Having gotten that out of the way, it’s also worth learning that while some of these state programs (especially Florida’s) are models of sound policy, efficient administration, and careful targeting of available resources, some others appear to be burdened by dubious practices on the part of schools, donors, elected officials, and maybe parents, too.

First, a brief refresher on what these programs are and how they work. Eight states allow individuals or corporations to take a full or partial credit against their state taxes for contributions they make to nonprofit groups that award private school scholarships. Some states, like Florida, award scholarships only to low-income students. Others, such as the programs in Arizona and Georgia, place no income restrictions on eligibility. None excludes participation in religious schooling (and, in fact, the majority of scholarship students attend faith-based schools).

Yes, they are cousins of voucher programs but they don’t involve checks written by the state (or district) to private schools, using money that has already entered the public coffers. The money, in fact, never enters the state treasury. Such programs thus skirt some of the statutory and constitutional obstacles that get in the way of vouchers—and in many cases enjoy smoother political sailing as well.

If Ms. Saul is to be believed, however, some of these programs are vulnerable to various forms of misbehavior, including parents getting cash in their pockets, politicians deciding which schools should benefit, even donors getting tax credits while underwriting particular students.

These programs involve credits against state taxes. Hence a state’s tax code determines what is and isn’t kosher. Certainly some of these alleged practices wouldn’t be acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service. (For example, one cannot make a federally-deductible gift to a college or school that is then used to provide tuition relief to one’s own kid. If that were allowed, nobody would pay tuition to Princeton; they’d make gifts instead—and benefit from the tax deduction.)

Even in Ms. Saul’s telling, it’s evident (from the Florida example) that such programs can be meticulously designed, well-run and close to fool-proof. But it also appears that some are loosey-goosey and vulnerable to chicanery. Which raises the question of whose job is it to set them right on behalf of the kids, parents, educators, and taxpayers who have every reason to expect that?

The state, of course, should do much of this. It’s a state program and the state equivalent of the IRS should be monitoring its collection and distribution of money. State watchdog agencies, too, should ensure that taxpayers are benefitting, as has happened in Florida. The state education department (or local school system) should be ensuring that the kids who benefit from it are attending bona fide schools that satisfy whatever are the applicable requirements for private schools to operate in that jurisdiction. And legislatures should examine the academic impact of these programs, as greater transparency often weeds out schools with shaky credentials and questionable business practices.

But aspects of this go well beyond state government and could well be superior to it. Should the private school “community,” such as it is, be monitoring its own members for their participation in and handling of such aid programs? (What is the Council for American Private Education and its state affiliates for?) How about the accrediting bodies that typically review many aspects of private schools and allow them (if they pass muster) to declare that they are accredited? What about advocacy groups (such as the American Federation for Children) that press for the expansion and replication of such programs and that presumably have an interest in their integrity and reputation? The private foundations (e.g. Friedman, Walton, DeVos) that underwrite such efforts? Why does this sector of school choice have no counterpart to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) to promulgate a code of sound practices and invite membership from organizations that adhere to these?

The more such entities do to ensure sound practices in state-level tax-credit scholarship programs, the less temptation there will be for government agencies to clamp down on them, with likely adverse effects on legitimate schools and needy pupils.

And the less hostile publications like the Times and gotcha journalists like Ms. Saul will have with which to make mischief.

PS: It’s not just “private” and “profit” that she abhors. Her piece on Tuesday was really a model of take-no-prisoners left-wing journalism! She hit at least five hot buttons: privatization, football, evolution, fundamentalism, and fracking! Somehow she missed climate change, phonics, and traditional family units.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Adam Emerson

Ed. note: Adam Emerson previously contributed to policy and public affairs initiatives for Step Up For Students, the scholarship organization responsible for administering the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students.

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

If the effort succeeds, the state’s educator-evaluation system—which measures teachers’ impact on student learning—would become a primary component of school personnel policies. Teachers’ unions themselves collaborated with the state education department to create the evaluation system. But the unions oppose tying the evaluations to key staffing decisions. At present, seniority drives layoff and transfer policies in many districts.

Although Massachusetts is often hailed as a leader in public education, underachievement is common among poor and minority students. In a survey of the state’s schools, Stand for Children—the nonprofit leading the ballot-initiative effort—found that quality-blind staffing policies are more common in low-income districts. For example, the survey found that 58 percent of those districts have contract language establishing reverse-seniority layoffs for tenured teachers, compared to only 34 percent of wealthier districts.

Stand for Children made a prudent choice by taking this proposal to the ballot box. After all, the Democratic state legislature wouldn’t have enacted this law on its own. Yet most voters seem to agree that classroom effectiveness should motivate teacher-staffing policies. Ballot-initiative procedures—which are a Progressive Era reform—were designed for situations like this: Through the ballot box, the electorate can circumvent special interest-driven legislatures and directly enact popular laws. In reality, however, special-interest groups can be hugely influential in ballot-initiative campaigns.

The state’s largest teachers’ union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, is taking a kitchen-sink approach to defeat Stand for Children’s proposal. The union filed a lawsuit earlier this year to prevent voters from even deciding the issue. The lawsuit—which raises three fairly technical claims based on the state’s constitutional requirements for ballot initiatives—alleges that the state attorney general erred by certifying the proposal to appear on this year’s ballot.

Experts predict that the union’s legal challenge will fail. “It strikes me as a Hail Mary lawsuit,” said Leslie Graves of the website Ballotpedia. Similarly, Professor Jonathan Matsusaka, who is president of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California, said that the union’s claims amount to a “big stretch.”

Even Peter Enrich, a Northeastern University law professor who opposes the initiative on policy grounds, said that the lawsuit is weak. “I understand why the plaintiffs don’t want this question on the ballot,” he said. “But when you look at the claims with an eye to the state constitution, they are reaches.”

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard oral arguments in the case earlier this month. A decision is expected by mid-July.

If its legal claims are losers, why did the union ever bother filing suit?  Ms. Graves of Ballotpedia has a few explanations. For starters, judges can be unpredictable and so seemingly weak claims sometimes succeed. And it may have been worth rolling the dice when the lawsuit’s costs will amount to little more than the union’s lawyers’ time. In comparison, a full-blown advertising campaign against the initiative could carry a price tag in the millions. Thus, the potential savings may be worth the effort of drafting some papers and making a few court appearances. Finally, lawsuits attract media attention and create public-relations opportunities, which may serve as a cheap way for the union to launch its broader campaign against the proposal.

Teachers’ unions have some advantages going into the campaign. “The electorate is sympathetic to teachers,” said Professor Matsusak, “and teachers have proven to be highly effective politically as a result.” Thus, teachers’ unions may jam local media with ads of educators encouraging voters to oppose the initiative. And this strategy may work: In Oregon, teachers’ unions ran an aggressive campaign to help defeat a 2008 proposal that would have required schools to pay teachers based on merit, not seniority. Similarly, the largest teachers’ union in California spent millions to crush a 2000 proposal that would have created a statewide voucher system.

But the Massachusetts initiative still has promise. Public-opinion surveys suggest that the proposal—which ties hiring, firing, and transfer decisions to teacher effectiveness, while still giving some consideration to seniority—may be more popular than the merit-pay or school-voucher proposals. Also, Stand for Children recently kicked off an ambitious advertising campaign, which could rival the unions’ own outreach efforts.

However, status-quo bias is another hurdle for the initiative. “Voters hesitate to upset the world as it is, unless they’re confident that the alternative is going to be better,” said Professor Matsusak, who estimates that nationally about 60 percent of initiatives have failed over the past century. Bias against change could be strong in Massachusetts, where the schools are widely considered to be some of the country’s best.

Voters are particularly hesitant to embrace complex initiatives, said Professor Enrich, who considers Stand for Children’s 16-page proposal “awfully complicated.”  Merit-based staffing is a simple idea. But the reality is that few voters will understand the particulars of the initiative on Election Day. And ads against the proposal will likely stir up voters’ fear of the unknown.

Regardless of the outcome, the Massachusetts proposal could offer a way forward for education reform in other states. About half of the 50 states allow for ballot initiatives. If proposals are tailored to public opinion, the ballot box could be a tool to improve this country’s schools in states where legislatures disappoint.

Mark Osmond, who holds a master’s degree in economics and public policy from Columbia University, is a law student at the University of Michigan. He can be reached at mark.a.osmond@gmail.com.

Yet, despite our student population’s diversity, the number of diverse schools, as imagined by Brown, remains limited. Upwards of 40 percent of black and Latino students still attend racially isolated schools (where white pupils represent less than 10 percent of the enrollment). And the average black or Latino student attends a school that is 75-percent minority. Meanwhile, more than four in five white students attend schools that are majority-white—even though whites barely make up 50 percent of our school population. (All of these data are from Gary Orfield’s Civil Rights Project.)

A long Times article from a few days earlier described in moving terms what this type of racial isolation means for young people. “At Explore, as at many schools in New York City, children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality.” One student, Amiyah, tells the reporter: “It’s a bit weird. All my friends are predominantly black, and all the teachers are predominantly white. I think white kids go to different schools. I don’t know. I haven’t seen many white people in a big space before.”

Sure enough, most studies show the benefits of racially and socio-economically mixed schools. Even such luminaries as Eric Hanushek and Caroline Hoxby have found positive peer effects for minority students when they sit in integrated classrooms. Less rigorous research has linked exposure to middle-class students (and their culture) to better life outcomes for poor kids.

The question today, as for the past twenty years or so (when the forcible desegregation movement ran out of steam), is what can be done to better integrate our schools? The Supreme Court no longer allows explicit social engineering by race. And parents have shown—in Wake County, North Carolina and elsewhere—an unwillingness to have their kids forcibly bused to distant schools. (Not that such policies are in line with a free society, anyway.)

But there are at least two reasons for hope. First, contrary to what you might think, the rapid gentrification of many of our great cities is making school integration more feasible than it’s been for decades. As neighborhoods grow more diverse, it’s easier (though not inevitable) for their local schools to become diverse, too. Second, the charter school movement is awakening to the opportunities that charters might play in creating voluntarily integrated schools of choice.

These efforts will struggle, however, with the difficult question of academic diversity. Which brings us to last week’s other solid piece of reporting, this one in the Washington Post, on the topic of differentiated instruction—“in essence, adapting lessons for kids of different abilities within a classroom” rather than tracking or grouping students by ability.

As I wrote in Education Next last year, the wide spread in students’ prior academic achievement is probably the greatest challenge facing teachers today. No classroom is immune. But classes that are racially and socio-economically diverse are likely to have especially large achievement gaps between their high and low performers—creating a nearly impossible instructional task for mere mortals.

Consider a second Hoxby peer-effects study. In 2006, she and Gretchen Weingarth examined the schools in Wake County. For the better part of two decades, that district, in and around Raleigh, had been reassigning lots of kids to different schools every year in order to keep its schools racially and socioeconomically balanced. That created thousands of natural experiments whereby the composition of classrooms changed dramatically but randomly. That, in turn, provided Hoxby and Weingarth an opportunity to investigate the impact of these changes on student achievement.

They found evidence for what they called the “boutique model” of peer effects, “in which students do best when the environment is made to cater to their type.” They wrote: “Our evidence does not suggest that complete segregation of people, by types, is optimal…What our evidence does suggest is that efforts to create interactions between lower and higher types ought to maintain continuity of types.”

What that means for classrooms is that it’s okay for them to contain a range of students (say high, medium, and low achievers), as long as that range is not too wide. What’s pernicious is a “bimodal” distribution of students in the same class: just very high and very low achievers, with few in between. Yet that is precisely the kind of distribution many diverse schools find themselves with. On average, upper-middle-class white students from college-educated two-parent families tend to achieve at very high levels and poor minority students from single-parents homes tend to achieve at very low levels. Put these students in the same classroom and you’ve got a real dilemma.

How on earth can a teacher instruct such a group of pupils effectively? If the answer is to keep kids in separate ability groups all day, then why not just create whole classrooms by ability instead? In schools that are not racially and socio-economically diverse—say, high-poverty inner-city schools, or affluent all-white suburban schools—it’s not as difficult an issue. There you can group students by ability without grouping students by race or class.

In diverse schools, however, such grouping will often (stress often, not always) mean re-segregating students by race and/or class. And what’s the point of an integrated school with segregated classrooms? Which brings us back to “differentiated instruction,” and the hope that somehow a teacher can reach kids of all abilities together.

Squaring this circle is the daunting challenge that diverse schools face. Most will probably land on a combination of strategies—grouping students by achievement level for part of the day, maybe for reading and math, while teaching them heterogeneously in subjects like science, social studies, art, music, and P.E. But schools that refuse to group at all—out of an ideological aversion to “sorting”—will struggle to help all their students achieve at high levels. At least that’s what the best research indicates. And if parents—of all races and classes—see that their own kids aren’t getting what they need, you can kiss those diverse schools goodbye.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning—effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness.  For example, in a large-scale methodologically rigorous evaluation of the differential impact of four leading mathematics curricula, second-grade students taught using Saxon Math scored on average 0.17 standard deviations higher in mathematics than students taught using Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics.  By way of comparison, the difference in the impact on student achievement of a teacher at the 75^th percentile of effectiveness compared to an average teacher is only 0.11 to 0.15 standard deviations.  But whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming; making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick.

Administrators are prevented from making better choices of instructional materials by the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of the materials currently in use.  The vast majority of materials either have no studies of their effectiveness or have no studies that meet reasonable standards of evidence.  Not only is little information available on the effectiveness of most instructional materials, there is also very little systematic information on which materials are being used in which schools.  In every state except one, it is impossible to find out what materials districts are currently using without contacting the districts one at a time to ask.

This scandalous lack of information will only become more troubling as two major policy initiatives—the Common Core standards and efforts to improve teacher effectiveness—are implemented.  Publishers of instructional materials are lining up to declare the alignment of their materials with the Common Core standards using the most superficial of definitions.  The Common Core standards will only have a chance of raising student achievement if they are implemented with high-quality materials, but there is currently no basis to measure the quality of materials.  Efforts to improve teacher effectiveness will also fall short if they focus solely on the selection and retention of teachers and ignore the instructional tools that teachers are given to practice their craft.

In our Brookings Institution report, we show how this problem can be fixed by states with support from the federal government, non-profit organizations, and private philanthropy.  First, state education agencies should collect data from districts on the instructional materials in use in their schools.  The collection of comprehensive and accurate data will require states to survey districts, and in some cases districts may need to survey their schools.  In the near term, many states can quickly glean useful information by requesting purchasing reports from their districts’ finance offices.  Building on these initial efforts, states should look to initiate future efforts to survey teachers, albeit on a more limited basis.

The federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics should aid states in this effort by developing data collection templates for them to use through its Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), and providing guidance on how states can use and share data on instructional materials.  The most recent version of CEDS contains 679 data elements for K–12 education, none of which relate to instructional materials in use.

Organizations with an interest in education reform should support this effort.  For example, the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) have put their reputations on the line by sponsoring the Common Core State Standards Initiative.  Research based on current and past state standards indicates that this initiative is unlikely to have much of an effect on student achievement in and of itself.  The NGA and CCSSO should put their considerable weight behind the effort to improve the collection of information on instructional materials in order to create an environment in which states, districts, and schools will be able to choose the materials most likely to help students master the content laid out in the Common Core standards.

States facing severe budgetary pressures may be reluctant to undertake new data collection efforts.  Philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education could have a major impact by providing the start-up funding needed to collect data on instructional materials and support the research that would put those data to use.

In 1955, educational psychologist Lee J. Cronbach wrote that “The sheer absence of trustworthy fact regarding the text-in-use is amazing.”  It is more than a half-century later and we still don’t know.  How can we tolerate ignorance on something that is as critical to student learning as instructional materials?

Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, who are research director and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, are the authors of Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness, and the Common Core.

Reviewed by A. Graham Down

I can’t think of enough nice things to say about this book.  It is well-written, entirely logical in its constructively skeptical approach, and captures more powerfully than any other book on education that I have read the unintended consequences of exaggerated expectations.

As David Labaree points out, traditionally, schools have been thought of as instruments of social policy, in spite of the tension between individual and collective advancement. This results, predictably enough, in the relative neglect of the academic aspects of schooling.

I am not surprised by the book’s quality; Labaree comes from a long line of distinguished policy analysts (to whom the book is dedicated) at Stanford.  In Chapter 1 he clearly outlines the architecture of the book, a structure he follows to the letter.

He begins by deftly summarizing the history of American education. He catalogues the successes that relate to its assimilative capacity, emphasizing the schools’ central role in shaping the civic complexion of American society through the adoption of the common school approach, while at the same time noting its limitations.  As Labaree puts it, “Educational consumers show a preference for a school system that provides an edge in the competition for jobs more than one which enriches academic achievement.”

The core of this book explains why the various tides of school reform have failed to make a serious dent in the system that had evolved by the late 1920’s.

In his survey, the author writes that the standards movement of the late 20^th century was the first conscious effort to improve the level of student achievement in the various academic subjects.  (Previous reforms had concentrated on issues of access, governance and accountability.)  Regrettably, Labaree chooses to overlook the best efforts of the Council for Basic Education to the contrary (one of my few quibbles – as a former Executive Director and President of the Council – with the author).

However, he does identify the four necessary pre-requisites to effective change – rhetorical agreement, structural considerations (14,000 school systems in a highly decentralized system), teaching practices in the self-contained classroom (3 million public school teachers in 95,000 schools), and, most important of all, student compliance.  In this context, one cannot help but be reminded of Clemenceau’s famous dictum that “..it is easier to move a graveyard than to change a school curriculum.”   Schools are simply relatively impervious to societal change, organized as they are locally and reflecting the values and aspirations of parents, who are typically more nostalgic than realistic in their vision of education.

Finally, David Labaree deliberately resists the temptation to provide a panacea or anything that even looks like a list of recommendations.  On the contrary, he engages in a set of cautionary suggestions.  Like me, he believes that education in its present form is not susceptible to lasting revolutionary change.  Rather, he is a realist who subscribes to the view that “less is more” when it comes to school reform.  Putting it another way, expectations and outcomes need to become both more realistic and attainable if they are to last.  This book should be required reading for both theorists and practitioners in this field.

-A. Graham Down

More book reviews by Graham Down can be found here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Rick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Uncle Sam is dreadful at micromanaging what actually happens in schools and classrooms. What he’s best at is setting agendas and driving priorities. Through a combination of jawboning, incentivizing, regulating, mandating, forbidding, spotlighting, and subsidizing, he can significantly influence the overall direction of the K-12 system and catalyze profound changes in it (though the system is so loosely coupled that these changes occur gradually and incompletely).

It’s just as well that such big directional shifts don’t happen very often, because the change, however gradual, can be wrenching. And it isn’t apt to happen much more often in the future, either, because the “federal government” is no single entity. It is, at minimum, three branches, two political parties, 535 members of Congress, innumerable judges, the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and umpteen executive-branch agencies—a list that only starts with the U.S. Department of Education. Nearly all of these stars must come into rough alignment before anything important begins to change. And that only occurs once in a while, often under extraordinary political or historical circumstances, usually when the country faces a big challenge, crisis, or widespread injustice.

Let’s look at seven examples of federal “agenda setters” in K-12 education, one per decade.

1950s. One could legitimately cite Sputnik and the National Defense Education Act, but the decade’s real game-changer was the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, striking down government-mandated racial segregation in Southern schools.

1960s. In the name of fostering opportunity, ending poverty, and giving needy kids a boost, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the modern era of federal aid to K-12 education via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, and the Economic Opportunity Act, which incorporated such high-profile programs as Head Start, the Job Corps, and the “domestic Peace Corps” known as VISTA.

1970s. Enacted in 1976, and signed (with some public misgivings) by President Gerald R. Ford, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, righted another historic wrong by declaring that every youngster with disabilities is entitled to a “free, appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment.” Combined with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the law meant public schools now had an obligation to educate such children in ways that responded to their needs.

1980s. Though nominally just a commission report, A Nation at Risk (1983) told Americans that we faced a crisis of educational achievement and began to nudge the country through a 90-degree change of course from the “equity” agenda of the previous quarter-century to the “excellence” obsession of recent decades, complete with academic standards, tests, and results-based accountability systems.

1990 ushered in the first-ever state-by-state results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as the first-ever reporting of NAEP results according to newly established performance benchmarks. This dual development opened a new era of awareness of academic achievement in the United States and made possible the first bona fide comparisons of state performance at a time when state-based reform was in the ascendancy and governors craved such comparisons. It also launched what amounted to the first real set of standards by which to determine just “how good is good enough” when it comes to student achievement in various subjects.

2001 brought passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, a momentous reauthorization of the ESEA, declaring not only that every single student should become “proficient” in math and reading, but also that every school in the land would have its performance reported, both school wide and for its student demographic subgroups, and that schools failing to make “adequate yearly progress” would face a cascade of sanctions and interventions. NCLB transformed the federal government from funder to would-be reformer of American public education. In the course of becoming a reformer, Uncle Sam also became a regulator as never before.

And the present decade opened with the Race to the Top, the brainchild of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, based on the bold hypothesis that sizable grants of federal dollars, disbursed via a competitive process, can induce states to jump through reform policy hoops that they likely would not otherwise have attempted.

Add them up: America desegregated its schools, with respect both to race and handicap. It inaugurated big-time federal aid to K-12 education, initially in the name of equitable opportunity, now more targeted on academic achievement and gap-closing. It devised new ways of assessing, judging, and comparing achievement across the states—and prodded those states to make politically difficult changes to reform a system that wasn’t producing satisfactory results. And in the process, unsurprisingly, Washington evolved from funder and equalizer into enforcer and regulator.

None of this worked as well as ardent advocates had hoped. All brought unintended consequences, pushback, and sizable financial burdens. But American education is a very different enterprise—and for the most part a better enterprise—as a result of these game-changing initiatives from Washington.

What causes some federal initiatives to function, at least for a while, as positive game-changers, while so many others almost immediately become duds? I see four conditions:

First, there needs to be a sizable, pent-up problem in need of a large solution—a lot of accumulated pressure seeking a release valve. That’s a very different thing from a notional seems-like-a-good-idea or scratch-a-minor-itch add-on to a pre-existing portfolio of programs.

Second, the problem needs to be one that affects the whole country (for example, economic competitiveness, social justice, national security), even if the solution focuses mostly on a region (the segregated South) or significant constituency (kids with disabilities).

Third, the solution needs to be something that can be crafted by implements in the federal toolkit, which is basically limited to financial incentives, regulation of state and district practices, research and data, and litigation or the threat thereof. (And, of course, the bully pulpit itself.)

Fourth, and finally, enough political stars must align—and stay aligned long enough to make a difference.

Not all of them need to be aligned, however. (If they were, the problem would likely have been tackled already.) Congress was not about to outlaw racial segregation in 1954, for example, and plenty of prominent educators declared A Nation at Risk wrong in 1983. Lots of states dragged their heels big-time on No Child Left Behind, and any number of psychometricians denounced the NAEP achievement levels.

But there has to be enough oomph of one kind or another—moral, economic, political, judicial, even occasionally (in the case of school segregation) military—behind these kinds of changes for them to overcome resistance and gain real traction. And when that oomph diminishes—whether because of fresh election returns, limited attention span, newfound prosperity, exhaustion, backlash, or whatever—what remains may be a country with its education direction lastingly changed for the better. Or it may be the husk of yet another federal initiative that was promising at the start but grew stale, obsolete, or oppressive. Or both.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared as a commentary in Education Week and is adapted from an essay in the book Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit (Harvard Education Press, 2011).

In December, the organization of conservative state lawmakers adopted two Common Core resolutions in its education committee. One—the subject of the vote tomorrow at the board of directors level—calls on states to back out of the common standards initiative altogether. The second—which has already become ALEC policy—focuses instead on the federal role in the initiative, and tells Uncle Sam to back off.

Here’s the first resolution:

The State Board of Education may not adopt, and the State Department of Education may not implement, the Common Core State Standards developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Any actions taken to adopt or implement the Common Core State Standards as of the effective date of this section are void ab initio. Neither this nor any other statewide education standards may be adopted or implemented without the approval of the Legislature.

And the second:

BE IT RESOLVED, that the {legislative body} vigorously opposes any effort by the federal government to deny the authority of any state to set its own education academic content standards or to attempt to overturn decisions made duly by a state regarding any education standards deemed by the constitutionally-designated authorities in that state to be in the best interest of that state’s children.

So which is the true “conservative” resolution? The one that tells states what to do and demands a one-size-fits-all approach (pulling out of the Common Core)? Or the one that trusts states to make up their own minds—without interference from Washington? If you chose the latter, you will be relieved to know that Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Tony Bennett, and Jeb Bush—Common Core supporters all—agree.

-Mike Petrilli

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

Policymakers and reform advocates alike have rallied around the movement toward a national curriculum, suggesting that this will break the stagnation in achievement of U.S. students.  But there is little evidence that confusion about what we should teach has been a real inhibition to student achievement.  In fact, the existing evidence suggests just the opposite:  there is no relationship between the learning standards of the states and student performance.

To be sure, it is a real problem when students in one state learn very different things than those in other states, and in particular when students from some states lack the skills needed for our modern economy.  We really do have a national labor market, and significant numbers of our population end up living and working in a state different than that where they were born and went to school.  The presumption behind having national standards (whether voluntary or coerced) is that having a clearer and more consistent statement of learning objectives across states would tend to lessen the problem of heterogeneous skills that students bring to the labor market.  Again, however, the fundamental problem is lack of minimal skills and not the heterogeneity of skills per se.

Experience provides little support for the argument that just more clearly declaring what we want children to learn will have much impact.   In arguing for focusing on standards, proponents of national standards conventionally point to Massachusetts:  strong standards and top results.  But it is useful to expand thinking from just Massachusetts to include California, a second state noted for its high learning standards.  Indeed, some have argued that both states would have to lower their standards in order to fit into the structure of the Common Core.  But California balances Massachusetts:  strong standards and bottom results.

In order to see the issue more broadly, it is possible to compare state-by-state measures of learning standards to student outcomes.  There are different independent ratings of the quality of the learning standards currently existing for each state, and these can be combined with assessments of student performance from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  The most comprehensive rating of state standards is probably that of Education Week.   Education Week developed a comprehensive grading across grade-specific standards, testing, and the accountability that goes with them in each state.  This ranking provides aggregate grades for each state.  (Another widely acknowledged rating of state standards by subject is produced by the Fordham Institute.  These competing rankings are correlated with those of Education Week, though not perfectly, and it really makes no difference for the analysis which we use.)

The figure below shows how the ranking of standards compares to NAEP scores – here the 8^th grade math scores.  (The specific NAEP assessment for grade and subject has no influence on the overall conclusions).

As can be seen, the better the state standards the worse the students tend to do.  But, of course, this does not imply that we should move toward weaker standards.  The real conclusion is that state standards have little to do with student performance.

In other words, what really matters is what is actually taught in the classroom.  Simply setting a different goal – even if backed by intensive professional development, new textbooks, and the like – has not historically had much influence as we look across state outcomes.

There are a number of refinements that one can think about for this analysis, but they do not change the answer.  This conclusion holds even under more sophisticated analysis, as demonstrated quite conclusively by Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution.  Indeed his analysis helps to frame the entire debate.

The continuing emphasis on Common Core standards, including the debates about the legality of them, is often interpreted as indicating that the Common Core is a really big deal in school reform.  The data suggest otherwise.

The one possible complementary gain from the move to national standards is that the assessments of performance might become better.  It is widely recognized that the current tests used to judge outcomes within individual states tend to be quite weak.  (This concern about tests is not leveled at NAEP, which was used in the comparisons above, but instead applies to the tests states use for accountability purposes).  If the new standards lead to better tests – something that might come out of the two testing consortia funded by the U.S. Education Department – we might have the basis for improved school policies.  But that is also not certain and cannot be used as a primary justification for the focus on Common Core standards.

One interpretation of the emphasis on developing the Common Core curriculum is that these debates provide a convenient distraction from potentially more intractable fights over bigger reform ideas like teacher evaluations, expanded school choice, or improved accountability systems.    While I am not against having better learning standards, I believe that we cannot be distracted from more fundamental reform of our schools.  The future economic well-being of the U.S. is dependent on improving the achievement and skills of today’s students.

-Eric Hanushek

While Jerry Brown, Tom Torlakson, and Mike Kirst deserve plenty of criticism for their indifference to education reform—kicking charter supporters off the state board, cozying up to the teacher unions—on this one they deserve nothing but kudos.

In a nine-page request (still in draft form for another month), they ask Arne Duncan to allow California to use its own accountability system, the Academic Performance Index (API), and to scrap AYP. Mimicking language Duncan himself has used, they write:

Unrealistic and ever-increasing performance targets have forced us to label 63 percent of Title I schools and 47 percent of districts receiving Title I funds as needing improvement, and to apply sanctions that do not necessarily lead to improved learning for the students in those schools. This practice has confused the public, demoralized teachers, and tied up funds that could have been more precisely targeted on the schools and districts that are most in need of improvement.

But they refuse to meet one of Duncan’s conditions for such flexibility: Namely, the creation of a statewide teacher evaluation system. From Politics K-12:

Why? The cash-strapped state just doesn’t have the funds to help school districts cover the cost of a new evaluation plan, as state law requires, Kirst said.

“We’re saying we just can’t pay for it,” Kirst said. Other states that have applied for the flexibility “must be rich,” he joked.

And, in Kirst’s view, the waiver request is consistent with what’s actually in the NCLB law. “We do not see anything in the law about state mandates for teacher evaluation,” he said.

Amen, amen, amen! Finally, a state willing to call out the Administration on the illegality of its waiver policy. (And a true-blue state at that!)

Let me be clear: I’m not saying California’s request should automatically be approved. There are legitimate questions about API, and whether it’s demanding enough (and sensitive enough to subgroup performance). As with the other states, Duncan has a right to negotiate over the particulars.

But he doesn’t have a right to demand the creation of a teacher evaluation system not mentioned in the law in return. Part of me hopes he’ll turn down the request anyway so that California can sue—and win.

-Mike Petrilli

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

Massachusetts supposedly has the best public schools in the United States, and the best of the best are to be found in the affluent Boston suburbs—Belmont, Lexington and Wellesley, for example.

So when these top-flight schools decide that advanced honors courses in physics and chemistry are to be given the same weight in calculating a student’s official grade point average (GPA) as any other course, including cooking, check-book balancing, and make-up algebra, it becomes ever so clear—once again—that the country’s progressive educators have successfully pushed back the forces of school reform.  And it remains no less apparent that these same progressives continue to bash both talent and hard work.

Belmont and Lexington, with Wellesley in hot pursuit, have said that the official GPA shall no longer be boosted if the grades are earned in honors-level courses.  That antiquated practice of recognizing that some courses are more demanding than others creates social divides and denies students genuine course choice, it is thought.

Previously, students who wanted a top level GPA were forced to take the most challenging courses the school had to offer.  Now a student with a perfect GPA can become valedictorian of the class simply by accumulating a set of A’s in any old class whatsoever.

As usual, it’s a student who tells the truth.  “I feel that if you take the harder classes, that should be calculated in your GPA,” the vice president of the Wellesley student council told a Boston Globe reporter.

It is the Wellesley school board that prevaricates. A report from one of its committees told parents that “students who meet the expectation of a course should have a GPA that reflects the grade that they earned.”  (As if earning an A in computer science is the same as one in cooking.) To those who ask questions, school officials say that colleges pay no attention to GPAs anyhow—they look at the actual courses taken.  If it is not an honors course, the student is penalized by the college admissions office, so the change won’t really make any difference to student chances of getting into a good college.  They will need to take the honors courses anyhow.

Left unsaid is the fact that students are being misled when told every course counts the same.

Of course those from sophisticated families will see through the prevarication the education progressives have concocted in the name of social equality.  Those who suffer are only the bright kids from the less sophisticated families who foolishly believe what their school district tells them.

All this would be less painful to watch, were it not for the fact that what is happening in the best schools is inevitably going to shape what occurs elsewhere.

-Paul Peterson

For word nerds, here’s a summary:

• Our nation is falling behind globally as other nations provide increasingly rigorous and widespread education to their people. No surprises there.
• It’s not hard to see why: In contrast to educationally high-performing nations, ours is not selective about who teaches our children. As a result, schools cannot provide the kind of autonomy that great teachers crave. They just can’t have confidence that most teaching professionals will self- lead the rigor-and-innovation infused school cultures great teachers want and students need.


Click to Enlarge

• But excellent teachers literally make all the difference for kids who rely on school for learning opportunity. The top 20-25 percent produce about a half year more learning progress than solid teachers, on average. A child who starts one year behind can catch up in two years and then become an honors student two years later – if the child has excellent teachers four years running. A student who starts stuck in the middle can become an honors student, and then excel like top international peers, with the same run of excellent teachers. In contrast, students who have good, solid teachers every year, or the usual distribution, end up where they started compared to peers.
• Yet only 25% of classes are taught by excellent teachers, ones who achieve this level of student growth on average and who develop students’ higher-order thinking with similar skill. That means 75% of classrooms, and the students in them, are left out.
• What can be done? How about extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students, effectively putting them in charge of all U.S. classrooms and every student? But how?

If you’ve been following our work on this, you know that we released 20+ school model summaries late last year. Last week, we released 10 detailed school models. These models use job redesign and technology to extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay. Many let these same teachers help peers produce excellent results, create collaborative work teams and free teachers’ time for additional planning and professional development. And they’re all designed to work within current budgets – generating cost savings that can be used to pay excellent teachers more and meet other school needs.

In each of these models, teachers have career opportunities dependent upon their excellence, leadership, and student impact. Advancement allows more pay and greater reach. These school models are part of our effort – now with numerous partners – to create an “Opportunity Culture” for all U.S. teachers and students. And if you wonder what that really means, well now’s the time to open that infographic.

Of course, policy barrier are plentiful, as we wrote here. But many of the barriers to an Opportunity Culture are barriers of the mind and will.

We hope some practical tools will help willing leaders. We will be releasing more soon – career paths, job descriptions, evaluation tools, a short video to engage teachers in school redesign, and more. Learn more at our new website: OpportunityCulture.org.

-Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel

Consider: Nine-year-olds at the 10th percentile posted 12 points of progress between 1990 and 2008 on the long-term National Assessment of Educational Progress—10 of those points between 1999 and 2004 alone. (That’s about a grade level’s worth of gains.) Thirteen-year-olds at the 10th percentile posted 7 points of progress from 1990 and 2008. But seventeen-year-olds at the 10th percentile only gained 3 points. (The story is much the same for the 25th percentile.) The story for reading is more sobering, with big gains at the nine-year-old level, a flattening out in middle school, and actually declines in high school.

The question is how to interpret these trends. One hypothesis is about fade-out: The improvements at the elementary level are ephemeral, perhaps because the way math or reading is taught doesn’t set students up for future success. In reading, for example, it’s quite likely that a heavy focus on phonics is helping students to decode better—and post better scores as nine-year-olds—but isn’t giving them the vocabulary or content knowledge to keep making progress in middle school. Another hypothesis is that our high schools aren’t as strong as our elementary schools, perhaps because they haven’t been the focus of as much reform and attention.

Let me float a third theory: Could it be that increased graduation rates are driving down twelfth-grade performance? Recent studies have indicated that graduation rates are up significantly over the past decade; that means that we have twelfth-graders in school today who previously would have dropped out. And those students are likely to be very low-achieving. Could they be pulling down the mean? Just like we see with the SAT as more students—and more lower-income students—take the exam?

I’m not a statistician but it seems plausible to me. Number-crunchers out there: What say ye?

-Mike Petrilli

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

The movie Waiting for Superman chronicles the role of chance in determining the fate of a relatively small number of families trying to enroll their children in oversubscribed charter schools. Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff document the much larger problem of ineffective teachers scattered about a multitude of schools. From the viewpoint of the student, this latter issue may appear to be chance when class assignments are made, and when some get good teachers and others get ineffective ones. From the standpoint of the system, however, it is not chance but mismanagement that allows ineffective teachers to continue harming students.

Chetty et al. have produced new and elegant estimates of how teacher effectiveness relates to long-run student outcomes. As economists are prone to do, they have produced a paper that deals with a long list of technical questions that have absorbed the scientific literature on teacher effectiveness. Their work is thorough, convincing, and scientifically innovative.

The overarching idea of the paper is linking gains from having a high-value-added teacher in grades 4–8 to subsequent long-run outcomes, including college attendance, earnings, and family creation. But, from the outset, they must deal with the two primary challenges leveled at teacher value-added measures based on student test scores. First, are these  estimates biased measures of effectiveness? The answer is no. The wealth of information that Chetty et al. have about families from tax records and some clever analyses effectively rule out the possibility that conventional estimates of value-added based only on school administrative data are misleading. Second, do the effects of good teachers (or bad teachers) quickly fade away? Again, the answer is no. Even as these students leave school and enter into adult careers in their late 20s, the significant trace of their early schooling is quite discernible.

But the warranted attention to this work derives not from its technical aspects but from the policy implications of the results. The fundamental finding is that good teachers have an extraordinarily powerful impact on the future lives of their students. Symmetrically, the researchers show the lasting damage that poor teachers have on the lives of their students. This work sweeps away a variety of attempts to deflect questions about the importance of teacher quality and our ability to identify it. It also brings us back to the question of informed policy.

As the evidence on the importance of teacher quality has grown, policy discussions have actually moved. In the beginning, there were doubts about the impact of teacher quality relative to families, curriculum, or a host of other influences. Those doubts have largely receded and been replaced by questions of how policy should proceed. And here is where the additional evidence presented in the Chetty study comes into play.

Much of the discussion has centered on the political difficulties of reforming the schools by dealing with the problem of the most ineffective teachers. The unions have dug in their heels, resisting any change that does not ensure perfect identification of the worst teachers. Their resistance has resulted in many policymakers simply asserting that it is too politically costly to make active decisions about teacher effectiveness and instead looking to alternatives such as more professional development, better mentoring, or heightened requirements of certification.

Chetty et al.’s evidence shows that bad teachers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income and productivity each year that they remain in the classroom. These costs are large enough that failing to address them is simply inexcusable. It is time that we develop policies that truly are designed to help our children and not just the adults in schools today.

We have recently seen a number of brave states step out and legislate better evaluations of teachers including, when possible, the use of value-added measures. Coupled with both pay and tenure reforms, these movements show real promise and should be encouraged on a wider scale.

Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

On the whole, his piece is lightweight, trying to make a Santa Cruz mountain out of facts known to the ground squirrels swarming the university’s foothills.  (When at the Hoover Institution, located on the Stanford camps, those hills and squirrels are among my favorite companions.)

Auletta worries that Hennessy is too assiduous at harvesting the wealth of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Is science and engineering taking over?  Are the liberal arts about to be abandoned?  Are Stanford students too happy?  Where are the demonstrators? As if those are today’s raging issues in higher education!

Auletta rightly questions Hennessey’s effort to build a new, science-oriented campus in New York, but he then turns around and attacks the president for retracting the proposal when doubled crossed by the New York politicians. The idea of a second campus on the East Coast was always a distraction. It poured a hefty share of Stanford’s wealth into bricks-and-mortar thousands of miles from home. Why not take that same pot of gold—or, more exactly, a handful or two out of that pot—and start building a digital university for the ages?

Apparently, that much better idea is now on the agenda. After Hennessy’s New York real estate deal fell through, Hennessey, always better at thinking outside the box than most of his peers, seems to have come to the realization that digital learning could disrupt even the nation’s greatest universities. Stanford is already offering an online high school diploma to any young person the school admits no matter where they live.  That it is placing tight limits on enrollment only makes sense until its model is fully designed and tested.  But once affluent families begin comparing the strength and quality of a Stanford diploma with those offered by many local high schools, there could be a vast demand for its product.

And it may not be just high school that Stanford could reshape.  Auletta tells us that Hennessy’s “experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable…. Students in an online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and wouldn’t have to waste time bicycling to class.”  Apparently, Stanford’s president is mulling all this over during his sabbatical.

Like a good adventure story, Auletta’s tale gets better and better as it goes along and reads best of all at the very end.

- Paul E. Peterson

The fundamental problem is that “best practices” analyses lack variation in the dependent variable – they only examine in detail successful organizations or countries – so they can’t link particular practices or policies to success.  To make such a link they would need to observe that the presence or absence of those practices or policies is related to the presence or absence of success.  If they only look at successful organizations, then they can’t know whether they would have been less (or more) successful had they not adopted a particular policy or practice.  They also do not rule out the possibility that others who have adopted the “best practices” do so without success.

But Tucker claims that he didn’t only look at successful countries because “the strategy we used was to compare the top performing countries to the United States.”  Making (mostly implicit) comparisons to the United States does not solve the problem.  Again, without considering a broad spectrum of successful and unsuccessful countries it is impossible to attribute the superior performance of another country to any particular policy or practice.

There are many things that are different between the U.S. and Shanghai, Finland, Japan, Singapore, and Canada.  How can Tucker or anyone know which differences caused the superior performance?  Tucker just picks and chooses the policies and practices he favors, ignoring that his recommendations are not even universally present in the handful of successful places he examines.  And by limiting variation in the dependent variable to exclude places that perform worse than the United States, Tucker is unable to discover whether lower-achieving countries are also employing the practices and policies he recommends, which would debunk his claim of having found the formula for success.

I’m far from being the only one who is aware of the problems with Tucker’s method of “selection on the dependent variable.”  Virtually every introductory text on research design warns readers not to do as Tucker and other best practices enthusiasts do when they focus only on successful organizations or countries.  For example, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, in their classic Designing Social Inquiry, make the point emphatically:

That brings us to a basic and obvious rule: selection should allow for the possibility of at least some variation on the dependent variable. This point seems so obvious that we would think it hardly needs to be mentioned. How can we explain variations on a dependent variable if it does not vary? Unfortunately, the literature is full of work that makes just this mistake of failing to let the dependent variable vary…. The cases of extreme selection bias—where there is by design no variation on the dependent variable—are easy to deal with: avoid them! We will not learn about causal effects from them.

In my review I recommend analyses of international policies and practices done by Eric Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann, Martin West, Michael Kremer, Karthik Muralidharan and Charles Glenn because, unlike Tucker and other “best practices” gurus,  they avoid the error of selection on the dependent variable by considering the full range of outcomes, not just focusing on successful places.

Tucker is apparently unable to understand the difference between what he and these reputable researchers do when he mistakenly declares:

Greene appears to realize that his war on “best practices” has led him to inadvertently attack the kinds of studies done by people whose policy prescriptions he prefers, like Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek, who have done well-regarded statistical analyses of survey data from OECD-PISA and other sources…. So, in the end, all the methods we used meet with Jay Greene’s approval.  It is only our conclusions that are odious.

Tucker’s inability to understand the difference and his dismissal of the selection on dependent variable criticism as “highfalutin language” is just plain embarrassing.  It’s not so much embarrassing for him, since he appears to be proud in his ignorance, as it is embarrassing for the Gates Foundation that pays for his work and the supporters of Common Core who rely on Tucker as one of their principal architects and advocates.

There is a cynical habit in the education policy world to fund and promote analyses that people know or should know to be faulty as long as those analyses advance their cause.  Shaming those who engage in this cynical practice by revealing the obvious flaws in Tucker’s work was the purpose of my review.  I fear that it will not end the use of “best practices” in education, but I hope it will exact a price for those who engage in such hucksterism.

-Jay Greene

Most other distinctions are grayer today, involving degrees of difference about things like teacher evaluations, “common core” standards, and just how much discretion Washington should return to states.

Short of plain goofiness (as in “abolish the Department of Education”), vouchers are where bright lines get drawn. The conventional explanation is that Democrats don’t dare cross this threshold lest the teacher unions (already antsy about charters, merit pay, test-based accountability, etc.) forsake their traditional party—or simply sit on their hands come campaign season and election day, while Republicans tend to take the side of parents and don’t much care what the unions—or other parts of the education establishment—think or do.

It feels and acts like a political line—witness the political football known as the D.C. voucher program—yet not so many years ago this was primarily a split over platform language, and party positioning because vouchers were all but nonexistent. (For ages, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and a few wee towns in northern New England were the only places you could actually find any.)

That’s changed—and continues to. A few weeks back, one could already point to Indiana and Ohio, both with statewide programs. The D.C. program is back, at least for now. Louisiana moved the other day. And then there are kissing-cousin programs like tax credit scholarships in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and beyond.

Vouchers and their cousins are real today, thanks partly to political realignments, partly to the Zelman decision (which took the Establishment Clause issue off the table as far as the feds are concerned), and partly to mounting dismay over the performance of public schools, as well as the meager returns from other education reforms of the past two decades.

As vouchers have become real, however, the political picture has grown more complex. Eight newish factors are worth noting:

First, while the U.S. constitution is no longer a deal-breaker, some thirty-eight states have sundry provisions in their own constitutions that make it difficult or impossible to aid private schools and/or religious institutions and/or any sort of education program that isn’t “free and uniform.” (This is what killed the Florida “opportunity scholarship program” in that state’s Supreme Court in 2006.) Hence there’s a practical limit to how far vouchers can really spread.

Second, as religion has loomed larger as a political issue, evangelicals (most often Republicans) are keener and keener for it to play a role in public policy, including religious education and church-affiliated schools, while secularists (more apt to be Democrats) are even more resistant to public support for such schools.

Third, other features of private schools—that have nothing to do with unions—also cause palpitations among liberals (most often Democrats), such as selectivity in the admissions office (and the risk of “exclusion” of poor or disabled or minority or other “diverse” kids). Such anxieties may not cause them to keep their own daughters and sons out of such schools but a double standard often comes into play where “public policy” is concerned.

Fourth, even as the pro-voucher team has picked up a handful (but only that) of influential Democrats, a lot of state and local Republicans have grown somewhat equivocal about school choice—charters, vouchers, inter-district transfers, and more. Their own suburban constituents, whether enrolled in public or private schools, are averse to welcoming many of those kids into their classrooms, and their proud suburban school systems don’t much want to lose their own pupils, either.

Fifth, what was for decades the strongest lobby in favor of vouchers (and tuition tax credits and more), namely the Roman Catholic Church, is today neither nearly as strong as it once was nor nearly as committed to revitalizing its own schools. It seems to have lost most of the wind from its sails.

Sixth, private schools in general are queasy about government entanglements and rules, worried about “accountability” requirements, alarmed at the prospect of forfeiting their distinctiveness, fretful about losing control of their standards and admission processes, leery of disclosing comparable data on their own educational effectiveness, and, sometimes, legitimately unsure that they really can do a good job with those kids. Nor has American private education shown much entrepreneurial inclination to grow to accommodate greater demand.

Seventh, with state and local budgets tight, the claim that vouchers save taxpayer money over the long run is met with incredulity by school systems that can only see revenue disappearing along with headcount. And the argument that vouchers will be a needless and, for the taxpayer, costly windfall for middle-class families whose children already attend private schools is not easy to refute. (Of course, a carefully designed program may aid only “new” students.)

Eighth, and finally, the word “private” has grown even more suspect in American education circles today than it was yesterday. “Privatization” has sometimes gone badly. Some private operators of charter schools are greedy, self-absorbed, and uninterested in educational quality. (Likewise for private SES providers and such.) Early evaluations have yielded mixed results for privately operated “cyber schools.” Private school (and college) tuitions keep rising without evidence of improved results. And in era of transparency and accountability, the reluctance of private educational institutions to disclose key information about themselves, their students, their academic gains, and their finances—even to private organizations such as GreatSchools.net—has made them at least slightly suspect. (Why are they so secretive?)

I’m still heartily in favor of more vouchers, provided that the program is structured with an eye toward serving the neediest kids first and making participating schools reasonably accountable for their results. I do expect the momentum in this direction to continue. But I don’t expect it to accelerate. And that’s not just because of hostility from Messrs. Obama and Duncan.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

The program took effect only in July 2011, and the Utah legislature is still tinkering with the specifics of the law, so it is too soon to draw firm conclusions.  However, early signs indicate that choices between online and brick-and-mortar courses will be limited to offerings within the student’s home school district.  Statewide competition may well be more the exception than the rule.

The program is designed to grow at a measured pace.  In the current school year, students may take 2 of their 8 credits online, with that number increasing by one each year until, in 2016-17, students may take three-fourths of their coursework online.  Such measured step-taking is not to be faulted, as it takes time to develop high-quality content and to put systems in place.  Still, it will be at least 5 years before the full impact of the Utah initiative can be assessed.

Keep in mind that digital learning is still but a speck on the public school horizon.  As of October 2011, nearly 550,000 pupils were enrolled in public schools in Utah.  But only one percent of that number–less than 6,000 students—has received credit for courses taken from the state-run Utah Electronic High School.  A harbinger of what may happen under the new program, course-taking at Electronic High has been hampered by state rules. To be eligible, students must be homeschoolers or seeking credit recovery (for courses which they failed or from which they withdrew)—unless guidance counselors at their home schools agree to include online courses in their education plan.

In principle, the new law opens the door to many more statewide providers in addition to Electronic High.  But in the first year of its operation, fewer than 200 students were enrolled in an online course offered by a provider outside their home districts.  Applications from close to one hundred additional students were rejected, mainly on the grounds that the online course had already begun or the student was trying to speed up their high school graduation by adding courses to the eight regarded as full-time load.

While any high school student is eligible to take two courses online, students enrolled in online courses may not earn more credits than those earned by students who take a full course load at a district school—unless they plan to graduate early according to their plan of study, which must be approved by the student’s guidance counselor. That is an unduly restrictive rule.  One of the most promising features of online education is that it can allow students to move forward at their own pace, not in lock-step with all the other students.  By expecting courses to start at the beginning of the school year, and by not allowing students to enroll in extra courses, Utah has placed an unnecessary barrier on the innovation. And by making district-paid guidance counselors the gatekeepers to digital education, the state has set up a barrier to student choice, even though the law says that guidance counselors cannot restrict the student’s selection of online courses.

Funding levels also seem to be designed more for the purpose of protecting school district revenues than encouraging the creation of exciting courses. Per pupil funding at Utah district schools is hardly generous—just short of $8,000 a year (as compared to a national average that runs close to $12,000 annually).  State funding for students attending charter schools is just 70 percent of the district level—less than $5700 per pupil annually. Online courses have been funded at about the charter school level—$726 per full-year course or $363 per term.  But if an amendment recently passed by the state legislature is signed into law by the governor, only language arts, math and science courses will be funded close to this level (at $350 per term).

Lighter-weight courses—health, fitness for life, computer literacy, financial literacy, and driver’s education—will be funded at $200 per term. That would be reasonable if academic courses were funded at a higher rate and the same rule were applied to brick-and-mortar schools.   But when funding for lightweight digital courses is tightened to the extreme, it removes the ballast that digital providers need to mount the poorly funded heavyweight courses. The point is non-trivial, as lightweight courses are among the most popular online options. Many students see little point in wasting their time in classrooms, day after day, just to learn how to balance their checkbook or take care of their acne.  The highly regarded Florida Virtual School relies on the revenue from such courses to provide expensive, high-quality academic courses. That option is being taken off the table in Utah.

It is nice that districts will receive about 25 percent of the revenue for courses that are being offered online instead of at their schools, as they have fixed costs that are ongoing regardless of whether a student takes 6 or 8 courses from them.  And one understands that states, strapped for cash, must search for ways to save their dollars.  But starving the digital baby is hardly the way to motivate the design of high-quality courses.

The demand for online learning is surely higher than indicated by the fact that only 200 students completed an online course outside their district in the first year of the new program. Within school districts themselves, online course enrollments are already over 5,000, a sign that students are being channeled into home-district offerings.  If this trend continues, local districts will be offering online courses to their own students—and hardly anyone else. A statewide market needs statewide promotion of alternatives.  But the risk is great that districts will implicitly sign a no-raid pact by not advertising their wares outside their own district. That way each district captures its traditional share of the revenue. It will take an energetic student or parent to secure that out-of-district placement, if guidance counselors, while obeying the letter of the law, nonetheless steer students toward the home-grown option.

One can only speculate at this early stage.  But there seems to be a shadow falling between the Utah rhetoric and the Utah reality.  On the surface, the Utah digital legislation is pathbreaking.  It seems to create multiple new choices for students and families.  But if online learning is going to be of the district, by the district, and for the district, the innovation is unlikely to be transformative.

-Paul E. Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Says White,

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

-Peter Meyer

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

Then came the meteoric shock of consequential accountability, and student test scores (on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and state exams, too) started to take off. For some subgroups of students, math and reading skills improved by two or three grade levels since just the mid 1990s.

Yet we all know the downsides of the narrow focus on reading and math scores in grades three through eight and once in high school. This regimen puts enormous pressure on schools to ignore or exclude other important subjects (art, music, history, even science). It penalizes schools with an educational strategy that succeeds in the long term but doesn’t produce sky-high scores now. (I’m thinking of Waldorf schools, for instance, such as the preschool my son attends.) And it undervalues other important contributions that schools make, such as to students’ character development and social skills.

When it comes to evaluating teachers, there’s wide agreement that we need to look at student achievement results—but not exclusively. Teaching is a very human act; evaluating good teaching takes human judgment—and the teacher’s role in the school’s life, and her students’ lives, goes beyond measurable academic gains. Thus the interest in regular observations by principals and/or master teachers. These folks can pick up on nuances missed by the value-added data—plus can provide actionable feedback to instructors so that they can improve their craft. (Harrison School District Two in Colorado has one of the best plans in this regard.)

So why do we assume, when it comes to evaluating schools, that we must look at numbers alone? Sure, there have been calls to build additional indicators, beyond test scores, into school grading systems. These might include graduation rates, student or teacher attendance rates, results from student surveys, AP course-taking or exam-passing rates, etc. Our own recent paper on model state accountability systems offers quite a few ideas along these lines. This is all well and good.

But it’s not enough. It still assumes that we can take discrete bits of data and spit out a credible assessment of organizations as complex as schools. That’s not the way it works in businesses, famous for their “bottom lines.” Fund managers don’t just look at the profit and loss statements for the companies in which they invest. They send analysts to go visit with the team, hear about their strategy, kick the tires, talk to insiders, find out what’s really going on. Their assessment starts with the numbers, but it doesn’t end there.

So it should be with school accountability systems. The best ones today take various data points and turn them into user-friendly letter grades, easily understandable by educators, parents, and taxpayers alike. So far so good. Why not add a human component to the process, via school inspectors like those in England? (See this excellent Education Sector paper, by my friend Craig Jerald, for background on how that works.)

Imagine: At least once a year (more would be better) a group of inspectors visits a school. (These would be professionals on contract with the state department of education—typically retired teachers and principals. In the case of charter schools, authorizers would be involved, too.) They would mostly look for two things:

• Evidence that the school is achieving important outcomes that may not be captured by the state accountability system. For example, the school’s administrators might show them test score data from a computer adaptive exam like NWEA’s that demonstrates progress for individual kids (especially those well above or below grade level) that isn’t picked up by the less-sensitive state test. Or perhaps a high school has compelling data about its graduates’ college matriculation and graduation rates that put its mediocre test scores in a different light.
• Indications that the school’s culture and instructional program are inculcating valuable attributes in their students. This is to guard against the “testing factory” phenomenon. Is the school offering a well-balanced curriculum (and extra-curriculars), or engaging in test-prep for weeks on end? Is it focused on teaching “non-cognitive” skills and attributes, such leadership, perseverance, and teamwork? Character traits like empathy, honesty, and courage?

The school visits should not be exercises in excuse-making. This isn’t about lowering expectations because of difficulties particular communities face, or delaying needed changes because the school’s educators appear to be “trying hard.” Rather, it’s a chance to round out the picture generated by the state’s (inevitably) incomplete accountability report.

So here’s how it would work: The state would develop school grades based on a variety of indicators, as it does now. Then those grades could be raised or lowered based on the findings of the school inspectors. (Generally just a letter-grade, but sometimes more.) Grades would go up because of evidence of strong outcomes not captured by the state accountability system; grades would go down because of evidence of unhealthy curricular narrowing.

Such a system would remain imperfect. Human judgment would introduce subjectivity and error into the process. Inspectors might face pressure (maybe even bribes) to raise schools’ grades. And it would be expensive—at least as compared to the testing-and-accountability systems we have now. These issues would need to be addressed.

Still, it’s worth it. To the extent that school grades (and consequences linked to them) drive policy and behavior, we ought to make sure that those grades are informed by more than just numbers. The correct response to the unintended consequences of accountability isn’t to end accountability, but to make it work better. That could have positive consequences for many years to come.

-Michael Petrilli

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

Neal McCluskey of the CATO Institute does not think the comparison should be made—on the grounds that the data are “too blunt to tell us much about a single administration’s policies.”  Perhaps, but the same can be said for the growth of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the growth in the number of Americans who are employed. Both are gross, blunt numbers, affected by many factors other than presidential decisions, but the public holds presidents accountable for what happens under their watch. For that very reason, Obama is doing everything he can to pump GDP upward, and the White House staff seized up last Friday when employment figures revealed that the gains were only half what had been anticipated.

The public is right to insist that basic numbers on the ground move in the right direction, no matter how distant from direct presidential control they seem to be. When presidents know they are being held accountable for economic performance, they act more responsibly—or suffer the consequences. If presidents come to learn that they are also being held accountable for the nation’s educational performance, they will think more carefully about the consequences of their actions for students, not job holders.

But, says McCluskey, presidents can’t do much about education in any short period of time. Neither Bush nor Obama should not be given credit or blame for events that happen early in their term of office.   That wave of the hand allows him to slice and dice the numbers to suit his convenience.

But such hand-waving ignores one of Teddy Roosevelt’s keenest insights: The bully pulpit is the most powerful weapon in a president’s arsenal. True about governing in general, it’s of particular significance when it comes to education. For learning to take place, teachers, students, administrators, parents and neighbors must all be committed to the enterprise.

To mobilize broad movement toward a common goal is a job for presidents.  They are the ones best placed to energize a nation, and some presidents have done just that.

Ronald Reagan reversed the downward trend in SAT scores almost overnight when his National Commission on Educational Excellence galvanized the nation to take the educational crisis seriously. At the time Congress passed no law, and no pile of money was added to the pot, but the White House message had a major impact nonetheless.  (For details, see chapter 8 in my book, Saving Schools).

Similarly, George W. Bush, both in his 2000 campaign and immediately upon assuming office, insistently called for accountability reforms that would lead to No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  It was not the law’s rules and regulations but the national attention that had the impact.  Schools, students, and teachers were put on notice that more was expected.  NAEP scores jumped noticeably—from the very beginning of the Bush term.

Though presidents usually enjoy the biggest bully pulpit, Martin Luther King proved no less influential.  When he called for equal educational opportunity in the South, the test scores of African American students in southern states rose dramatically. The biggest gains were among the high school students most susceptible to the calls of the civil rights movement.

The U. S. Department of Education has encouraged a certain amount of reform with its convoluted Race to the Top initiative.  But President Obama’s first—and most powerful— education message to all Americans came with his stimulus package. He urged its passage not so that children might learn but in order that teachers might keep their jobs. That was precisely the wrong signal, and it is not surprising that NAEP gains slowed to a virtual halt.  The stimulus package did little for the nation’s GDP, and it has had a negative impact on its education GDP.

-Paul Peterson

A couple of headlines from the meta-analysis are worth spotlighting here.

First, the work shines some questions on Benjamin Bloom’s analysis from a couple decades ago that suggested that well-designed human tutoring could deliver around a whopping 2 standard deviations worth of learning performance. VanLehn’s paper suggests that the effect size seems to be more around 0.79 than 2 standard deviations—still, nothing at which to scoff.

Second, as Saxberg details, VanLehn does some important work in splitting up the types of tutoring research by “grain size”: answer-based tutors, step-based tutors, substep-based tutors, and human tutoring, as well as by the type of student behavior, which ranges from passive to active to constructive and finally interactive.  Stunningly, the typical answer-based tutoring systems average an effect size of around 0.35 standard deviations, and all three of the step-based, substep-based, and human tutoring cluster around an effect size of 0.75 standard deviations. In other words, some machine-based tutoring is approaching the effect size of real human tutoring—and there is less variation than one might expect as the grain size of tutoring becomes finer. This finding is a startling observation.

Saxberg makes some great points on the cautions and potential of this research, as well as the questions we should be continuing to ask. I just want to talk briefly about this from the angle of disruptive innovation and think about how we might implement these tutoring solutions at scale.

As Saxberg writes, great human tutoring is wonderful if you can get it, but simply isn’t practical at scale. We know that the vast majority of learners that could benefit from tutoring simply don’t have access to any at all (some have suggested this number approaches 80 percent of students). This means that there is a lot of nonconsumption in the tutoring space to launch disruptive innovations that utilize the power of machine tutoring at a much lower price point in a manner far more accessible and convenient than are human tutors to millions or even billions around the world. The wrong tactic for entrepreneurs debuting these solutions is to compete head on against existing solutions where the performance won’t be as good. They should instead focus on where the advantages of convenience, accessibility, simplicity, and affordability are valued and more important than absolute efficacy.

By competing against nonconsumption where this is the case, for those who suggest that the machine-based tutoring isn’t as good as the best that’s out there, that will be the answer to the wrong question, as it will be way better than the alternative—nothing at all. And as the research illustrates, it’s a good deal better than that even at this point.

What’s predictable about technology is that it improves constantly year over year, so what at one point isn’t good enough for most, over time will actually overshoot what many need from it. The lessons from disruptive innovation suggest that these technologies may never be as good as the absolute best human tutor (for example, the raw capacity of vacuum tubes still outpaces that of transistors, which disrupted the vacuum tubes in the consumer electronics market), but they will be plenty close. And as they improve, the machine-based tutoring technologies will become good enough for those who could or would have paid full price or changed up their schedule to connect with a human tutor, such that machine-based tutoring may well be the norm for many of us as a prime mode of learning in the future.

In some ways, the Khan Academy and other start-ups are packing in some elements of these machine-based tutoring systems as they evolve and grow, such that this revolution is really already under way.

When I was writing Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, I often wondered whether the subtitle should be “For every child, a tutor.” As the research shows, that vision may not be so far-fetched.

-Michael Horn

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

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

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

A triumvirate of kumbaya they are not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let the games—er, battles—begin.

-Peter Meyer

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

NBC has concentrated on initiatives favored by self-styled education reformers. The network has been particularly generous to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting teacher merit pay proposals and privately run charter schools – an agenda strongly opposed by many public school teachers, labor unions and educators.

During its first “Education Nation” summit in 2010, for example, “NBC Nightly News” aired a profile of a Gates Foundation initiative, “Measures of Effective Teaching,” which seeks to create a database of effective teaching methods. The reporter was former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw. During the second summit last fall, Brokaw showed up on “Today” with Melinda Gates to discuss the same Gates initiative. Turning from reporter to advocate, Brokaw told host Natalie Morales, “So what Bill and Melinda have done, and it’s a great credit to them, and it’s a great gift to this country, is that they have taken the kind of episodic values that we know about teaching and they’ve put them together in a way that everyone can learn from them. So that’s a big, big step.”

And Farhi’s not wrong; the media has indeed been obsessed with the teacher effectiveness agenda. That’s one finding of my own analysis of education reporting that I just published in Education Next. My team and I coded all of the national education stories published in 2011 in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, and Associated Press. And sure enough, teacher-related policies were covered more than any other topic.

But can you really blame the reporters? As former Secretary of Education Rod Paige once explained to me, journalists are in the “conflict business,” and there was a ton of conflict around teacher policies (LIFO, teacher evaluations, tenure, etc.) in 2011. (Remember Madison and Columbus?)

Farhi and I also agree about the downer tone of much reporting. Results from the various NAEP exams were big drivers of education coverage in 2011 too—and the presentation was overwhelmingly negative, even though many groups of students made historic gains. Cheating by teachers was another major story—and we all know how uplifting that one is.

Where I disagree with Farhi, however, is in lumping all reforms together. Consider school vouchers. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page may have declared 2011 the “year of school choice,” but its news side dedicated exactly zero articles to the topic. And it wasn’t alone; only the A.P. published a story (just one) on the wave of voucher and tax credit bills enacted by Republican legislatures and governors last year. This wasn’t important enough a development to find space in the Times or Washington Post?

So Farhi could have been more precise: Journalists (especially broadcast journalists) are enamored with policies put forward by lefty reformers. And with the mainstream media’s liberal leanings, this makes sense. And goes to show, once again, that the most interesting fights in education reform today are intramural battles among the progressive elite.

See my full Education Next article here.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry also appears on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Even though the Miami New Times article was just a re-hash of an article they had run during the summer before, critics of special ed vouchers seized upon the piece as proof of the need to stop the rapid expansion of that type of program to other states, impose heavy regulations on Florida’s program to ensure that nothing bad could ever happen, or just shut down special ed programs because only public provision of services to disabled students could be trusted.

Diane Ravitch, in her usual scholarly and measured way, responded to the article by tweeting “Legalized child abuse in Florida?” Sara Mead, Andy Rotherham, and Ed Sector all circulated the New Times piece as proof of their earlier criticisms of McKay.  When I attempted to put the scandal in perspective relative to misconduct and incompetence that is all too common in traditional public schools, Sara Mead clucked that I was like a child trying to excuse misbehavior by crying “he did it first!”

Well, I wonder if a story out of Alabama might help put things in perspective without sounding like an unreasonable child.  It’s a story about a boy named Jose Salinas, or Little Joe, who has cerebral palsy.  His mother wondered why he was acting unusually and repeatedly claiming that he couldn’t go to school because he wasn’t feeling well.  So, she decided to attached a secret audio recording device to his wheelchair to find out what was going on at school.

Here is what she discovered:

“You drooled on the paper,” teacher’s aide Drew Faircloth could be heard saying impatiently. “That’s disgusting.”

“Keep your mouth closed and don’t drool on my paper,” teacher Alicia Brown said on the tape. “I do not want to touch your drool. Do you understand that? Obviously, you don’t.”

Over the three days of recordings, Salinas said Jose received about 20 minutes of actual instruction and spent almost the entire day sitting in silence with no one speaking to him.

“I could not believe someone would treat a child that way, much less a special needs child,” Melisha Salinas told ABCNews.com. “The anger in his voices … and the thing he was getting angry about, [Jose] just can’t help.”

“Why is my paper wet?” Brown demanded. “Look at me and answer. That’s not an answer. That’s not even a word.”

“Do you seen anybody else at this table drooling? Then, stop,” she said. “You have got drool all over your face and it is gross.”

Little Joe’s mom took the recording to school officials who suspended the teachers with pay.  But within days the teachers were back working in the school, although no longer assigned to Little Joe.  Angry parents protested the return of the teachers, who were then once again placed on administrative leave with pay.

Houston County Schools superintendent Tim Pitchford helped explain:

“I made a poor decision and re-assigned them back to school,” he said. “It was the wrong decision and I accept full responsibility.”

Alabama state law does not allow superintendents to fire teachers on the spot, Pitchford said. He has to make a recommendation to the board, which makes the final decision.

“From day one, it was obvious where this was going to end with the employees,” he said. “We knew where this process was going to end, but the process does not allow it to be immediate.”

Salinas was shocked to hear the teacher and aide were back at school.

“They were back at the school and my children were there so I got them out of school and so did several angry parents,” Salinas said. “I just lost all hope. Nobody was listening to me.”

Of course, if Alabama had a special ed voucher program, like McKay, Mrs. Salinas would not have had to secretly record misconduct, prove it to school officials, and then organize a protest to ensure that those teachers were not still in the school with her son.  She could have just followed her good mother’s perception that things were going very badly and switched her child to another school with the same amount of public funding.  How many Little Joe’s are out there without having their mistreatment recorded or protests organized?

Of course, examples of misconduct in traditional public schools is no more proof of the merits of McKay-like programs than examples of misconduct are proof of the need to regulate or eliminate special ed vouchers.  For more systematic evidence on the merits of McKay, readers may wish to read the article that Marcus Winters and I published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the leading AERA empirical journal, which finds that McKay competition increases student achievement for disabled students who remain in traditional public schools and lowers the rate at which students are newly identified as disabled.

But some people prefer mindless tweets over systematic evidence.  And somehow I don’t expect Diane Ravitch, Sara Mead, or Andy Rotherham now to tweet that Little Joe proves the wisdom of McKay or that traditional public schools are equivalent to child abuse.  They prefer to be selective in the anecdotes they tweet.

-Jay P. Greene

The overall idea of weighted student funding—that some students require more resources than others because they require extra educational services—makes sense intuitively and provides a sensible way for states to think about pieces of their school finance systems. The usual categories of students requiring “weights” are those in special education, disadvantaged students as generally defined by family income, and English-language learners.

Indeed, every state in the union currently uses some version of weighted funding, either through explicit inclusion in its funding formula or through allocations using “weighted students” instead of actual students. The federal government’s most significant K-12 spending programs target disadvantaged students (through Title I) and students with disabilities (via the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).

Given that, why is weighted student funding such a common element of reform? The prevailing idea that drives the somewhat surprising alliance of right and left goes beyond simply funding districts according to assessments of needs based on poverty status, special education, language deficiencies, and the like. The reform envisioned is not so much about providing differential dollars based on student needs, but about changing who makes funding decisions. The supporters also importantly call for dollars to go directly to individual schools based on these categorizations of student needs, with individual budget decisions being made at the school level. The unstated goal is to bypass any decisionmaking at the district level—where each group sees intractably bad political outcomes.

But hoping that a new distribution of funding that goes directly to the school level—call it school-based weighted funding—will create the right incentives appears both misguided and possibly harmful.

Let’s dig deeper here. Liberals like the concept of school-based weighted funding because they believe it would push money to schools that serve more-disadvantaged populations, and they tend to focus most on funding variations within urban districts. The highest-poverty schools in urban areas traditionally have received less funding than more-advantaged schools, not because of programmatic disparities, but largely because they employ more rookie teachers who come with lower salaries than more-senior educators.

These liberals ignore the fact that local schools have no control over teacher salaries or, for the most part, over the choice of teachers. Thus, the added dollars from the weighted student funding seldom empower them to make choices that improve the quality of teachers. As a result, the benefit of additional funding in a world where the quality of teachers is unrelated to the salary of individual teachers is murky at best.

By contrast, conservatives like the idea because, in their vision, it would push funding to charter schools that traditionally have received less-than-equal shares of federal, state, and local aid. Conservatives focused largely on the federal and state dollars ignore the fact that local funding would not necessarily flow with the child to the charter school under a weighted system. Redirecting the revenue stream would not achieve the parity they seek for charter schools without altering significantly the varied arrangements nationwide for state and local school finance.

At their heart, both positions rely upon an untested view of politics: If only the actual flow of dollars were more transparent, political forces would be inescapably set in motion that would in turn eliminate the current shackles on schools and allow them to make the decisions needed to improve achievement.

We should have absolutely no reason to believe that such a vision will come to fruition. For one, for the vision to hold, we must ignore any questions about decisionmaking capacities at the school level.

The underlying motivation for weighted student funding is built on a presumption that districts are making patently bad decisions, either because of a lack of capacity or distorted incentives. Is it the case that these problems appear just at the district level, but not the school level? Why do we believe that school-level personnel—without any prior training and experience—will become better stewards of resources or better judges of personnel, curricula, or instructional techniques?

“The reform envisioned is not so much about providing differential dollars based on student needs, but about changing who makes funding decisions.”

Additionally, we must believe that public pressure set in motion by this formulaic funding of schools will sweep away the rigidities of contracts, the desire to insulate the system from competitive pressures, and the interests of current personnel, and will lead to better solutions. Neither of these underlying presumptions appears plausible. What appears to be happening is that we are attempting to produce fresh approaches to regulating the process of education, only at a different level of governance.

Liberals and conservatives both want improved achievement of all students, but achieving that seems much more likely through rewarding success, rather than relying on the hope that a naive model of political reaction would work better. In simplest terms, weighted student funding does little or nothing to alter incentives for performance in the schools unless the vague hopes behind these ideas are realized.

A contrasting perspective can be seen in funding ideas that change incentives, developed in a book by Alfred Lindseth and me, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses. Provide funding to districts that adjusts the base amount for each student—disadvantaged students, English-language learners, or special education students—to reflect differences in education needs. But, having provided funding that recognizes different needs, reward districts that promote greater student achievement. And, don’t reward schools and districts where students fail to improve their performance. In other words, provide incentives for greater achievement, and do not reward failure. The different levels of funding compensate districts and schools for different demands on them, but the hopes for improved achievement come from providing incentives directly related to student achievement.

One premise of this alternative is that it is necessary to be clear about what outcomes need to be, but to allow districts to decide how to achieve those goals. Districts may find it useful in their management to employ some sort of weighted student funding for individual schools, but they might alternatively rely on strong district leadership and more-centralized funding decisions. It simply doesn’t make sense to try to dictate management rules from the state or national capital.

Schools will not improve until there are greater incentives for improving student achievement. Redistributing funds across schools or increasing the funding to schools by themselves will not magically put us on this path.

-Eric Hanushek

This commentary also appeared in Education Week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Frederick Hess

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

One hundred years ago, a progressive populist barnstormed the country, delivering fiery speeches and railing against the gold standard. Today another progressive populist barnstorms the country, delivering fiery speeches and railing against academic standards. Meet Alfie Kohn, the William Jennings Bryan of our age.

Like most demagogues, Kohn knows how to tap into his audience’s raw emotions—anger, feelings of powerlessness, and resentment of a ruling elite. In his case, he puts voice to what many educators already believe: That school reform is a corporate plot to turn young people into docile employees; that an obsession with standardized testing is crowding out any real intellectual engagement in our schools; and that teachers have no say over what happens inside their own classrooms.

These arguments are half-crazy and half-true, which is what makes Kohn so effective—and so maddening.

Where Kohn gets it right is in his observation that many American schools are “mindless, soul-killing” institutions, especially the schools serving our most disadvantaged communities. While this has almost certainly been the case for decades, it’s probably true that test-based accountability has made the situation worse, at least in many locales.

Even the most hawkish reformer must blush at depictions of the endless test prep and shamefully narrowed curriculum that is present at too many inner city schools. “That’s not what we intended for them to do,” we reformers say, but the combination of high pressure and low capacity too often leads educators to panic and look for shortcuts to higher test scores. We can’t just look the other way and pretend it’s not happening.

Where Kohn gets it wrong, however, is in his vision for a better education system. Here he’s an unreconstructed John Dewey acolyte, right down the line. He views all the markers of “traditional” education with suspicion, from grading to lecturing to teachers asserting their authority.

He doesn’t just think that the focus on testing has gone overboard, he actually asserts that rising test scores indicate malevolent behavior. If the scores at your child’s school go up, he claimed in a recent speech, “either it’s meaningless or it’s bad news.”

Really? Kohn refuses to consider the hundreds (maybe thousands) of “traditional” schools that produce great test scores and give their students a rich, intellectually stimulating experience. What about Catholic schools, those unabashedly “authoritative” institutions that for 100 years have helped poor, minority and immigrant children get started on a path to the middle class?

What about the nation’s high-flying charter schools, such those in the KIPP network, which boast high student achievement and a well-rounded curriculum (including art and music for everybody!)? And what about Finland—the cause célèbre of progressive educators—which boasts “authentic” learning and sky-high test scores?

What Kohn refuses to wrestle with is the argument—made by Core Knowledge creator E.D. Hirsch Jr., among others—that progressive education might work well for children of the affluent but tends to be disastrous for children of the poor.

Democratic decision-making, self-directed studies, internal motivation, and the like are wonderful aspirations. But when it comes to lifting children out of poverty, heavy doses of basic skills, rich content, and clear expectations have been proven time and again to be more effective.

That’s not to be mistaken for the “mindless, soul-killing” teaching that Kohn bemoans, but it’s also not the progressive utopia he envisions, either.

What Kohn and other reactionaries refuse to acknowledge is that what fuels the modern school reform movement is not acquiescence to Corporate America but outrage at the nation’s lack of social mobility.

As Kati Haycock of the (very liberal) Education Trust has argued, “We take the children who need the most and give them the least”—schools with the least resources, least qualified teachers, and least challenge. Kohn is right that test scores are most closely related to social class; changing that brutal fact is what the reform movement is all about.

But Kohn would rather spar with boogeymen like the “Billionaire Boys Club”—the label Diane Ravitch affixed to reform-minded philanthropists—than the pro-reform civil rights groups they support. Does Kohn think that these organizations—from Education Trust to the National Council of La Raza to the United Negro College Fund and on and on—are dupes when they equate higher test scores for poor kids with better life opportunities?

Kohn might want to familiarize himself with the recent blockbuster study by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff, which illustrated the enormous impact an effective teacher could have on her students’ life chances. But, as the (liberal) Kevin Carey wrote at the time of its release, it also indicated the connection between test scores and outcomes in the real world:

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 [Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff] 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.

Kohn argues that if test scores don’t matter and are antithetical to real learning, then the entire school-reform movement is built on quicksand. But what if test scores do matter—a lot—especially for our society’s most vulnerable children? Is Kohn willing to acknowledge that his progressive vision is too dismissive of the importance of basic knowledge and skills?

Alfie Kohn isn’t evil, as some social conservatives have implied. He’s right that what passes for education in too many of our schools should be the cause of outrage and fundamental change. But he’s wrong that resisting “reform” is a clear path to a better future for our children.

His progressive vision might do no serious harm in schools serving affluent children—kids who are getting the basic skills, strong vocabulary, and internal motivation at home. But backing away from accountability, teacher effectiveness, and academic “rigor” would likely create an even bleaker future for children growing up in poverty—children for whom school matters most.

Kohn’s populism, like William Jennings Bryan’s before him, stirs emotions, but doesn’t point toward a positive program, especially for the poor. There’s plenty to criticize when it comes to testing, merit pay and the rest. Midcourse corrections are called for.

But Mr. Kohn: Education reform shall not be crucified on a cross of “no.”

-Michael Petrilli

This post originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Rick Hess

This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.

This month, the Council on Foreign Relations issued a report calling in the name of national security for national curriculum-content standards on science, civics, foreign languages, technology, creativity, and problem-solving – for elementary and secondary education.

Co-chairman of the task force that sponsored the report was Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City’s schools.  Klein told PBC Newshour in a March 20 interview that one of the most important levers that the report focuses on is the “whole nationalization” of curriculum-content standards through the national Common Core standards for English and math, which are endorsed by the Obama administration and whose implementation is  currently being supported by millions in federal funds.  Klein and his task force want to extend the current national English and math standards by adding science, civics and the other curriculum subject-matter.

The Council on Foreign Relations report also criticizes multiple-choice questions and short essays and calls for replacing these, to the extent possible, with federally-funded national tests that are “interdisciplinary” simulations of “real world” circumstances.  They call for national tests of “decision-making” and “problem-solving.” (Such simulation-based tests are fraught with difficulties, and inter-disciplinary tests will obscure how well students are doing in actual academic disciples like math and biology.)

Curriculum-content standards are what people in education policy-making call a formal list of topics that teachers are expected to teach and students are expected to learn.  The Council on Foreign Relations report says – in direct contradiction to America’s federal system and the primary responsibility of the states for public education – that “clearly” there cannot be “cannot be different standards and expectations” in “a single country.”

The Council on Foreign Relations calls for the U.S. Defense Department to evaluate and “periodically” review the new national curriculum standards in science, civics, foreign languages, technology, creativity, and problem-solving.  It wants to add federally-run accountability in the form of an annual U.S. Department of Education audit of K-12 public education, to be done in collaboration with the Departments of Defense and State and the U.S. intelligence agencies.  At the same time, the report is careful to add that it opposes releasing information on individual-teacher effectiveness based on student test scores.  (Teacher union leader Randi Weingarten was a member of the Council task force.)

This Council on Foreign Relations proposal sounds like a much more ambitious re-run of the federal foray into K-12 education after the launching of Sputnik back on Oct. 4, 1957.  Sputnik was the first satellite to orbit the earth and it was launched by the Soviet Union, a Communist country and America’s principal international rival in the Cold War. The launch of Sputnik back then was what historian and renowned textbook writer Thomas A. Bailey called “a psychological Pearl Harbor” for U.S. officials and the American public.

Sputnik led Congress to pass the 1958 Na­tional Defense Education Act, which funded programs in math, sci­ence, and Cold-War-related foreign-languages. But such activity did not go unchallenged. Conservatives and libertarians who were strict constructionists complained that when the federal government used conditional grants-in-aid to promote physics and like subjects, the federal authorities were determining the make-up and content of curriculum. These conservatives and libertarians said that the control of curriculum content was the most complete, most thoroughgoing sort of control of education and hence the least desirable sort of control for the federal government to have.

Many conservatives and libertarians — then and now — doubt that the federal government should have an extensive say in the K-12 curriculum in civilian schools in the name of providing for the “common defense.”  Such an extensive say is what the Council on Foreign Relations is proposing.

These conservatives and libertarians say that such a notion is overbroad and hence constitutionally dubious.  If the federal government can sponsor K-12 curriculum in the name of providing for defense, it can do anything in the name of defense, and we no longer — these conservatives and libertarians say — have a federal government of limited powers.

Because of Cold War concerns and as a follow-on to the Sputnik panic, there were numerous federally-funded exemplary K-12 curriculum back in the early 1960s, especially in math and science, but eventually in the social sciences as well. Although creating this new national curriculum and putting it in place were subsided with federal money, the 1960s curriculum was said to be “voluntary” – rhetorical terminology that was frequently used then and is frequently and misleadingly used today by proponents of a national curriculum.

Yet critics back in the 1960s said the federally-sponsored reform was coercive because adoption of these curricula met conditions for eligibility for other federal grants and contracts and districts sometimes adopted them, in historian Jon Schaffarzick’s words, “for fear of losing other federal support.” Making adoption of a national curriculum in effect a necessity to compete for federal grants was a strategy also to be used by the Clinton administration in the 1990s and by the Obama administration today.

While this post-Sputnik national curriculum left a residue of influence in future state and local curricula, it is mostly remembered as an example of federal over-reach and because of the local dissent it provoked.  The New Math curriculum (characterized by set theory, working with numbers in bases other than 10, and formalism) was even satirized for its complexity and difficulty in a song by mathematician and comedian Tom Lehrer.

Historian Diane Ravitch noted that, for a while, “every textbook series” (because of fashion and federal incentives) adhered to the New Math, but teachers “complained that it was too difficult to teach,” mathematicians “found it too abstract,” and parent found it too different from the mathematics they were familiar with.

The 1960s federally-funded middle-school social-studies curriculum produced a hostile reaction in Congress, in part because the National Science Foundation’s efforts to create, support, and publicize this curriculum were seen as crowding out noncompliant private publishers and imposing a uniform curriculum across the country with federal funds. Newspaper columnist James J. Kilpatrick wrote at the time that “once the notion is accepted” that government has legitimate authority “to commission and to subsidize” textbooks in history and social studies, America will have moved “a significant step down the road to 1984” (an Orwellian date that in those days was decades in the future).

When that social-studies curriculum was imposed in West Virginia, it provoked many people in that state to rise in rebellion, in part, because the curriculum taught cultural relativism. As acknowledged by course-developer Jerome Bruner, the children were supposed to come to certain conclusions about social-studies topics through a process in which they were to be manipulated by the curriculum materials and through the efforts of their teacher – an engineering of supposed “discovery” by the children in a “context of problem-solving,” to use Bruner’s own jargon.

Over the next few years, these increasingly unpopular curriculum programs faded from the scene. George Weber of the Council for Basic Education wrote afterwards that when you consider that these innovative national curricula math and in the social studies “not only didn’t deliver what was promised” but instead may well have “even left us worse off than we were before,” there is natural proclivity on the part of the public to say, “We’ve been conned.”

The experience of the attempt to put in place the new national curricula in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the name of national security probably contributed to future skepticism about a federal role in curriculum. The experience in the 1950s and 1960s definitely led to the prohibition of such efforts in federal statutes – prohibitions that the Obama administration has violated in recent years by endorsing national curriculum standards and funding national tests and national curriculum frameworks together with related teaching materials and lesson plans.

What can we learn from what was tried in the name of national security back in the 1950s and 1960s?  What will be the outcome of the current effort at national curriculum in English and math, supported by the Obama administration?  What should we think about the Council on Foreign Relations effort to urge national curriculum standards in science, civics, foreign languages, technology, creativity, and problem-solving?

We can learn from the effort in the 1960s that federally-supported curriculum, once it is in place, is likely to be controversial.  We can learn that federal education programs that look mighty and inevitable can collapse quickly and largely disappear in a few years.  We can learn that even in the height of the Cold War, rhetoric about education and national security could not spin straw into gold.

We are living in Obama era of federal over-reach, and we don’t know how influential these current efforts at federal direction of K-12 curriculum will be.  But the lesson of history is that what looks like a federal educational Juggernaut today can crumble tomorrow.

-Bill Evers

Ladd elaborates the BBA theory in a lengthy paper in which she says school reforms—accountability, merit pay, school choice—are nefarious and harmful.  It would be much better, she says, to boost student performance by reducing the “incidence of poverty.”

In my critique of BBA theory, I show that much of the association between family income and achievement is a byproduct of other factors. Income’s causal impact is modest, smaller than the impacts of many reforms now under consideration.

In an ill-considered rebuttal, blogger Valerie Strauss denies that BBA disparages the value of school reform.  She even denies that either BBA or Ladd ever meant to say that income had much of an impact on achievement. She insists “Harvard’s Paul E. Petersen” has “mischaracterized” Ladd’s argument, “accusing her of saying things she didn’t say.”

“There’s no such thing as bad press, as long as they spell your name right,” said circus master P. T. Barnum. So I could have forgiven Strauss her error-prone post had she taken the trouble to figure out how I spell my name.  All Scandinavians may look alike, but Pedersen was the name given to my grandfather in Denmark, and Peterson was the name assigned to me when I was born and baptized, and it remains so on my American Express card to this day, but Petersen I was not, am not, nor will be, despite what Strauss says—not just once but five times within the space of three pages.

Since she can’t get my name right, she’s probably out of whack on other things as well. Let’s see.

Strauss denies that Ladd ever said that “the income of a child’s family determines his or her educational achievement.”  Instead, Ladd “speaks of income as one of many factors that characterize educational disadvantage.  [Ladd’s] entire argument is framed around the issue of economic and other types of disadvantage.”

Strauss even denies that BBA opposes the school reforms on the nation’s agenda.   The coalition, we are told, “doesn’t say schools and teachers shouldn’t be held accountable for how well they do their jobs.  In fact, its mission statement notes that school improvements should continue to be a priority though it doesn’t take sides on what those improvements should be.”

In fact, says Strauss, “there is not a particularly strong casual (SIC!) link between income and outcomes.”  Wow!  Read that sentence again!  If one corrects Strauss’s additional spelling error so it reads “causal,” not ”casual,” then Strauss summarizes  the very argument I am advancing, namely: THERE IS NOT A PARTICULARLY STRONG CAUSAL LINK BETWEEN INCOME AND OUTCOMES.

Does Ladd actually agree that “there is not a particularly strong causal link between income and outcomes?”  I wish that were true, but if that is indeed her belief she has done a fabulous job of hiding it.

Consider the following passage from Ladd’s essay: The “logical policy response [to low performance by students from low-income families] . . . would be to pursue policies to reduce the incidence of poverty….Many considerations…make a compelling case for the country to take strong steps to reduce income inequality.”

If the solution is to reduce income inequality, the cause must be the paucity of dollar bills in the hands of the poor.  There are not many other ways of interpreting the passage above.

Of course, Ladd is too trained a social scientist not to realize she skates on the slimmest of ice when she presses her poverty argument to the extent she has. She is well aware of the research literature that shows little evidence that family income has a large causal impact on student achievement. To protect herself, she refers to “correlation” even in contexts where she is making a strong case for a causal impact.

But that sleight- of-hand fools only those who either want to be deceived or who do not quite understand the meaning of   “correlation” (a relationship which may or may not be causal). Elsewhere, Ladd routinely slips into causal language.  Consider, for example, the passage in which Ladd characterizes school reformers as “deniers” of the “effects of poverty.” Here she makes it absolutely clear she is making causal claims, for if poverty has an effect that is being denied, then poverty must certainly be the cause of that effect.  Or consider the opening paragraph of the BBA mission statement, which claims to have identified “a powerful association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement.” How can an association be powerful unless it is causal?  Or consider Ladd’s accusation against school reformers that “denying the correlation is nefarious.”  It could hardly be nefarious if reformers were not ignoring an important cause!

Strauss further denies that BBA says “school choice or school accountability are ‘dangerous.’”  But Ladd, the group’s spokesperson, clearly said the following:  “Current policy initiatives are misguided because they . . . have contributed little—and are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps…. Moreover, such policies have the potential to do serious harm.”

As mothers well know, things that have the “potential to do serious harm” are dangerous, whatever Strauss might say.

Strauss tells us that BBA supports reform.  But Ladd says:  “Evaluations that place heavy weight on student test scores are likely to do more harm than good.”  “Governance changes [such as charters] do little . . . to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children.”  She denounces the “punitive test-based accountability that we now have in this country.”   Ladd concludes: Education reform policies “are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing [gaps in] achievement.”

It is true that BBA does not actually do much to advocate redistribution of income. It is more interested in growing jobs for public sector professionals. But Ladd makes it clear that she would prefer to reduce income inequality.  Alas, she says, it “is not in the cards, at least in the near term…unless the current protests in New York City and elsewhere…[put] income inequality back on the policy agenda.”

So Ladd and her union friends instead propose to fund a host of new social services as well as educational services outside the regular school day, such as summer school, pre-school, and after-school.  All that was done in the 1970s with Medicaid and Head Start and summer recreation programs and much more.  If those programs were the solution, why didn’t they lift the achievement of students from low income families?

A likely explanation is the stark increase in the number of single-parent households, a matter about which Ladd has nothing to say. Nor does Strauss like being reminded of that bitter fact.  “So it’s not apparently consequences of poverty, but the consequences of living with a single parent. Hmmm.”  How are we to translate that hum?  Does Strauss mean to say: “I know you are right, Peterson. If a child does not have two parents, that child is at risk—at risk of poverty and at risk of dropping out of school. But I don’t like your bringing up politically incorrect facts.”

In sum, Strauss denies that BBA and its ranking intellectual leader, Helen Ladd, oppose school reform and think poverty is the root cause of our current educational discontent. If she can deny that, she can deny most anything.

Still,  Strauss does an absolutely superb job of introducing the co-chair of the Broader Bolder coalition as “Helen Ladd, the Edgar T. Thompson Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics at Duke University who has spent years researching school accountability, education finance, teacher labor markets, and school choice.” Despite our disagreements, Ladd remains a good friend, so I do not begrudge any accolade which comes her way.  But if Strauss is inclined to introduce professors fulsomely, she might let her readers know that I am the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, who has spent years researching school governance, school choice, school accountability, and teacher effectiveness rather than referring to me as “Harvard’s Paul E. Petersen.”

But, then, in these days of online erasures, she could just deny she misspelled my name.

-Paul E. Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Rick Hess

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Is there a racist behind every tree in the American education forest? Photo by Stuart

The federal data (from 2009-10) cover a multitude of issues but what caught most eyes was the finding that black and Latino students are suspended or expelled from school in numbers greater than their shares of the overall pupil population. “The undeniable truth,” declared Education Secretary Arne Duncan, “is that the everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.” Declaring that the new data paint “a very disturbing picture,” Assistant Secretary (for Civil Rights) Russlynn Ali proudly informed the media that her office has “launched 14 large-scale investigations into disparate discipline rates across the country.”

Ponder the phrase: disparate discipline rates. This arises from the doctrine of “disparate impact,” a sly phrase coined as a means of boosting civil rights in the realm of employment law. It means, in effect, that discrimination may be afoot—and enforcement called for—whenever a seemingly neutral or universal policy gives rise to disparities (by race, gender, etc.) in whatever benefit or harm that policy leads to. But it’s by no means limited to employment any longer.

At the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the enforcers hunt for disparities in sundry realms of education from college admissions to Advanced Placement course access, as well as discipline and more. If they find that something good or bad isn’t getting bestowed across the entire eligible population in proportion to the basic demographics of that population, they sense “disparate impact” at work, which is invariably accompanied by at least a hint that discrimination must be the cause of it.

Such hints swiftly get picked up, echoed, and amplified. That’s what Wade Henderson, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, was about when he  thundered that the OCR data “points [sic] to mass and systemic discrimination in our public education system” and it’s the Education Department’s duty to “investigate school districts…and take appropriate enforcement action.”

Ms. Ali, one senses, also sees that as her duty.

The primordial problem with this whole line of analysis, of course, is that an infinity of good and bad things get unevenly distributed across populations for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the kinds of discrimination that are banned in our laws and Constitution. People who aren’t very smart are disproportionately rejected by the Princeton admissions office. People who aren’t very tall seldom make it onto varsity basketball teams. (It often appears that white and Asian students—pace Jeremy Lin—don’t either.) Those who can’t hear very well seldom play violin in the school orchestra. And on and on.

As for school discipline, there’s a reason for it. It’s to make naughty, disruptive, or disorderly kids behave or exit, both for their own good and for the good of the school as an educational institution. Enforcement ranges from keeping kids safe (from weapons and fighting, for example) to creating a calm, respectful atmosphere in which those who are serious about learning can study without disturbance. Discipline, in other words, isn’t only about those being disciplined. It’s even more important for everybody else.

The Wall Street Journal’s invaluable editorial writer, Jason Riley, picked up on this in a perceptive March 10 columntitled “What about the kids who behave?” “The Obama administration’s sympathies,” he wrote, “are with the knuckleheads who are disrupting class, not with the kids who are trying to get an education. But is racial parity in disciplinary outcomes more important than school safety? Going easy on the students who behave badly—especially in inner-city schools where the problem is pronounced—is an odd way of advancing black education and closing the learning gap. Black kids already tend to be stuck in dropout factories with the most inexperienced teachers. Must they be consigned to the most violent schools as well?”

Riley correctly added that data such as these create an even stronger argument for school choice—charters, vouchers, and more—to enable low-income families whose kids are serious students to escape intolerable schools for better ones. (Let’s hope Ms. Ali’s enforcers don’t bully the charter and private schools into disciplinary submission, too.) On some parts of the choice agenda—charters in particular—the Obama-Duncan administration has been positive. It’s been death on vouchers, though, even in inner-city Washington D.C., due in no small part to its pals in the teacher unions.

Apropos of which, another much-discussed pattern in the new OCR data is the presence of lesser-paid teachers in heavily minority schools. Again, the civil rights folk imply that this signals discrimination against black and brown kids. (“Give ‘em the cheap teachers.”) But in the real world it almost certainly stems from the fact that—as Riley noted—inner-city schools have, on average, less experiencedteachers, hence teachers with relatively lower salaries. Why? Many reasons, of course, including the disruptive and insufficiently disciplined atmosphere in some such schools, but also because—thanks, once more, to the teacher unions—veteran instructors enjoy contractual provisions that allow them to choose their schools and for some reason (badly behaved students, perchance?) more than a few shun inner-city postings. We shall see whether Mr. Duncan and Ms. Ali manage to move teachers around against their will to overcome this particular “disparate impact.” (There’s a big loophole in the spending-comparability requirements of the Title I program which, if closed, would prod such re-assignments.) Or if they push hard against discipline policies aimed at keeping inner-city (and other) schools orderly enough that those who do teach in them will come back.

They’ll be under plenty of pressure to do that. At the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project, for example, long-time activist Gary Orfield is calling for “stepped-up enforcement actions by the Office for Civil Rights to respond to the stark disparities in discipline, not to mention the many other indicators of injustice and inequity. For example, the number of “disparate impact” interventions has been disappointing… OCR should actively investigate the pronounced disparities revealed by the data. Where unjustifiable policies are to blame, OCR should use its enforcement authority as well as technical assistance resources to spur schools and districts to replace the ineffective policies with less discriminatory ones.”

Expect much more of this sort of thing—and don’t be surprised if Ms. Ali is quietly soliciting it!

One more point. The OCR data themselves emerged from an overhauled version of a long-standing biennial survey of schools and districts serving about 85 percent of U.S. students. They’re self-reported, however, and susceptible to error and misinformation at every level. Examine closely the results for any given district or school and you’re apt to find stuff that doesn’t make sense on its face. Consider, for example, the absurdity of the Seattle Public Schools reporting that they spent just $323.53 per pupil on instructional-staff salaries in 2009—about $2,623.14 less than the neighboring Shoreline School District. It was probably a misplaced decimal point—but it made it into the national data set, the averages and, presumably, the “disparities.”

Is such information robust enough to sustain enforcement actions? It obviously is in the eyes of Orfield, Henderson and others. The prior question, however, is whether “disparate impact” is a reasonable basis for such actions in the first place. What if it is simply true—regrettable, but true—that some kids or groups of kids break school rules more often than others?

-Chester E. Finn Jr.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper Blog

Miller put forward his own bills, which most of the self-same groups quickly endorsed, and which, Miller argues, “eliminates inflexible and outdated provisions of No Child Left Behind and requires states and [districts] to adopt strong but flexible and achievable standards, assessments, and accountability reforms.”

So let’s see how Miller and company do at “eliminating inflexible and outdated provisions of NCLB” and requiring “strong but flexible” accountability systems. The package…

1. Requires states to expect “all” students to reach college and career readiness eventually. (Didn’t we learn from NCLB that calling for “universal proficiency” merely pushes states to lower the bar?)

2. Tightens the screws on NCLB’s “subgroup accountability,” requiring schools to hit targets on dozens of indicators in order to avoid stigmas and sanctions. (Why not let states develop new ways to ensure that vulnerable kids don’t get overlooked—but without all the complexity?)

3. Makes failure even more likely by adding student growth and graduation rates to the mix (along with proficiency rates).

4. Potentially subjects a high number of schools to federally prescribed interventions. Rather than restrict the proportion of schools that must face the strictest sanctions to 5 or 10 percent, as Lamar Alexander’s legislative package and the Administration’s own Blueprint do, the sky is once again the limit under the Miller approach.

5. Micromanages the way that state accountability systems include students with disabilities, setting inflexible rules about how many students can take alternate assessments.

6. Establishes an enormous unfunded mandate by requiring states to translate examinations for every language group of 10,000 students or more. In larger states, this could mean the development of dozens of new assessment formats.

7. Penalizes school districts for doing more with less by keeping intact the “maintenance of effort” requirement—which substitutes Congress’s priorities over state legislatures’ and county councils’ when it comes to spending limited state/local resources.

8. Mandates that states and districts redistribute “effective” teachers from middle class to poor schools, even though recent research indicates that the “teacher effectiveness gap” may not exist.

9. Keeps in place the “Highly Qualified Teachers” mandate, even though its focus on paper credentials has been completely discredited.

10. Creates or reinstates myriad pet programs that Congress has already defunded, often with support from the Obama Administration.

So if Republicans are “radical,” Miller and his allies must be “conservative” because they essentially want No Child Left Behind to stay the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Frederick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Thinking otherwise is a group of advocates and interest groups, including leaders of the country’s two big teacher unions, that calls itself the Broader, Bolder Approach (BBA) to school reform.  Its mission statement says that “weakening [the] link [between income and achievement] is the fundamental challenge facing America’s education policy makers.”  In a paper given last November, Duke University Professor Helen F. Ladd, a BBA co-chair, makes the best case she can for the group’s position.   She shows that in fourteen different countries student achievement is higher if a student comes from a family with higher income.

But a correlation proves nothing about cause and effect, as I explain in a new article, “Neither Broad Nor Bold,” and in an op-ed in the New York Daily News. Years ago, Susan Mayer, former dean of the Harris School at the University of Chicago, showed that much of the connection between income and achievement is spurious, caused by other factors associated with both.  More recently two Brookings scholars, Julia Isaacs and Katherine Magnuson, updated the Mayer work by examining an array of family characteristics – such as race, income, mother’s and father’s education, single or two-parent family, smoking during pregnancy – on school readiness and achievement.  The Brookings study found that the distinctive impact of family income was just 6.4 percent of a standard deviation, which is generally regarded as a small effect.  The impact of the rise in single-parent families is likely to be much more important for student achievement than any changes in the distribution of income in the United States.

In the end, Ladd and her BBA colleagues seem to agree that income redistribution is not essential, as they quickly drop the idea in favor of an alternative dear to the heart of any public-sector union leader: Expanding the range of social services to include medical and nutritional services as well as pre-school, after-school, and summer programs. All those expensive programs outside the regular school day would undoubtedly add to the number of professionals available for recruitment by public-sector unions.  But none of them hold as much promise for student learning as any one of the many school reforms on the nation’s agenda—student and school accountability, school choice, and changes in teacher recruitment, compensation and retention policies.

Jay Matthews, of the Washington Post, says it is “galling,” at least to some, for me to have worried about the rising number of single-parent families while doubting the value of hiring more professionals.  But I am surprised he thought my common-sense observations were “thrilling.”  I concede that adjective to Jay only if he agrees that little boys are exhilarating when speaking frankly about emperors parading in birthday suits.

- Paul Peterson

There are three points I want to make today.

• It’s important that those of us who support socio-economic integration don’t oversell the evidence, and I’m worried that in the book and in today’s comments we’re doing some of that.
• We shouldn’t pit controlled choice against other forms of school choice, especially charter schools.
• We need to think of controlled choice not just as a means of integrating schools; we need to think of diverse schools as a choice in and of themselves.

Let me take each of these points in turn.

On not overselling the evidence

I think it’s a mistake to say, as Marco did, that we’ve known since the Coleman Report that integrated schools do better. We know that there’s a relationship. Rick goes into this in his book, looking at NAEP scores and other evidence, and you can see that in schools with more integration, students perform better—especially poor and minority students. But that does not necessary prove that school integration “works.”

Those of us who support school choice and school vouchers used to like to point out the higher test scores and graduation rates for poor kids in Catholic schools—and argue that therefore Catholic schools are better than public schools. But critics rightfully argued that you can’t prove that it’s the Catholic schools that are making the difference. There’s a selection bias issue. There might be something about the families who are choosing Catholic schools that is relating to the higher achievement, not necessarily the schools themselves. That led to demand for random assignment studies in which we could track kids that not only look the same on the surface (in terms of their background and parental education and such) but had the same motivation. They all entered a lottery, some got in, some didn’t, and we could track their progress. And what we found was that there is an advantage for Catholic schools but it’s smaller than we thought.

We probably have a similar situation when it comes to socioeconomically integrated schools. We haven’t had many random assignment studies. Heather Schwartz’s paper is an important contribution to the research for that reason. But the Chris Swanson study that Marco cited, which found graduation rates to be 10 percentage points higher in socio-economically integrated high schools, is far from gold-standard evidence. As Marco admits in his paper, the evidence is “limited,” because of the selection bias problem.

So we have to be careful not to pretend that we know for sure that if we integrate our schools we will see these huge benefits in terms of increased student achievement and higher graduation rates. We might. But we don’t know that for sure. It’s similar to the way in which we don’t know for sure whether we’d see big gains if we sent more kids into Catholic or charter schools.

Still, I personally find the evidence on integration compelling. Not the evidence discussed here, or in the book, but some of the peer effects research done by Rick Hanushek and Caroline Hoxby that examines the composition of classrooms. What they both find is a strong relationship between the composition of classrooms and student achievement. Mostly this has been looked at in terms of race. As you have high concentrations of African-Americans in a classroom, the African-Americans perform worse. Some scholars have raised questions about these studies, but still, they are pretty compelling.

So if we can get not only integrated schools but also integrated classrooms there’s some evidence that you can have an impact on achievement. But that brings us to another challenge.  I strongly suspect that many of these integrated schools we’re talking about—especially magnet schools—don’t necessarily have integrated classrooms. You have schools within schools where there’s a population that’s mostly middle class / upper middle class in the magnet program and the rest of the school is mostly poor. I’m not convinced that we have much evidence that that’s going to do much good in terms of raising achievement.

We have similar issues with gifted programs, honors programs, and AP programs. But if you say to the upper middle class parents: Not only do we want you to choose an integrated school, but we’re NOT going to allow you to choose a gifted program or another opportunity for your kids to get extra challenge—that’s going to be another political difficulty.

In other words, this is all much more complicated than some of today’s conversation has indicated.

On not pitting “controlled choice” against other forms of choice

This is a big mistake politically and strategically. There are a lot of influential people out there who support charter schools and would be with us on controlled choice, but who will be against us if it’s framed as one or the other. We’ve heard from Stephanie that while we could be achieving a lot more integration than we are today, for the foreseeable future there is still going to be a LOT of schools with concentrated poverty. And the question then is: How do we make those schools as high achieving and successful as possible?

My own view is that we look out there and see the KIPPs and other “no excuses” charter schools, as well as some traditional public schools and Catholic schools, that are serving high concentrations of poverty and are doing an amazing job, and we should celebrate those examples and replicate them, rather than saying “it can’t be done except with integration.” Because we’ll never have 100 percent integration.

So let’s have two tracks: Let’s do everything we can to integrate the schools, and for the schools that are going to have high concentrations of poverty, let’s make sure that they are excellent as well.

On diverse schools as a choice in and of themselves

Finally, my last point: The conversation that Rick has led and that’s in the book is how to use controlled choice to get schools that are more integrated. So we say, “OK, we know that middle class/ upper middle class parents like things like language immersion schools, or Montessori schools, or STEM. So we will develop magnet programs, put them in high poverty neighborhoods, and convince affluent parents to cross into other communities for their children’s schooling.”

I don’t have a problem with that, and if you can make it work, and work out the logistics, great.

But we’re missing an opportunity if we don’t think of integrated schools as another brand of choice.  In other words, some parents want language immersion, some parents want STEM, some parents want Montessori, some parents want something even more progressive. And some parents really want integrated schools. I am hopeful that there are many of those parents out there who would like to choose that kind of a school for their child.

So, for example, we have in the charter school movement a very important development recently in which there are a number of diverse charter schools that are getting started: Capital City here in DC, the Denver School of Science and Technology, High Tech High. These are excellent schools that have as their mission to be both high achieving and to be diverse. And there’s a place within the charter school movement for these integrated schools. Part of the message to parents is: Choose the school not only because of the academic program that we offer but because you value integration. Parents have signed up. And when they are excellent schools, parents come in droves. Let’s respect parents enough to make diversity a selling point as well.

You can watch the entire discussion from Wednesday’s panel, The Future of School Integration, below.

Video streaming by Ustream
-Michael Petrilli

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper Blog

Let me now revisit a fifth potential asset, which is also the main reason that small-government conservatives should favor the Common Core or other high-quality “national standards”: This is the best path toward getting Uncle Sam and heavy-handed state governments to back off from micro-managing how schools are run and to return that authority to communities, individual schools, teachers, and parents.

It’s the path to getting “tight-loose” right in American K-12 education, unlike NCLB, which has it backward. (I refer to the well-known management doctrine that large organizations with many parts should be “tight about ends, loose about means.”) The proper work of conservatives going forward is to stop doing battle with the Common Core and instead do their utmost to ensure that the “loose” part gets done right. This could also be the path toward a viable political compromise on NCLB/ESEA reauthorization.

Common Core or other high-quality “national standards” are the best path toward getting Uncle Sam to back off from micro-managing how schools are run. Photo by DonkeyHotey.

Some on the Right don’t yet see any need for compromise because they expect to be in the driver’s seat in both houses of Congress and the Oval Office after November. Maybe that will happen. Maybe John Kline will have his way in the 113th Congress and at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., meaning that future federal K-12 dollars will be turned over to states with essentially no strings attached.

But I wouldn’t stake our kids’ future on the election working out that way. And even if it were to, there’s never yet been an ESEA reauthorization that wasn’t bipartisan to some extent. Which suggests to me that compromise is going to be needed and “tight-loose” is the right basis for it.

Here’s the core proposition: If all U.S. public schools embraced the same rigorous standards (for their curricular core), were assessed on the same tests, and had their results made public via a transparent system, then everybody would know how their own schools are doing and could decide for themselves whether to (a) leave things be, (b) demand a makeover, or (c) move their kids to other schools.

Communities would have grounds to rally in support of their schools, to fire the school board, to encourage charters and other innovators and entrepreneurs to arrive, etc. State-level voters would have grounds to fire the governor or legislature at the next election and to vote for higher or lower education taxes in the next referendum. Employers would know where to locate their education-intensive plants and offices and where to avoid. Philanthropists would know where to invest—or not. Reformers would know where to intervene with what. Above all, parents would know how content (or not) to be with the schools attended by their own kids.

Uncle Sam could then cease and desist from telling states and districts how to run their schools, how to “qualify” and evaluate their teachers, how and on what to spend their money, what to do about low-performing schools, to whom and how to provide choices among which sorts of schools and how many of them, etc.

But “loose” isn’t going to happen all by itself. Literally hundreds of federal programs (starting with but by no means limited to Title I and IDEA) will need to be reshaped by statute (or consolidated or abolished) for “loose” to work.

The brainpower and policy energy needed to prepare for that enormous undertaking isn’t going to be available if conservatives in the education space spend all their time battling against the “tight” part of the deal.

Remember, too, that “tight” is voluntary and should stay that way. No state needs to buy into the Common Core or the assessments now under development—as Education Secretary Arne Duncanunderscored in a letter this week to Utah’s state superintendent. (An important question for potential compromisers, however: If a state doesn’t accept “tight,” how much “loose” does it get and on what basis?)

Let me restate the essence of the compromise I’m suggesting: If everybody’s schools use the same academic targets and metrics to track their academic performance—duly reported by demographic subgroup, perhaps by individual classrooms, too—and if everybody has access to this information via a transparent reporting system, a powerful case can be made for getting “big government” to back away from managing schools. This case would be strengthened further if the education dollars—from every source—also accompany individual pupils to the schools they actually attend. Then those schools can and should be freed up to “run themselves” in the ways that matter most: budget, staffing, curriculum, schedule, and more. They can decide for themselves whether to pool resources for various external purchases and back-office operations (and where to obtain those). They can also decide for themselves what to teach on top of the “common” standards in the same or additional subjects. Schools will be freer than today to specialize in, say, art/music, STEM, technical-vocational education or history and literature.

This will lead to an overdue revolution in school governance at the state/local level, too, not just in Washington. The role of districts will change dramatically, at least in states that see this through to its logical conclusion. And the demand for outstanding building-level school leadership will soar.

Yes, this could all happen without the Common Core per se. It could be pegged to other widely agreed-upon academic standards and assessments—if such existed. Nor does any of this mean that the standards and assessments should come from the federal government. The tight-loose “compromise,” however, is mainly about the terms accompanying future federal K-12 funding and will need to be incorporated in some workable fashion into federal law.

This will, of course, be attacked from both sides. Some conservatives, as noted, will insist that the voters will soon vindicate their preference for restoring control and authority to states and districts with no expectation of common standards or tests. Some liberals will hate the “loose” part because they don’t trust states, communities, or schools to do right by kids and will therefore want continued heavy regulation from Washington. (How well has that worked, folks?)

But that’s the sort of “nobody’s pleased” situation that creates the possibility of compromise. Which would surely be better than today’s reauthorization gridlock cum waivers of dubious constitutionality (and continued heavy-handedness).

Compromise means everybody yields some of what’s important to them in return for getting (or keeping) another part that would be jeopardized if they didn’t also yield. It’s a term that’s fallen out of use in Washington of late. Can it return to favor in federal education policy in 2013?

- Chester E. Finn Jr.

This post originally appeared on Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Frederick Hess

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Those of us at the Fordham Institute (and our partners at the Center for American Progress) have been making the case that our governance structures impede our ability to do implementation right. Local school districts—with their elected school boards, susceptibility to interest group capture, and lack of scale—aren’t always inclined or well suited to turn legislative reforms into real change on the ground. I’ve wondered out loud whether we should abolish school districts and run the whole kit and caboodle out of state departments of education.

That’s still a tantalizing idea, but probably too radical for anyone to take seriously in the immediate future. So here’s an alternative: How about creating a “virtual education ministry” that school districts would choose to associate with voluntarily? (Creating more than one of these entities would even better.) Think of it as a private-sector department of education, but run much more efficiently and with higher-quality staff than the government ever could.

Such a ministry would be akin to the comprehensive school reform organizations of the 1990s (such as Success for All, Modern Red Schoolhouse, Expeditionary Learning, etc.) or the charter management organizations of the 2000s (Aspire, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, etc.), except it would focus on “whole district reform” rather than “whole school reform.” (This would also differentiate it from myriad other organizations that provide piecemeal consulting or solutions to school districts. The intent here is to be soup-to-nuts.)

Picture a non-profit organization governed by a prestigious board of directors with a range of experience and expertise. Its mission would be to build the capacity of interested school districts in order to prepare their students for college and career readiness, as defined by the Common Core. It would be particularly attractive for small- to medium-sized school districts that don’t have the scale to have their own curriculum developers or R&D shops (in other words, most of the school districts in the nation).

This “ministry” would tackle the following responsibilities (as bona fide ministries of education do in most European and Asian countries):

• The development and continuous improvement of a curriculum aligned to the Common Core. This curriculum would incorporate the best available resources—from textbooks, online learning materials, etc.—into a coherent scope and sequences for every major subject for grades K-12.
• The creation and management of a robust instructional support system. Such a system would incorporate curricular materials, lesson plans, videos of master teachers, interim assessments, social tools for professional interaction among teachers, etc. (The “ministry” could very well buy this, rather than build it, as several vendors are working on this sort of solution.) The ministry would have personnel on staff to facilitate conversations among teachers, answer questions, identify promising practices, load “master videos,” and otherwise ensure that a true professional community develops online that stays focused on effective classroom practice.
• The development and continuous improvement of “standard operating procedures.” What are the best approaches to classroom management? How to build a strong school culture focused on achievement? What goes into an effective “Response to Intervention” system? What are the best ways to serve students with certain disabilities? What staffing models are most cost-effective? What do strong programs for English language learners look like? In elementary school, how often should students take “specials” (art, music, P.E., library, etc.)? What do model student schedules look like in middle school and high school?
• The development of a virtual HR office. This office would publish guidelines on best practices around teacher and administrator recruitment and selection (including offering screening tools, examinations, etc. for schools to use); model collective bargaining agreements; model teacher evaluation forms (and ancillary materials); and training for school leaders in inducting, managing, and, when necessary, terminating staff, among other topics.
• The creation of a robust research and development function. This R&D capacity would be essential to ground as many decisions as possible in sound research, as well as feedback from on-the-ground educators throughout the network. It would stay busy (via staff or contractors) answering practical questions. Which parts of the national curriculum are working well and which aren’t, and why? Which instructional strategies are leading to strong student achievement growth, and deserve to be highlighted in the instructional support system? How should the “standard operating procedures” be revised over time? For example, what new evidence is available about effective classroom management strategies? What is current “best practice” in the treatment of autistic students, or those with developmental delays? How should the screening tools for principals and teachers be fine-tuned, based on the latest data? How can the network’s school model be made as cost-effective as possible? This shop would also be responsible for screening the myriad vendors that want their products to be part of the ministry’s school model. (More on that below.)
• Accreditation of teacher and administrator preparation programs aligned with the ministry’s model. It would recruit schools of education and alternate route providers into a network of programs dedicated to preparing educators for the ministry’s approach. Candidates would be screened according to the ministry’s criteria (based on rigorous evidence); fieldwork would take place in participating school districts; and coursework would be tightly aligned with the curriculum and standard operative procedures of the network’s schools.

When this “virtual education ministry” is built out, then, participating schools and school districts would be immersed in a coherent system that includes teacher selection and preparation; a common curriculum and related (and robust) instructional supports; detailed guidance on key instructional issues, such as those related to special education; and support for school leaders on essential management tasks, especially evaluating their teachers. And because the “ministry” wouldn’t live in the governmental sector, it wouldn’t face all the impediments that make it so hard for school districts or state departments of education to recruit and retain high-quality staff.

This approach could provide huge benefits for entrepreneurs, too.

Imagine if the network grows to serve one-fifth of the nation’s student population, or 10 million children. Tool-builders could petition the “ministry” to include their solutions in its instructional support system or standards operating procedures. If a product is approved—because of its compelling evidence—the ministry could encourage all of its participating school districts to purchase it—perhaps at a discount rate through the ministry itself. This would facilitate the “scaling up” process dramatically.

Is it possible that such a “virtual education ministry” (or two or three such entities) could provide all the benefits of a national or state-driven education system, without the political risks and backlash? Let me know what you think.

-Mike Petrilli

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

The NYC score release brings two related and relevant issues squarely to mind. First, we now have the capacity to assess the impact of teacher performance on students in a very general way. We can do this in a majority of states and cities in the nation, and could do it in all if there was sufficient political will.  Second, the release begins to give us some appreciation for whether or not we are systematically biasing education away from the neediest students.  Since before Brown vs. Board of Education, there has been concern that political forces align to deprive minorities and poor students of an equal opportunity to a high quality education. Until now, however, it was difficult to look clearly at this issue.

We are approaching a time when we can develop objective measures of the distribution of actual teacher effectiveness. The measures can include value-added information like that in NYC.  It can also include rigorous evaluation information like that developed in Washington, DC.

The potential power of this type of analysis is seen vividly in the Ed Trust West report on teacher effectiveness across Los Angeles schools.  While it is admittedly still not easy to distinguish between differences in teacher effectiveness across schools and differences in the students who select particular schools, we can and should at least begin to map out the true distribution of teaching talent across all our schools.  Doing this, and paying attention to it, is vitally important for fulfilling our promises of equal opportunities for all students.  Doing it is also important for guiding our various policy efforts designed to ensure that our disadvantaged students get an equal shake.

Continuing anachronistic regulatory and policy efforts aimed at input measures and credentials does not make sense when the alternative — a capacity to look at the varying levels of education that are actually being provided to our students — is available to us.

-Eric A. Hanushek

This post originally appeared on the blog of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Peter Meyer

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

• Its content-and-skill expectations for grades K-12 in English and math are, by almost everyone’s reckoning, about as rigorous as the best state-specific academic standards and superior to most.
• It was developed outside the federal government, voluntarily by states, using private dollars. (The related assessments are another matter.) And both standards and assessments remain voluntary for states.
• It opens the way, for the first time, to comparing student, school and district performance across the land on a credible, common metric—and gauging their achievement against that of youngsters in other countries on our shrinking and ever-more-competitive planet.
• Besides comparability, it brings the possibility that families moving around our highly mobile society will be able to enroll their kids seamlessly in schools that are teaching the same things at the same grade levels.

Ever since it landed, however, the Common Core has been the object of ceaseless attacks from multiple directions. The number of zealous assailants is small and, for a time, it all looked like a tempest in a highly visible teapot. That may yet turn out to be the case. But the attacks are growing fiercer; some recent recruits to the attack squad are people who tend to get taken seriously; and anything can happen in an election year. Remember the classic Peter Sellers movie, The Mouse That Roared? The Duchy of Grand Fenwick ended up triumphing over the United States of America. As you may recall, that happened in large part because the U.S. government contributed to its own defeat. In the present case, something similar could well transpire. Please read on.

Before examining the assaults, however, let’s remind ourselves what the Common Core is not. It is no guarantee of stronger student achievement or school performance. Huge challenges await any (serious) academic standards on the implementation, assessment and accountability fronts. To get traction in classrooms, states that adopt these standards (and all but four say they’re doing so) must take pains with curriculum, teacher preparation, assessment, accountability and more. To yield real rigor (and comparability), the currently-under-development assessments must avoid numerous pitfalls and incorporate hard-to-achieve consensus on genuinely challenging issues (such as where to set the “cut score”).

In and of themselves, academic standards merely describe the end point to be reached and the major stops en route. They don’t get you there. But it’s far better to have an education destination worth reaching, i.e. rigorous standards set forth with sufficient specificity, clarity, and rich content to provide real guidance to curriculum designers, classroom teachers, test developers and more. Few states have managed to do that on their own.

To be sure, other states could simply copy the best of those that already exist. But that’s more or less what the Common Core is: an amalgam of good standards put together by people who know a lot—and care a lot—about both content and skills.

So why the nonstop attacks against it? As best I can tell, they arise from six objections and fears.

First, a few earnest critics are convinced that the standards are substantively flawed, that the algebra sequence (or grade level) is wrong, the English standards don’t contain enough literature, the emphasis on “math facts” isn’t as strong as it should be, etc. This sort of thing has accompanied every past set of standards of every sort, and it’s perfectly legitimate. Insofar as such criticisms are warranted, the Common Core can be revised, states can add standards of their own, and jurisdictions that find the common version truly unsatisfactory can change their minds about using it at all.

Second, the Common Core will be difficult and expensive to implement. Many organizations are working hard to help states surmount these genuine challenges. Many philanthropists are kicking money into the effort. And some groups (Fordham included) are trying to cost it all out. Nobody denies that doing this right will be hard and costly (though some of those costs are already embedded in state and district budgets.) Of course, those who think the country is doing OK today have every reason to shirk that challenge and stick with what they’re used to.

Third, the Common Core won’t make any difference in student achievement—but may cause a politically-unacceptable level of student failure. As noted above, standards per se do not boost achievement. (Of course, standards per se don’t carry costs or failure rates, either. They don’t, by themselves, do much of anything!) And failure rates will worsen only if (a) the new assessments are truly rigorous and (b) schools neglect preparing their pupils to pass them.

Fourth, states have done as well, or better, on their own, and switching over to the Common Core will just mess them up. This criticism mostly emanates from Massachusetts, which has done a commendable job on its own and where the decision to adopt the Common Core was truly conflicted. Other states that prefer to go it alone, mostly notably Texas and Virginia, have simply declined to adopt the Common Core. Others are free to exit from it (though doing so would, for some, violate commitments they made in their Race to the Top proposals.)

Fifth, “national” is not the right way to do anything in American education. We retain a deep (if, in my view, unwarranted) affection for “local control” in this realm and constitutional responsibility for education is undeniably vested in the states. Some folks dread the prospect of a “national curriculum.” (Some simply mistrust the Gates Foundation, which has bankrolled much of this work.) Others are incapable (perhaps willfully so) of seeing any distinction between “national” and “federal”, though we seem to have no difficulty making that distinction elsewhere in education. (E.g. National Governors Association, S.A.T., A.P., ACT.)

Sixth, and closely related to the blurring of national with federal is the expectation that Uncle Sam won’t be able to keep his hands off the Common Core—which means the whole enterprise will be politicized, corrupted and turned from national/voluntary into federal/coercive. This is probably the strongest objection to the Common Core and, alas, it’s probably the most valid, thanks in large measure to our over-zealous Education Secretary and the President he serves.

Let’s face it. Three major actions by the Obama administration have tended to envelop the Common Core in a cozy federal embrace, as have some ill-advised (but probably intentional) remarks by Messrs. Duncan and Obama that imply greater coziness to follow.

There was the fiscal “incentive” in Race to the Top for states to adopt the Common Core as evidence of their seriousness about raising academic standards.

Then there’s today’s “incentive,” built into the NCLB waiver process, for states to adopt the Common Core as exactly the same sort of evidence.

(In both cases, strictly speaking, states could supply other evidence. But there’s a lot of winking going on.)

The third federal entanglement was the Education Department’s grants to two consortia of states to develop new Common Core-aligned assessments, which came with various requirements and strings set by Secretary Duncan’s team.

This trifecta of actual events is problematic in its own right, not because the federal government is evil but because Washington has become so partisan and politicized and because of angst and suspicion that linger from failed efforts during the 1990’s to generate national standards and tests via federal action.

What’s truly energized the Common Core’s enemies, however, has been a series of ex cathedra comments by President Obama and Secretary Duncan. Most recently, the Education Secretary excoriated South Carolina for even contemplating a withdrawal from the Common Core. Previously, the President indicated that state eligibility for Title I dollars, post-ESEA reauthorization, would hinge on adoption of the Common Core. Talking with the governors about NCLB waivers earlier this week, he stated that “if you’re willing to set, higher, more honest standards then we will give you more flexibility to meet those standards.” I don’t know whether he winked. But everybody knew what standards he was talking about.

It will, of course, be ironic as well as unfortunate if the Common Core ends up in the dustbin of history as a result of actions and comments by its supporters. But in March 2012 there can be little doubt that the strongest weapons in the arsenal of its enemies are those that they have supplied.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

KIPP Empower Academy is a Los Angeles-based elementary school that opened in 2010. It currently serves kindergarteners and 1st graders, and it plans to grow by one grade each year up to 4th grade. A blended-learning school, students rotate between individualized online-learning, and small-group stations within each classroom. In the school’s first year, its now 1st-grade students experienced some notable results. As reported on its website, “Though many students at KIPP Empower Academy entered kindergarten without basic letter and number recognition skills, by the end of the year, 98 percent were reading and performing math at or above the national average.” Not only that, but many students were also reading at a “2.5” grade level and performing math almost at the 3rd-grade level. And reported teacher satisfaction at the school was sky high.

Carpe Diem is a blended school based in Yuma, Ariz., which will be expanding beyond the state into Indiana in the next school year. The school, which serves grades 6 through 12, uses an individual-rotation model. In 35-minute increments students rotate from online learning for concept introduction and instruction to face-to-face for reinforcement and application. In 2010, Carpe Diem ranked first in its county in student performance in math and reading and ranked among the top 10 percent of Arizona charter schools.

The Los Altos School District began using the Khan Academy last year in a handful of 5th-grade and two 7th-grade classrooms to blend its math learning. This year the district has incorporated Khan Academy into its math curriculum for all 5th- through 8th-grade students—about 1,000 in all. With Khan Academy, teachers are able to individualize learning for each child based on real-time data. The blended-learning environment in Los Altos schools allows for seamless targeted intervention and flexible groupings, as well as real collaboration among students—all of which allows them to exercise their own student voice and choice.

Quakertown Community School District (QCS) is a traditional school district in Pennsylvania that has embraced the power of online learning to create a “self-blend” learning environment for students. All students in grades 6 through 12 have the option to take one or more online courses, and district teachers teach all the courses with the exception of those, like Mandarin, where there is no certified teacher available within the district. Two district teachers are responsible for only online courses, and roughly 75 percent of all QCS teachers are responsible for at least one online course. Courses are asynchronous; students can work on their assignments at any time during the day. Many students take advantage of this option in order to work around vocational programs, work schedules, and extracurricular interests. Some take these classes at home, and others work on them during free periods during the school day. There are designated areas in the high schools and middle schools, called cyber lounges, where students can work comfortably in a cafe setting between their face-to-face classes. The online courses allow students to move at their own pace and complete courses based on competency rather than being tethered to the traditional semester timeline.

Most powerfully, students in the district have produced a number of videos that speak to the power of the district’s approach, from the advantages of online learning from students’ point of view to the perspective of a face-to-face and online teacher, as well as a video that summarizes the district’s positive and improving student outcomes.

*  *  *

For more video viewing of blended-learning schools, I also recommend checking out the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools BLAST school, which is turning heads in Los Angeles.

• We want to improve the quality of teachers everywhere—which in my opinion calls for weeding out the ineffective teachers everywhere.
• Even if little of the variation in teacher quality is between schools, it does not eliminate concerns about what is happening in disadvantaged schools.
• A recent EdTrust West paper—which is great and which tried to analyze the issues in a serious way—finds some substantial differences in average quality (biased against disadvantaged students) in Los Angeles—so if a serious analysis of New York City finds no bias, we will still be left with policy issues outside of NYC.
• It would not make sense to attempt to redistribute good teachers from middle-class to low-income schools, but we can still pursue policies that try to hold top teachers in poor schools. Thus, direct incentives (tied to effectiveness of teachers) would make sense in poor schools. That would be a direct way to increase average quality. Moreover, apropos the recent LA decision, it might be easier to break the bad contract provisions in schools serving predominantly poor kids.
• Even if average teacher quality is the same across middle-class and poor schools, the poor kids in general will score lower because they come with less average inputs from family and neighborhoods—and we have to deal with that as a nation.
• It does not take indirect evidence from the New York Times, crossed with Marguerite Roza’s data, to infer that teacher characteristics are not good proxies of effectiveness. We have much more extensive and persuasive evidence on this.

-Eric Hanushek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Peter Meyer

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

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

A key element of this effort is developing evaluation systems that identify both the highly effective and the highly ineffective teachers and administrators — and then actually uses that information to make personnel decisions.

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

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

This political balance has, however, taken a sudden and somewhat surprising turn. Within the last few years, a surprising number of states have made some dramatic changes – Colorado, Indiana, Florida, Michigan, Idaho, and more.  Each has revisited the historic system of teacher tenure that is not based on any true evaluation of the teacher’s contribution to students’ learning but instead is based solely on a couple of years on the job.

These recent changes in law quite generally prescribe new evaluations based on classroom performance, using student achievement where feasible.  There has also been valuable movement to finally begin to base personnel decisions, including both rewards and dismissals, on the basis of real measures of teacher quality.

These changes have also filtered into collective bargaining agreements.  Washington, DC, is perhaps the most advanced in developing a rigorous evaluation system that links directly with personnel decisions.

In each of these instances, the development of a rigorous and comprehensive evaluation system is essential.

The sorry state of evaluations in the schools has been known for some time. The perfunctory evaluation in which 99% of the teachers are excellent — or, in New York City, 97% are deemed “satisfactory” — fed a system that defied ever removing a teacher because of ineffectiveness.

When pressed, everybody in the system nodded knowingly and said sanctimoniously, “we need to develop a better evaluation system.” That agreement led to endless numbers of meetings and statements that said “we must do better.”

But the reality of the status quo continued.

With the development — finally — of better measures of student learning that came from tracking achievement across grades comes the ability to see where success and failure reside. Turns out, many teachers are doing a fantastic job. But some are doing lasting harm to their children.

For them, mentoring and professional development aren’t enough. They must find a different line of work.

Contrary to what Bill Gates argued in on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the release of value-added scores of teachers is not a way of shaming the ineffective teachers. It is a prod to insisting that teachers who harm their children should finally be removed from the classroom.

Everybody who has looked at the problem agrees. Evaluations should not be based exclusively on test scores but should — as a new agreement in New York State affirms — use a combination of evaluation methods that include test scores and other observational methods.  The forces trying to stop the evaluation of teachers try to paint the picture of narrow, error-prone evaluations, but that is really just political spin designed to mobilize support for the status quo.

The issue raised by the release of value-added information is simply how quickly and how assuredly we get to a more rational system of evaluations – for both teachers and administrators – and to a more rational personnel system that guarantees an effective teacher in every classroom.

-Eric Hanushek

An early discussion of these issues was found in the New York Daily News.

That said, I’m also becoming convinced that the future of our economy and the acquisition of good jobs will hinge as much on well-developed technical prowess as on Aristotle, Shakespeare, Darwin, Rembrandt, and Mozart.

Recent weeks have brought multiple reports of U.S. jobs going unfilled, or being outsourced to distant lands, because too few American workers have the requisite skills to perform them well.

On January 21, for example, the New York Times explained why Apple has its iPhones, iPads, and such manufactured in China. Among the multiple reasons, not all of them praiseworthy, this one stuck with me:

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Further evidence turned up in The Washington Post a few days ago, with employers in several states lamenting the dearth of technically qualified workers for decently-paid jobs now going unfilled:

[A]s the 2012 presidential candidates roam the state offering ways to “bring the jobs back,” many manufacturers say that, in fact, the jobs are already here. What’s missing are the skilled workers needed to fill them.

A metal-parts factory here has been searching since the fall for a machinist, an assembly team leader, and a die-setter. Another plant is offering referral bonuses for a welder. And a company that makes molds for automakers has been trying for seven months to fill four spots on the second shift.

“Our guys have been working 60 to 70 hours a week, and they’re dead. They’re gone,” said Corey Carolla, vice president of operations at Mach Mold, a forty-man shop in Benton Harbor, Mich. “We need more people. The trouble is finding them.”

As such reports make plain, somewhere along the education continuum, America in 2012 needs to prepare thousands more people for jobs that do exist. The skills they call for, by and large, are technical and do not seem to require much of a “liberal arts” background, even if citizenship does. Many do not entail sitting at a desk or wearing a white lab coat. Rather, they involve today’s version of what used to be called “blue collar” and “foreman” work and the educational preparation for succeeding in them does not look much like what the “everyone should complete college” crowd seems to have in mind.

Recall the provocative Pathways to Prosperity report from the Harvard ed school a year back, observing that just 30 percent of the jobs in 2018 will require a bachelor’s degree and arguing for a “multiple pathways” approach to K-12 reform. This didn’t get the attention it deserved—and still deserves. For it demands not only rethinking the “college for all” mantra but also launching a bold makeover of America’s “vocational” high schools (and kindred postsecondary institutions), bringing them into the 21st century rather than either jettisoning them or retaining them unchanged.

My home town of Dayton is setting a good example with the recently opened David H. Ponitz Career Technology Center. Plenty more schools have incorporated the word “technical” or “technology” into their names. But as you scan their curricula, you find many that have clung to the old programs (carpentry, metal working, auto body) that still sound worthy but may well lead to underprepared and ultimately unemployable people—and that’s even assuming that their students bring strong basic skills (and cultural literacy) with them into ninth grade.

In sum: Somewhere between the dead-end of old-style vocational high schools and the fashionable but ill-advised “college for everyone” campaign is a course of action that will actually equip young Americans for both successful citizenship and the real economy that they will inhabit.

-Chester E. Finn Jr.

This post also appeared in Fordham’s Education Gadfly Weekly

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

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

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

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

This is the skills dilemma.

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

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

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

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

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

- Peter Meyer

This post also appeared in Fordham’s Education Gadfly Weekly