept.  Putting districts in charge of online learning, while allowing them to contract out to private providers if they wish, creates a competitive marketplace within a legitimate political framework.  If properly implemented so as to maintain course quality and integrity, it can give all students, no matter what their racial, ethnic, or religious background, no matter what their place of residence, an opportunity to take well-designed courses offered under the direction of truly high quality teachers, to be taken by students each at their own pace.

-Paul Peterson

This would be a big change in a short period. Through most of 2011, the Obama Administration reaped accolades for its intention to allow states to take a new course vis-à-vis the Elementary and Secondary Education act (a.k.a. NCLB). In September, the President got wall-to-wall coverage of the official announcement of his plan to offer waivers to the states to give them “more flexibility to meet high standards.”

Keep in mind, the change we’re making is not lowering standards; we’re saying we’re going to give you more flexibility to meet high standards. We’re going to let states, schools and teachers come up with innovative ways to give our children the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future. Because what works in Rhode Island may not be the same thing that works in Tennessee—but every student should have the same opportunity to learn and grow, no matter what state they live in.

Set aside the debate about the conditions he attached to those standards. Set aside the small matter of Constitutionality and separation of powers. On the issue of flexibility itself, virtually everyone seemed to be in agreement (at least in theory): The 10-year-old law is broken and it’s time to fix it. In particular, Adequate Yearly Progress needs to go the way of the dinosaurs and be replaced by something very different. Even on Capitol Hill, for all the misgivings about Duncan’s unilateralism, there was broad consensus that states should be given much greater leeway to design next-generation accountability systems. (Leeway that both Republican and Democratic governors asked for in an NGA policy statement released last week.)

The idea of flexibility is so popular, in fact, that the President reiterated it in his State of the Union address:

Let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. And in return, grant schools flexibility: to teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn. That’s a bargain worth making.

So far so good. It certainly appeared from the rhetoric that the Administration would make every effort to approve reasonable proposals from states, including the 11 that applied in November for the first round of waivers (the round for which results are now imminent). The era of “Washington knows best” in education would come to an end.

But no. Thanks to excellent reporting by Associated Press correspondent Christine Armario, we now have access to letters the U.S. Department of Education sent to these states in December. Which document that federal micromanagement is still the order of the day.

Consider the missive sent to Massachusetts—the first-place finisher in the Race to the Top, the state with the highest achievement in the land, the one that has seen dramatic gains across all subgroups of students, a strong supporter (for better or worse) of the Common Core standards. One might assume that the Bay State would be given the benefit of the doubt. But no.

Here’s an excerpt from the Department’s response to the Massachusetts waiver request:

Please address concerns identified by peers regarding subgroup accountability, including:

• • Without sufficient safeguards to ensure attention and action when an individual subgroup is struggling over a number of years, the use of the “high needs” combined subgroup could lead to individual subgroups not meeting their goals even when the “high needs” combined subgroup is moving forward, and therefore undermine the goal of improved achievement for all students.
  • Massachusetts’s current n-size for subgroups is too high and should be reduced.
  • Schools with high English Learner populations may not be receiving appropriate, targeted interventions.

And another:

• • Please address concern that without differentiating schools within Level 2, there are insufficient incentives to improve achievement for all groups of students. In particular, please address the concern that annual measurable objectives (AMOs) are not used along with other measures to provide incentives and supports to other Title I schools that are not making progress in improving student achievement and narrowing achievement gaps.

(That’s just the tip of the iceberg; read the whole thing yourself.)

All of these issues can be debated ad nauseum by policy wonks. For example, when creating an A to F rating system, what should qualify a school for an A? Strong achievement? Strong growth over time? If the school misses an achievement or growth target for one subgroup (say, special education kids) should that disqualify it for an A? What if all subgroups are doing well but there’s still a big achievement gap?

Whatever your view on these arcane matters, the real issue at stake is whether the feds, or the states, should make such calls. How can the President promise a state like Massachusetts “flexibility to meet high standards” and then second-guess its attempt to rationalize its accountability system?

So how will this go down?

• The Department of Education will announce that most of the 11 states that applied were approved for flexibility. At first, this will lead to a Kumbaya moment.
• Upon closer inspection, observers will notice that the amount of flexibility granted on accountability is tiny. Approved plans will amount to minor changes away from the AYP system we’ve got today.
• The number of states planning to apply for waivers by February 21 will drop precipitously, as they realize that it’s just not worth the effort.
• All of this will embolden members of Congress to talk (again) about the urgency of fixing No Child Left Behind for real (though nothing will come of it this year).

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The problem of the textbook in American pre-collegiate education–how it is used, the vagaries associated with the adoption process, the superficiality of most textbooks–is by no means new.  As Beverlee Jobrack points out, many of the issues were adroitly addressed by Harriet Tyson-Bernstein in her Conspiracy of Good Intentions: America’s Textbook Fiasco (1988).  Commendably, Ms. Joback’s approach, in addition to dealing in depth with these issues, is even more comprehensive, paying considerable attention to the importance of curriculum, arguably the most neglected facet of current school reform efforts.

As far back as 1963, when Richard Hofstadter wrote his famous book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, concern was raised about the low levels of academic achievement, caused, it was felt, by the overemphasis on students’ social development, characteristic of the Progressive Era in American education.  Nevertheless, the tradition of emphasizing governance issues, access, teacher quality (recruitment, retention and renewal) – important as these issues are – has tended to divert public attention from what it is that society can reasonably expect our students to know when they graduate from high school.  As a spokesperson from the American Federation of Teachers put it, “A curriculum sets forth the body of knowledge and skills our children need to know to grow into economically productive and socially responsible citizens.”

The power of Tyranny of the Textbook is the author’s ability to connect the textbook issue to every facet of student learning.  She explains how textbook publishers have, in effect, usurped the whole arena of what students should know, engaging in an unholy alliance with test makers neutralizing the influence of even the best teachers in the process.  Parallel, but not necessarily integrated with this, has been the development of a whole set of core academic standards.  These have largely failed to bolster academic achievement because of the chasm between the content of the standards and the content of the textbook.

However, for all of the author’s ability to use her insights garnered from years of experience in the textbook world, none is more salient than her instinct for appreciating the centrality of curriculum and subject matter content in the learning process.

To quote directly from her book: “A curriculum is not a set of standards, nor is it a set of lessons, although it includes both….A curriculum is not a teaching method, but incorporates different teaching methods to teach concepts in an organized way.  A curriculum is a set of daily lesson plans, activities, supporting resources and assessments organized in a way to develop student skills and understandings in a subject area.”  What better description can be found to describe an ideal curriculum!  As such, I recommend this book without reservation.

-A. Graham Down

More book reviews by Graham Down are available here.

Still, the chatter in various social media about the announcement extend two faulty themes that needlessly limit educational technology discussions.

The first misguided frame, expressed by Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio in USA Today, is whether technology, in this case digital textbooks, is a “magic bullet.” Pondiscio is right: Of course it’s not and anybody who claims so is foolish. But debating this point gets us nowhere.

What’s most important to understand about the digital textbook effort is that it’s an opportunity to open up a large amount of existing public money that has been locked into use by a very small and closed set of publishers. Opening up classrooms to new technologies in no way guarantees that textbooks or digital instructional materials will be better. But, it does provide the opportunity to shift power to educators, offering the possibility for not only more customization by teachers, but also access to a greater array of better materials. And, smaller publishers, including those who offer free content, such as Core Knowledge, may finally have a chance to enter classrooms based on the strength of their content, rather than their distribution and sales teams.

The second faulty frame is the conspiratorial suspicion of nefarious intent: any technology initiative is just a cover for private profit-seeking. But let’s be serious. We wouldn’t be having this discussion around school modernization. Construction companies make a lot of money on educational projects. We understand though, that this is a reason to exercise strong oversight of public funds. It’s not a reason to oppose modernizing crumbling facilities.

In reality, opposition to digital textbooks cements corporate control of instructional materials. This is about technology-driven industry change. Again, our K-12 schools already spend billions each year on textbooks — almost all purchased from the same small set of publishers. New companies are surely aiming at these dollars, just as Google, Facebook, and Craigslist have siphoned off newspaper ad revenues. And, this industry change also opens the doors for open educational resources (OER) that can be freely shared and modified. This is the real battle, between new and old ways of doing business, open and closed, as seen in the recent debate over SOPA. If there’s a critique here, it’s that there was little sign of the OER community in either the FCC’s announcement or the “Digital Textbook Collaborative” that it convened.

Two more things you may have missed:

• TASC continued its Digital Learning Beyond School effort with a white paper and video that makes the case for using technology to help community educators and teachers engage students in learning anywhere at any time.
• My favorite article from yesterday’s coverage describes a collaboration between the University of Utah and Google that is helping kids with autism spectrum disorders to shine. (h/t @mcleod)

-Bill Tucker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Frederick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

It’s vintage Jennings, perceptive about both what has happened and why and how it has (and hasn’t) worked, then incurably and relentlessly over-ambitious—in a classic, big-government, big-spending, liberal sort of way—about what federal policy should do tomorrow.

As to the past, and oversimplifying some points that he makes more subtly,

• Equity-based reform didn’t get very far because it amounted to add-on programs, suffered from limited funding, and failed to “generally improve the broader educational system.”
• School choice pleases parents but doesn’t raise achievement much, “an interesting case of convictions trumping evidence.”
• Standards-based reform has had more traction but has “gone astray”: too much testing, too much labeling, not enough real alteration in the quality of what’s taught and learned.

None of that is wrong. But his prescription for the future comes across as wishful thinking even if you’re disposed to agree with it. (I’m not.) Jennings favors a federal law declaring that “no child in the United States will be denied equal educational opportunity in elementary and secondary education through the lack of a challenging curriculum, well-prepared and effective teachers, and the funding to pay for that education.”

This would, of course, have the effect of transferring the responsibility for educating (and financing the education of) 55 million kids to Washington. I guess one might term this a “governance reform” but I don’t think it’s going to happen or that it would work well if it did. (Jack has done just about everything during the course of his long career EXCEPT work in the executive branch. If he had, he might harbor fewer illusions about its capacity in the realm of education.)

It’s notable, too, that he continues after all these years to put his faith in Uncle Sam to fix what ails American education. There’s no mention here of changes in the delivery system (e.g. technology), the system’s efficiency/productivity, or its structures and governance (except as noted above). He also downplays the value of “outsiders” (e.g. governors, mayors) as agents of change in K-12 education.

It is said that if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Much as I respect and admire Jack Jennings, in spite of all his experience in this field, his main tool remains federal legislation, which I’ve come to believe is almost always wielded clumsily in pursuit of nails that either won’t budge at all or end up bent.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Call this the test score hypothesis. It explains reformers’ enthusiasm for test-based accountability; for “college and career-ready standards”; for teacher evaluations based, in significant part, on student outcomes; for “data-based instruction”; and for much of the rest of the modern-day reform agenda. After all, if reading, math, and science knowledge and skills are so directly linked to the life chances of individual kids, and of the livelihood of the country as a whole, why not get the education system focused like a laser on them?

But is this hypothesis correct? Is stronger academic performance related to better life outcomes for kids and better economic outcomes for nations?

In a word: yes. As Kevin Carey noted recently, the big Chetty et al study didn’t just demonstrate the importance of teacher effectiveness. It also offered strong support for the Test Score Hypothesis.

If you believe standardized tests are worthless or highly flawed or deeply inadequate or even troublingly limited in accuracy and scope–and many reasonable people believe these things–then you could dismiss or downplay value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, by definition….But now the CFR study says that teachers who are unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests today aren’t just unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests tomorrow. They also have an unusual effect on the likelihood of students going to college, going to a good college, earning a good living, living in a nice place, and saving for retirement. In other words, whatever the limitations of standardized tests may be, test-based value-added scores do, in fact, provide valuable information about the things most people care most about.

Then there’s the international evidence. As Eric Hanushek has been arguing vociferously for years, there’s a direct link between academic achievement (as measured by math and science tests) and a country’s economic growth.

The level of cognitive skills of a nation’s students has a large effect on its subsequent economic growth rate. Increasing the average number of years of schooling attained by the labor force boosts the economy only when increased levels of school attainment also boost cognitive skills. In other words, it is not enough simply to spend more time in school; something has to be learned there.

Hanushek further argues that the only way to solve our country’s long term fiscal challenge is to grow our way out of it. If we could indeed boost the cognitive skills of our students, even by a little, our structural deficit would go away.

So student achievement matters a lot. But does it matter the most? It’s hard to make the case anymore that test scores are irrelevant. But what remains unknown is whether reading, math, and science are the most important things that schools could be teaching. As Dana Goldstein noted back in December,

I’ve been struck again and again by the newness of the idea that schooling is primarily a matter of academic achievement…. It is only really since “A Nation at Risk” that we’ve had a national dialogue about academic excellence for every child. This is a much-needed development in American culture, but its discontents are numerous: A lack of attention paid to the civic, social, and artistic benefits of schooling, and the ways in which children are (ideally) shaped as moral, cultured, socially-responsible people by their teachers and school communities. 

We might all want schools to walk and chew gum at the same time—to boost “academic achievement” while also developing “moral, cultured, socially-responsible people.” But our policies—especially school-level accountability and test-based teacher evaluations—focus on academic achievement alone.

The nagging question then—the “known unknown”—is whether other stuff matters more—both to kids’ life chances and to the country’s economic success. What if, for instance, “social and emotional intelligence”—knowing how to relate to others—is more important than many reformers have been willing to acknowledge? What if these interpersonal skills are what help lift poor kids out of poverty and enable economies to succeed? Or other “soft skills” and attributes like grit, perseverance, industriousness, the ability to delay gratification, and so forth?

In that case, is it smart to push Head Start centers to focus overwhelmingly on pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills (as many of us have)? Is it wise to cut time for recess, to trim extracurriculars, or to push for the maximum amount of homework, to be completed by solitary would-be scholars? Does it make sense to ask teachers to obsess about student achievement over everything else?

The private school sector, which many reformers admire, is not so conflicted. Every high-end school boasts about its commitment to the “whole child,” to kids’ intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development. These schools would never consider their graduates to be well-educated without an appreciation for the arts, participation in sports, a commitment to community service, and the development of strong character. And judging by the admissions policies of the nation’s great universities, our elite higher education institutions hold this holistic view, too. Are these non-academic attributes just “extras”—luxuries that schools serving poor or working class kids just can’t afford? Or are they as essential as academics, for everyone?

Reading, math, and science matter a lot, but they are almost certainly not enough. That is why we must tread carefully when designing next-generation school accountability and teacher evaluation systems. If we accidentally create incentives for schools and teachers to focus solely on academic achievement and ignore the rest, we could be making our children and our nation less competitive, not more so. Let us proceed with care.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Just under 18 months ago, the U.S. Department of Education awarded over $330 million to two state consortia, PARCC and Smarter/Balanced, representing 45 states and the District of Columbia, to design and implement new student assessment systems. Two smaller state consortia, Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM) and the National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC), received an additional $67 million to develop new assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities. The new assessments, offered mostly online, will replace the current state tests given to millions of students each year in reading and math. At the time, Secretary of Education Duncan called these initiatives an “absolute game-changer” and pledged tests of “critical thinking skills and complex student learning that are not just fill-in-the-bubble tests of basic skills.” In short, it’s an all-out effort to significantly improve one of the weakest — and most despised — aspects of our nation’s current educational system.

But, while it’s easy to think of the consortia as “building tests,” the more apt description is that they are attempting to re-invent, with heavy use of technology, the entire process of assessment. They are developing new types of assessment questions to go beyond multiple choice in conjunction with new methods to deliver, administer, score, and report on these assessments. They will delve deeply into professional development. And, together, they are also adopting common performance standards so that proficiency, which now means different things in different states, is a consistent standard across states.

Officially, the new assessments, including formative and interim tools, will not launch until the 2014-15 school year. In reality, though, most of the work needs to be fully-baked for field-testing in the 2013-14 time frame. That means the real work will take place over the next 18 months. This timeline will increasingly drive both decision-making and expenditures. Even though the consortia have generous grants, doing something quickly, for the first time, and in collaboration across many diverse states costs much more.

Many schools and districts, but not all, will struggle to develop the raw capacity – hardware, software, bandwidth, and tech support – to deliver online testing. Since it takes time for budgeting and procurement, districts want to know right now what the “requirements” are going to be. Yet, there’s a chicken/egg situation because the consortia don’t yet know the content/item types, so they can’t say whether to prepare for bandwidth-hogging simulations, graphics, etc.

At the same time, we have a limited sense of schools’ and districts’ actual capacity. When pushed, they may find a way: As one official at a recent State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA) event noted, in his state districts and schools felt like they were being pushed off the cliff when online testing was implemented, but in reality, the cliff was only a couple of feet high. While the consortia are developing a “readiness tool” to assess the state of technology down to a school level, they’ll soon have to make a guess as to how ambitious the tech specs will be and that will then become a major constraint to development. And, that guess will have to be made in 2012 about 2015 technology. (iPads were not even around when the Department announced the grant competition.) Lower tech requirements will make schools’/districts’ lives easier, but may limit amount of innovation in item types, data collection, etc. Too far towards the other extreme increases the capacity problem.

From an instructional technology and content standpoint, the enormous scope means that the process by which the consortia do their work may have large implications. For example, if the consortia specify that you must have a device with at least a 13” screen size, good luck selling a 10” iPad tablet. More importantly on the back-end, decisions about the underlying technology architecture and standards for data/content transport will also have implications for both the vendor marketplace and integration of all sorts of other data systems (reporting, analytics, student information systems, formative assessments, content repositories, learning management systems, etc.). In other words, the consortia have the potential to exert a fair-amount of market power in a market that is currently dysfunctional. Whether the consortia choose to wield that power, and whether they do it as a force for good, remains to be seen. Ideally, this will all be done with a keen eye towards interoperability, openness, and extensibility, a system design principle where the implementation takes into consideration future growth. But, designing with the future in mind may take more time, could cost more, and often entails risk – presenting a dilemma for high-stakes development on a tight timeline.

The consortia provide a real opportunity to both understand and upgrade schools’/districts’ technology capacity. As a technology director told me, “they’ll buy for the testing mandate.” Yet, whether this capacity will have dual-use for instruction remains to be seen. Schools could get just enough bandwidth to support testing, but have to shut down any other uses for multiple weeks throughout the year. They could also decide to acquire “secure” computer labs, but isolate these from day-to-day classroom instruction. On the good side, one of the hopes of the new assessments is that they will point instruction to more cognitively challenging and beneficial methods. To the extent that these are technology-based, students must have access not just for testing, but also for instruction.

This may all seem to be too far in the weeds to pay attention. But like it or not, how we measure matters. The next generation of assessments will go a long way towards determining whether digital learning actually fulfills its immense promise. And this may be the best chance to get it right.

UPDATE: Smarter/Balanced and PARCC release statement announcing the new technology readiness tool.

- Bill Tucker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Peter Meyer

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

Or so they say, until push comes to shove. And then many of the players discover that they don’t like flexibility after all. They want to change federal policy in theory but not in reality.

It’s not just the President’s bizarre State of the Union request that states raise their compulsory attendance age to 18. (Perhaps that would help to trim the dropout rate, though the studies suggesting so rely on 40-year-old data.) I’m assuming that he was merely using the bully pulpit to promote a pet idea, not suggesting a new federal mandate.

No, I’m referring to the Army of the Potomac’s reaction to John Kline’s ESEA proposal and to Chairman Tom Harkin’s and Rep. George Miller’s response to the waiver requests put forward by several states.

In both cases, we hear somber leaders express concern that the moves will “undermine the core American value of equality of opportunity in education” and move away from “the critically important gains for our students’ civil rights and educational equity that NCLB achieved.”

So what’s the beef? See this from Harkin’s and Miller’s letter to Arne Duncan about the waiver requests:

In its analysis of the eleven waiver applications, the Center on Education Policy found that nine state applicants will base almost all accountability decisions on the achievement of only two students groups; i.e., all students and a “disadvantaged” student group or “super subgroup.” We fear that putting students with disabilities, English language learners and minority students into one “super subgroup” will mask the individual needs of these distinct student subgroups and will prevent schools from tailoring interventions appropriately. Therefore, we urge you to consider each applicant’s subgroup performance measures as significant and coherent components of overall accountability and require applicants to articulate meaningful and effective interventions for schools that are low performing or have subgroups that fail to progress.”

There’s a name for what Harkin and Miller are calling for: the Adequate Yearly Progress system. This is exactly what we’ve got now! So they seem to be saying: “We favor flexibility, as long as nothing really changes.”

There are two debates going on here. One is over the policy specifics; for example, are “super subgroups” a good idea? The second is over power and control: Who should get to decide if super subgroups are a reasonable way forward? If your answer to the second question is “Uncle Sam” then you’re not really a proponent of state flexibility after all. Lefty reformers, civil rights groups, Chairman Harkin, and Representative Miller: I’m talking about you.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The longer, more informative, and more alarming of the articles was an extensive account of why Apple’s iPhones are now made in China rather than the U.S. The short version is that “the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”

Flexibility, diligence, and industrial skills. Hold that thought.

The second article previewed the President’s speech which, as predicted, focused heavily on the U.S. economy and ways to boost it. His proposals do, in fact, include some education and job-training initiatives, as well as macro-economic policies, several of them noted in the speech itself. But mostly what Mr. Obama did was trot out a bunch of government programs and rattle on about ways by which Uncle Sam should enhance the “fairness” of the U.S. economy, particularly its income distribution. (He used the words “fair,” “fairness,” or “unfair” eight times.) He didn’t talk about its efficiency, productivity, or industriousness. And his only reference to “hard work” was historical. Simply put, although the President spoke of restoring millions of manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores, it’s hard to picture Apple (or similar firms) responding, since the steps he has in mind to attract them are federal spending and tax programs and have little to do with the “diligence” of American workers, only a bit to do with “flexibility,” and a bit more to do with “skills.”

He deserves some credit on the skills front—a word he used five times. Instead of calling for everyone to complete college, for example, he called on community colleges and private firms—duly mustered and disciplined by Uncle Sam, of course!—to equip two million people with usable, job-related skills.

He addressed K-12 education, too, but only on the “compulsory attendance” and “teacher quality” fronts—and while the latter hinted at merit pay and nodded at schools having the flexibility to “replace” instructors “who just aren’t helping kids learn”—mostly what he did was urge more money for schools-as-we-know-them and those who teach in their classrooms.

As for “flexibility” and “diligence,” qualities important to Apple and myriad other firms—and qualities they’re apparently finding abroad—you didn’t hear anything about those in the State of the Union. My ear heard the opposite, actually, for all the talk about federal programs and tax policies enhancing “fairness” will exacerbate our nanny-state tendencies, our habit of assuming that government will provide and that we need not redouble our efforts to provide for ourselves. Instead, the President signaled that we should resent those who are better provided-for—and look to Washington to tug the levers of “fairness.”

Tuesday’s address was, in this regard, a reprise of Mr. Obama’s widely noted remarks in Osawatomie, Kansas last month. Here’s an excerpt. (You can find the whole speech at the White House website.) He began by recalling the values of what Tom Brokaw termed “the greatest generation” before fast-forwarding to the present.

Today, we’re still home to the world’s most productive workers. We’re still home to the world’s most innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people.

Read that last sentence again: “Hard work stopped paying off for too many people.”

What lesson were his listeners supposed to draw? Seems pretty clear to me: under the current rules, there’s no point in working hard. It doesn’t “pay off.”

Then read Charles Murray’s fine essay in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (derived from a forthcoming book): “The New American Divide.” Murray contends that “the American way of life” has decayed and what he calls “the new lower class” (pretty much what we used to call the “working class”) has lost the value of “industriousness.”

Now put them together. Murray says that core value has badly eroded. The President says it no longer “pays off”—and the government must do something to foster “fairness.” And Apple says it has moved production to China because Americans lack “diligence.”

What has any of this to do with our schools? Could K-12 education contribute significantly to a revival of industriousness in the U.S. population? Could it lead our young people to believe—and act on the belief—that hard work does pay off? I believe so, even if Mr. Obama didn’t mention it, but to do this our teachers and policymakers will need to reverse now-widespread practices and beliefs. They will, to begin, have to reward rather than discourage hard work and actual achievement. They will have to make kids work harder than most are accustomed to doing. They will even have to foster competition and honor winners—while helping others to boost their own performance.

Today, as has been widely noted, U.S. schools and educators discourage competition in favor of “collaboration” (which has its place, albeit a limited one). They have short days and years and don’t assign much homework. They resist singling anyone out as better than others; hence the animus toward valedictorians and such. They generally engage in social promotion lest youngsters “fall behind their peers.”(Observe what a big deal it is when a state insists that children must be able, say, to read by the end of third grade in order to move on to fourth.) They inflate grades. They lower “proficiency” cut scores. And in the name of self-esteem-building they praise everybody all the time no matter whether the fruits of a student’s efforts are worth praising or not.

Stanford’s Carol Dweck and UVa’s Dan Willingham are leaders within a growing band of serious education scholars who have determined that the opposite is closer to the truth: unearned praise and unwarranted self-esteem are bad for kids. Instead, teachers should praise and reward students for genuine accomplishment—and the harder kids work and the more they learn and accomplish the more praise (and reward) they earn.

Will that make them more “diligent” and “industrious”? Maybe. It might also boost their knowledge and skills. It may even make the U.S. more competitive—and grow the economy by making firms likelier to locate jobs in this country. In the long run, it will boost opportunity and maybe even “fairness” within our economy. It won’t be enough to reverse what Charles Murray views as a vast deterioration of the civic culture in general. But I’ll wager that it would do more good than another federal program—or a war of resentment over income distribution.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Yes, answers Roland Fryer in an amazing study released this month.  Based on earlier work, he identified 5 features of charter schools that helped them produce strong results: “increased time, better human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations.”  Fryer then somehow convinced the superintendent and school board in Houston to pursue these five reforms in a serious way in 9 struggling traditional public schools. (CORRECTION — the Houston folks report that they were eager to pursue some promising reforms and required no convincing.  They should be commended for that.) Here, in brief, is what they did:

To increase time on task, the school day was lengthened one hour and the school year was lengthened ten days. This amounts to 21 percent more school than students in these schools obtained in the year pre-treatment and roughly the same as successful charter schools in New York City. In addition, students were strongly encouraged and even incentivized to attend classes on Saturday. In an effort to significantly alter the human capital in the nine schools, 100 percent of principals, 30 percent of other administrators, and 52 percent of teachers were removed and replaced with individuals who possessed the values and beliefs consistent with an achievement-driven mantra and, wherever possible, a demonstrated record of achievement. To enhance student-level differentiation, we supplied all sixth and ninth graders with a math tutor in a two-on-one setting and provided an extra dose of reading or math instruction to students in other grades who had previously performed below grade level. This model was adapted from the MATCH school in Boston – a charter school that largely adheres to the methods described in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b). In order to help teachers use interim data on student performance to guide and inform instructional practice, we required schools to administer interim assessments every three to four weeks and provided schools with three cumulative benchmarks assessments, as well as assistance in analyzing and presenting student performance on these assessments. Finally, to instill a culture of high expectations and college access for all students, we started by setting clear expectations for school leadership. Schools were provided with a rubric for the school and classroom environment and were expected to implement school-parent-student contracts. Specific student performance goals were set for each school and the principal was held accountable for these goals.

And the result:

In the grade/subject areas in which we implemented all five policies described in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b) – sixth and ninth grade math – the increase in student achievement is dramatic. Relative to students who attended comparison schools, sixth grade math scores increased 0.484σ (.097) in one year. In seventh and eighth grades, the treatment effect in math is 0.125σ (.065) and is statistically significant. A very similar pattern emerges in high school math: large effects in ninth grade and a more modest but statistically significant effect in tenth and eleventh grade, which suggest that two-on-one tutoring is particularly effective. The results in reading exhibit a different pattern. If anything, the reading scores demonstrate a slight decrease in middle school, though not statistically significant, and a modest increase in high school. Impacts on attendance – which are positive and statistically insignificant – are difficult to interpret given the longer school day and longer school year.

Strikingly, both the magnitude of the increase in math and the muted effect for reading are consistent with the results of successful charter schools. Taking the treatment effects at face value, treatment schools in Houston would rank third out of twelve in math and fifth out of twelve in reading among charter schools in NYC with statistically significant positive results in the sample analyzed in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b).

Using data from the National Student Clearinghouse, we investigate treatment effects on two college outcomes: whether a student enrolled in any college (extensive margin) and whether they chose a four-year college, conditional on enrolling in any college (intensive margin). Calculated at the mean, students are 6.2 percentage points less likely to attend college, though the effect is not statistically significant. Conditional on attending college, however, treatment students are 17.7 percentage points more likely to enroll in a four-year institution, relative to a mean of 46% in comparison schools – a 40% increase.

Traditional public schools can get results like a KIPP school without having to actually become KIPP schools. They just have to imitate a few of the key features employed by KIPP and other successful charter schools. This is incredibly encouraging news. It means that traditional public schools are really capable of making significant progress if only they become more open to learning from successful charter schools. They can make that progress without having to cure poverty and all other social ills (although I’m sure that would be nice too).

Of course, there are serious concerns about bringing these reforms to scale, which Fryer considers in his conclusion. He dismisses union opposition as a serious obstacle based on the fact that the unionized school system in Denver is pursuing a similar reform strategy. I’m not so easily convinced that unions nationwide will jump aboard a plan that involves huge turnover in staffing and significantly more hours and days per year. Cost is another barrier to bringing this reform strategy to scale, but he notes that the marginal cost is only $1,837 per student and the rate of return on that investment would be roughly 20%.

But the most serious concerns seem to be fidelity to implementation and shortages of quality labor. We could all be heart surgeons if we just did what heart surgeons do. But there are only so many people capable of doing that work and not every office building can be re-organized as a hospital. Then again, successful teaching isn’t exactly heart surgery (although it can be just about as important), so perhaps there is real hope of bringing this to scale. We won’t know until we try it in more places with more schools.

- Jay Greene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It promises to be an exciting year.

- Peter Meyer

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

The topic of collaboration between districts and charter schools inevitably leads to Cold War imagery. Are we talking about appeasement? Détente? Trust but verify?

Like the ideal of world peace, it’s easy to agree about cooperation—moving from a “battleground” to “common ground,” as one Gates Foundation official put it. But how can we ensure that cooperation doesn’t turn into an excuse to co-opt the charter school movement?

The key, it seems to me, is for charters to come to the negotiating table as equal powers.

To be sure, some enlightened superintendents and school boards will welcome charter school engagement for all the right reasons. But local politics being what they are, let’s not take goodwill as a given. Through a prism of Realpolitik (!), the key to making partnerships work is even strength on either side.

What that implies is that long-lasting charter-district collaborations are only likely to work in locales where charter schools boast serious market share and significant political power. So before charter schools sit down to hammer out a deal, they should:

• Get to scale. If districts are losing twenty or thirty percent of their students (and funding) to charters, that’s enough to change political dynamics. Much less than that, and districts (and unions) can mostly look the other way.
• Build a political base. This is largely connected to my first point; charter school parents, if organized, can be a powerful voting bloc. But other actions are key, too. The first is to put well-connected people on charter school boards—people willing to go to bat for the movement. And the second is to make sure that local charter schools—or at least some of them—serve the children of the affluent. These parents are particularly effective at playing political hardball.
• Focus on quality. Bad charter schools have little to offer school districts. They don’t have innovations to share, best practices to teach, or techniques to replicate. Great charter schools, however, can be important resources. By showing what’s possible, they can put pressure on unions to remove barriers that keep district schools from following suit. They can share hard-earned lessons. And in some states, at least, they can lend their high test scores to districts’ performance metrics. (Ohio law allows for this, for example.)

Until these three conditions are met, charter schools will always play David to the district Goliath. Collaboration is great, but only when the local charter school movement is ready for it.

- Michael Petrilli

This post was originally published on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper Blog

It is, indeed, a modern platitude that “we must do something to improve Americans’ knowledge of civics and government.”

But there is a problem in civics education, a sort of dividing line, about which there is far less agreement across society. On one side, we find an emphasis on infusing kids with basic knowledge about government, an understanding of the merits (as well as the shortcomings) of American democracy, and a sense of what can still be called patriotism: the belief that this country and its values need to be defended. (Stanford’s Bill Damon does a terrific job of elaborating on this viewpoint in his recent book, Failing Liberty 101.)

On the other side, we find much greater emphasis on civic participation and activism, on voluntarism and “service learning,” and on what is often termed “collective decision making” (or problem solving) and “democratic engagement,” which often boils down into the communitarian view that issues facing society are best dealt with through group action, by people joining hands and working together rather than through the political process.

I will admit, after watching the antics of Congress, many state legislatures, and the current GOP presidential candidates, that American society would benefit from more “working together” than our elected officials have displayed of late. (And I keep recalling the late David Broder’s remark that the death of Ted Kennedy marked the passing of the last of the Senate’s great “deal makers,” willing to compromise and work across party lines to accomplish something worthwhile, even if it wasn’t everything that either party wanted.)

Still and all, schools have a special responsibility to the young people in their care, which is to be exceptionally careful about providing lessons and activities of a political nature or enlisting them in adult causes, however worthy some may deem them. And Uncle Sam has a special responsibility not to “take sides” in the big debate—or, if it does, to come down on the side of patriotism. Unfortunately, a new report out of the U.S. Department of Education, one that appears to enjoy Arne Duncan’s strong personal backing, suggests that the executive branch is tilting toward the other side.

One is reminded, without pleasure, the ruckus that President Obama stirred up with his first back-to-school address in 2009—and the controversial “lesson plan” that the Education Department prepared to accompany it.

The “democratic engagement” faction within civics education has recently re-energized—even without Mr. Duncan’s help—and is pressing hard on schools to push kids into activism. You can see a vivid example of this in a recent publication called (cutely) A Crucible Moment and billed as “a national call to action.” Although it’s primarily aimed at colleges and universities, its authors make plain that its message is meant for primary and secondary schools, too. (Those authors, however, include absolutely nobody from the K-12 world.)

The publication sets forth a quintet of “essential actions,” among which I find three at least a bit troublesome, particularly when applied to compulsory public education of impressionable children rather than the voluntary education of young adults:

• “Advance a contemporary, comprehensive framework for civic learning—embracing U.S. and global interdependence—that includes historic and modern understandings of democratic values, capacities to engage diverse perspectives and people, and commitment to collective civic problem solving.”Global interdependence? Collective civic problem solving?
• “Capitalize upon the interdependent responsibilities of K–12 and higher education to foster progressively higher levels of civic knowledge, skills, examined values, and action as expectations for every student.” Values examined by whom? What sort of “action”?
• “Expand the number of robust, generative civic partnerships and alliances, locally, nationally, and globally to address common problems, empower people to act, strengthen communities and nations, and generate new frontiers of knowledge.” What exactly are “generative civic partnerships” and who in particular is supposed to be “empowered” to do what?

Are you with me so far? But you may be thinking that this is all kind of academic and irrelevant, isn’t it, just one more pious commission report?

Well, it would be, but for one big attention-getter: Uncle Sam putting his thumb on this side of the civics-education scale.

Check out the Education Department’s brand-new official publication, Advancing Civic Learning and Engagement in Democracy: A Road Map and Call to Action. Although this thirty-pager comes out of the Department’s postsecondary wing and is, once again, meant mostly for higher education, it, too, makes no real age-specific distinctions and explicitly urges the nation’s K-12 schools to, for example, “both expand and transform their approach to civic learning and democratic engagement, rather than engage in tinkering at the margins. At no school, college, or university should students graduate with less civic literacy and engagement than when they arrived.”

Duncan himself made a pretty big deal of this at a recent White House conference where he remarked that “Unlike traditional civic education, civic learning and democratic engagement 2.0 is more ambitious and participatory than in the past. To paraphrase Justice O’Connor, the new generation of civic education initiatives move beyond your ‘grandmother’s civics’ to what has been labeled ‘action civics.’”

Hmm, “action civics”?

To be sure, most of what the Department proposes to do itself in this realm is consistent either with longstanding federal practice (e.g. research, data) or with ingrained Obama-administration priorities (e.g. “public-private partnerships”). But there are policy hints that go farther, such as suggesting that the forthcoming ESEA/NCLB reauthorization should include a program to “assist states, local education agencies, and nonprofits in developing implementing, evaluating, and replicating evidence-based programs that contribute to a well-rounded education—including civics, government, economics, and history. Other disciplines included in the program could incorporate evidence-based civic learning and democratic engagement approaches—such as service-learning.”

Read that last bit again and ask yourself if this is really a proper federal role in K-12 education, keeping in mind that the kids to be affected probably cannot even name the mayor of their town or the governor of their state, nor have much idea what political parties are and how legislation gets passed (or not).

It’s well and good for the Education Department to seek a broadening of the K-12 curriculum and an overdue consolidation of too many discipline-specific curriculum-related programs into a single block grant. It’s not acceptable, however, for them to push “action civics” on our nation’s schools.

-Chester E. Finn Jr

This post was originally published in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly

The Chetty study shows that over a ten year period, the payoff for the students of a very effective teacher amounts to a total of $2.5 million. The harm done by a very ineffective teacher is the same. So if we could replace a terrible teacher with a great one, it would be worth $5 million total for all those kids affected by the switch.  And losing a great teacher, only to hire a bad one, would cost the same.   That’s convincing evidence for those who want to limit the tenure of non-performing teachers while giving the excellent ones their just reward.

But unions want to protect teacher tenure and pay all teachers the same, regardless of effectiveness.  So denying the Chetty study is absolutely crucial.

Though he lacks the necessary econometric skills, Michael Winerip takes up the assignment, claiming the data on teacher effectiveness, which comes from student testing during the 1990s, is too old to tell us anything.

But to ascertain the impact of teaching on student earnings that occur much later in life, it is of course necessary to look at those educated in the 1990s.   Those students have now finished high school (or not), gone to college (or not), and entered the work force (or not).  For today’s students, no one has that information–for the obvious reason that they are still too young.

Aha! says Mr. Winerip. That is the fatal flaw. Back in the 1990s, when students took standardized tests, No Child Left Behind did not exist, so “whether those results are applicable to our post-2004 high-stakes world, we cannot tell.”

If we are to buy this argument, the data will always be too old to tell us anything.  To learn what works we have to wait twenty years, and when that data is available, it will be just too old.

But is it?  Why should we assume that the tests taken back in the 1990s were more accurate than the post-NCLB tests given in 2005, when both teachers and students took them more seriously.  Student performance is more accurately measured when students take a test seriously and when teachers make sure the students understand the testing procedures to be followed. All that is more likely when tests count for something.

So if Chetty and his colleagues could identify large impacts of effective teaching using data from the 1990s, his successors will probably find even larger impacts from more accurate information gathered in the first decade of the 21^st century.

Of course, I cannot prove that, but it is certainly more likely than Winerip’s counter-hypothesis.  While he admits the 1990s tests were accurate, he claims tests today no longer are.  Only if Winerip is willing to make the astounding claim that most teachers today are cheating deliberately and systematically does that assertion hold. Otherwise, we can characterize his argument in one word:  Silly.

- Paul Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Payne concludes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Peter Meyer

This also appears on Board’s Eye View.

———–

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

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

But while there are significant differences among the players, a clear path toward a workable, maybe even bipartisan, package is still visible. In short: all roads lead to Lamar. Not only does the Alexander package represent smart policy, it also serves as a sort of mid-point between the Senate bill that passed out of committee and the House GOP bill that is likely to do the same. Let’s tackle the five big issues:

• Requirements for standards and tests. The Administration and the Senate (including supporters of both the Harkin-Enzi and Alexander measures) want states to adopt standards that indicate college and career readiness; the House Republicans don’t. The real issue at stake is not just differing views of big, pushy Uncle Sam but also the new Common Core standards initiative, and whether federal policy should encourage (or even coerce) states to participate. The House GOP bill comes out swinging, stating that “the Secretary shall not attempt to influence, incentivize, or coerce state participation” in any work on common standards or tests. On the other hand, the same bill also says states must develop accountability systems that “ensure that all public school students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the workforce without the need for remediation.” That amounts to college and career readiness, right? Proponents of the Common Core should simply swallow their pride, and accept the House language. It doesn’t really matter, anyway; with forty-six states already on board, those of us who support the Common Core should have a very quiet victory party and then move on to hoping that at least one of the two test-building consortia devises a workable assessment system. Where the House GOP gets it wrong is in scrapping the requirement that states test students in science. Reducing transparency around science achievement isn’t a smart way to promote flexibility or cost savings; current law is fine on that point. Indeed, the more Washington substitutes transparency for regulation, the more data it should insist be transparent—and more it should want those data to span as much of the curriculum as possible, not just reading and math.
• Federal mandates around state accountability systems. No Child Left Behind famously required states to adopt the “Adequate Yearly Progress” measure for identifying failing schools. Today, nobody wants to keep AYP; the question is how much leeway to give states when creating their next-generation systems. The Administration’s waiver policy allows states to propose radically different approaches—but they must still consider subgroup performance and must set annual targets for all schools (and groups) to hit. Harkin-Enzi concurs on subgroups but leaves out the annual targets; instead, states must expect schools to make “continuous progress.” (For that alleged crime by the Senators, many reformers and civil rights groups cried bloody murder.) Alexander goes a step further, leaving it to the states to figure out how to “differentiate” among schools, though they still must consider the performance of “categories” of students. And the House GOP goes the farthest by prohibiting the Department of Education from dictating the contours of state accountability systems at all (though still requiring states to evaluate schools based on the performance of subgroups). Alexander’s language represents a reasonable middle ground, and it’s not bad. States must establish “a system of identifying and differentiating among all public elementary schools and secondary schools in the State based on student academic achievement and any other factors determined appropriate by the State [that] also takes into account achievement gaps…and overall performance of all students and of each category of students.” That gives the states clear guidance and plenty of room for flexibility, but maintains the focus on the performance of disadvantaged students. Next?
• Federally mandated interventions in failing schools. Here there’s more agreement than may meet the eye. Nobody wants to continue NCLB’s notorious (and ineffectual)“cascade of sanctions” for faltering schools:  choice for kids in schools “in need of improvement”; supplemental services for kids stuck in schools in “corrective action”; more stringent demands for those in need of “restructuring.” And nobody wants to force states to intervene in schools that are merely mediocre. (Which isn’t to say states should leave them be, especially if their students have no viable alternatives. Remember, this is about federal policy.) The question is whether states—to keep receiving federal dollars—must do something about really awful schools at the bottom. The final Harkin-Enzi bill includes a compromise with Lamar Alexander to offer states and districts a wider range of options for intervening in their five percent worst schools. (That range is wider than Senator Harkin—or the Administration—may have preferred.) The House GOP bill, on the other hand, merely asks states to develop a “system for school improvement for low-performing” Title I schools and to make sure districts “implement interventions in such schools that are designed to address such schools’ weaknesses.” Personally, I like the House approach, since the Federal government doesn’t have the expertise or capacity to enforce a system of sanctions anyway. But that also means this is another symbolic debate; it doesn’t really matter what Congress writes into law, since it will be impossible to implement. So adopting the compromise Senate language wouldn’t be the end of the world.
• Teacher effectiveness. There is a bundle of questions in play here: Should Congress scrap the “highly qualified teachers” mandate? Should it replace it with a tougher requirement that states and/or districts develop rigorous teacher evaluation systems? Should it mandate the “equitable distribution of teachers”? Should it require such an equitable distribution within districts by tweaking Title I’s “comparability” rule? On most of these issues, the House GOP plan is (predictably) less demanding than the Senate. Unlike Harkin-Enzi, it would scrap the HQT mandate while eliminating any federal efforts to redistribute teachers (via “comparability” or otherwise).  Alexander’s plan does the same. On teacher evaluations—a genuine surprise–however, the House would require them (at either the state or district level), while the Senate would simply provide competitive funds for such systems. This might be the toughest area around which to forge common ground. The unions will fight to eliminate the evaluation mandate, and few “local control” Republicans will push back, I suspect. So expect it to get tossed. The HQT mandate is an abomination, beloved by nobody, so I’m hopeful that it will get killed. But conservatives will probably have to cede some ground on the “inequitable distribution” policies. A good first step would be to require states to collect and make public data on the distribution of effective teachers—though without a teacher evaluation mandate, it’s hard to understand how that would work. What’s most doable, then, would be a new requirement for districts to report actual spending, school by school, and include the real cost of teachers’ salaries and benefits in those data.
• Spending. It always comes down to money in the end. The House GOP bill explicitly limits the growth in out-year spending on ESEA programs to the rate of inflation; the Senate is silent on the issue. Furthermore, the House wants to scrap the law’s longstanding “maintenance of effort” requirements, which penalize districts for cutting their own expenditures. Expect the House to lose on the out-year spending issue (which is another symbolic fight; Congressional appropriators will make these decisions every year anyway). But dropping maintenance of effort is a good idea, especially in the New Normal of tight budgets. (In the real world, after all the compromising is done, MOE is more likely to be loosened than jettisoned entirely.)

This truly is not rocket science; with a little presidential leadership and goodwill from both parties, a deal could be hammered out quickly. We haven’t had much of any of that in recent months, however—an issue voters might raise come November.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry also appears on Flypaper.

Since the National Education Association (NEA) can collect multi-millions of dollars through a check-off system that generates revenues directly from teacher paychecks (unless a teacher specifically objects), the NEA, a la Peachum, can invest in the work of less-advantaged non-profits that ostensibly have entirely different agendas.  Even a little bit of money can produce a valuable ally somewhere down the line.

During the 2010-11 fiscal year, the NEA invested $18.8 million dollars in a bewildering array of grateful non-profit groups and organizations, the Education Intelligence Agency tells us.

Some of the money goes to ostensibly independent research groups, such as a $250,000 grant to the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice (which has migrated to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which received another quarter million in direct funding), a $255,000 grant to the Economic Policy Institute, a reliably pro-labor “think tank,” and a $50,000 award to Phi Delta Kappa, which publishes a journal highly protective of union interests.

Research groups connected to the Democratic mainstream also collect money from the NEA.  The Center for American Progress was given $25,000 and the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability was awarded $20,000.

Even tiny research outfits can get something:  the Global Institute for Language and Literacy Development got $18,000, while the Employee Benefit Research Institute was awarded $7,500, and Media Matters, a group that attacks conservative groups and commentators, was treated to a $100,000 gift. The anti-accountability group, FairTest, bagged $35,000.

And some money goes to those who have the potential to write stories about unions.  The Education Writers Association, for example, received a grant of $11,500.

Groups representing the interests of education schools are another NEA favorite, strengthening the symbiotic relationship between schools of education and teacher unions.  Grants were given to the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education ($400,373) and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards ($10,000)

NEA also likes to help out pillars of the education establishment.  The Council of Chief State School Offices received $50,417; the Council of State Governments got $19,750; the Education Commission of the States was awarded $60,000; the National Parent Teachers Association was given $6,250; the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association captured $50,000; and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate was awarded $200,000.

A wide array of civil rights and minority groups appreciate the help they receive from the NEA, including the NAACP ($25,000), Congressional Black Caucus Foundation ($170,000), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund ($10,000), the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network ($7,500), the National Women’s Law Center ($10,000),  Rainbow PUSH Coalition ($5,000), People for the American Way ($128,000), National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund ($12,500), National Black Caucus of State Legislators ($5,500), National Association for Multicultural Education ($5,000), National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education ($17,500), and something called the Hip Hop Caucus Education Fund ($10,000). No wonder it’s nearly impossible to get a civil rights coalition to take on the teacher unions.

Even Republicans can cash in.  The Ripon Society, a liberal-leaning faction within the party, got $10,000.

The list goes on and on, as you can see by checking out the link given above. The recipients, big and small, help to build a broad, diverse coalition that can be called upon by a teacher union when help is needed.  Keeping the document handy may prove helpful if one wants to understand the interstices of the debate over school reform.  As “Deep Throat” advised, “Follow the money.”  Even a little money can go a long ways.  If you don’t believe me, ask Mrs. Peachum.

-Paul Peterson

The market is plenty motivated to create disruptive products and services to serve the public education system, but today’s policies and regulations don’t incentivize and reward those products and services that best serve students. As a result, philanthropic dollars are critical to help create the correct conditions such that those products that are efficacious and serve a higher end—student learning—are the ones that gain share.

As we’ve argued, public policy should reward those providers that best deliver student outcomes—and punish those providers that do not serve the public good.

There is one area, however, where I think philanthropic dollars should probably fund products and services, which is in the category of assessments. If we’re going to have a system that pays providers on how students do on outcome measures, we need robust assessments that are authentic and that people trust. The political incentives—for a variety of reasons—to create high-quality assessments aren’t particularly strong, so having philanthropists invest dollars to create these assessments and continue to push innovation is critical.

This is why yesterday’s announcement that The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will award a $100,000 prize to the designers of software that can reliably automate essay grading for state tests to drive testing of deeper learning is so important. Open Education Solutions and The Common Pool designed and will be managing the competition.

The Hewlett Foundation’s leadership in creating better assessments to measure critical reasoning and writing is a big step forward—and its use of Kaggle, a platform for predictive modeling competitions, to host the competition is clever.

According to the press release, “The automated scoring competition intends to solve the longstanding problem of high cost and low turnaround of current testing deeper learning such as student essays. The goal is to shift testing away from standardized bubble tests to tests that evaluate critical thinking, problem solving and other 21st century skills.”

In addition, the competition is being conducted with the support of the two state testing consortia that are currently designing the next-generation assessments for the Common Core. Having this buy-in and collaboration gives the competition serious validity and the potential to have real impact.

-Michael Horn

The top-line findings, that blended learning models cost an estimated $8,900 per pupil (+/- 15%) and fully online schools cost $6,400 (+/- 20%) — compared to traditional expenditures averaging $10,000 — will surely be repeated in statehouse policy battles throughout the country. But, those who actually read the short brief will quickly realize that the authors have bent over backwards to caveat their findings in multiple ways. The most important of these caveats? The author’s cost figures reflect estimates of what online and blended schools are currently spending, rather than what they should be spending. In other words, since we have little understanding of how spending relates to student outcomes, the authors cannot say much about either the effectiveness or productivity of this spending. Is it the right amount? We just don’t know.

Still, readers of the paper will better understand the various components of costs in blended and fully online programs – and how they differ from one another and with traditional instruction. These insights should inform those looking to evaluate digital programs by helping them ask better questions about the choices these programs have made and how they align with an overall instructional philosophy. For example, online programs could spend relatively little on content, relying primarily on their teachers to adapt free and open educational resources. In that case, the program would instead need to invest in its educators, ensuring that they have both the support and expertise needed to assemble and modify curriculum. Likewise, programs investing in sophisticated adaptive content will likely pursue a different instructional model.

Finally, one part of the paper will hopefully improve the overall dialogue around potential “cost savings” from digital innovations. The authors correctly note the wide variations in types of blended and online programs, along with the many different reasons that educators and policymakers pursue these programs. Often, advocates confuse attempts to reduce overall costs with efforts to re-allocate the same costs into a different instructional model (i.e., Rocketship). The first results in lower total expenditures. While the latter may mean lower expenditures in certain areas, such as facilities, those savings are put back into different areas in an attempt to be more productive or focus resources on a particularly vexing instructional problem.

As debates around digital learning become increasingly prominent across the country, it would behoove advocates on all sides to better understand the economics behind these programs. This paper is a helpful start, not only for its content, but also for highlighting the ongoing need to better understand the student outcomes that result from these public expenditures.

-Bill Tucker

That I think would be a serious mistake.  As I explain in an op-ed appearing on Sunday in the Chicago Tribune, the two party system is one of the bulwarks of American democracy.  When parties are limited to two (apart from tiny splinter groups), the public, in presidential elections,  generally gets a choice between two consensus-building political leaders who have the skills needed to lead broad, heterogeneous parties with significant internal cleavages.  They may seem to be unprincipled flip-floppers, but they have the ability to sense the public’s thinking, the ability to listen to a wide range of perspectives, and the pragmatism necessary to adapt to new circumstances.

We all would like to vote for leaders whose thinking reflects our own thoughts exactly, and in a world of three, four or five parties, it becomes easier to find such “principled” leaders.  But the countries of the world that have a multi-party system (Greece, Israel, Italy, France, Spain, to mention only the most obvious cases in point) hardly offer models of effective government.

It is the job of policy analysts and interest group leaders, in education as in other policy areas,  to clarify the issues and propose striking alternatives.  It is the job of party leaders to translate those ideas into laws that the public as a whole can accept.

I, for one, will resist the song of the third-party siren.

-Paul Peterson

Initially filed in 2007, the case raised the now boilerplate claims that Washington state insufficiently funds education.  The trial court judge sided with the plaintiffs and instructed the state to “proceed with real and measurable progress.” But the judge left it to the state to establish both the cost of an adequate education and how to fund it.  The state appealed directly to Washington’s Supreme Court, setting the stage for last week’s decision.

The Supreme Court agreed with the trial court that the state underfunds education, but then said the trial court went too far in trying to dictate “the precise means by which the state must discharge its duty.”  In other words, the Supreme Court was not even going to ask the state to meet the trial court’s very minimal command to do another cost study.  The Court noted that “finding the appropriate remedy” in education clause cases “has always proved elusive.”  The Court decided that, instead of ordering a specific remedy, it would just retain jurisdiction over the case to monitor the implementation of reforms that the legislature had already adopted on its own.

The takeaway is that the Court has said that it will maybe think about possibly doing something at some point in the future, but it can’t say what.  Implicitly the Court was just recognizing the reality that it lacks the capacity to determine what constitutes an appropriate system of school finance, the power to generate billions of dollars of new revenue, and the legitimacy to dictate how the legislature is to do its job.  The Court just couldn’t bring itself to explicitly say so, and seemed to desperately want to assert its institutional relevance.

The response from the state legislature only confirmed that the Court’s decision is going to be largely irrelevant.  The Seattle Times reported that, after the Court’s decision, “lawmakers on both sides of the aisle made clear that when the Legislature convenes Monday to address a $1.5 billion budget shortfall, education cuts will still be on the table,” despite the Court’s decision.  Washington, like most states, has faced declining revenues, and funding education at the level desired by the plaintiffs would require drastic cuts to other essential government services.

If McCleary counts as a victory for school finance advocates, then states facing these lawsuits should hope for similar defeats in the future.

-Joshua Dunn

• It worked!

As Mark Schneider shows in his recent paper for Fordham—and as Eric Hanushek and others demonstrated before him—poor, minority, and low-achieving students made huge progress in math, and sizable progress in reading, during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their most recent scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate all-time highs for most grades and subjects. These students are typically performing two grade levels ahead of where their peers were fifteen years ago in math, and are reading at least one grade level higher. So how to explain these historic gains? While we can’t draw causal conclusions from NAEP, we can make educated guesses. What’s clear is that states that adopted “consequential accountability” in the nineties saw big test-score jumps, and the late-adopter states saw similar progress once No Child Left Behind kicked into action. So, while other factors could have been in play, too (such as efforts to reduce class size or the cessation of the crack-cocaine epidemic), there’s a pretty good case that testing and accountability succeeded in spurring higher student achievement, at least at the bottom of the performance spectrum.

• But it couldn’t work forever. As Schneider argues, the test-score gains sparked by NCLB-style accountability appear to have hit a plateau. We’re back to anemic progress in most grades and subjects, particularly in the states (like Texas) that embraced testing and accountability first. That shouldn’t be too surprising. While the initial pressure (and shame) provided by consequential accountability appears to have changed behavior at the district and school level, after a while being called a “failing school” loses its sting. Furthermore, holding “schools” accountable has rarely equaled holding individuals accountable—real-live teachers and principals who might lose their jobs. Once it became clear that NCLB was all bark and no bite, schools could return to the status quo ante.
• The trade-offs are real. The good news is that we’ve seen enormous progress for our lowest-achieving students. The bad news is that we’ve seen languid progress for our highest achievers. The good news is that math scores are way up and, to a lesser degree, reading scores are up, too (especially for poor and minority kids). The bad news is that history and science have been squeezed out of the elementary school curriculum, particularly in high-poverty schools. Whether these trade-offs were worth it depends on your point of view. Personally, I’d prefer a policy that aims for more balance: achievement gains across the performance spectrum, not just at the bottom; and a more holistic view of what it means for students to be well educated. Literacy and numeracy are (obviously) not enough.
• Pet ideas from both parties crashed and burned. The Democrats gave the country the “white elephant” gift of the “highly qualified teachers” mandate, a policy that succeeded in turning the nation’s teachers against NCLB from the very beginning; managed to tie up myriad schools (including charters) in all manner of red tape; and gravely threatened Teach For America, one of the most promising reforms of the NCLB era. From the Republicans we got “supplemental educational services,” a.k.a. free tutoring. This was more of an impulse than a fleshed-out idea. It was never clear whether SES was meant to be a sanction for failing districts (if you don’t improve your test scores, we’ll take some of your Title I money away from you); a serious effort at parental choice; or a way to “extend” learning time for needy kids. Regardless, its entire design was predicated on cooperation from school districts, which were responsible for facilitating the flow of funds away from their coffers and into the hands of nonprofit and for-profit providers. As my Italian grandmother would have said, “Fatta chance.
• It’s time for something new. On this point, virtually everybody agrees. But what should the next phase of education reform entail? The contours are now taking shape. First, there’s agreement that, for accountability to be real, it has to be placed upon real-live people, not just amorphous “schools.” That means, first and foremost, holding teachers accountable for their performance. Thus the interest in: more sophisticated teacher-evaluation systems, tenure reform, performance pay, and all the rest. Second, there’s broad consensus that we need to balance the “tough love” approach of accountability with the “helping hand” of capacity-building: Providing teachers with tools like a coherent curriculum—linked to the new Common Core standards—so they don’t have to make it all up on their own. And third, we can all glimpse the promise of digital learning, if technology can be harnessed effectively and if the political and governance roadblocks can be removed. But what’s the appropriate (and politically feasible) federal role in all of this? In all of these reforms, Uncle Sam’s involvement will be—and should be—minimal. The political thirst for aggressive federal involvement in education has been quenched, and the dollars to fund it spent. Plus these “next wave” reforms require nuance, care, and thoughtfulness to get them right—attributes not associated with Uncle Sam. In other words, reform will continue, but the federal government will lead from behind. As well it should.

Happy birthday, No Child Left Behind. And here’s hoping that you don’t make it to eleven.

-Michael Petrilli

This post also appeared on Flypaper.

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

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

As Dillon writes,

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

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

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

- Peter Meyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Frederick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up

California policy has done its best to create a byzantine—some might say bizarre—set of regulations to frustrate the power of online learning to do just that. From geographic barriers that limit the ability of students in certain locales to access online learning to restricting blended learning in some unfortunate ways, California has created a maze to frustrate would-be innovators.

There have been some attempts by legislators over the last couple of years to begin to rectify some of these problems, but they have only stalled. Although some charter school operators, such as Rocketship Education and KIPP Empower, as well as some school districts, like Riverside School District, have created stellar blended-learning models, the most advanced school districts in California in online and blended learning have seen their efforts frustrated and curtailed. Even the exciting emerging blended-learning models appearing throughout California in response to tight budgets are limited in how innovative they could be by California’s regulatory landscape.

Against this backdrop, a group called Education Forward has introduced “The California Student Bill of Rights Act”—a proposed ballot initiative that would unlock some of the most onerous barriers to online and blended learning in California. But it would do so in an indirect way.

The initiative is actually not about online or blended learning per se; instead it’s designed to solve one of the most pressing problems facing California students today.

That problem is this: a stunning 1 million high school students in California—roughly 50 percent of the state’s high school student population—attend schools that do not offer the full slate of courses required for admission to the state’s university systems. This means that in many of California’s public high schools, students can graduate, but they won’t be able to get into a UC or CSU college even if they have a good GPA and good test scores.

The initiative solves this problem by creating a mechanism to move beyond simple seat-time funding and instead offer fractional funding to the course level, so students can take courses from an outside institution if their home school doesn’t offer a certain course. The initiative also stipulates that a school or district cannot deny students access to the courses needed for admission to the University of California and California State University systems, including college prep and Advanced Placement courses—a statement of a student’s basic educational rights.

If the initiative gathers the requisite number of signatures to be on the ballot, with a single vote this November, California’s voters could eliminate one of the most egregious examples of inequity in its educational system—and it won’t cost taxpayers any additional funds to do it. This fact alone should allow people from all sides to come together and get behind this.

The initiative certainly isn’t perfect—no initiative or bill is. It leaves a lot of discretion up to several entities, from the departments of education and finance to potentially the legislature—to create the mechanisms to make this all work well. If it passes, the “real” work would likely begin afterward. Some of the organizers behind Education Forward have some clever ideas about how to fund the online courses a student might take, for example—by offering 50 percent of funding to the provider up-front for enrollment, 25 percent for the student passing the course, and the last 25 percent upon successful passage of the state final exam—but this idea, which moves the focus to student outcomes, isn’t codified explicitly in the initiative (although the notion of competency-based learning is, which might lead to such an outcomes-based funding system).

But what successful passage of the measure would do is assert the voice of the people of California as a means to pressure the stalled legislature to do the right thing. And in so doing, it could do more than just solve the problem of equity to high-quality educational opportunities in the state, it also creates a mechanism for competency-based learning, establishes a strong grounding for what online learning and blended learning are, and eliminates the outmoded geographic barriers that prevent students from being able to access high-quality learning opportunities no matter where they originate in the state.

As such, it’s a much-needed breath of fresh air for a state that has been stuck for years now when it comes to education policy—and it could lead the way to bigger and better things ahead.

-Michael Horn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Presence Scoring Rubric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Rick Hess

This also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

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

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

Checker wrote about this phenomenon in India in 2008:

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

1. Cathie Black will be gone by Easter.

Right!

This was perhaps my proudest moment of the year. (I even got some shout-outs from the mainstream media.) In hindsight, though, it wasn’t really a tough call. I mean, Cathie Black? What was Mayor Bloomberg thinking?

2. A new ESEA will be law by Thanksgiving.

Wrong!

For a few fleeting moments this fall I thought I might have a chance. But alas, it wasn’t in the cards. The issue wasn’t substance—something akin to Lamar Alexander’s reauthorization package could pass both chambers of Congress by a wide margin, and the President would happily sign it. Politics were to blame, mostly on the Democratic side of the aisle. Simply put, the reformers and civil rights groups on the Left weren’t going to allow a bill to move that would step away from NCLB’s top-down accountability mandates, and the Administration’s actions on waivers took away the urgency to act.

3. Education-establishment groups will file a slew of new funding-equity lawsuits–and charter school groups will join them.

Half right

I don’t see any sign of legal activity from the charter sector, but this year’s budget cutbacks have indeed led to a new round of school finance lawsuits. Several are underway in Texas, Alabama was home to a novel federal suit, and the Wall Street Journal reports that über-lawyer Michael Rebell is getting ready to jump back into action (if not head to the courthouse itself).

4. Michelle Rhee will embrace “paycheck protection” as part of her agenda.

Wrong!

She had her chance, as such a policy was a part of Wisconsin’s collective bargaining reforms. But she decided to oppose the changes in Wisconsin and, like Democrats for Education Reform, went out of her way to voice support for collective bargaining rights. Still, as long as the unions can raise hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign cash just by adding a small surtax to their members’ fees, Rhee is going to be doing battle with one hand tied behind her back. I still think, at some point, paycheck protection will go mainstream among reformers (including Rhee).

5. At least one district will go bankrupt.

Wrong!

At least, I’m not aware of any district that did. But a half-dozen municipalities, including Central Falls, Rhode Island, did enter bankruptcy, which has implications for their local schools.

6. “Local control” will come under further attack.

Right!

But this one was cheating; those of us at Fordham are among the ones doing the attacking, as we investigate the future of education governance in America.

7. Diane Ravitch and the teachers unions will criticize budget cuts but offer no alternatives.

Right!

Diane and Randi will demur, but throughout the conversation about the “New Normal,” their most consistent suggestion has been to raise taxes in order to reverse budget cuts. That’s a reasonable argument, but it’s not currently politically viable. So then what? Diane at times has criticized expensive no-bid contracts going out to New York City vendors, but trimming those wouldn’t reap much savings. The union-backed “National Center for Education Policy” blasted the Department of Education for promoting resources (including several from Fordham) that offer cost-cutting ideas—but provided no alternatives of its own.

***

By my count, I batted .500. Not bad if you’re a baseball slugger; not so good if you’re picking stocks. In coming days I’ll take a crack at 2012 and see if I can do any better. Until then, Happy New Year!

-Mike Petrilli

This post also appears on Flypaper.

Until something better comes along, I’m going to fancy myself a member of the Green-tea Party. Here are its seven tenets, one for each day of the week:

• Low taxes, efficient government, a balanced budget, a vigorous foreign policy (no more “leading from behind”), and a strong national defense.
• A full-bore, full-throated war on terrorism, terrorists, pirates and other such menaces, wherever they are.
• Decent provision for the truly dependent—and no help at all for those who can and should provide for themselves, their families and their neighbors.
• Decent respect for the environment—I’ve seen those glaciers melt and trash in the ocean—and for conservation of non-renewable resources.
• Minimal government regulation of just about everything else.
• That includes governments (and politicians) keeping out of adults’ lives, bedrooms, beliefs, orientations and practices. (Children are another story.)
• High education standards, plenty of quality school choices and lots more bang for the education buck.

Anybody want to join me? To run on this platform? You might even get more than one vote.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post also appears on Flypaper.

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

The Condition of Education 2011

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

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

Best and Worst from the Left

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

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

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

The Best:

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

The Worst:

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

Ed Week’s Top 10

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

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

A Quiz on 2011

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

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

BONUS QUESTIONS:

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

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

Rick Hess’s Top 10 for 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Rick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas.

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

This much everybody knows. But unless we want to live out the classic definition of insanity (“doing the same thing over again with the expectation that it will produce a different result”), we need to focus laser-like on the barriers that keep us from making major-league gains. If we don’t break through (or circumnavigate) these barriers, academic achievement will remain stagnant.

The barriers I’m talking about are not cultural issues, parenting issues, demographic issues, or other macro-influences on educational achievement. Those are all plenty real, but largely beyond the reach of public policy. No, here I refer to obstacles that competent leaders and bold policymakers could reduce or eradicate if they were serious.

How much difference would that really make? It’s possible, of course, that we’re pursuing the wrong core strategies. Maybe standards-based reform has exhausted its potential (as Mark Schneider suggests in The Accountability Plateau). Perhaps choice and competition really cannot lift all boats. Possibly technology is overrated, alternate certification can never amount to much, teacher quality is doomed to mediocrity, principals don’t truly want authority, etc.

Could be. But from where I sit, the basic strategies aren’t ill-conceived. Rather, they’ve been stumped, stymied, and constrained by formidable barriers that are more or less built into the K-12 system as we know it.

Those barriers aren’t accidents. They’ve been erected by adult interests, bureaucratic routine, structural rigidity, and political stalemate. And they function to keep anything in education from changing very much. Eight such barriers are especially troublesome. Uninterrupted, they are likely to keep us from making major gains. One ought not, however, despair. On several fronts, promising interruptions and interrupters are emerging. Whether they can muster what it will take to tear down these walls remains unknown.

First and foremost is the archaic governance of K-12 education. I’ve written elsewhere about this problem, but it’s so fundamental and ubiquitous that we tend not even to notice it, much less to think that anything could be done about it. Instead, we take for granted (like it or not) that we’re stuck forever with local control in the form of school districts, separate from the rest of government and run by school boards that are particularly vulnerable to capture by adult interests, as well as with a marble cake of federal, state, and local decisions, regulations, and funding streams.

There are beginning to be exceptions, however, that illustrate what could be possible. Mayoral control of the schools in D.C., New York, Chicago, and several other major cities is one example. State-operated “recovery” school districts in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Michigan are another. The “parent trigger” idea is a third.

Second, our dysfunctional system of school finance puts the brakes on just about every reform while perpetuating inequity. We don’t fund learning, we fund programs. We don’t fund kids, we fund adult job slots. We don’t fund schools, we fund district-wide categoricals. We don’t blend the money from multiple sources into a single, flexible stream; rather, we leave it in discrete programs and silos, each with its own rules, uses of funding, and accounting obligations.

Here, too, small cracks can be seen in the glacier. Several states (notably Michigan, Indiana, and Vermont) have shifted their funding systems to mostly state dollars. Voucher programs, though still limited (but growing!), enable at least some of the money to accompany individual kids to the schools of their choice. A few cities have devolved as much budgetary authority as they can—district-wide teacher contracts are a huge constraint here—to the building level. Waivers can be sought (though seldom are) from states and Washington that allow enterprising superintendents to combine and redirect some of the categorical funds. And a few brave school-finance experts are probing deep into district budgets to see how much things really cost and where the dollars really flow.

Third, our academic standards are too low almost everywhere. It’s not just that too little is being achieved; it’s that too little is expected. Even where a state’s standards look great on paper—a few do—its “cut scores” for passing the tests aligned with those standards are rarely ambitious, and NCLB hasn’t helped one bit on that front. Fordham and others have been documenting these problems forever.

The silver lining in this cloud is widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards for math and reading, and work now underway to produce a kindred set of multi-state standards for science. The Common Core itself turned out well, superior to the academic standards of most states and more or less on par with the best of them. The big questions now are whether it will be properly implemented, which means accompanying it with suitable curricula, assessments, and more—and whether public officials will have the fortitude to stick with it after scads of their current students turn out to be no match for it. Several state education leaders—Ohio’s Stan Heffner and Massachusetts’s Mitch Chester come to mind—are already walking the Common Core walk. In other jurisdictions, it may still be mostly talk.

Which brings us to weak-kneed accountability, the fourth great barrier to real achievement gains. About half the states have high school graduation tests that one must pass to qualify for a diploma but nearly all of these are easy—eighth- or tenth-grade content with low passing scores and multiple make-up opportunities. A few states have “promotional gates”—achievement benchmarks that determine whether you get to move on to the next grade. Many states give ratings or labels to schools according to their academic results and NCLB has added the (“made” or “failed”) AYP designation for schools and districts. Still and all, there are precious few tangible consequences for the adults in the system; it isn’t that demanding for the kids; and schools that find themselves subject to “interventions” or “reconstitutions” usually end up with the minimum-hassle version.

Whether the state consortia now developing Common Core-aligned assessments will be able to agree on demanding “cut scores” is an open question, to be followed by whether individual states using those tests will let those cut scores make any real difference in promotion, graduation, teacher retention (or reward), school reconstitution, and all the rest. Yes, there’s movement toward tying teacher evaluations and pay more tightly to student learning, but we’re still in the earliest stages of that ambitious project and there is much resistance to it.

Fifth, though choice programs of every sort are proliferating—virtual, charter, hybrid, voucher, and more—and though it can be demonstrated that more than half of all U.S. pupils now attend schools that they or their parents chose via one means or another, the facts remain that too many of those choices are mediocre (or worse), that the kids in greatest need of better options are least apt to be able to access them, and that our “schools of choice” for the most part labor under too much input-and-process regulation coupled with insufficient resources.

The best of the CMOs and a handful of one-off schools show that quality is possible, but even they face great difficulty replicating success and expanding their networks. The best state charter laws show that the regulatory and resource challenges can be tackled. But we’ve got a long way to go.

Sixth, although instructional technology holds enormous promise to transform education—in both its fully virtual and blended forms—it is stoutly opposed by the usual interest groups, is pushed (perhaps too hard) by politically connected profit seekers who care little about academic achievement, is ill-suited to existing governance and financing arrangements, and is shackled by absurd regulatory provisions that make scant sense even in a brick-and-mortar environment. The Digital Learning Council and others (including the Foundation for Excellence in Education and Fordham itself) are showing where and how paths through these thickets could be cut but politicians and policymakers will have to do the heavy cutting.

Seventh, our human resource practices and policies are sorely antiquated and anti-quality, particularly as regards teachers, whether one is looking at seniority provisions, uniform pay schedules, overly rich pension-and-benefit plans, licensure-and-certification rules, or a hundred other parts of public education’s HR system. There have been bold moves in several states to limit the scope of collective bargaining (a pillar of archaic HR practices), to modernize benefit structures, to make employment hinge more on effectiveness than on credentials and seniority, and to evaluate teachers (and sometimes principals) more on the basis of student achievement. But, once again, we have a very long way to go.

Eighth and finally, our preoccupation with “at risk” populations and with achievement gaps defined as the distance between demographic groups has led to the benign neglect of millions of kids, including but not limited to gifted students and high-achieving learners. America will never solve its international-competitiveness problem just by raising the bottom of the achievement distribution. Though a number of states and districts are trying to enlarge their Advanced Placement programs and to reward top students with college financial aid and other initiatives aimed at high achievers, it’s also the case that tight budgets have shrunk gifted-and-talented programs in many places. (And Congress has zero-funded the only federal initiative that tries to encourage such activities.) Note, too, that widening access to AP and such isn’t necessarily a good thing for the “talented tenth” who were already taking those courses and passing those exams.

With these eight problems unsolved—and more that could be added to the list—as well as gridlocked policymaking in Washington and open warfare in many state capitals, is there reason to be optimistic about the future of K-12 education?

I say yes, albeit cautiously. What gives me the greatest hope today is the emergence—and steadfastness—of a new cadre of change-minded people in positions of influence (think Jeb Bush, the “Chiefs for Change,” Joel Klein, Wendy Kopp, Kevin Huffman, Michelle Rhee, and yes, Arne Duncan) and the birth of a number of new-and/or-improved advocacy organizations, mostly operating at the state level (think 50CAN, Advance Illinois, PIE-Network, Democrats for Education Reform, Students First, Stand for Children, BAEO, the American Federation for Children, Parent Revolution). They’re still no match for the protectors of the status quo—i.e. bulwarks of the barriers enumerated above—but they’re slowly gaining. Let us wish them much clout in the New Year and beyond.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This also appears in The Education Gadfly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

Permit me to admit to a prejudice.  I have always admired Catholic high schools which, more likely than not, have been consistent bastions of high quality basic education for urban students regardless of their religious persuasion.  It seems I am not alone in this conviction. To quote from a famous interview given by James Coleman, cited in this book, “Catholic high schools educate students better than public schools do…students drop out four times more often than their Catholic school counterparts.”

Not that they are immune from institutional challenge.  They are being closed down left and right in many urban centers due to lack of funding.  Some of them have converted into charter schools.  Their teaching staffs are no longer drawn from the religious orders. They face an increasingly secular culture, described by James Heft as “consumerist and pluralistic.”  Given this litany of negative circumstances, what must they do to survive?

The author, after reviewing the history of Catholic Education in the United States, believes that their unique sense of mission transcends all these challenges:

- that lay faculty, properly trained, can be just as successful as their clerical forebears in their discharge of their professional functions;

- that by offering a viable alternative to the values of contemporary society, the Catholic high school has a unique niche in the educational scheme of things, especially given the lack of consensus about educational goals characteristic of so many public urban schools.

To quote from Fr, Heft’s concluding chapter, “A Catholic high school that offers the education that it should will provide not only spiritual development, it will also provide a superior education, precisely because it will integrate knowledge; attend to both the heads and hearts of their students; engage parents more intimately in the education of their children; deepen their understanding and strengthen the practice of their faith; and prepare their graduates to enter thoughtfully a culture that offers opportunities and has needs, not just for technical skills, but even more for wisdom and generosity.”

As may be inferred, this is a serious book about a serious subject.  Predictably perhaps, Fr. Heft’s approach is strictly conventional.  Much is said about the religious aspects of schooling, to the extent that I could not help wondering how conversant the author is with the real world of urban education.  In spite of some admirable recommendations relative to teacher recruitment, teacher pay and teacher accountability, what the author essentially envisages is the traditional model of Catholic education, updated to accommodate the needs of contemporary society.

Fortunately, there is little or no educational jargon in this book.  Rather, its momentum is conveyed by the earnestness of the author and the sense that as long as urban public schools continue to be mediocre, there will always be a place for the Catholic high school where administrative costs (and therefore, fees) are relatively modest. To reiterate, this is a conservative view of education, but one that deserves respect and support.

-A. Graham Down

More book reviews by Graham Down are available here.

For more on Catholic schools, please read “Can Catholic Schools be Saved?” by Peter Meyer, which appeared in Ed Next in 2007, and also “Catholic Ethos, Public Education,” also by Peter Meyer, which looked at two public schools run by a Catholic order in Chicago.

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

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

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

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

Huh?

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

Huh?

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

As Porter-Magee wrote last July,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretend to ignore?

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

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

—Peter Meyer

This post also appeared on Flypaper.

Supporters of digital learning, many of whom were among the strongest supporters of national standards, have organized in opposition to the imposition of a single test on the nation’s schools.  As it stands, the federal government is dumping several hundred million dollars on two testing consortia to develop assessments based on the federally “incentivized” Common Core standards.  A choice of two tests is not the same as a single test, but it is darn close.  It’s like the old joke where you have a choice between death or roo-roo.

The backers of digital learning organized by Innosight issued a group letter in which they express their desire for a multitude of testing options because they (finally) recognize the connection between choice and innovation:

Create a dynamic testing ecosystem, not another one-size-fits-all assessment. Rather than a single common test, the federal-funded opportunity offers the potential to create a vibrant assessment ecosystem comprised of multiple platforms, open-item banks, and multiple testing options that encourages deeper learning. An assessment ecosystem, rather than a single common test, will give states the flexibility to take advantage of innovations in digital learning over time while maintaining interoperability and comparability.

Signatories to this anti-national testing statement include Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Gisele Huff, Terry  Moe, Tom Vander Ark, Bob Wise, and Julie. E. Young in addition to dozens of others.

I’m not sure why backers of digital learning have taken so long to recognize the threat posed by the nationalization movement.  And I really can’t understand why some of them have been ardent supporters of national standards.  The adoption of national standards only has the possibility of having an effect if it is tightly connected to national testing and curriculum.

The “tight-loose” idea that we can nationally impose standards but allow a wide range of assessments, curricula, and teaching methods is just an empty slogan used to conceal the inevitability of nationalizing all of these aspects of the education system if the standards are to mean anything.  If we don’t have a common way of assessing, how can we be sure that everyone is adhering to the national standards?  And if the national standards are more than vague generalities, they inevitably drive  what is in the curriculum and how it must be taught.  You can have a little bit of nationalization about as much as you can be a little bit pregnant.

Despite the intellectual incoherence of some of these digital learning backers of national standards but opponents of national testing, it is nice to see the nationalization train starting to go off the tracks.  As the train moves further along and the full implications of nationalizing key aspects of the education system become more obvious to everyone, more and more people will jump that train. Without significant coercion it will be very hard to keep everyone on board until they reach the station where standards, assessments, and curriculum are all centrally imposed.

-Jay P. Greene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mike Petrilli and Rick Hess

So argues Mark Schneider, a scholar, analyst, and friend whom we once affectionately (and appropriately) named “Statstud.” Schneider, a political scientist, served as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics from 2005 to 2008, and is now affiliated with the American Institutes for Research and the American Enterprise Institute. In his new analysis, he digs into twenty years of trends on the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the “Nation’s Report Card.”

We originally asked Schneider to investigate the achievement record of the great state of Texas. At the time—it feels like just yesterday—Lone Star Governor Rick Perry was riding high in the polls, making an issue of education, and taking flak from Secretary Arne Duncan for running an inadequate school system. We wondered: Was Duncan right to feel “very, very badly” for the children of Texas? Had the state’s schools—once darlings of the standards movement and prototypes for NCLB—really slipped into decline since Perry took office? What do the NAEP data really show?

Schneider agreed to take on the project but quickly concluded that there’s a larger and more interesting story to tell than simply the saga of Texas. It was true, he noted, that Texas’s achievement slowed during the Perry years, particularly as compared to the rest of the country. But rather than pin that development on the governor, Schneider saw a more likely explanation: As an early adopter of standards, testing, and accountability, Texas got a head start on big achievement gains, most of which it realized in the 1990s when George W. Bush was governor—and also a head start on flat-lining thereafter, during Rick Perry’s tenure.

Indeed, the Lone Star State made Texas-sized gains from the early- to mid-1990s, as its accountability system got traction. But as other states followed suit, they too hit the achievement fast-track, leading to sizable national gains from 1998 to 2003. Since then, however, Texas’s progress has cooled, and the same is now happening to the country as a whole. It’s not that Perry was a worse “education governor” than Bush (or, for that matter, Ann Richards) before him, but that he presided over an accountability strategy that was running out of steam.

It’s an intriguing argument, and one that deserves serious consideration, even more so as the U.S. marks the tenth anniversary of the enactment of NCLB and tries to figure out what the next version of that law should entail. If school-level accountability, as currently practiced, is no longer an effective lever for raising student achievement, then what is? If we need another “meteor” to disrupt the system, where should we look? Mark suggests that the Common Core and rigorous teacher evaluations have potential. We also see promise in the digital-learning revolution. But other shocks to the system might work even better. What are they?

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael Petrilli

In contrast, 75 percent of U.S. classrooms do not have an excellent teacher in charge. But in this country, limiting teaching to top grads would just produce a teacher shortage. Here, star students have so many career opportunities. Most want the psychic and financial rewards of having excellence recognized at work—hard to come by if they remain teachers. So, as we have posted on the Ed Next blog before, our nation needs a different strategy: extending the reach of excellent teachers. But how?

Public Impact has just posted brief descriptions of more than 20 school models for extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay, within budget. We are seeking five major sites to tailor and implement these and similar school models that put excellent teachers in charge of more children’s learning.

The models describe how schools can adjust teaching roles and use technology to reach every child with excellent teachers—the 20 to 25 percent who make well over a year of progress each year, on average, with their students. In coming months, Public Impact will add examples and detail, including job descriptions, evaluation rubrics, and financial considerations. All will be available, free, on OpportunityCulture.org.

This work builds on Public Impact’s “Opportunity Culture” initiative, which aims both to reach every child with high-growth, enriched learning and to provide paid career advancement opportunities to excellent teachers, within budget. It is made possible by $1 million in funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and builds on a two-year initiative funded primarily by The Joyce Foundation. The Colorado Legacy Foundation also contributed to early model development.

The new funding supports development and dissemination of the models, engagement of teachers and other stakeholders, tracking of efforts to extend the reach of top teachers, and recruitment of the five sites.

Excellent teachers from Teach Plus and other experts contributed to the models, alongside the initial Opportunity Culture Advisory Team, which includes leaders in teaching, technology, and philanthropic organizations.

From the five sites chosen to implement the models, Public Impact will expect a commitment to reach far more children with excellent teachers and to adhere to the Opportunity Culture reach extension principles:

1. Reach more children successfully with excellent teachers.

2. Pay excellent teachers more for reaching more children successfully.

3. Achieve permanent financial sustainability, keeping post-transition costs within the budgets available from regular per-pupil funding sources.

4. Include roles for other educators that enable solid performers both to learn from excellent peers and to contribute to excellent outcomes for children.

5. Identify the adult who is accountable for each student’s outcomes, and clarify what people, technology, and other resources (s)he is empowered to choose and manage.

Those interested in becoming an implementation site or in offering model feedback should contact Public Impact at opportunitycultureinput@publicimpact.com.

-Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel

But just as these criticisms aren’t going away, neither is online learning itself. The genie is out of the bottle. So how can we go about drafting policies that will push digital learning in the direction of quality?

This is something we at Fordham are thinking a lot about, and we’ve published three papers (so far) in our series, Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning: Rick Hess on quality control; Paul Hill on funding; and Bryan and Emily Hassel on teachers. And in January, we’ll publish an analysis by the Parthenon Group of what high-quality fulltime online learning really costs.

I’ll leave it to others to rebut the Times’ extremely selective use of data, expert opinion, and evidence. Where the article landed a punch, in my view, was around the perverse incentives at play today. Clearly K12, and its well-paid CEO, Ron Packard, face strong incentives to boost enrollment at their schools. Unfortunately, states haven’t figured out a way to create similar incentives around quality. And that needs to change.

First, a short digression. I worked at K12 a long, long time ago, just after its creation. (I believe I was employee number 10.) I needed a job, and I convinced Bill Bennett to create a role for me (the august-sounding Vice President for Community Partnerships) in which I would figure out how to take K12’s rich resources and make them available for poor kids. Our basic assumption was that K12’s model—which relied on parents or other caretakers doing most of the instruction—wouldn’t be feasible for kids living in poverty, most of whom would need the custodial care offered by traditional public schools.

To be honest, I didn’t make much progress. The learning materials weren’t even created yet, and so I had few “partnerships” to offer to communities. I left after 9 months for an appointment in the George W. Bush administration.

But what a difference a decade makes. One of the real surprises of the online learning movement is that lots of poor families are choosing to give it a try, and that explains (to a large degree) why K12’s test scores are lagging. (Yes, poverty and achievement are linked, at least for now.)

And the impression painted by the Times article is that online education companies like K12 have every reason to sign up as many parents as possible—poor, rich, whatever—regardless of how prepared they are to tackle the challenge of home-based instruction. Because of some states’ sloppy finance systems, the schools can keep the money if the families change their minds and head back to traditional schools. And, as has been true for all public schools since the beginning of time, the online schools get paid whether their students are learning or not.

Fixing the payment problem is a no brainer. (Schools of all kinds should only get paid for the days of instruction that kids actually show up for.) But is it time to consider performance-based funding, too? To pay companies like K12 more or less depending on how their students perform on state tests or depending on their graduation rates?

In his paper for Fordham, Paul Hill dismisses the idea, arguing:

Pay for performance would create a harsh environment for all education providers. Conventional, virtual, and hybrid schools might spend money on a student’s instruction for a whole course or semester yet receive nothing in return. Online vendors of all kinds, who have little control over their students’ effort or persistence, could be even more at risk. In general, this approach would limit the unproductive use of public funds and quickly destroy any vendor that could not demonstrate good results. It would favor providers with deep pockets, e.g., district-run schools and online vendors supported by large foundations. Performance-based payment as defined here could create a lethal environment for smaller-scale innovators.

He’s probably right about smaller-scale innovators, but I still think it’s worth a try, at least for full-time online schools. (It might be harder in the “blended learning” setting, where a child might be taking just one or two subjects online.)

What if K12 only got paid for every student that made at least a year’s worth of progress on the state test? Some argue that this would create its own perverse incentives, encouraging the company to cherry pick students who are most likely to succeed. But if the measure is student growth, and the test being used is a good one (a big if, admittedly), then all kids but those with severe cognitive disabilities should be seen as contenders.

Instead of indiscriminately signing up students willy-nilly, K12 would then have a reason to vet each family’s situation to make sure they are ready for the rigors of online learning. They would invest, up-front, in assessing whether the child’s parents or other caretakers are up to the task of instructing the student, and whether they have a home situation conducive to success. And then K12 would work like the dickens to make sure every student was making strong progress over the course of the year.

Personally, I’d like to see performance-based pay for all schools. That won’t fly anytime soon, but performance-pay for online learning (at the least the full-time, virtual charter school version) could. Which state is ready to give it a try?

-Mike Petrilli

In the current issue of the Education Gadfly and on the Education Next blog Checker Finn offers an unusual argument for adoption of K-12 national standards.  He likens opposition to national standards to rooting for the Euro to fail:

If you hope the Euro crashes, that this week’s Brussels summit fails, and that European commerce returns to francs, marks, lira, drachma, and pesetas, you may be one of those rare Americans who also seeks the demise of the Common Core State Standards Initiative in U.S. education.

It’s odd that Checker should pick the Euro as a way to make the case for national standards since the Euro’s difficulties wonderfully illustrate the problems with national standards.  The Euro is in trouble because it was an attempt to impose a common currency on countries that were too diverse in their economic needs and political traditions.  The Euro is too strong of a currency for countries with un-competitive labor forces and undisciplined budget deficits, like Greece, Italy, and Spain.  But if the European Central Bank significantly loosens the currency to bail out these countries, it will create serious inflation problems in countries like Germany and others with more skilled labor forces and reasonable deficits.

The Euro is not in trouble because some people “hope the Euro crashes.”  It’s in trouble because it is a centralized institution that does not fit the diversity of its members.

Similarly, national standards will fail because it is not possible to have a centrally determined set of meaningful standards that can accommodate the legitimate diversity of needs, goals, and values of all of our nation’s school children.  To have an effect national standards inevitably drive the assessments that are used to measure student achievement as well as the methods of instruction that are used to produce that achievement.  ”Tight-loose” is just an empty slogan (or part of a drinking game).  In reality standards, assessments, and instruction are closely connected unless they are just irrelevant things.

In a country as large and diverse as ours there is no single, right set of knowledge for all students to possess, no single, best way to assess that knowledge, and no single, best method for teaching it.  The attempt to impose a nationalized system onto this diversity is doomed to fail just as the Euro is doomed to fail in imposing a common currency on such diverse economies and political systems.

The fact that the Euro is in such trouble and creating such political and economic turmoil ought to scare us away from trying to impose a centralized solution on too much diversity.  The Euro crisis is an argument against national standards, unless we are eager to have similar difficulties here.

No one is rooting for those failures, per se.  Some of us just recognize that reality is not created by repeating slogans to each other over catered lunches at DC think tank conferences.  Reality actually exists out there in the world and no matter how many chardonnays I’ve had while listening to the keynote speaker and no matter how many grants the Gates Foundation sprinkles on me and my friends, centrally imposing institutions on too much diversity is doomed to fail.

Of course, there is a way to overcome that diversity and improve the chances for centrally imposed institutions to succeed — force.  If European countries relinquish power to make their own budgets to a central authority, the Euro might work.  Similarly, if individual schools, school districts, and states relinquish power over daily operations to a central authority, the nationalized education movement might succeed.

But achieving that type of centralization in the face of diversity requires an enormous amount of coercion.  People who disagree have to be suppressed, or at least denied the ability to do anything about their dissent.  Local folks no longer get to make the meaningful decisions.  They can just implement the decisions that are centrally made.

This could work but it would be awful.  Some people say they would favor a World Government if only it were possible to do it.  I’m not one of those people.  World Government would be awful because it would require an enormous amount of coercion to overcome local diversity.  To a much lesser degree, a nationalized education system in the US could be done but it would run roughshod over the needs and legitimate interests of many individuals.

But some people are nevertheless attracted to centralized solutions.  I think Tears for Fears has a song that might explain why.

To be sure, the Euro already exists in the real world—you can hold one in your hands and buy things with it—and its demise would likely trigger a worldwide economic crisis, whereas the Common Core so far exists only on paper and all of its implementation challenges lie ahead. If it fails to gain traction, the sky won’t fall; we’ll simply stick with the status quo.

If you find the status quo in American K-12 education acceptable, bully for you. I find it akin to the condition of Europe and its economy after World War II: weak, battered, and fragmented, in need of a major tune-up and tone-up. It needs more focus, too—and greater capacity to help states pull in the same direction instead of pulling apart.

Recognizing those woes, and sensing that their war-torn nations would be better served by joining forces, the post-war years saw a half-dozen visionary European leaders striving to construct something more coherent and viable. In 1957, six core countries signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the “common market,” or the European Union as it’s been known since 1967, which has slowly grown to include twenty-seven countries allied in a federation of shared economic and political interests. (Several more are “candidates” for admission.) Almost all of western and central Europe now participates, save Norway and Switzerland. Within the EU, a subset of seventeen countries (not including Britain, Sweden, Poland, Denmark, etc.) share the common currency known (since 1999) as the Euro.

Today finds the Euro (and, by association, the European Union) in jeopardy, because participating countries have handled their economies in radically different ways. Worsened by the 2008 recession, the real-estate collapse, and the banking crisis, some of them (Ireland, Portugal, Greece, and maybe more) have needed major outside help to keep going, while the better managed, less-indebted, and more prosperous nations (above all Germany and France) have been reluctant to “bail out” their embattled counterparts. That may change in the coming weeks—if the “Merkozy” plan to rewrite the treaties and reshape Europe’s political and economic structures finds favor across the continent.

Our states are not educationally inter-dependent in the same way, of course, and some may implement the Common Core well while others don’t. Unless Congress or the Education Department makes a dumb move and entangles the Common Core with ESEA reauthorization and federal funding, participation in it will remain voluntary and its implementation will likely be uneven.

That unevenness will be harder to sustain, however, when common assessments come on line, particularly if the multi-state consortia developing those assessments can actually (as their RTTT grant says they must) agree on common “cut scores” to denote student proficiency—and “college-career readiness”—in every participating state.

Those cut scores will be more like the Euro, a sort of common currency that moves across state borders much as EU passport holders are able to move across national borders. It will certainly make for easier comparisons of student and school performance than we’ve ever had before and is apt to forge various new uniformities in curriculum, teacher preparation, textbooks, and more. (It will also be a huge benefit to providers of virtual education for whom district and state borders have been an irksome and archaic obstacle.)

Texas, Virginia, Alaska, and Nebraska have not wanted to participate at all. Like Norway and Switzerland, they prefer to go it alone. So be it. The Common Core enterprise, like the EU, is voluntary and its main selling point is that participants will be better off in various ways than will the outliers.

The small but noisy band of Common Core critics and kvetchers, however, clearly wants the whole enterprise to go away. They mistrust claims of voluntarism and find the potential loss of state sovereignty a bigger threat to America’s educational wellbeing than today’s uneven standards and slipshod academic performance. They use scary language akin to the New York Times correspondent describing the major changes in treaties and governance that Merkel and Sarkozy hope the entire EU will agree to: “The changes…would effectively subordinate economic sovereignty to collective discipline enforced by European technocrats in Brussels.”

That’s what Common Core critics fear will happen here. They worry especially that the U.S. equivalent of “Brussels technocrats” (i.e. Uncle Sam) will end up taking over—and they’re mindful that no durable governance mechanism yet exists for maintaining the Common Core, managing the new assessments over time, keeping it all voluntary while keeping the states in charge. Nor has anyone made a serious move to create such a mechanism. (When we at Fordham suggested that something of the sort is needed, we were admonished by NGA and CCSSO to butt out.)

The critics’ angst is not baseless. The absence of a Common Core management mechanism for the long term—for the standards and especially for the assessments—is a problem and creates a vacuum that the “Brussels technocrats” may well be tempted to fill. It’s also true that uneven implementation by states, like uneven implementation of sound economic policy by the countries of Europe, could lead to a Merkozy-like call for greater centralization.

But is that grounds to abort the whole project—for states to pull back from it and presidential aspirants to denounce it? Depends, I think, on your view of the status quo and the risks you are willing to take to see it altered. Like Europe in 1950, the nation remains at grave risk, educationally and economically, and almost nobody looking at our long term prospects thinks we can climb out of this ditch without a major boost in educational effectiveness and productivity.

No, the Common Core does not assure that boost. Plenty of other things need to change, too—and every one of them has critics, kvetchers, and hostile interest groups. (So did the European Union: DeGaulle, for example, really didn’t want Britain allowed in.) It may be that Massachusetts and a few other states can do as well or better on their own. Perhaps the “Chiefs for Change” will eventually have fifty members. Or perhaps it’s acceptable for Arkansas and California and others to continue wallowing in mediocrity. Maybe we’re not a “nation” at risk, just fifty states with varying degrees of risk.

I for one hope this week’s summit in Brussels leads them to rewrite the treaties. And that the Common Core prevails over its critics. The people of Europe—and the world—are better off with the Euro than without it. And the people of the United States would be better off if all our kids were held to the same high educational expectations.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post also appears on Flypaper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Frederick Hess

This post also appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up

States are taking notice. Michigan jumped in first with an online-learning requirement for graduation 5 years ago, and Alabama quickly followed suit. In the last year, Florida and Idaho have jumped on board as well, and districts, such as Tennessee’s Putnam County schools, have adopted an online-learning graduation requirement, too.

But is an online-learning requirement a good idea? For someone who advocates for a transformed student-centric education system powered by digital learning, you might think my quick answer would be an emphatic yes, but I’m not so sure.

I’ve never been bullish on mandates. As a general rule, they tend to distort markets and sectors, have unintended consequences down the line at best and immediately at worst, and lock in ways of doing things at the expense of innovation.

My overriding concern has been to see a student-centric system emerge that can flexibly and affordably respond to different student needs so that students can realize their fullest human potential. Digital learning, I argue, provides the platform to do this at scale, but in many cases, students may learn better offline, and a system powered by digital learning should be able to accommodate that. The purpose should never be technology for technology’s sake.

As Katherine Mackey and I have written, the focus from a policy perspective should ultimately be on student outcomes, not the inputs to get there. Focusing on inputs has the effect of locking a system into a set way of doing things and inhibiting innovation; focusing on outcomes, on the other hand, encourages continuous improvement against a set of overall goals and can unlock a path toward the creation of a high-quality student-centric system.

One argument though in favor of an online-learning graduation requirement is actually from an outcomes perspective that has some merit. 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 work-force training are increasingly done online and lifelong learning is critical to people’s lifetime success.

A question to ask perhaps is if this is the right way to seek those outcomes? Can we require that students develop these skills but leave open the possibility that there may be other ways to acquire these? I’m on the fence.

In many ways, an online learning mandate appears to be yet another input-based requirement in a system already overburdened with mandates—and in conflict with the very spirit of digital learning. If the purpose of this mandate is simply to bolster online learning for its own sake out of a belief that this is the only way to break the current factory-model system, I think that’s a mistake.

As Fordham’s Education Gadfly recently wrote, “Supporters of such mandates often claim that learning how to take an online course is itself a critical skill to build. But if the courses are well-designed (like, say, your iPhone), mastering the experience should be a no-brainer.” To this I might add that given Digital Learning Now!’s recommendation that dollars follow students to the online course of their choice and not the district’s, if the experience is so important or compelling, won’t students naturally flock to online learning?

-Michael Horn

Leave it to the Times to get it wrong.

The parent, Natalie Hopkinson, is understandably frustrated about the poor public-school options available in her mostly African-American neighborhood. She’s also angry that D.C.’s hard-charging former schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, closed down some of the public schools in her vicinity. But her depiction of “school choice” as the culprit is misguided.

The real story is more complicated, and more interesting. In the last five years, Washington parents have seen some school-choice options disappear (Hopkinson’s beef) while new options have come onto the scene. But the reduction of choice isn’t because of Michelle Rhee’s policies — it’s because of gentrification. It used to be that black families living east of Rock Creek Park could send their kids to schools “west of the park” via the district’s out-of-boundary choice system. After all, the schools in tony neighborhoods weren’t filled to capacity.

That’s changed because more families (mostly white, virtually all of them affluent and well-educated) are living in west-of-the-park neighborhoods like Cleveland Park and Chevy Chase. And what else is new is that they are sending their kids to the public schools again. (Perhaps Rhee should get the blame for that — or the credit.) As a result, there’s no space for “out of boundary” kids, most of them black, and thus fewer choices for families like Ms. Hopkinson’s. A similar dynamic is playing out in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

At the same time, new charter schools are opening every year, and an increasing number of them are finding a market in Washington’s middle class. As Hopkinson points out, these are not neighborhood schools, and families need to win a lottery in order to enroll their children in them. The best charter schools (like the best west-of-the-park schools) have long waiting lists, which can breed frustration and a sense of despair.

Rebuilding strong neighborhood schools is certainly part of the solution to the problem, which is that Washington still has too few high-quality school choice options. But replicating high-performing charter schools, and expanding the city’s private-school-scholarship program, could help too.

Ms. Hopkinson and other Washington families are demanding better choices. Let’s remove the red tape keeping the supply of good schools from catching up.

-Mike Petrilli

This post originally appeared on National Review Online and also appears on Flypaper.

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

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

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

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

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

- Rick Hess

This post appeared earlier on Rick Hess Straight Up.