The Texas Constitution’s education clause requires the legislature “to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.” Relying on this meager textual material, school finance lawsuits have reached the Texas supreme court five times, with the last decision coming in 2005. Since then, enterprising attorneys have flooded the lower courts with four separate cases. One of them, Texas Taxpayer and Student Fairness Coalition v. Williams, has already been ruled on by a trial court judge and will almost certainly reach the supreme court. In this case, more than two-thirds of Texas’s 1,032 school districts joined in claiming once again that the state does not adequately fund education.

Following a similar script from cases in other states, the plaintiffs claimed that the state could not increase education standards without also increasing funding. This claim proved to be catnip for trial court judge John Dietz. In a meandering, near stream-of-consciousness statement delivered with his ruling, he talked about the wonders of education and how it is obvious that if the state wants higher standards it has to pay more, because “there is no free lunch.” Resolutely leaving no vapid cliché behind, he went on to expound, “It is a fact that the more educated we are, the greater our income will be. The greater our income as a state, the fewer citizens need public assistance. With greater income, the lower the crime rate.” How education can cure virtually every social ill while not being subject to diminishing marginal utility he doesn’t explain.

In Kansas, in response to a supreme court order, the legislature drastically increased funding in 2006, to no discernible educational effect. But as the economy declined, Kansas had to cut spending, and it included education in the cuts. This prompted a large coalition of school districts, which enroll more than 40 percent of the state’s students, to file suit in 2010 claiming that the decline in state revenue could not justify decreasing spending on education. In January 2013, a three-judge district court panel ruled in Gannon v. State that the legislature’s spending reductions were unconstitutional. As in Texas, the panel called upon weepy clichés. The state, it said, was “experimenting with our children” and depriving them of “opportunities” that “do not repeat themselves.” The panel enjoined the state from providing less than $4,492 in per-pupil aid. The import of this decision is that economic reality can have no effect on budgetary decisions. Presumably, even if Kansas’s total tax revenues were less than this amount, the judges would still demand that the legislature provide it.

In response to this ruling, the state appealed, and Kansas governor Sam Brownback successfully asked the state supreme court to order mediation between the state and the complaining school districts. If mediation fails, the supreme court will hear the case in October.

Most striking about both the Texas and Kansas cases are the broadly encompassing constituencies the plaintiffs represent. If students in two-thirds of the school districts in Texas and 40 percent of the students in Kansas are being deprived of an adequate education, then a political incentive would exist to save them from educational immiseration and protect school spending, even under adverse economic conditions. The histories of the Texas and Kansas supreme courts make us doubt they will resist the treacly rhetoric of the trial courts and return these questions to the legislatures and governors, where they belong. We expect rather that the cases will continue to shuffle abroad in state courts, like the ghoul in a late-night horror show that, in a different context, Justice Scalia said refused to die, even after being repeatedly killed and buried.

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

First, a bit of history. In the 1970s, U.S. education policy was all about “equity,” inclusion, and funding and its reformist zeal came from the left, save for noble but isolated exceptions such as Milton Friedman.

Few deny that the equity agenda did some good, especially for disabled and minority youngsters, but the concomitant neglect of academic achievement proved costly. Though the College Board didn’t acknowledge it until 1975, SAT scores had peaked a decade earlier and were in free fall. Every newspaper seemed to bring word of another teacher strike. Adult authority was in decline, goofy curricular schemes were ascendant—and Jimmy Carter decided that his top education priority would be creation of a new federal agency to reward the NEA for its support in the ‘76 election.

In the blunt words of chronicler Tom Toch (then with U.S. News, now with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), “the 1970’s left public education in a shambles.”

Fast forward just three years to A Nation At Risk (1983) which powerfully stated that American K-12 education was tanking. Ronald Reagan concurred. And by then, a series of governors, many of them Republican, many in the South, had reached the same conclusion on their own. They understood that the future vitality of their states depended on a major overhaul of their education systems. Alexander, for example, proposed his “Better Schools Program” to the Tennessee legislature months ahead of the national commission report—and, as chairman of the National Governors Association in the mid-eighties, had that organization embark on a comprehensive, multi-year commitment to school reform.

In Washington, meanwhile, occupying the top post in the new Education Department, Bennett encouraged the reformers and took serious steps to equip them with the research findings and data they needed to bring rigor, comparability, and choice into their work. (He proposed, for example, changes in the National Assessment of Educational Progress that made possible the first valid state-to-state comparisons of academic performance.)

The initial impulse of many of these conservative ed-reformers was to raise standards for the system as a whole, which began with tougher graduation requirements, “minimum competency” exams and fewer electives of the basket-weaving variety. They also pushed to create additional school choices for families. Minnesota enacted statewide “open enrollment” in 1988 and two years later Wisconsin began the country’s first modern voucher program.

Toughening standards, however, was easier said than done, because it was easy for districts and state education departments to game such requirements: “You want three years of math instead of two? Fine, we’ll just spread out the same content.” What the system needed were true external standards—statements of what students should know and be able to do, a clear definition of the desired endpoint, and tests by which to determine how many kids and schools were getting there.

In 1989, the governors—all of them—met with President George H.W. Bush in Charlottesville and emerged with a set of ambitious (and ultimately unworkable) “national education goals” for the year 2000. This was followed, during the Bush père and Clinton years, by an abortive attempt at setting federally inspired, subject-specific, education standards for the country. After this flopped badly, the standards action moved back to the states, where it’s been ever since, albeit with various forms of encouragement (and harassment) from Washington. Early adopters of rigorous statewide standards, including Texas and North Carolina, showed that this approach—combined with suitable tests and public results—could lead to significant achievement gains. Other states, including Jeb Bush’s Florida and Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts, followed suit, with even better results. (Massachusetts is now the sole state whose educational performance rivals the highest-achieving countries of Asia and Europe.)

At the same time, the push for parental choice gained oomph as Minnesota passed the first charter school law (1991), followed swiftly by California and Colorado, then dozens more. Other forms of public-school choice have burgeoned, and vouchers and tax credit scholarships have spread, too, to some 16 states today.

Some conservatives saw standards and choice as conflicting, but in fact they’re complementary, even (in today’s argot) co-dependent. Standards do a good job of clarifying the public’s expectations for schools, and signaling to parents and taxpayers whether the campus down the street is educating its students poorly or well. But standards-based reform has never had a suitable answer for failing schools. It can identify them but has had little success turning them around.

Choice, on the other hand, is great at creating new school options, places that can replace the failures and give needy kids decent alternatives. Yet market-based reform needs reliable consumer information for it to lead to strong outcomes—information that standards and tests are excellent at providing.

Sticky wickets remain, to be sure, such as the vexed question of accountability for schools of choice where tax dollars are involved. Market-minded reformers tend to argue that satisfying the “customers,” in this case parents and kids, is all that’s needed. We’ve argued, on the other hand, that since education is a public as well as a private good, choice schools—when the public is covering their costs—should also be accountable to the public for student learning. (Wholly private schools are a different matter.) Besides, we’ve seen too many examples of parents who consider everything except academic performance when selecting schools for their kids.

There’s also been much debate among conservative ed-reformers about Washington’s role. While any Republican governor worth his salt pushes for both standards and choice at the state level, it’s tough to know what Uncle Sam should or should not do. George W. Bush moved federal policy to a more aggressive stance with his No Child Left Behind act. A dozen years later, and with ample cause and provocation, Republicans in both the House and Senate are moving to roll back almost all of that. Meanwhile, for better and worse, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have embraced key items on what had been mostly a GOP reform agenda, including charter schools, rigorous teacher evaluations, even performance-based pay. During the last election, just about the only singular education policy (at the K-12 level) that Mitt Romney could claim as his alone was vouchers.

Enter the Common Core

Though few ordinary folks have ever heard of the “Common Core,” it has emerged in recent weeks as the biggest education flashpoint among state-level GOP policymakers and in the conservative coalition generally. Prompted by Tea Party activists, a couple of influential talk-radio hosts and bloggers, some disgruntled academics, several conservative think-tanks, and a couple of shadowy but deep-pocketed funders, in April the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution blasting the Common Core as “an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children.” Several states that previously adopted it for their schools are on the verge of backing out. It’s been a major hot button in Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Alabama.

Why all the fuss?

Heretofore, states set their own academic standards. A few did this well but most, according to reviews undertaken by our Institute and others, faltered badly, putting forth vague expectations that lack content and rigor, are unhelpful to teachers and curriculum directors, and often promote left-wing dogma. Even the good ones differ so much from state to state that school and student performance cannot be compared around the country, much less with other lands.

Public education is indisputably the responsibility of states—embedded deeply in their constitutions—but preparing young Americans to succeed in a mobile society on a shrinking and more competitive planet calls for some uniformity of basic education expectations across the land, expectations that, if met, truly prepare young people for college and good jobs and prepare the U.S. workforce for the 21st century.

Many state leaders understand this and, beginning five years ago, the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers (to which most “state superintendents” belong) launched a foundation-funded project called the “Common Core State Standards initiative,” which gave birth (in 2010) to a set of commendably strong standards for English and math from kindergarten through high school. Our Institute’s reviewers found them superior to the academic expectations set by three-quarters of the states—and essentially on par with the rest.

But would states actually embrace them—and give up their own? This was—and remains—totally voluntary, but decisions grew more complicated when the Obama administration started pushing states toward such adoptions by jawboning, hectoring, and luring them with dollars and regulatory waivers.

Whether it was the standards’ intrinsic merit, administration pressure, or the potential advantages of commonality, 45 states plus D.C. and the Pentagon’s school network signed on. (Texas and Virginia remain the big exceptions.) The top-priority education initiative in most of those places today is preparing teachers, parents, and others for these demanding standards—and for the likelihood that scores will plummet on the tougher tests that are due to be launched in 2015.

Then came the backlash. Some arose on the left from longtime foes of testing and from teacher groups wary of being evaluated against sterner criteria. Some arose from parents and educators fretful that heavier emphasis on English and math will eclipse music, art, civics, health, and the remaining components of a balanced curriculum.

The heavy artillery, however, came from the right. Much of it focused on what was presented, Tea Party style, as a federal plot—worse, an Obama plot, in cahoots with the Gates Foundation, maybe even the United Nations—to take over American schools, end local control, undermine state sovereignty, and vanquish school choice.

Some decried the Common Core as a lowering of standards because, for example, it doesn’t mandate algebra in the eighth grade. (Never mind that few eighth graders study real algebra today.) Others prophesied that Jane Austen and Mark Twain would be replaced by close study of auto-repair manuals. (The list of recommended readings that accompanies the Common Core is excellent—but bad choices by teachers or curriculum directors can subvert any standards.)

Critics of the Common Core would, of course, like all states—especially their own—to repudiate these “national” academic standards. Writing on this website, directors at the Boston-based Pioneer Institute lamented what they said was Common Core’s obliviousness to the sources of the Bay State’s (genuine) academic progress. Several California think-tankers insist that the Golden State’s school standards are superior to the new ones. And it’s true that those states are among those that our analysts deemed “too close to call” when they reviewed the Common Core alongside state-developed standards. (Little good can be said, however, about actual achievement in California—further evidence that even solid standards gain traction only when well implemented.)

The critics’ best-founded beef, however, is with the Obama administration, not with the Common Core, which was state developed and remains state owned—and voluntary. The White House and Education Department erred when they created federal incentives for states to take the plunge—and erred again when, in this year’s State of the Union address, the president claimed credit for “convinc(ing) almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards.” By tying a blue ribbon around the Common Core, he made it more problematic in red states.

Still, the fact that Obama thinks well of it doesn’t means there’s anything (else) wrong with it. This is understood by the many respected conservatives who back the Common Core, including such scarred veterans of the education-reform wars as Jeb Bush, Bill Bennett, John Engler, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Sonny Perdue, Bobby Jindal, Rod Paige, and Mitch Daniels. They realize that academic standards are only the beginning, setting out a destination but not how to get there. They understand, however, that a destination worth reaching beats aimless wandering—and a big modern country is better off if it knows how all its kids and schools are doing against a rigorous set of shared expectations for the three R’s.

Nor are the standards’ rigor the sole consideration—or the only reason that conservatives should favor them. The Common Core can save dollars while enhancing accountability, hastening the development of powerful instructional technologies, strengthening American competitiveness, reducing remediation in college, boosting the country’s shared civic culture, and (by supplying parents with better information about school performance) advancing school choice.

Some states will surely withdraw from the Common Core, and others will only go through the motions of implementing it. Even in jurisdictions that take it seriously, implementation is apt to be uneven from district to district, and more political rapids lie ahead, when results from new tests begin to arrive, almost certainly showing far fewer young Americans to be “college and career ready” than elected officials will be comfortable with..

Yet none of this means that conservatives should come unglued over the Common Core. Rather, they should maximize the good it can do and minimize its potential harm. Here are three useful steps:

1. Draw a bright line between the standards and the federal government. (Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is onto one approach with his proposal to ban any further federal spending related to the Common Core.)
2. Overhaul No Child Left Behind as proposed by Senator Lamar Alexander and House education committee chairman John Kline, in effect rolling back the regulatory regime that has turned results-based school accountability into Uncle Sam’s business. (The tighten-the-screws alternative advanced by Senate Democrats would entangle Washington even further with states’ standards and accountability systems—as well as much more mischief.)
3. Continue to push aggressively in dozens of states for more school choice, both public and private—and allow voucher schools (and maybe charters, too) to opt out of their states’ standards and tests (Common Core or otherwise) if they can present alternatives that are just as rigorous. (Disclosure: the co-authors of this piece are still tussling over this one!)

Actions such as these might not restore harmony to American conservatism—and education most definitely is not the only hot issue—but they’d be a worthy start. Meanwhile, it’s worth examining the Common Core standards with one’s own eyes. (You can find them online at http://www.corestandards.org/.) We predict that you will be impressed by their rigor, thoroughness, solidity, and ambition—even their “conservative” nature. You may just agree that the United States would be better off if more of its high school graduates possessed these skills and knowledge.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Michael J. Petrilli are, respectively, president and executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Finn served in the Reagan Administration, Petrilli in the George W. Bush Administration. Both are also affiliated with the Hoover Institution.

This article first appeared on the blog of The Weekly Standard.

Checker Finn and I argued six years ago in Education Next that NCLB’s critical flaw was its pie-eyed, overwrought ambition. As we wrote, “NCLB is, in fact, a civil rights manifesto masquerading as an education accountability system. Its grand ambition provided a shaky basis for policymaking, rather as if Congress asserted in the name of energy reform that America will no longer need to import oil after 2014 or fought crime by declaring that by that date all U.S. cities would be peaceable kingdoms.”

All the same, we were not unsympathetic. We wrote at the time: “NCLB’s backers can legitimately argue that they had already spent nearly two decades asking state and local officials and education leaders to address mediocre school performance and stubborn race- and class-linked inequities… In that light, the passion-drenched unseriousness infusing NCLB is forgivable, even honorable. And NCLB indeed has virtues: it produced long-overdue school transparency, focused unprecedented attention on achievement, [and] created urgency where lethargy had ruled.”

That said, the design failings of NCLB were notable. Unaddressed, they infused the Harkin-Enzi bill that emerged in 2011, and will continue to haunt the Democratic proposal. Checker and I pointed out that NCLB sought to do three different things — each sensible enough in its own right, but a Rube Goldbergesque hodge-podge when combined. As we wrote:

“Embedded within NCLB’s accountability system are three distinct, discernible models of educational change that have been awkwardly welded together.

Model one would make transparent the performance of students across the nation, providing an X-ray to show parents, educators, and policymakers how different schools and groups are performing in key subjects. Model two would deploy “behavior modification” accountability methods, refined through decades of public sector reform, to force low-performing schools and districts to set goals, assess effectiveness, and do better. And model three would set “shoot-the-moon” targets and use the federal bully pulpit to exhort leaders in states and districts to improve.

Each of these approaches is plausible on its own terms. And each has a place in federal policy. But they cannot reasonably be linked to one another, as NCLB tries to do. They entail discrepant views of the federal role in education and employ discordant mechanisms. The result isn’t working.”

We pointed out, “The value of an ‘X-ray’ of the nation’s school performance has long been recognized. NCLB’s dictate that all states regularly test students in key subjects marked a historic success. The accuracy of the picture is compromised, however, when this cross-sectional look at student achievement becomes the basis for gauging the performance of schools and educators, much less for triggering interventions or remedies. We don’t judge doctors based on whether their patients are sick today but by how much patient health improves under their care. Judging professional performance on the basis of a one-moment-in-time X-ray encourages questionable behavior, leads states to play games with standards, and threatens to discredit the X-ray itself.”

Similarly, when it came to the idea that the feds needed to force states to act, we wrote “Prodding public sector institutions to set goals, monitor performance, and then reward excellence and address mediocrity has been a signal success for reformers on both the left and the right… Sensibly structured accountability systems encourage self-interested workers to take goals seriously, focus on outcomes, and employ all the levers at their disposal to produce those outcomes. But we compromise such ‘behavior modification’ when those on the ground view the targets as unattainable. If workers know they are unlikely to succeed, the goal becomes to avoid trouble when they fail. By making failure inevitable, unrealistic goals have the perverse effect of focusing employees on compliance.”

What to do about all this? It requires teasing apart these three roles. The federal government can and should insist on transparency in return for federal funds. It’s fine for the Secretary of Education to be a cheerleader and appropriate for the SecEd to use moral suasion. But it’s a mistake to tie artificial goals to pleasing sentiments. And it’s a mistake for Uncle Sam to try and get into the business of fixing schools, no matter how much he distrusts state and system leaders. After all, Uncle Sam can’t fix schools. All he can do is pass laws, which makes ED write regulations, ordering states or districts to alter policies, in the hope that these change practices in schools and classrooms.

Now, for instance, the feds requiring states to set performance targets instead of setting a national 100% by 2014 target is an invitation to repeat some of these same problems, just with a new wrinkle. States will be pressed by the Secretary of Education to set pie-in-the-sky growth expectations for gap-closing… and then all the pathologies of NCLB repeat. Unless and until someone proffers workable suggestions here, such a proposal tells me that the lessons of NCLB haven’t really been learned.

A decision to focus NCLB reauthorization on promoting transparency, honest measurements of spending and achievement, and on ensuring that constitutional protections are respected ought not be seen as a retreat from NCLB but as an attempt to have the feds do what they can do sensibly and well.

- Rick Hess

This blog entry first appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The differences in expectations for students across states are striking.  In 2011, for example, Alabama reported that 77 percent of its 8th grade students were proficient in math, while the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests administered that same year indicated that just 20 percent of Alabama’s 8th graders were proficient against NAEP standards.  In Massachusetts, on the other hand, roughly the same share of 8th graders achieved proficiency on the state test (52 percent) as did so on the NAEP (51 percent).  In other words, Alabama deemed 25 percent more of its students proficient than did Massachusetts despite the fact that its students performed at markedly lower levels when evaluated against a common standard.  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has gone so far as to accuse states like Alabama of “lying to children and parents” by setting low expectations for student performance.

There’s no doubt that the definition of proficiency in many states provides a misleading view of the extent to which students are prepared for success in college or careers.  Yet whether the way in which states define proficiency matters for student achievement is far from clear.  As Tom Loveless demonstrated in the 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education, the rigor of state proficiency definitions is largely unrelated to the level of student achievement on the NAEP across states.   Similarly, Russ Whitehurst and Michelle Croft have shown that the quality of state standards (as assessed by third party organizations) is unrelated to NAEP scores, a finding confirmed by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Josh Goodman in an analysis that examined the effects of changes in the quality of standards within states over time.  The lack of  a systematic relationship between either the rigor or the quality of state standards and student achievement casts doubt on claims that higher and better standards under the Common Core will, in and of themselves, spur higher student achievement.

Less attention has been paid to whether the rigor of state standards matters for public perceptions of the quality of the schools in their states and local communities.  If using a more lenient definition of proficiency leads citizens to evaluate their schools more favorably, then the advent of common expectations under the Common Core could alter public perceptions quite dramatically – perhaps increasing pressure for reform in regions of the country in which state proficiency definitions have provided an inflated view of student accomplishment.  Is such an outcome likely?

To shed light on this question, I use data from two surveys conducted in 2011 and 2012 under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.  In each year, my colleagues and I asked a nationally representative sample of roughly 2,500 Americans to grade the public schools in their local community on a standard A-F scale.  In the figures below, I examine whether the average grade the residents of each state assigned to their local schools is associated with the share of 2011 8th graders deemed proficient by the state’s own test and by the NAEP.  To the extent that differences in the definition of proficiency from one state to the next interfere with citizens’ ability to discern the performance of their local schools, we should see that the average grades citizens assign their schools hew more closely to proficiency rates as determined by state tests than by the NAEP.

The figures demonstrate the opposite.  Figure 1a shows that average citizen ratings of local schools across states are only weakly correlated with 8th grade proficiency rates on state tests.  Although the relationship is statistically significant, it is quite small in size: a 10-percentage-point increase in the share of students deemed proficient is associated with an increase in citizen ratings of just 0.03 points on a GPA-style scale (i.e., A=4.0; F=0).  Figure 1b, in contrast, reveals a markedly stronger relationship between citizen ratings and NAEP proficiency rates, with a 10-percentage-point increase in proficiency associated with an increase in citizen ratings of 0.17 grade points.

Figure 1a: Relationship between the Average Grades Assigned to Local Public Schools and Proficiency Rates on State Tests

Click to enlarge

Figure 1b: Relationship between the Average Grades Assigned to Local Public Schools and Proficiency Rates on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

Click to enlarge

Source: Author’s calculations based on data from the 2011 and 2012 EdNext-PEPG Surveys, state education agency websites, and the NAEP Data Explorer.

Notes: Average grades are reported on a standard GPA scale (i.e., A=4, F=0).  State and NAEP proficiency rates are the average of 8th grade proficiency rates in math and reading.  The regression analyses used to generate fitted values are weighted by the inverse of each observation’s estimated variance to account for differences in the number of respondents from each state; unweighted regressions yield substantively similar results.

A simple regression of the average grades citizens assign to local schools in each state on NAEP and state proficiency rates simultaneously confirms that average grades (1) are strongly correlated with NAEP proficiency rates and (2) after controlling for NAEP proficiency rates, have no relationship whatsoever with proficiency rates on state tests.   An increase in NAEP proficiency rates of 32 percentage points – the difference between Washington DC and Massachusetts – is associated with an increase in citizen ratings of more than a half of a letter grade.  Holding NAEP scores constant, a difference in state test proficiency rates matters not at all.

In short, this evidence suggests that Americans have been wise enough to ignore the woefully misleading information about student proficiency rates generated by state testing systems when forming judgments about the quality of their state’s schools.  This does not mean that they ignore state testing data altogether.  Indeed, Matthew Chingos, Michael Henderson and I have shown that, within a given state, the grades citizens assign to specific elementary and middle schools are highly correlated with state proficiency rates in those schools.  Nor does it necessarily imply that information from the NAEP has a causal effect on perceptions of school quality.  The relationship between NAEP performance and the grades citizens assign their schools could easily be driven by other variables, such as the prosperity level of the state, that influence student achievement levels and could also influence school grades.  Yet it does suggest that the implementation of the Common Core, by providing information about performance against a common standard, may have less of an impact on public perceptions of school quality than many have projected.

—Martin West

This blog entry first appeared on the Brown Center Chalkboard from the Brookings Institution.

The converse was also true: The things that the organization was designed to do weren’t at the top of our list.

This second point was particularly troublesome, because those things—like sending teams out to do monitoring visits or pestering districts to send in reports—were required by federal laws.

We did our very best to deal with the hand we were dealt. We reorganized the department, made clear what our goals were, and repurposed funding and positions (to the extent permitted).

I think this is what responsible leaders of public-sector organizations do: They don’t bellyache about the problems and constrains of government agencies—they deal with them.

Throughout my career, I’ve bounced between the nonprofit and public sectors. I read, think, and write about issues for a while, and then I go into the system and spend whatever intellectual capital I’ve accumulated. Because of the “writing” part of this formula, I generally enter government service with a bit of, shall we say, baggage.

For example, there was (to be diplomatic) some concern that I had written extensively about the bad-ideaness of massive school-turnaround efforts and then, in my official capacity as state deputy education commissioner, had a hand in our state’s SIG grant.

I never saw a problem with this. My view was simple: When I work for the government, I deal with the world as it is; when I’m outside of the government, thinking and writing, I deal with it as I think it ought to be. So I’m comfortable criticizing SIG from the outside and then trying my best to make it work when I go inside.

This is the split mindset that I brought to the CRPE report “Modernizing the State Education Agency: Different Paths Toward Performance Management,” by Patrick J. Murphy and Lydia Rainey.

Released just as I was leaving state service, the paper studied eight SEAs (including New Jersey’s) that were trying, in various ways, to change their work.

The report uses the issue of addressing a state’s lowest-performing schools to investigate each SEA’s evolution.

The government-service Andy would’ve found the report pretty valuable. It argues that SEAs generally think about these activities through a lens provided by federal law; it discusses how today’s reform-minded state chiefs prioritize this line of work; it highlights how SEAs need to alter how they interact with LEAs if these schools are to improve; it details how some departments have reorganized themselves to do this work; it discusses the challenges associated with launching new school-improvement efforts in an era of austerity; and it offers a three-category framework for comparing SEAs.

Had I still been in the system when this report came out, it probably would have changed the way I saw my organization and how I went about my work.

But today’s Andy—the world-as-it-ought-to-be Andy—sees this report as more evidence that we need to bring to an end the SEA as we currently know it.

Every page has an example of a very good leader wrestling with old rules, habits, programs, and funding streams, struggling to make a new type of organization out of one created for a different time and different purposes.

To their credit, the authors recognize this tension. But, perhaps because they position themselves largely as journalists reporting on the activities of state leaders, they assume themselves—and us—into a corner.

Consider the following two examples:

• They write that succeeding with school improvement and performance management “will require state agencies to build new capacities and assume new roles.”
• Later they write, “effective school improvement cannot happen if the SEA itself does not evolve from an organization preoccupied with compliance to one that manages performance.”

The government-service Andy would have had on the same blinders. Maybe you have them on, too.

Both bullets—actually, the entire report and our collective response to the state-level challenges we face—simply assume that if we want new and different state-level things done, we have to change the SEA so it does them.

There is, however, another answer. Let the SEA do what it was designed to do and what is required of it. And nothing more.

All other responsibilities should be invested in different—preferably new—organizations, some government-run, some in the nonprofit sector.

I don’t have all of the specifics down yet (this is one of the advantages of think-tankery over in-the-belly positions: the ability to surface problems without answers!). But it certainly means major initiatives—for example, leading teacher-evaluation reform, authorizing charters, and leading innovations like blended learning—would take place outside of the SEA.

If you think this is entirely far-fetched, consider two recent developments. First, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Michigan have created new state entities (the RSD, ASD, and EEA) to deal with their states’ lowest-performing schools.

Second, Colorado and New York have created independent but affiliated nonprofit arms responsible for activities traditionally done by SEAs.

My point is similar to the one I made in my book. Just as we can re-imagine how K–12 public education is delivered in America’s cities, we can re-imagine how a state goes about its K–12 work.

The SEA need not have the dominant, default role.

-Andy Smarick

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

Because, at least when it comes to education policy, just about everything he wants the federal government to do involves things that can’t be done successfully from Washington but that well-led states can and should do: raise academic standards, evaluate teachers, give kids choices, and more.

His latest passion in this realm is “quality early childhood education for all.” And as post–State of the Union specifics seep from the White House, we see more clearly what he has in mind: a multi-pronged endeavor, including home visits by nurses, programs for poor kids from birth to age three (“Early Head Start”), more Head Start (mostly for three-year-olds), lots more state-sponsored preschool for four-year-olds (subsidized up to twice the poverty line), and full-day Kindergarten for all.

All are plausible undertakings by states. Only one, however, could be satisfactorily carried out by Uncle Sam: a thorough and much-needed makeover of the five-decade-old Head Start program. But that isn’t likely to happen. The retrograde Head Start lobby is too strong, and the program’s iconic status means it’s easy to resist fundamental changes in it.

Yet Head Start is by far the largest extant preschool program in the land—serving about a million kids, well targeted at low-income families, and costing about $10,000 per child. The problem is that every program evaluation over many years has reached the same sorry conclusion: Head Start is fine and dandy as a provider of child care, social services, decent food, and some dental and health care, but it’s a total washout in terms of school readiness. Whatever limited cognitive gains its participants show after their year in the program vanish soon after (or even before) they enter school.

Yes, we can blame elementary schools for failing to capture those gains, but as Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution points out, the main culprit is Head Start itself, which doesn’t try very hard for cognitive gains and which has defenders who stoutly resist even viewing it as an education program. (That’s why it’s housed in the Department of Health and Human Services.)

To its credit, the Obama Administration has pushed to reform Head Start (as did several prior presidents), but with very limited success. The fact is that big federal programs, once entrenched, are exceptionally hard to change. Head Start should be turned over to the states—where, with governors like Barack Obama, it might be merged into states’ own efforts to provide preschooling to those who need it.

But states face mighty challenges of their own on this front. Besides cost, two are paramount.

First, the early-childhood-education crowd cannot agree on what “quality” means in preschool education. What it should mean is evidence of school readiness and a preschool operator’s success in getting kids to meet curricular standards that mesh with the state’s Kindergarten standards. What “quality” usually ends up being defined as, however—and the White House documents half-slip into this trap—is a bunch of “inputs” related to class size, room size, teacher credentials and such.

Second, the politically appealing impulse to promise “universal” preschool education is in direct conflict with who actually needs it and isn’t getting it today. The overwhelming majority of American four-year-olds already participate in some form of preschool—and more than 40 percent enjoy the publicly financed kind. Universalizing access to public preschool, besides being very expensive for taxpayers, amounts to a huge windfall for public schools (and their teacher unions), as well as for middle class families and communities that have already found ways of obtaining it for their kids. And it’s invariably a low-intensity program that doesn’t deliver the degree of help and duration that might put the neediest youngsters onto a more level education playing field. (Essentially all the evidence of lasting gains—and long-term savings—from preschool comes from a few very pricey and intensive boutique-style programs targeted on small numbers of exceptionally disadvantaged children.)

These are tough nuts for states to crack, but the federal government can resolve neither. In a time of tight budgets and staggering debt, Uncle Sam can’t do much on the cost front, either.

Well-led states can make some headway. Oklahoma (mentioned by the president) hasn’t done badly. Neither has Florida, despite its risky embrace of “universalism”. Washington can surely jawbone—Arne Duncan is far better at this than Kathleen Sebelius—and may deploy some modest incentive dollars for states to match. But if Mr. Obama really wants to make a difference on the preschool front, he should first clean up the Head Start mess, then go back to Illinois and straighten out his own state’s policies and programs.

A version of this article also appeared on The Corner.

That’s why I was so impressed with (and proud of) the recent memo sent out by my former colleagues.

I’ve said many times before that educator evaluation policy got far ahead of the practice. This memo shows that the NJDOE has been assiduous in trying to bridge that gap.

The graphic on page 3 shows how they’ve used multiple sources to continuously inform their work. The timeline on the final page shows how they’ve choreographed the various activities over a long stretch of time to ensure that the work progresses—but prudently.

The heart of the memo is a summary of what they’ve learned from these various sources to date and how the department is responding to the lessons.

I may be biased, but this is—in my opinion—top-notch, grown-up policymaking by a state department of education: Take a broad policy directive, start a pilot, develop multiple external assessors, integrate this work with mid-stream RTTT-3 funds and a new tenure law, make course corrections, act with transparency about findings, and push on.

I would commend this memo to just about anyone in our field, but particularly groups like TNTP that do this work day in and day out, officials at USED interested in witnessing the difficulty of bringing an Administration priority to life, the Gates Foundation MET team (who I’ve been pestering about next steps), academics who study policy implementation, and anyone else with an interest in today’s work on educator effectiveness.

Finally, I’m including a few links to somewhat unflattering news articles associated with the memo’s release. These should serve as lessons to those who want to do serious policymaking. Do your job thoughtfully and well, and take pride in that—but know that the aspects likeliest to be covered will be those that generate the most heat, not the most light.

My congratulations to my superior former boss Commissioner Chris Cerf, my amazing former colleague Chief Talent Officer Pete Shulman, and their colleagues.

When people look back on this era of ed reform, I’m sure they will remember the big pieces of legislation and the political fights. That’s wonderful theatre for sure.

But the day-to-day work to animate cold words in a statute book is what matters most.

-Andy Smarick

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

Hess moderated the forum, and panelists included Chris Barbic, of the Tennessee Achievement School District; Deb Gist, of the Rhode Island Department of Education; Kaya Henderson, of DC Public Schools; Adrian Manuel, of Kingston High School; and Michelle Rhee, of StudentsFirst.

An article based on the book, “Combating the Culture of Can’t,” was recently published by Education Next in advance of the Spring 2013 issue.

—Education Next

In the following essays, we identify some of the key findings from the sixth annual Education Next-PEPG Survey, a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens interviewed during April and May of 2012 (for survey methodology, see sidebar). Highlights include

• the Republican tilt of the education views of independents

• the especially high marks that Hispanics give their public schools

• strong support among the general public for using test-score information to hold teachers accountable

• lower confidence in teachers than has previously been reported

• the public’s (and teachers’) growing uneasiness with teachers unions

• the shaky foundations of public support for increased spending

• majority support for a broad range of school choice initiatives.

In addition to the views of the public as a whole, in this year’s survey special attention is paid to Hispanics, African Americans, parents, and teachers, all of whom were oversampled in order to obtain a sufficient number of observations. And in an effort to assess the sensitivity of respondents’ opinions to information and question wording, we embedded in this survey, as we have done in previous ones, various experiments. Responses to all questions are posted on our website, educationnext.org.

Independents lean Republican in their views of teachers unions and school spending—and support private school choice.

With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney running neck and neck, the nation’s eyes are trained on independent voters, who will likely decide the presidential election. And in the days leading up to the national conventions, education policy, though hardly at the top of the public agenda, did assume a more prominent role in both campaigns. Which candidate is best positioned to use education to bring undecided voters into the fold? The answer may be surprising.

Just one-third of independents report that President Obama has done an “excellent” or “good” job of handling education issues, while the rest assign him a “fair” or “poor” rating. And on the education policy issues that most clearly divide the parties—the role of teachers unions and support for school spending—the views of independents hew closer to those of Republicans than of Democrats. Moreover, independents are more supportive than members of either party of expanding private school choice for disadvantaged students, the centerpiece of Governor Romney’s proposals for K–12 education reform.

Whereas 25 percent of respondents to the EdNext-PEPG survey report that they are Republicans and 34 percent say that they are Democrats, fully 41 percent claim no affiliation with either major party. Of this group, 52 percent claim that they lean Democratic, while just 40 percent lean Republican. On key education issues, however, these independents express views that better align with Republicans.

No single education issue divides Republicans and Democrats more sharply than the role of teachers unions (see Figure 1). Seventy-one percent of Republicans report that the teachers unions have a generally negative effect on schools, as compared to just 29 percent of Democrats. Though independents come down in between, a majority of them (56 percent) agree with Republicans that unions have a negative effect.

Republican and Democratic voters also diverge in their preferences on school spending and teacher salaries. Figure 2 shows that when not provided with information about current spending levels, 79 percent of Democrats say that spending on public schools in their local district should increase, as compared with 50 percent of Republicans. Among independents, 57 percent support increased spending, again placing them closer to Republicans in their view of the issue. And when respondents are informed about current spending levels, the gap between Republicans and independents vanishes: 39 percent of both groups support spending increases, compared to just 51 percent of Democrats.

The same pattern holds for teacher salaries: when respondents are not provided with information about current salary levels, 60 percent of independents support increasing teacher salaries, placing them closer to Republicans (54 percent of whom support increases) than to Democrats (75 percent). Providing information on current teacher salaries in their state reduces support for salary increases among independents to 34 percent—exactly the same as among Republicans. Information also shrinks the share of Democrats supporting salary increases to 41 percent.

Governor Romney has made the expansion of school choice for disadvantaged students central to his campaign, calling for the expansion of the Washington, D.C., voucher program and for allowing low-income and special education students to use federal funds to enroll in private schools. It is perhaps surprising, then, to find that Republicans are less supportive of this concept than are Democrats (see Figure 3). Just 42 percent of Republicans express support for the idea, compared to 52 percent of Democrats. Voucher support among independents appears to be as high as (or greater than) it is among Democrats, at 54 percent.

Hispanics like public schools but not all union demands in contract negotiations.

Increasingly, both the Republican and Democratic parties have sought ways to court Hispanics. Though they lean Democratic—63 percent of Hispanic adults approve of the way President Barack Obama is handling his job as president—they are not as blue as is the African American community, 92 percent of whom give Obama a thumbs-up.

Those seeking the Hispanic vote in 2012 should know that education is an issue that resonates with the Latino community. Almost 60 percent of those we surveyed say they are “very” or “quite a bit” interested in education issues, as compared to less than 40 percent of African American and white voters.

On many topics—including school vouchers, charter schools, digital learning, student and school accountability, common core standards, and teacher recruitment and retention policies—the views of Hispanic adults do not differ noticeably from those of either whites or African Americans.

But in certain domains—estimates of school costs and school quality, support for teachers unions, teacher tenure, and teacher pensions—the views of Hispanics differ rather substantially. Their judgment of the American school is generous, perhaps because they compare public schools in the United States to much less effective institutions in Mexico, Cuba, and other parts of Latin America. They also underestimate the costs of running public schools, though they revise their thinking rather substantially about the merits of spending increases once they learn the facts. They are less supportive of unions and union demands than are African Americans.

Nearly 40 percent of Hispanic adults give the nation’s public schools a grade of an “A” or a “B” on the traditional scale used to evaluate schools (see Figure 4). When asked about the public schools in their community, no less than 55 percent give such favorable assessments. By comparison, whites and African Americans express significantly less enthusiasm about the nation’s schools. Less than 20 percent of whites and African Americans accord the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” and only around 40 percent give the schools in their community one of these two top grades.

Hispanic respondents think American students perform better academically than is actually the case. American 15-year-olds ranked no better than 25th among the 34 developed democracies participating in the latest round of international tests. Yet nearly 45 percent of Hispanics say student math performance in the United States ranks among the top 15 countries in the world in math. Only 30 percent of white and African American respondents place the United States that high.

Hispanic respondents also think the public schools cost a lot less than they actually do. While annual per-pupil expenditures run around $12,500, Hispanics, on average, estimate their cost at less than $5,000. Whites and African Americans estimate the costs to be more than $7,000.

The same goes for teacher salaries, which average about $56,000 a year. On average, Hispanics think teachers are paid little more than $25,000 a year; blacks, on average, think they are paid around $30,000 a year; and whites estimate salaries at $35,000.

When told just how much schools cost, however, Hispanic respondents adjust their thinking quite dramatically. When informed about actual per-pupil expenditures, Hispanics’ support for higher taxes to fund spending increases drops from 46 percent to 25 percent. When given the actual amount teachers receive, their support for higher salaries plummets nearly in half—from over 60 percent to little more than 30 percent.

Although learning the truth about costs and salaries has a similar impact on white opinion, African Americans remain more committed to higher spending. Thirty-seven percent of African Americans favor higher taxes, even when told how much is currently being spent, only a slight dip from the 42 percent favorable when that information is withheld. When given the facts about teacher salaries, African American support for higher salaries drops 20 percentage points—from 74 percent to 54 percent.

Like other ethnic groups, Hispanics do not appear especially sympathetic to teachers union demands in collective bargaining negotiations. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic adults think teachers should pay 20 percent of their pension and health care costs, as do 56 percent of African Americans.

By an overwhelming margin (87 percent), Hispanic respondents favor proposals to condition teacher tenure on their students’ making adequate progress on state tests. Whites and African Americans also favor such proposals but not to the same degree (75 percent and 80 percent, respectively). When it comes to whether teachers unions are playing a more positive or a more negative role in their local community, Hispanic adults come out in the middle—at 59 percent in support, they are more supportive than whites (45 percent) but less supportive than African Americans (75 percent).

Use test scores for evaluations, says the public (but not the teachers).

Teachers have long been paid primarily on the basis of their academic credentials and years of experience, creating in most parts of the country a lockstep pay scale that does not account for a teacher’s classroom performance. This approach is often justified on the grounds that it precludes favoritism on the part of principals, school board members, and other administrative officials.

As teacher effectiveness has become an increasingly visible policy issue, standard approaches to salary and tenure decisions are undergoing substantial change. More than 20 states now require that student test-score gains be used in key personnel decisions, often including tenure and salary determinations. Four states go so far as to prohibit a teacher from receiving a top rating if students do not exceed a certain level of accomplishment, while another 10 require that achievement gains constitute at least 50 percent of each teacher’s evaluation.

Is the public onboard with these changes? And what do teachers think about them? To find out, we randomly divided those interviewed into two groups (see Figure 5). The first group was given a stark choice: How much weight should be given to test scores and how much should be given to principal recommendations?

Given this simple dichotomy, the public says test-score gains should be given more than half the weight (62 percent) in making salary and tenure decisions. Teachers, by contrast, are prepared to place only a quarter of the weight (24 percent) on this information, with the other three-fourths of the weight being given to principal recommendations.

The second half of the sample was asked a more complex question, which required giving weights to test scores and evaluations from four different sources: principals, parents, students, and fellow teachers.

When the question was posed this way, the public and the teachers once again disagree. The public would place about one-third of the weight (32 percent) on test scores, but teachers would assign them less than one-fifth (19 percent). Conversely, teachers would give principal recommendations nearly half the weight (44 percent), while the public would give their recommendations less than one-quarter (23 percent).

Perhaps surprisingly, teachers are unenthusiastic about being evaluated by their fellow teachers. Like the rest of the public, they divide up the remaining weight more or less equally among the three remaining sources of evidence (students, parents, and fellow teachers).

An even bigger gap between teachers and the public emerges on the desirability of releasing information about teacher performance to the public at large. In both New York City and Los Angeles, newspapers have published such information, provoking an outcry among teachers, who felt their privacy had been invaded. When we asked respondents about this as a general practice, 78 percent of the public expresses support, compared to just 33 percent of teachers (see Figure 6).

When given the option of expressing neutrality on the issue (as another randomly chosen half of the sample was), 60 percent of the public still says it supports the publication of information about teacher performance, while only 13 percent is opposed, the remaining 27 percent taking the neutral position. Teacher opinion is almost the mirror image. Fifty-four percent oppose making information on test-score impacts publicly available, 30 percent express support, with the remaining 16 percent not taking a clear position either way.

Are teachers unions undermining teacher popularity?

Teachers have long held a cherished place in American popular culture. In such films as Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, and Dead Poets Society, Hollywood has highlighted the power of teachers to utterly transform the lives of their students.

But is this now changing? Are Waiting for Superman, Bad Teacher, and Won’t Back Down (forthcoming “A Takeover Tale,” cultured, Winter 2013) harbingers of a new, more skeptical depiction of teachers? At first, it would seem that public trust in teachers is widespread. When we asked half of the respondents in our survey whether they “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools,” no less than 72 percent say “yes” (see Figure 7). This is almost exactly what Phi Delta Kappan (PDK), a publication sympathetic to teachers unions, found in its 2012 poll and about the same as in PDK polls in previous years.

When we expand the possible response categories, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Only 4 percent of the American public has “complete” trust and confidence in teachers, and just 38 percent has “a lot” of trust and confidence in them. Meanwhile, 49 percent has “some” trust and confidence, and 9 percent has “little” trust and confidence. In other words, 58 percent of those surveyed express less than “a lot of trust and confidence” in the teaching force.

Since this is the first time the public has been asked to break its assessment of teachers into four categories, we cannot document any trends over time. But we do know that public opinion toward teachers unions—and teachers’ opinions of them, too—has turned in a negative direction. The portion who thinks that teachers unions have had a positive effect on their local schools has dropped by 7 percentage points over the past year. Among teachers, the downward shift is no less than 16 percentage points.

In this year’s survey, as we have done in the past, we asked the following question: “Some people say teachers unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Others say that unions fight for better schools and better teachers. What is your opinion? Do you think teachers unions have a generally positive view on your local schools, or do you think they have a generally negative effect?” Respondents could choose among five options: very positive, somewhat positive, neither positive nor negative, somewhat negative, and very negative.

In our polls from 2009 to 2011, we saw little change in public opinion. Around 40 percent of respondents took the neutral position, saying that unions had neither a positive nor a negative impact. The remainder were divided almost evenly, with the negative share just barely exceeding the positive.

This year, however, the teachers unions lost ground. While 41 percent of the public still takes the neutral position, the portion with a positive view of unions dropped 7 percentage points in the last year, from 29 percent to 22 percent.

The drop is even greater, in both magnitude and significance, among our nationally representative sample of teachers. At a time when, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, the National Education Association has lost 150,000 members over the past two years, and projects to lose 200,000 more members by 2014, teacher discontent appears to be rising. Whereas 58 percent of teachers had a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43 percent do so in 2012. Meanwhile, the percentage of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled during this period, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

But when that same question was posed in either/or terms to the public as a whole, respondents split down the middle: 51 percent say unions had a negative impact, while 49 percent say their effect was positive. Teachers, meanwhile, offered a more positive assessment. When forced to choose between just two options, 71 percent of teachers claim that unions are a force for good, whereas 29 percent see them as a stumbling block to reform.

Support for school spending is shaky.

With the U.S. economy trying to crawl back to recovery, an unemployment rate above 8 percent, and state and local governments facing the prospect of insolvency, many school districts have found it necessary to cut expenditures and personnel. In California, the cities of Stockton and San Bernardino have declared bankruptcy. In Michigan, the financially bankrupt Muskegon schools have been handed over to a for-profit charter organization. Cuts in arts programs and extracurricular activities are becoming commonplace. Nationwide, the number of school employees has drifted downward by as much as 5 percent in the past few years.

Still, the American public continues to support increasing spending on local public schools. Or at least it appears to do so (see Figure 8). Sixty-three percent of the general public says it prefers an increase in school expenditures in the local district, well up from levels in 2007 when only 51 percent of the public called for expenditure increases. Not surprisingly, teachers are even more enthusiastic about increasing expenditures, 68 percent of whom like the idea.

When one investigates the issue just a bit further, however, fractures can be detected in the public’s willingness to spend more on public schools. Though most Americans still offer their support for spending increases in the abstract, their enthusiasm ebbs rather substantially when the taxes needed to pay for the increased expenditures are broached and when information about actual expenditures and salaries is provided.

Part of the explanation for this is the widespread ignorance on the part of the general public about just how much already is spent on public schools. When asked to estimate per-pupil expenditure in their district, Americans guess that expenditures are about $6,500 annually, when in fact they are around $12,500. That is only a slightly better set of estimates than the ones given in 2009, when Americans thought $4,231 was being spent per pupil and the reality was closer to $10,000 (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009).

When respondents are told the correct figure, support for spending on public schools shifts sharply downward. Support for increased spending on our standard question drops by 20 percentage points, a much bigger drop than what was observed in 2009, when support for increased spending fell only 8 percentage points (from 46 percent to 38 percent).

In another sign of less-than-wholehearted support for an education spending spree, only 35 percent of the public says taxes should increase to fund the schools. Support drops by another 11 percentage points—to just 24 percent—when those interviewed were first told how much was currently being spent.

Teachers, who stand to benefit from increased expenditure, remain committed to more spending when told the realities of the expenditure situation in their district. Their support slips only 8 percentage points from the high of 68 percent when no information is supplied about current expenditures. But even teachers are 17 percentage points less likely to support higher taxes to fund increases in education spending.

When the subject turns from per-pupil expenditures to teacher salaries, the same pattern emerges (see Figure 9). When asked without any accompanying information, nearly two out of three Americans think that teacher salaries should go up. Among teachers, support for a salary boost registers at no less than 85 percent.

As they do on per-pupil expenditures, however, Americans hold markedly inaccurate views about actual teacher salaries. When asked to hazard a guess, Americans estimate that public school teachers in their states receive, on average, about $36,000 in salary annually. The true figure, even without accounting for benefits, pensions, and the like, sits at about $56,000 nationwide.

Support for higher salaries plummets, however, when Americans are told how much teachers actually make in their states. Of those given the facts, only 36 percent favor an increase, which amounts to a whopping 28-percentage-point decline from the 64 percent favoring an increase when no information is supplied.

When teachers were given accurate information about salary levels in their state, their support slips by only 10 percentage points, probably because they are thinking about their own paycheck. Also, they have a better sense of teacher salaries in their state than the public has, estimating them to be about $44,000 annually.

Is public support for charters really that much higher than for vouchers and tax credits?

As a policy reform, school choice shows no signs of slowing. The number of states with school-voucher and tax-credit programs has escalated since 2010, the number of students attending charter schools climbs steadily year by year, and new technologies for online learning are being promoted by a cascade of new entrepreneurs.

The contours of elite debate about school choice, however, are not replicated in the larger public. While charter schools and digital learning are thought to be the safest choice options for political elites to promote, tax credits are even more popular than charters, and vouchers, the most controversial proposal, also command the support of half the population when the idea is posed in an inviting way.

Vouchers and tax credits. When it comes to school vouchers, apparent levels of public support turn on the wording of the question. For the past two years, PDK has asked whether respondents “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” Even with the rather loaded “at public expense” phrasing, PDK reported that support shifted upward from 34 percent to 44 percent between 2011 and 2012.

If one asks the question in a more inviting manner, as we have, support jumps further still (see Figure 10). Told about a proposal “that would give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition,” 50 percent of the American public comes out in support and 50 percent expresses opposition.

Still, support for vouchers does not match public willingness to back tax credits, even though most economists think the difference between vouchers and tax credits more a matter of style than substance. Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) of the public favors a “tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools.” We find little evidence that support for tax credits has changed significantly since 2011.

Charters. Figure 11 shows that when given a choice of supporting or opposing charter schools, 62 percent of the public says it favors ”the formation of charter schools,” nearly identical to what PDK finds (66 percent favoring ”the idea of charter schools”). Support for charters, however, is softer than it might seem. When respondents are given the opportunity to take a neutral position that neither supports nor opposes charters, no less than 41 percent choose that option. Among the remainder, the split is nearly three to one in favor of charters.

Meanwhile, public knowledge about charters remains as impoverished as ever. As our survey did two years ago, we asked respondents a variety of factual questions: whether charter schools can hold religious services, charge tuition, receive more or less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools, and are legally obligated to admit students randomly when oversubscribed. We found little change in the level of public information over the past two years. Large percentages of respondents still say they don’t know the answers to these questions. Among those who hazard a guess, they are as likely to give the wrong answer as the correct one. Although teachers do a better job of accurately identifying the characteristics of charter schools, even a majority of teachers get many of the answers wrong or say they don’t know.

Online education. As major universities—Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and others—are joining community colleges and state universities in a nationwide dash toward online learning in higher education, many states are exploring ways of incorporating new digital technologies into secondary schools.

A substantial share of both the public and the teaching force seems ready to consider the expansion of online learning. When asked if high school students should be allowed to take “approved classes either online or in school,” opinion splits down the middle, with a bare majority (53 percent to 47 percent) favoring the idea. Teachers are more enthusiastic, among whom no less than 61 percent feel students should be given an online option.

The public, however, is not equally enthusiastic about all uses of the online tool, nor is support for the idea gaining strength. The most popular uses are for rural education and advanced course taking. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed think students in rural areas should have online opportunities, with only 14 percent opposing the idea. That is down modestly from the 64 percent who supported this use in 2008. Similar percentages of support and opposition are expressed for advanced courses taken online for college credit. But once again, levels of support have slipped since 2008 (from 68 percent to 57 percent in 2012).

Less popular are online courses for dropouts and home schoolers. Only 44 percent favor, and 30 percent oppose, using public funding to help dropouts take courses online. Many home schoolers find online courses to be a valuable tool, but the public remains dubious. Only 28 percent favors public funding for such uses, and 38 percent opposes it. Those percentages have not changed materially since 2008.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The Educrats claim this is fair and equitable; children from at-risk populations are often far behind their more affluent peers, and expecting all children to meet the same high standards is unfair, even mean-spirited.  And D.C. school officials are not alone in this effort.  Educrats all over the country have begun to persuade federal education officials to grant waivers from NCLB, adopting the position that it is unfair to label schools as failing when the performance gaps between ethnic groups are so wide and when minority children lag so far behind their White, more affluent peers.  According to a recent article in the Washington Post, twenty-seven of thirty-three states that won waivers from NCLB have established different performance targets for different groups of students.  A recent Education Week analysis of waiver requests from thirty-four states found that only eight states—Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Oregon –set the same target for all students.

Further, the Educrats assert that the new policy of lower standards actually raises performance expectations for minority children because they will have to progress at a faster rate over the same span of time.  For example, over the next five years in Maryland, African American students need to increase their proficiency in reading from 76 to 88 percent (a 12 percent increase over 5 years), while White students need only increase from 92 to 96 percent (a 4 percent increase) over that same period.  Furthermore, the waivers permit schools within the same district to establish different student performance targets, again on the logic that school-to-school differences exist even within the same subgroup of students.

Do you think former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee would have permitted the schools to lower their standards and expectations for children of color?  Certainly not.  Whatever anyone may think of her tenure as D.C. school’s chief, and she had many detractors, she would most certainly have never allowed standards to vary by ethnicity.  Some minority parents agree, asserting that lower standards for their children is a form of prejudice, the “soft bigotry of low expectations” as former President George W. Bush called it.  In a recent article in the Washington Post, Alicia Rucker, a single mother of six, called the new policy “disgraceful.  It’s ridiculous to even believe that if you expect less from someone, you’re going to get more.”  She continued, “We need to have as high expectations for any child in Ward 2 as Ward 7, for any child in Ward 3 as Ward 8.  There should be no difference.”  She is right on at least two points.

First, lowering standards equates to lowering expectations.  There is no industry, profession, or athletic sport in which lowering standards does not lead to lower expectations. While standards and expectations may mean different things in theory, in practice, the two are often used synonymously. Decades of research on effective schools conclusively demonstrates that setting high standards and expectations for all children, but especially those most at-risk of academic failure, creates a more positive, inclusive school culture and raises their level of achievement.  The best teachers and school leaders recognize this and make this part of their daily practice.  Unfortunately, this is often the exception rather than the rule.

Second, let’s not pretend that lowering performance expectations is in the best interests of children.  Although they sometimes don’t demonstrate it on standardized tests, kids are smart, specifically, as it pertains to understanding adults.  Kids know which educators truly care about them and which do not.  And they will pick up in an instant the lowered performance targets and expectations the adults in the system have for them.  In reaction to criticism of the policy, Cate Swinburn, head of data and accountability in the D.C. school system, stated, “In no way does DCPS hold our students to different expectations based on their skin color or language ability or special learning needs”.

Perhaps she is right – the new policy isn’t about the kids.  This new system of different performance targets is all about the adults in the schools, not the children.  For proof, one need only ask, “Who stands most to gain from these new performance targets?”  Teachers will benefit, because by lowering the bar of student achievement, they will rate better on performance evaluations.  School leaders will similarly benefit.  It will certainly improve the morale of teachers and school leaders; after all, who would want to work in a system where the majority of children do not perform at a minimum level of proficiency?  This new policy will help the adults feel better about themselves and their performance.  And having significantly lower numbers of failing schools means that state officials, including some mayors and governors, will not be embarrassed with large numbers of failing schools.  After all, it is difficult to win reelection as the education governor (or state superintendent or mayor) if many of your schools fail to effectively educate all children.

So, if children enter school behind, the new policy essentially recognizes that they will leave school at different levels as well.  If teachers and school leaders cannot eliminate the achievement gap within a decade (as NCLB originally intended, since that was woefully unrealistic), perhaps these relaxed, lower standards will enable those working in schools to bring everyone up to proficiency gradually, over time—perhaps in a generation or two.  I can see how such a policy would be attractive to adults working in the system.

Who are the losers in this new system?  The largest group is those children who will look to their teachers and principals and recognize that they have lower expectations for them than they do for other children.  And, because far fewer schools will be labeled as failing, fewer children and their families will be given at least the opportunity to transfer to a higher performing public school in the district.  This is a win-win situation for school leaders who really don’t want those kids transferring into their schools anyway.  So, this new policy makes it easier for adults working in the system.  Adults win; poor, minority students lose.  Again.

NCLB did set unrealistic goals for student achievement; most everyone knew it at the time.  But that wasn’t important.  What was important is that for the first time, policymakers pushed school leaders to focus explicitly on the achievement gap.  The “no excuses” mindset is what was important; the question of whether it was realistically feasible to do so in a decade was less so.  Words and symbolism matter—a lot.  In the movie Second Hand Lions, Hub, played by Robert Duvall, makes an impassioned plea to his nephew: “Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most…Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.”  Setting high standards and expectations for all students, and expecting everyone in the schools—students, teachers, counselors, principals, and parents—to work hard with a laser-like focus to achieve those expectations, are important words and symbolism.  They convey a clear message about the core values and beliefs of the school system.

More importantly, it establishes a school culture of high standards and expectations today, not at some future point generations distant.  Establishing different standards of success (and of evaluating the adults who educate them) based on the color of children’s skin or on the wealth of their parents is the wrong message to send. Supporters of the new policy can play all the semantic games they want (and they are apparently playing them quite successfully and persuasively with federal education officials), the new standards will slow progress towards closing the achievement gap.  Seriously, does anyone expect the new standards to speed that progress up?  Sandy Kress, a former education aide to President Bush who helped craft NCLB, asked a very commonsense question that the Educrats have not answered: “Why, after 12-plus years, can’t we expect virtually all of our children to achieve at a basic level?” And these most basic standards of proficiency, as Mr. Kress pointed out, are not all that high.  Unfortunately, this belief about setting high standards and expectations for poor children and children of color, upon which decades of research is based, is being systematically discarded by Educrats throughout the country to make the system more fair to the adults working in schools.

Ms. Rucker observed that lowering expectations (making them more realistic) may help mask what are often profound needs in schools in the district.  Her trenchant observation gets at the heart of one major failure of federal and state education policy: the unwillingness or inability of public officials to invest more resources (fiscal, political, and entrepreneurial) into failing schools.  Talk is important but cheap and must be backed up with specific, concrete action plans for improvement.  All too often, state and federal education officials have been unwilling to make such investments, particularly in tight economic times, partly because they often adopt a myopic view of education’s (and educational programs’) return on investment.  Absent targeted reforms backed with human and fiscal capital, even the best efforts to push all students to proficiency and beyond will meet with uneven success.

NCLB shined a light on an all-too-often ignored problem that seemed insurmountable and thus wasn’t discussed in public.  That light is dimmer now, and at-risk children throughout the country will find it even more difficult to find their way in an increasingly competitive, international world.  I suspect Alicia Rucker, that single mother of six who sent her oldest child to (and through) Georgetown, knows more about improving the education of minority children than all the Educrats in D.C. combined.

- Lance Fusarelli

Lance D. Fusarelli is Professor in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Adult & Higher Education at North Carolina State University.

The problem with this story? It’s not true. Despite Mitt Romney’s charge that “President Obama’s policy response to every education challenge has been more federal spending,” on-budget K-12 education expenditure has grown during Obama’s first term at the slowest pace in two decades (aside from the massive, but unlikely to be repeated, infusions of ARRA and Edujobs). Now, RHSU readers know that I’m the last guy to disregard tens of billions in K-12 stimulus funds. But, for better or worse, those funds don’t inflate the K-12 baseline like on-budget increases do.

Let’s look at the numbers: Discretionary appropriations for K-12 education under Obama were $63.5 billion in 2009, $64.1 billion in 2010, $68.3 billion in 2011, and $68.1 billion in 2012. The administration has asked for $69.8 billion in 2013. This means that, even if the administration got its full request in 2013, spending would have increased 9.9% between 2009 and 2013 (and that’s setting aside the looming sequester). That’s the slowest rate of on-budget edu-spending growth in the past two decades.

In fact, spending growth has been much slower under Obama than it was under Republican George W. Bush or the budget-balancing Bill Clinton (who famously proclaimed “the era of big government is over”). During Bush’s first term, between 2001 and 2005, spending grew substantially–from $42.2 billion to $56.6 billion (or by 34%). And even in Bush’s second term, which included the start of the Great Recession, spending increased from $56.6 billion to $63.5 billion, or by 12.2%. Obama’s edu-spending has also grown more slowly than did Clinton’s. During Clinton’s first term, from 1993 to 1997, spending rose from $23.8 billion to $26.6 billion, or by 11.7%. During his second term, spending rocketed up from $26.6 billion to $42.2 billion, or by 59%.

The infusion of edu-dollars in the stimulus and the drama that’s surrounded Race to the Top has obscured these figures. Plus, the reality is inconvenient for everyone’s narrative. Obama has repeatedly touted his K-12 investments; he’s called for hiring 100,000 new teachers and has run ads championing smaller class size. It’d be a little off-message to brag that he’s grown on-budget edu-spending at the slowest rate in two decades. And Romney’s been eager to paint Obama as a big spender; he’s got no reason to point out that Obama has actually been far more penurious than George W. Bush on this count.

The bottom line: there was a burst of edu-spending between 1997 and 2005, under Clinton and Bush. But on-budget spending has slowed remarkably since ’05 and there’s a lot more of that in store. The math is simple: the federal government is spending a trillion dollars a year it doesn’t have, entitlements are on an unsustainable course, and nobody wants to raise taxes on the 98% of families earning less than $250,000 a year. This means that discretionary federal spending, across the board, will face continued pressure–and that’ll be true under either Obama or Romney.

Those who dream of increasing federal spending on education will probably have to wait on broad-based tax increases and substantial entitlement cuts. Now, raising the retirement age from 67 to 69 would save trillions, and raising premiums on Medicare Part B could save $500 billion or more over the next decade. Raising income tax rates on middle-class families could generate trillions. But all of this is highly unlikely.

The reality for those who would champion a lot of new federal education spending is that no one has shown much inclination to tackle any of this. For instance, Vice President Biden recently guaranteed that “there will be no changes in Social Security,” even though the actuaries report that Social Security will be broke by 2033. Meanwhile, Romney has been equally unwilling to stand up to seniors. Romney’s campaign has argued that President Obama cut billions from Medicare to pay for his health care overhaul. And while the Romney/Ryan budget promises a long-overdue approach to rethinking Medicare, Robert Samuelson accurately observed in a recent Washington Post piece, “The Ryan budget spares older people from almost any change or sacrifice.”

It’s a safe bet that an Obama victory will mean more federal funding for education than would a Romney victory. But, either way, federal edu-spending is going to be on a lean diet for a good, long while.

- Rick Hess

This blog entry first appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The role of teacher unions in education politics and policy is deeply polarizing. Critics (often including ourselves) typically assert that these organizations are the prime obstacles to needed reforms in K–12 schooling, while defenders (typically, also, supporters of the education status quo) insist that they are bulwarks of professionalism and safeguards against caprice and risky innovation.

Yet these arguments have rested on little but anecdote, opinion, and personal observation. There’s been scant real information on how much teacher unions matter, how exactly they seek to wield influence, and whether they wield more of it in some places than others.

There’s plenty of conventional wisdom, to be sure, mostly along the lines of, “unions are most powerful where every teacher must belong to them and every district must bargain with them and least consequential in ‘right-to-work’ states.”

But is that really true? Even if it is, does it oversimplify a more complex and nuanced situation?

In a major study we released this week together with Education Reform Now, How Strong Are U.S. Teacher Unions: A State-By-State Comparison, we dug deep, churning vast amounts of data to parse the differences in political strength across state-level unions in the fifty states plus the District of Columbia.

Let us acknowledge that it’s not a perfect analysis. Let us admit that its conclusions are more nuanced, even equivocal, than we at Fordham are accustomed to. And let us also recognize that, even as we were gathering and analyzing all that data, multiple factors—economic woes, party shifts, court decisions, changing policy agendas, the arrival of many new players—conspired to produce enormous flux in precisely the realms that we were examining.

Some union leaders are thrilled to wield that cudgel against our report, even terming it “laughable” and “silly.” AFT President Randi Weingarten said it appeared to be “deeply flawed and misleading” and faulted it for omitting poverty in the analysis. (She didn’t say whose poverty. The states’? The kids’? The teachers’? We did, in fact, examine the resource levels of state unions themselves.)

But of course they wouldn’t like it. They don’t want to be studied or compared. They go to great lengths to conceal information about the means by which they wield power. If they lauded our analysis, you would and should be suspicious of it.

In the end, we learned a ton from it—about individual states, about national patterns, about unexpected relationships, and about surprising exceptions. The report itself provides vast detail and is worth examining, but here are a few highlights:

Click to enlarge

• As the map shows, and as you likely expected, the strongest unions are generally found on the West Coast, in the Northeast, and in the industrial Midwest; the South is mostly the province of relatively weak unions. But there are surprises. Hawaii, currently perched on the edge of a teacher strike, might be unknown to many as union-central. Likewise, Montana and Alabama punch well above their reputational weights.

• Thirty-two states require local school boards to bargain collectively with their teachers, fourteen states permit local boards to do this, and five states prohibit collective bargaining altogether (Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia).• Teacher strikes, like the one recently concluded in Chicago, are legal in fourteen states and illegal in thirty-seven.

• Twenty-three states are “right-to-work” states, meaning that they prohibit unions from collecting “agency fees” from non-members. Twenty-eight jurisdictions allow such fees.

• In the 2010 election cycle, teacher unions in twenty-two states were among the top ten overall donors (excluding individual donations) to candidates for governor, legislature, high court, and elected education positions. In twenty-one states, they were among the top five highest-giving interest groups. In Colorado and Indiana, they ranked first.

• In just two states (Pennsylvania and New Jersey) did our survey of insiders unanimously deem teacher unions the most influential entities in shaping education policy over a recent three-year period. But survey respondents in twenty states found them to be generally more influential than other entities (including the state school board, state superintendent, governor, legislators, business interests, and advocacy groups).

• Despite all of that, the unions’ influence may be waning. For the three years prior to 2011, education policies in most states reflected union priorities. But in 2011’s legislative sessions (after 2010’s historic Republican surge), a growing number of lawmakers enacted policies that were less in line with union priorities.

We could not systematically link our rankings of union strength to state-level student achievement. Only a few of our data points (like teacher-employment policies) are apt to affect achievement directly. Others, like spending on education, could “touch” students indirectly, but there’s no strong evidence to support their link to achievement. We also have a timing problem since many state policies are in flux and don’t align with point-in-time snapshots of achievement. More important, we know that many other factors at both the state and local levels—poverty included, Randi!—affect how much and how well students learn, so postulating a relationship between state-level union activity and student achievement would be an oversimplification.

Having said that, we can’t resist eyeballing whether policies in a few high-performing states are more in line with the positions of reformers or of teacher unions. Take, for example, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Maryland. These three states, which, along with Florida, have significantly outpaced the rest of the country in student-achievement gains since the early 1990s, are often viewed as bastions of union influence. To be sure, they all have lots of unionized teachers. But when union strength is considered more holistically, these states show up toward the middle of the pack (nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third, respectively).

No, we can’t claim that weakened unions alone will result in student-achievement gains. Still, suffice it to say that no one can claim with a straight face: “Want to boost student outcomes? Empower the teachers unions!” Which means, to our eyes at least, that what groups like Democrats for Education Reform, Stand for Children, and StudentsFirst are doing to challenge the hegemony of the unions is appropriate, important, and good for the country.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Mike Petrilli

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

The Good:

Especially through Race to the Top, the administration aggressively encouraged states to uproot anachronistic institutional barriers when it comes to things like data firewalls and charter caps. This kind of support made it possible for governors and legislators to rally the votes needed to overcome opposition from unions, school boards, and others reluctant to change the status quo.

The administration, under the savvy hand of Jim Shelton, championed smart, more rigorous standards of evidence in designing the Investing in Innovation program (i3). One result was that naming the exercise an “innovation” fund turned the word into a misnomer; but the big upside was that i3 created a precedent for funding promising nontraditional operators on an equal footing with districts and schools of education.

The i3 effort was just one example of the Department’s admirable willingness to treat new charter school operators, teacher training programs, and tool builders as full and legitimate providers. In doing this via RTT, i3, and in public remarks, the administration showed an admirable commitment to helping dynamic, high-quality providers pose a “jurisdictional challenge” to the existing monopolies and oligopolies (in the parlance of Harvard’s Jal Mehta and Johns Hopkins’s Steven Teles).

The administration also did a terrific job wielding the bully pulpit. Secretary Duncan admirably noted the “New Normal” and publicly discussed the need to do better with the dollars schools currently have. He flagged the problems with simple-minded NCLB metrics and made clear the need to rethink the law’s crude accountability system and remedy cascade. He also did an impressive job broadening the national K-12 reform conversation to include teacher quality, school choice, school improvement, and school safety.

The Bad:

The Department undermined cost-effective efforts by making excuses for districts while showering on new dollars, as well as by touting the need to add or preserve K-12 jobs in promoting Edujobs and celebrating ARRA. I was particularly taken by the state-by-state mock-ups that showed how many education jobs were “saved” by the stimulus, and by Secretary Duncan telling the press two year agos that districts had been cutting their budgets for a half-decade or more (false) and had already cut “through, you know, fat, through flesh, and into bone.”

Also, the administration missed the opportunity posed by the “New Normal” to push for more informative bookkeeping and accounting, so that we can start to more accurately compare costs and determine bang-for-buck across districts and programs.

More to the point, the Obama administration didn’t distinguish those areas where federal action is useful and those where it is less likely to be so. In particular, it ignored the simple admonition that the federal government can make states and districts do things, but it can’t make them do them well–and therefore, the feds ought to be cautious about dictating action in realms where how things are done matters far more than whether they’re done (e.g. when it comes to teacher evaluation or school improvement). Along the way, the administration turned RTT and ESEA waivers into an exercise seemingly uninformed by an understanding of what ED can do effectively given the design of the federal system.

The Department soaked up limited state education agency bandwidth with RTT, while committing to union sign-offs and buy-in that yielded timid or hard-to-enforce pledges on school improvement and teacher quality. The result encouraged big schemes for new spending and led to the enthusiastic touting of jargon-laden, ambiguous applications consisting of cut-and-paste promises (along with the odd Maya Angelou poem) stitched together by consultants. I still can’t believe, with every state now out of compliance with its promised plan, that journalists aren’t revisiting those RTT applications to make fun of the hundreds of pages of ludicrous promises and unintelligible edu-jargon.

As with the Bush administration before it, the Obama administration has seemed to reduce school improvement to “gap-closing,” treating the needs of already-proficient and advanced students as a peripheral concern. At the same time, it has added a newly partisan dimension to the federal education debate by establishing a worrisome precedent with its novel approach to ESEA waivers and by functionally nationalizing the Common Core effort.

One final word. Though the administration has worried me at times, I want to go on record as saying that I think this is a Department staffed by smart, committed people who are trying to do what they think is right for the nation. Now, I disagree with them a lot (less based on principle and more because I don’t think they ultimately have an especially sound grasp of what the feds can and can’t do usefully when it comes to schooling). But they’re good people, they’ve worked hard in unusual circumstances, they’ve shown an interest in dissent, they’ve engaged critics, and-whether one agrees or disagrees with them on this or that call-it’s important to give credit where credit is due.

- Rick Hess

This blog entry first appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

The wage piece of the deal is likely to add about $74 million per year over the next four years to a municipal budget that is already deeply in the red. The extra dollars that go into wages will be taken out of other budgets, rendering classrooms and other facilities less suitable than before. The moderately stiffer standards for teacher evaluation, both before and after tenure, may make marginal improvements in teaching performance, but none that will be significant in the short term. The overall dismal performance of the Chicago public school system, with its 60 percent graduation rate, will remain more or less what it has been.

The recent news affirms that public education in Chicago and other major cities needs to be fundamentally overhauled. The first item on the reform list should be the collective bargaining system, which has taken over public education for the last fifty or so years. Collective bargaining has its roots in the private sector, where it received a huge boost from the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

The act allowed workers to band together to select, by secret ballot, a union of their choice to represent them in direct negotiations with the employer, who was bound to negotiate with them in good faith over all relevant terms and conditions of employment. Even in the private sphere, the decision to legitimate collective bargaining was a major policy mistake whose negative influences remain manifest to this present day.

Competitive Markets, Thwarted

Left to their own devices, labor markets are highly competitive. The protection that any worker has against his employer does not rest on endless rounds of bargaining backed by the threat of strike, but in his ability to leave his job to work for another employer who offers higher wages and better terms. No firm, therefore, can keep workers at artificially low wages so long as free entry is allowed by new firms. The competitive labor market allows many small adjustments, which on average tie wage levels to overall productivity, not to the artificial scarcity created under the NLRA.

The presence of a union changes all of that. With unions, the market is no longer as competitive because the union holds a monopoly enforced by law when it becomes the exclusive bargaining agent for its members. Under competition, wages tend to converge to a single point, so that the bargaining range—the gap between the most that the employer is willing to pay and the least that the worker will accept—shrinks.

In perfect competition, which we never see, all wages are uniquely determined, so that all transactions take place virtually costlessly on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The rate of job formation is high, and the costs per transaction are low, so few scarce resources are squandered in setting the wages and conditions of employment.

Union monopoly power expands that bargaining range. To keep it simple, assume that the employer can remain in business if it pays a wage of $25 per hour, and the workers are willing to stay employed at $15 per hour. Each side has a strong incentive to hold out for its preferred outcome, even at the cost of protracted and heated negotiations where both sides are posturing. Their bargaining threats become credible so long as workers are prepared to strike and employers are prepared to lockout workers if a deal is not reached. In most cases, these negotiations do produce a deal after both sides suffer high transaction costs, but in some fraction of cases they do not.

Advocates of the NLRA in 1935 hailed the law as a way to bring “industrial peace” to the troubled world of management-labor relations. But once the enforced labor truce of World War II came to an end, the “strike wave” of 1946 led to some important revisions of the NLRA that cut back on union power. But those changes did nothing to reintroduce competitive employment markets.

Over time, union power dwindled, not because the bargaining structure was reformed, but because deregulation and greater foreign competition left labor fewer monopoly profits to extract in key industries such as automobile and steel. With less to offer, union ranks have shrunk to, today, about seven percent of the market from a high of about 35 percent in the mid-1950s.

The Tyranny of Public Unions

Public unions have been exempt in large measure from these global changes, given that public education is run by a dominant firm—one with the lion’s share of the market that its small fringe competitors cannot displace. Today, the monopoly position of the teachers remains strong enough that they can muscle their way to a new contract.

But it is important to note the collateral damage that this bargaining process causes. There are about 350,000 students in the Chicago public schools, and each of their families had to scramble for seven days to adapt to the strike dislocations. Estimate the cost of these frantic last-minute arrangements at $20 per day per family, and the daily losses from the strike equal about $7 million per day or about $50 million for the strike period, which comes to about one-sixth of the salary gains that the teachers received.

Yet note this critical difference between the parents’ losses and the teachers’ gains. The wage increases were, at best, transfer payments from the public treasury to the teachers—a maneuvering of funds that will neither increase nor decrease the overall social welfare, given that typically a dollar in the hands of one party is worth as much as it is in the hands of another.

Progressives often challenge this assumption, but are hard-pressed to show that dollars are worth more in the hands of teachers than they are in the hands of parents. The key point is that these high wage settlements are likely to decrease social welfare if they contribute to the deterioration of the public finances of the city, making it all the more likely that it will default on its future obligations, especially its sorely underfunded pension plans. The short-term losses of the parents, by contrast, were not simple transfer payments. They were dead-weight social losses needed to repair the damage caused by the strike.

The overall social losses run even higher, given the ripple effects of the strike on third parties. These include private employers, whose routines were disrupted, and businesses and shops, which lost business.

In addition, the resolution of this episode before disaster struck is likely to further entrench the current system of gladiatorial combat between management and labor, which, in turn, increases long-term instability in the education sector in at least two ways. First, at the conclusion of this contract, the same cycle of negotiations will occur yet one more time. Second, the continued operation of the system is likely to expose the soft-underbelly of modern public finance—the underfunded pension plans crying out for reforms that union leaders, along with other public employees, resist.

The Pension Quagmire

The root of this difficulty is that both sides in public-employee negotiations find it in their interest to reduce the wage portion of the overall collective bargaining agreement—which, in the case of the Chicago public school teachers, is quite high at over $75,000 per year—in favor of larger pension benefits under a “defined benefits” plan. Such a plan places the risk of financial shortfall squarely on the public treasury.

The original motivation for defined-benefit plans is that a large financial system is better able to cushion the blow of market fluctuations than individual employees. But, in practice, the great risk to this approach is that it leads both sides to understate the cost of these liabilities by overstating the anticipated rate of return on the assets—often at a ludicrous eight percent—which are set aside to fund the program.

The alternative “defined contribution” system caps the liability of the public employer at the amount of the contribution, and then requires the individual employee to manage that fund, usually by diversifying assets, in ways that minimize the economic risks. Unfortunately, half-hearted efforts to switch future employees, and only future employees, to this plan will do nothing to avert the financial melt-down that is likely to come when these plans fail in the coming decades.

The Charter School Alternative

Fiddling with the collective bargaining system will do nothing to counter the system’s short-term political instability (from strikes) and its long-term insolvency (from excessive pension obligations). The political opposition to dismantling the public bargaining system is too ferocious to overcome. The best tactic, therefore, is to sap teachers unions of their power by supporting a competitive charter school system.

Under the charter school system, the city government continues to fund the schools but leaves separate and competing systems to run the schools and hire the teachers. This competitive environment reduces the gains that teachers get from unionization, and forces them to face savvy school administrators who know full well that unionization of their schools can easily be their death warrant. It has not gone unnoticed that during the Chicago strike, about 50,000 students continued their education uninterrupted in charter schools.

Defenders of public school teachers make the “bold progressive” case that charter school teachers earn, on average, eight-percent less than their unionized rivals. But they are wrong to think that this wage differential points to the weakness of the charter school system. The lower wages cannot count as an overall disadvantage of the system because of the tax relief that they confer on the system as a whole. In addition, it is risky to claim that lower wages impose a hardship on teachers, who often desire these coveted positions.

Further, the absence of unions means the absence of union dues and union work obligations, which together could easily account for a quarter to a half of the total wage differential. Additionally, charter school teachers do not face the risks of work disruptions through strike, with the attendant financial and emotional risks. And working in these environments has the advantage of forging more productive relations with school administrators because of the absence of restrictive union work rules that contribute to daily standoffs between management and labor.

There are today endless studies that compare the relative efficiency of charter schools to regular public schools. These reports have been used to critique and laud charter schools in equal measures. But the bottom line seems to be that for inner city students, charter schools offer some systematic long-term improvement, which accounts for the long-waiting lists of students desperate to escape the public school monopoly.

The preferred public policy should therefore allow more charters to be issued and fewer government restrictions to be placed on the formation and  operation of such schools. That will in turn put greater pressure on public school systems to clean up their own acts, if only to retain students.

Such competition will also give added impetus to the generally salutary, but not transformative, Race to the Top initiative of the Obama administration, championed by Arne Duncan, himself the former head (2001-2008) of the Chicago Public Schools.

In the end, the real driver of educational reform must be competition from new entrants, blessed, not regulated, by local governments.

Richard A. Epstein, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

This article appeared first on Defining Ideas, the Hoover Institution’s online journal.

Behind the Headline
The Long Reach of Teachers’ Unions
Education Next| Fall 2010

In this morning’s New York Times, Motoko Rich writes about the growth in donations made by teachers unions to support Republican candidates. Mike Antonucci had an article about the wide range of candidates and groups that teachers unions were supporting in the Fall 2010 issue of Ed Next. He wrote

If you think it’s far-fetched to suggest that a teachers union could play the role of political kingmaker, think again. The largest political campaign spender in America is not a megacorporation, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft, or ExxonMobil. It isn’t an industry association, like the American Bankers Association or the National Association of Realtors. It’s not even a labor federation, like the AFL-CIO. If you combine the campaign spending of all those entities it does not match the amount spent by the National Education Association, the public-sector labor union that represents some 2.3 million K–12 public school teachers and nearly a million education support workers (bus drivers, custodians, food service employees), retirees, and college student members.

-Education Next

Thanks a bunch, CTU.

This strike—the first big one by teachers in ages—will be examined every which way for months to come, and the contract that was finally agreed upon will be carefully autopsied. (If you’d like to see a careful analysis of a previous Chicago teacher contract, download Fordham’s Leadership Limbo report and flip to page fifty. If you’d like to inspect the contract that was in force until a couple of months ago—be warned that it’s 176 pages long!—you can access it from the National Council on Teacher Quality’s website.)

As for the new contract, my friends at NCTQ are more bullish than I am. Rick Hess’s take seems closer to the mark. Yes, it contains a handful of features from Rahm’s reform shopping list. But every one of them was weakened, diluted, deferred, or made very expensive for a city that can ill afford the added cost.

Here is what the CTU said to its own members in advance of Tuesday’s ratification vote:

Cities everywhere have been forced to adopt performance pay. Not here in Chicago! Months ago, CTU members won a strike authorization vote that our enemies thought would be impossible- now we have stopped the Board from imposing merit pay! We preserved our lanes and steps when the politicians and press predicted they were history. We held the line on healthcare costs….

And here’s what AFT president Randi Weingarten said in hailing the ratification:

CTU President Karen Lewis and her leadership team, with whom the AFT worked closely throughout this process, have represented their members well and made clear that their concerns go beyond wages and benefits to include all the issues affecting their students’ education. They demonstrated that collective bargaining is an essential tool to strengthen public schools.

But of course that’s precisely what this episode did not demonstrate. What it demonstrated was that what teacher unions care about has practically nothing to do with what’s good for the kids and everything to do with what teachers want for themselves. They are fundamentally selfish.

You can say that’s what unions exist to do. I don’t know for sure if the late Albert Shanker actually did declare that “when kids vote in union elections, that’s when I’ll worry about them” or words to that effect. But yes, it’s a fact that unions look after their members.

Let them then not pretend otherwise, despite all this talk by Randi Weingarten and Karen Lewis about the new CTU contract being in the best interest of Chicago’s schoolchildren. It’s not. Rahm’s original proposals were—and were more affordable, to boot.

We’ve seen a few instances in recent years of labor unions eventually realizing that the health of their industry and the quality of its products actually bear, in the long run, on their own jobs and well-being. The United Auto Workers eventually figured that out with regard to the U.S. auto industry. But not until Detroit’s “Big Three” were collapsing. And other major industries actually did collapse—“Big Steel,” for instance—in large part because their unions never got the message that it was bad for them to have those jobs move to Korea or Brazil.

Other industries—look at the airlines—have to declare bankruptcy in order to get out from under labor contracts that are, in fact, helping to bankrupt them. That’s because their unions were (and are), like the CTU, attending only to the interests, priorities, and preferences of the employees who belong to them.

By week two of the Chicago strike, I suspect, residents of the Windy City were figuring this out. At the outset, they tended to blame Rahm, not the CTU, for the walkout. But when a compromise was struck by district and union representatives—a compromise, I repeat, that is about the employees’ interests, not the kids’ or the taxpayers’—and the union still continued to strike for two utterly unnecessary days, Chicago’s parents and voters must have realized that this was indeed about selfish employees, not provocative mayors.

And that, I believe, is the principal long-term good that may come out of this for the country as a whole. Whitney Tilson got it right when he commented the other day that

the outrageous, selfish, greedy behavior by the union is an absolute godsend to we [sic] reformers. Parents in Chicago – and everyone else who’s paying attention across the country – are so mad that they can’t see straight – and it’s now 100% directed at the union. This will benefit us in Chicago and nationally for years to come. This type of behavior isn’t an outlier of course: so many teachers unions in cities and states all over the country are so disconnected from reality, so arrogant, and so used to bullying everyone that they do self-destructive things like this regularly, greatly diminishing whatever public support they might have. It may well be the greatest asset we reformers have.

Let’s hope he’s right. Then let’s make the most of it.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

Jay Greene takes on the issue in a wonderfully sassy post  headlined “In Chicago—Phony Merit Pay is Dead, Long Live True Merit Pay.” He recognizes that the ink isn’t dry on the deal hammered out between the Chicago Public Schools and the striking Chicago Teachers Union, but he suggests that it was a blessing (in disguise?) that CPS gave up on its attempt at “differentiated compensation” but retained the right to open new charter schools. As Greene argues, the former is “phony” merit pay and the latter is “true” merit pay:

In phony merit pay—the kind that hardly exists in any industry—there is a mechanistic calculation of performance that determines the size of a small bonus that is provided in addition to a base salary that is essentially guaranteed regardless of performance. You can stink and still keep your job and pay. The worst that can happen is you miss out on some or all of a modest bonus. To make it even more phony, in the few cases where this kind of phony merit pay has been tried, the game is often rigged so that virtually all employees are deemed meritorious and get at least some of the bonus.

Greene says that the most effective merit pay system is the one that gets you the best teachers.  As he writes,

The net effect of growing charter schools, closing under-enrolled traditional public schools, and only hiring back the best and most desired teachers from those schools is a true merit pay system. Bad teachers are let go. Good teachers not only get their job back, but they also get an extremely generous pay raise over the next four years for staying and being good. That’s real merit pay.

At a more micro level, recent research by Freakonomics co-author and University of Chicago professor Steven Levitt, Harvard professor and MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner Roland Fryer, Chicago’s John List, and University of California San Diego’s Sally Sadoff, supports this seemingly harsh view of performance-boosting incentives (for a quick introduction, read Amber Winker’s analysis). National Public Radio’s Shankar Vedantam took up the question this morning, interviewing John List about the group’s “loss aversion” study of 150 K-8 teachers in the Chicago Heights school district, a hard-scrabble community twenty miles south of Chicago proper where almost all the students are poor and only 64 percent meet minimum proficiency standards. The researchers divided the teachers into three groups, as Vedantam says,

One group got no incentive; they just went about their school year as usual. A second group was promised a bonus if their students did well at math.
The third group is where the psychology came in: The teachers were given a bonus of $4,000 upfront — but it had a catch. If student math performance didn’t improve, teachers had to sign a contract promising to return some or all of the money.

The third group burned up the competition. “Teachers who were paid in advance and [were] asked to give the money back if their students did not perform,” List tells NPR, “—their [students'] test scores were actually out of the roof: two to three times higher than the gains of the teachers in the traditional bonus group.” List said he believed that the loss aversion incentive was so successful because it made teachers focus on the kids who were not mastering the material and stick with them until they got it.

Writing about the study last July, The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann called it a “major breakthrough.”

There are, of course, the caveats; the data on reading scores, for instance, said Weissmann, were “shakier, since most students ultimately had more than one instructor working with them on language skills.”

And then there’s the politics of the thing. As Vedantam notes, “List warned that the bonus system needed buy-in from teachers. Teaching isn’t like making widgets; it requires motivation and passion. If teachers feel they are being manipulated rather than encouraged to improve their performance, they could end up looking for other lines of work.” Or they might just choke under the pressure. “From the perspective of a teacher’s union,” says Weissmann, “it’s easy to see how this would make the [merit pay] concept even more unpalatable—who wants to subject themselves to the stress of seeing their bonus stripped away?”

This is where we come back to Jay Greene. A brand-new system (“non-unionized,” in Greene’s view) offers the advantage of starting fresh. Knowing the rules going in—e.g., that you will be judged on performance (yours and your students) and that you could lose your job—makes it much easier to establish a collaborative and school-based incentive system.  As Kathleen Porter-Magee suggests, “Top-down systems that bypass or undermine school leaders rarely produce excellence in the classroom.”  In this case, the “top-down” applies just as well to federal and state bureaucrats as it does to organized labor.

So, though the ink isn’t dry yet, Chicagoans may have dodged a bullet without knowing it. The new CTU contract will not have the “phony” merit pay (differentiated pay) but will have the “real” thing (school autonomy). Whether it becomes an Edvard Munch moment is anyone’s guess. But it should be better for students.

-Peter Meyer

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

That’s not an accident. The local and national unions surely realized, after an onslaught of negative coverage, that complaining about 16 percent raises on top of $75,000 average salaries was not a winning argument during a period of 8 percent unemployment. So they changed their talking points: Now the teachers were upset about evaluations that would link their performance reviews with students’ test scores. But that position is unpopular, too—and puts the union at odds with President Obama—so now they are striking over…class sizes and air conditioning?

Right.

This is akin to the Republican defense of the dubious “Voter ID” laws: That they are necessary to protect against voter fraud. Everyone knows they are a cynical ploy to suppress the participation of poor and minority citizens—likely Democratic voters. But GOP officials can’t admit that. So they obfuscate.

So it is with the Chicago Teachers Union. It’s the meat-and-potatoes issue of pay and benefits that has been front and center during the months-long negotiations; to argue otherwise is simply dishonest.

And what about the issue of “respect”? The idea that Rahmbo is trying to steamroll the unions on his way to becoming an “imperial” mayor?

This is getting closer to the truth. The unions—in Chicago and other big cities—grew accustomed over the past four decades to holding veto power over all key education decisions. When leaders wanted reform, they needed to accept union-approved, watered-down versions—or pay up. As Rick Hess has argued, the more-money-for-more-reform bargain greased the wheels of compromise during flush times—but is unsustainable during today’s New Normal of flat-lined revenues and gaping deficits.

To be sure, many teachers (in Chicago and nationwide) feel blamed, discouraged, demoralized, and afraid; those sentiments were on display in the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher. The brash rhetoric and take-no-prisoners tactics of reformers—elected and otherwise—surely contribute to this dynamic (along with watching many colleagues get pink slips as districts try to close budget holes).

But such frustrations aren’t why the teachers of the Windy City took to the streets and sent the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans into disarray. Workers in all sectors of the economy experience stress and slights; it’s part of life. But most don’t walk off the job.

No, this is ultimately about power. The unions are feeling whipsawed by tectonic shifts that have occurred within the Democratic Party in recent years, with Democrats for Education Reform creating space for political leaders—from the mayor’s office to the Oval Office—to challenge them on fundamental issues. (And of course there are the charter schools, still open for business, which challenge the union’s monopoly to boot.) As a Chicago teacher told the local news before the strike, “We didn’t start this fight. We’re only defending ourselves.”

She’s right, in a way: For decades there was no fighting, just abdicating, as Democratic city officials gave the unions pretty much everything they wanted. (That’s why there have been so few teacher strikes in the past couple of decades.) Those days are over; the unions aren’t happy about it. Yet even as this week’s organized-labor tantrum winds down, it already feels more like a reminder of a past era or a last gasp than a sign of things to come.

-Mike Petrilli

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

It’s rarely wise for administrators (or school boards, or mayors) to pick unnecessary fights, but it’s also unwise to shy away from those that need to be fought through on behalf of the public interest.

School systems like Chicago’s face many opportunities for collaboration with teachers unions. For example, preparing to teach to the new, higher “Common Core” standards is an effort best done together, with the expertise of front-line teachers playing a key role.

But there are other times when the interests of the teachers and those of the broader public are not the same. Especially when money is tight, administrators (and elected officials like Rahm Emmanuel) have a duty to look out for the public fisc. More cash for teacher salaries, as the Chicago Teachers Union is demanding, means less for everything else—after-school programs, early childhood initiatives, police, public health, everything. Leaders need to hold the line.

Likewise with the issue of job security. Unions are built to protect their members’ jobs and pensions, regardless of performance. The public, on the other hand, is best served when administrators put the most effective teachers in the classroom, and ask the least effective to find other lines of work. In a system like Chicago’s, where declining enrollment and excess capacity is going to force leaders to close dozens of schools, these closely held values—call them fairness versus meritocracy—are in direct conflict with one another. Happy talk about “collaboration” won’t sugarcoat that fact.

Conflict is unavoidable—at least if we want our politicians, school boards, and administrators to do the job that we must trust them to do on behalf of children, taxpayers, and the nation’s future.

-Mike Petrilli

The roadblock? A federal “maintenance of effort” (MOE) requirement in the Individuals With Disabilities Act (IDEA, the federal special-education law) that handcuffs states and districts by requiring that special-ed spending never decline from one year to the next. In times of plenty, this mandate discourages efforts to make productivity gains; when revenues shrink, it means that special-education spending will consume an ever-growing slice of school budgets.

For one brief shining moment, Secretary Duncan appeared ready to end the MOE silliness. Then he caved to the powerful special-education lobby, which refused to accept anything other than expenditures escalating into perpetuity.

While economic realities alone should be reason enough to jettison requirements that dictate a spend-spend-spend approach to special ed, a new Fordham study by Nathan Levenson provides an even more compelling reason for doing away with MOE: Spending more on special ed simply may not do much for kids.

How is this possible? While public education is never very hospitable to innovation, efficiency, or productivity boosters, special education has generally been downright hostile. Despite statutory and regulatory tweaks from time to time, our approach hasn’t really changed since the federal law was passed more than thirty-five years ago, even as so much else in K–12 education has changed in important ways. That does not, regrettably, mean our traditional approach has worked well. Indeed, change is desperately needed in this corner of the K–12 world, as any look at the (woeful) achievement data or (skyrocketing) spending data for special-needs students demonstrates. To oversimplify just a bit, general (i.e., “regular”) education is now focused on academic outcomes, but special education remains fixated on inputs, ratios, and services.

That’s a shame, since the same basic dysfunctions that ail general education afflict special education too: middling (or worse) teacher quality; an inclination to throw “more people” at any problem; a reluctance to look at cost-effectiveness; a crazy quilt of governance and decision-making authorities; a tendency to add rather than replace or redirect; and a full-on fear of results-based accountability. Yet the fates (as well as the budgets) of general and special education are joined. In many schools, the latter is the place to stick the kids who have been failed by the former—a major cause of the sky-high special-education-identification rates in many states and districts. Further, there exists in many locales the unrealistic expectation that every neighborhood (and charter) school should be able to serve every youngster with special needs at a high level.

Enter Levenson, former superintendent of the Arlington (MA) Public Schools. In his new study, Boosting the Quality and Efficiency of Special Education, he and his team identified school districts that get similar (or superior) results for special-education students as their peer districts, yet do so at significantly lower cost. They are doing right by kids and right by the bottom line. Both at once. And their practices are eminently imitate-able.

Levenson & co. also developed a national database on special-ed spending—the largest and most detailed ever built. It contains information from almost 1,500 districts, representing 30 percent of U.S. schoolchildren. The database shows that special-education spending and staffing vary wildly—much more so than it does for regular education. Principally driving this variation are huge district-to-district differences in staffing levels.

Some districts hire almost three times more special-ed teachers (per thousand students) than do others. The difference for paraprofessionals (teachers’ aides) is greater than four times. Levenson calculates that, if the high-spending districts adjusted their staffing levels in line with national norms, the country could save (or redirect) $10 billion annually. That’s not chump change! For example, it’s more than twice the total sums invested (over multiple years) in Race to the Top.

The potential for additional savings—and better services for kids—is greater still. To its discredit, longstanding federal law bars the teams that develop Individualized Education Programs for disabled pupils from considering the cost of the interventions and services that they are recommending. Untangling federal barriers to efficiency and effectiveness in special education is the job of Congress—yet no one in Washington seems the least bit interested in tackling an IDEA reauthorization anytime soon. That’s a huge mistake.

Levenson draws on his research to offer a few simple, but assuredly not simplistic, solutions. Make general education better, he says, so that fewer kids get directed into special education. Once youngsters are in special education, design interventions for them that take cost-effectiveness into account—a benefit both for the kids and for the taxpayer. Focus on recruiting better teachers, not more teachers (and aides, specialists, etc.)—for general and special education alike. And scrupulously manage their caseloads.

Districts and states should take these lessons to heart, but the simplest fix supported by Levenson’s findings must occur at the federal level: End maintenance-of-effort requirements that are both inefficient and ineffective. As special-education costs eat into general-education coffers—a trend that is almost certain to continue in the lean years ahead—we suspect that education leaders, policymakers, and taxpayers alike (maybe even the parents and teachers of children with disabilities), will feel impelled to make our perplexing and inefficient special-education system a little less so.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

I appreciate the intuitive appeal of Rotherham’s argument; it was a similar concern about backing away from NCLB’s lofty goals that led me to attack an earlier set of tweaks way back in 2005. But on this one, Andy’s got it wrong, and Virginia officials have it right. As David Foster, the president of Virginia’s state board of education told the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton, “If you just set an arbitrary target without regard for what’s achievable and where they’re starting from, you’re just shooting in the dark. That was the whole problem with No Child Left Behind. It made no sense to say that by an arbitrary year. . . every child everywhere in this vast country would pass every math and reading test. We made a joke of the process that way.”

In other words, No Child Left Behind’s aspirational aims were more effective as rhetoric than as an accountability regime. As Rick Hess has argued persuasively, if the law’s objectives, carrots, and sticks are to actually motivate educators, and not just demoralize them, they must been seen as achievable. So why is it so “stunning” that Virginia wouldn’t expect the achievement gap to evaporate in just five years?

To be sure, even Virginia officials have agreed that the goals put into their ESEA application weren’t ambitious enough; they will come back later this month with more challenging targets for their poor and minority students. That’s fair; groups that are further behind should be expected to make greater progress over time.

But to follow Rotherham’s advice and demand “common targets” is to doom the next phase of NCLB implementation to the same fate as the last: It will fail, because it will lose credibility with the very people expected to make it succeed—the educators.

America’s schools aren’t doing nearly well enough, especially for our neediest children. We need accountability systems that create urgency and push for significant gains every year. Ideological arguments and utopian objectives don’t help.

-Mike Petrilli

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

The Department of Education’s latest foray into digital learning is a big deal.

The Race to the Top-District competition’s “Absolute Priority 1” is personalized learning. For those who have been working to personalize learning through digital learning in the field, this endorsement and what it means for online and blended learning may seem like old hat, but it’s important to note that this is relatively new territory for the Department.

It is the first time such a significant tranche of federal dollars will be used expressly to fund blended learning. Past federal initiatives have, in essence, cast technology as tools to be integrated into traditional classrooms—e-textbooks, broadband, and one-to-one laptops, for example. The emphasis has been on the tools rather than the learning.

Although I have some doubts about the wisdom of the Race to the Top competition, and there are other steps that I think the federal government could take that would support a more systematic transformation of our education system, this Race to the Top competition does have the potential to reset American schools’ relationship with technology by encouraging a transformation from a one-size-fits all schooling model to one that can customize affordably for each student’s unique learning needs. The Department’s recent revisions to the competition’s rules were also smart and increase the chances of the competition’s success.

Whether the competition ultimately delivers the goods though depends on the follow through. Done poorly, it could set the movement back ten years by propping up models that perpetuate and sustain the status quo rather than reimagining it, which would have significant negative ramifications. Done well, the competition could be just the national motivation the digital-learning movement has needed to see large-scale adoption of high-quality blended-learning programs.

In the hopes of encouraging that positive change, we at Innosight Institute recently published “A guide to personalizing learning: Suggestions for the Race to the Top-District competition.” The paper, written by our research assistant Meg Evans, lays out what we believe a successful application ought to include: the smart design of new schooling models, the leveraging of human capital in path-breaking ways, system-wide shifts in school management, effective data systems, competency-based learning, and community engagement. The document is grounded in the language of the application, and we hope that it will be helpful as districts craft their own vision for their application.

Ultimately it will be those visions, applications, the judging of the applications, and, most importantly, the execution of the winning visions by the school districts themselves that have the potential to set the country on a path toward transforming the education system into a student-centric one and bolstering the achievement of every child.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry originally appeared on Forbes.com

It’s not a new idea, either. I recall working with Bill Bennett on such a plan—which Ronald Reagan then proposed to a heedless Congress—a quarter century ago.

It had merit then and has even more today, if only because the passing decades have brought so much more evidence that the original versions of these programs don’t do much for kids. As America nears the half-century mark with Title I, we can fairly conclude that pumping all this money into districts to boost the budgets of schools serving disadvantaged students hasn’t done those youngsters much good by way of improved academic achievement, though of course that cash has been welcomed by revenue-hungry districts (and states). Evaluation after evaluation of Title I has shown that iconic program to have little or no positive impact, and everybody knows that the No Child Left Behind edition of Title I—which encompasses AYP and the law’s accountability provisions—hasn’t done much good either. It has, however, yielded an enormous number of schools that we now know, without doubt, are doing a miserable job, particularly with disadvantaged kids. Yet we’re having a dreadful time “turning around” those schools. One may fairly conclude that Title I in its present form isn’t working and probably cannot.

So why not try strapping the money to the backs of needy kids and letting them take it to the schools of their choice? This would help them escape from dreadful schools. It would make them more “affordable” for the schools they move into. It would remove one of the main barriers (the non-portability of federal dollars) that discourages states and districts from moving toward “weighted student funding” with their own money. And it would certainly go a long way to change the balance of power in American education from producers to consumers.

Having said that, a word of caution is needed. In K–12 education, the states are ultimately in charge and few federal initiatives in this realm work nearly as well as intended. (NCLB is again a large, recent, case in point.) Legitimate questions persist about what, exactly, is the federal role in the K–12 sphere, particularly in reforming it. A good case can be made for Washington to generate sound data, safeguard civil rights, support research, and assist with the costs of educating high-risk kids—but setting the ground rules for schools and operating the system is really the job of states. Moreover, the federal share of the school dollar—a dime—isn’t big enough to yield much leverage over how the system works. That’s why the Romney plan is apt to do some good in states (and districts) that want to extend more school choices to their students—the federal dime can join the 90 cents in state and local funds in the kids’ backpacks—but won’t make much difference in places that aren’t willing to put their own resources into this kind of reform.

Similar caveats must be attached to other possible methods by which Uncle Sam could try to foster school choice. Which isn’t to say such possibilities don’t exist. Indeed, I can think of four more opportunities.

First, any number of other existing federal programs could be “voucherized.” Some are small, to be sure, but others are substantial enough to benefit many thousands of kids. The “impact aid” program—for districts with military and other “federal” youngsters—is $1.3 billion. Vocational education (“Perkins Act”) is almost as large. Many billions lurk in sundry “school improvement” and “innovation” programs that could be amalgamated and then placed in the hands of students rather than states and districts. And don’t forget the enormous Head Start program (run by the Department of Health and Human Services).

Second, a handful of programs that already promote school choice—aid to charter schools, the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, etc.—could be expanded.

Third, the Education Department could mount a competitive-grant program akin to Race to the Top for states and/or districts that want to engage in more school choice. (See comment above regarding where the Romney plan is most apt to work!)

Fourth, Congress could enact Senator Lamar Alexander’s proposed “G.I. Bill for Children,” which would give needy K–12 students grants (in participating states) the equivalent of Pell Grants with which to pay tuition at the private school of their choice. (Essentially the same thing could be done via tax credits, too. I cut my own policy teeth back in the 1970s on the “Packwood Moynihan Tuition Tax Credit” bill—which passed the House but was then killed by feverish public-school lobbying.)

Let me say it again, however. At day’s end, states and districts control 90 cents of the K–12 dollar and Washington is limited in what it can do to override their institutional, political, and constitutional obstacles to school choice. Private schools are also more ambivalent today than they once were about taking government money and the strings that are inevitably attached to it.

But the fact remains that school choice, both the public and the private kinds, is spreading across the land, making clear that a nontrivial number of states and districts are up for this. In such places, Washington can surely help by removing the obstacles that today’s gnarly formulas and rules place on federal dollars that might otherwise accompany state and local monies into kids’ backpacks. And via adroit use of competitive grants and—at least as important—the presidential bully pulpit, Uncle Sam may be able to give a modest boost to the movement to put families, rather than bureaucracies, in control of their children’s education.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

A version of this editorial originally appeared on the RedefinED blog.

There is some evidence that this kind of race to the bottom has been occurring.  Rick Hess and Paul Peterson, for example, have compared state cut scores for proficiency on their state tests to results on the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to show that the level of achievement required to be declared proficient in many states has been dropping over the last decade. In his recent review of the Maranto and McShane book on Obama’s education policies, Nathan Glazer described how advocates for national standards see them as a fix for this race to the bottom:

in Race to the Top, “the Obama administration tacitly gave its approval to a set of ‘Common Core Standards’ developed by a consortium of state school officers and tied Race to the Top dollars to participation in the program.” This may be a path to finally getting a set of national standards and overriding the standards the states set, which have in many states been pushed lower. This “race to the bottom” has made it easier to show adequate yearly progress (AYP) and avoid triggering measures required for schools that do not show AYP.

So does competition among states and localities really produce a race to the bottom or does competition motivate improvement and spark continual improvements?  The answer depends on what states and localities are competing for.  If states and localities are competing to receive federal funds and/or avoid federal sanctions, as Glazer describes states seeking to make AYP, then competition will produce a race to the bottom.  In competing for bureaucratic approval from the feds, states only have to appear good (satisfy the bureaucratic requirements), but they don’t have to actually be good.  Competing for the bureaucratic approval of the federal government turns education into a redistributive policy where the goal is to get a larger share of the federal largess.

But if states and localities are competing for residents and businesses to increase their tax base, then the incentive from competition is to increase standards and quality.  Millions of individuals are not so easily fooled and can distinguish between phony claims of progress created by lowering the bar and real progress.  Clever bureaucrats can also tell the difference but they are bound by the rules for dispersing rewards and sanctions and so are forced into encouraging a race to the bottom.  Individual face no similar constraints.  They want to move to the areas with the best schools to help their kids, enhance their property values, and have access to a quality labor force.  Individuals may make mistakes or have bad taste, but in aggregate they reward real educational progress not fake, race to the bottom, manipulation.

The history of U.S. education is filled with evidence of how this competition for residents and tax base has spurred improvements in quality and increases in rigor.  The economic historian, William Fischel, carefully documents how the development and spread of high school education in the United States was driven by localities seeking to compete for residents demanding a more rigorous education.  And the standards required for graduating high school have steadily increased over time.  Graduation requires more college-prep coursework.  In almost half of the states students now have to pass a state test to receive a standard diploma.  And 37 states instituted their own testing and accountability systems before NCLB was adopted.  The result of these state and local efforts was not always a rigorous education, but they clearly show a trend toward higher standards and quality in response to consumer demand.  Competition produces a race to the top as long as it is competition for individual taxpayers and business instead of competition for federal government handouts.

So, if a race to the bottom is fueled by the desire to satisfy federal bureaucratic rules, why would we think the solution is in the adoption of more federal bureaucratic rules?  National standards will just create a new regime of gaming, manipulation, and the appearance of progress without the actuality of it.  Expanding choice and competition for individuals is the solution to a race to the bottom, not more centralized control that stifles that competition.

-Jay Greene

It was no small task. The headline cried “vouchers”  even while acknowledging that the word was unspoken: “Vouchers Unspoken, Romney Hails School Choice.”The first word of the story was “voucher” but followed with an acknowledgment that Governor Romney never actually uses the word. Rhetorically the damage was already done. Readers knew right up front the Romney plan must somehow be all about this polarizing idea. The story went on to explain the Romney proposal for school choice in some detail. But by the end, it casually labeled federal funding for disadvantaged and disabled students, “vouchers.”

The story is a disservice. The nation needs both presidential candidates to step up to the challenge of improving education achievement, especially for our most disadvantaged students. Neither candidate has given the issue the attention it deserves. In the long run, education is the key to our troubled economy. But, if new ideas are immediately subject to caricature and politicization, we won’t be hearing many of them.

For some time I have been part of a group of education scholars assembled by the Hoover Institution, which issued a detailed analysis of federal education policy last February. We concluded, among other things, that the federal government’s role in education needed to be rethought. Not because we have some Tea Party inspired aversion to federal power, but because we believe the last decade has revealed the limits of the ability of Washington to fix failing schools, from a distance. In this recommendation, we are not far from the Obama administration, which has offered the states waivers from NCLB to experiment with their own methods of school improvement, among other encouraged innovations.

Our analysis goes on to highlight a long tradition in formal economics, known as fiscal federalism. That body of work has established the theoretical and actual benefits of competition among states and cities in the delivery of certain public services. Research provides considerable evidence that such effects are significant in public education—among small public school districts, between public schools and Catholic schools, and between traditional public schools and charter schools.

Our analysis also examines and endorses portable student-weighted funding, more popularly known as “backpack” funding, and already being implemented in some major school districts. The surest way to have students receive the education services to which they are entitled is to have every dollar of funding provided for them go wherever they go to school. For example, a disadvantaged student who enrolls in a more advantaged school should bring with him the money policymakers intended to serve him.

Fiscal federalism and backpack funding are just two examples of ideas with deep research traditions—not political motivations—discussed in our analysis.

The Romney proposal (to which I had some input as an initial member of his education advisory team, but in which I have no investment today, having stepped aside to avoid any appearance of analytical bias) is hardly identical to the work that my colleagues and I produced at Hoover. It does not, for example, include testing requirements that we considered crucial.

The Romney proposal does include ideas that would be genuinely new for federal education policy—like portable student-weighted funding. The proposal has little to say about private schools, and adds that private school participation would be a state option, not a federal mandate. In the end, it is a proposal about giving our neediest students more choice among public schools.

Whatever its other virtues or defects, the plan should be debated on the basis of what it actually proposes—and not a politically-colored version thereof. The nation desperately needs fresh thinking in education. It will never happen if new ideas cannot receive impartial hearings.

-John Chubb

This post originally appeared on The Quick and the Ed

Honorable Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education
Washington, D.C. 20201

Re: Comments on Race to the Top District draft executive summary

Dear Secretary Duncan:

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Race to the Top-District draft executive summary.

Innosight Institute is a not-for-profit, non-partisan think tank whose mission is to apply Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen’s theories of disruptive innovation to develop and promote solutions to the most vexing problems in the social sector. In education, we seek to transform the country’s education system into a student-centric one where each child can realize his or her fullest human potential.

We applaud the Department’s desire to inspire innovation at the district level. We believe that the emphasis on students’ personal learning needs is a bold and important step forward. Encouraging a move toward competency-based learning models is critical for the success of our nation’s education system.

We hope that Race to the Top-District competition encourages substantive student-centered reform, and in order to ensure this clear purpose we have a few suggested revisions:

• Emphasize learning over teaching
• Do not use attendance as a metric for success
• Leave room for innovation; avoid prescribing specific inputs and focus instead on desired outcomes

Emphasize learning over teaching
The phrase “teaching and learning” appears nine times throughout the proposal. If the competition is to spur truly student-centered learning, however, then this must be captured in both semantics and spirit. Learning should come before teaching. In “Absolute Priority 1, Personalized Learning Environment(s)” the first design principle listed after the colon is to “significantly improve teaching and learning through the personalization of strategies, tools and support for teachers and students.” It is problematic to prioritize teacher improvement over the improvement of a learner’s experience. This first design principle also potentially falls short of encouraging true transformation by implying that the personalization through “strategies, tools and support” be in support of current learning environments rather than expanding the personalization to encompass a student’s entire learning experience. We suggest the following language to more closely align the content with the Priority’s heading:

“create student-centered learning environments that are designed to: personalize student learning; significantly improve learning outcomes by moving toward a competency-based system relying on student growth metrics; allow for student creativity; decrease the achievement gap across student groups; and increase the rates at which students graduate from high school prepared for college and careers.”

We encourage the Department to read the summary with an eye to the places in which teachers’ experience and improvement is seemingly prioritized over that of students. Great teachers are essential to all student success and professional development is necessary and important. Teacher development ought to be a means toward accomplishing bold student growth goals, not the goal itself.

Do not use attendance as a metric for success
Seat-time and student attendance are the incorrect measures of success in a world in which learning can happen anywhere and at any time and are at odds with other good language and goals in the executive summary (see Sec. C.3.a.ii for example). Including student attendance as a goal precludes districts from thinking about new and innovative ways to serve students outside of the four walls of a traditional brick and mortar school. It is clear that time spent sitting in a seat does not mean time spent truly learning; the metrics should reflect that although attendance may be correlated with achievement in traditional schooling models, it is not causal per se. If, in improving student learning, a school must focus directly on improving student attendance because it is relevant to the program it is creating, then of course that is good, and it should be reflected in the individual proposal to demonstrate a coherent and well-conceived program. This input metric, however, should not be prescribed as a goal of the competition. The competition ought to instead encourage districts to look away from seat time toward actual student learning; schools should be rewarded equally if this is accomplished through providing online course opportunities accessible from anywhere or through real-world learning. The first rounds of Race to the Top showed true potential to fuel legislative change at the state level. Even with a competition geared toward districts and consortia of LEAs, there still exists that opportunity. Race to the Top District, in emphasizing student experience and results over student attendance, has the potential to motivate states to do away with seat-time requirements, an important first step to allow districts to flourish and innovate. We believe this is an opportunity not to be missed.

Leave room for innovation; avoid prescribing specific inputs and focus instead on desired outcomes
The ultimate goals in this competition should be around bolstering all students’ learning. We are pleased to see the summary state that school leaders ought to have: “Sufficient flexibility and autonomy over such factors as school schedules and calendars, school staffing models, roles and responsibilities for educators and noneducators, and school-level budgets.” This leaves the door open for innovative leaders to take charge toward this end. We worry, however, that language elsewhere restricts this proposed autonomy and instead encourages a variety of traditional models of schooling and an emphasis on compliance instead of student learning growth.

One such traditional model that the rules seem to encourage is that of one teacher in a confined classroom. For example, the idea that the success of LEAs will be determined based on: “the number and percentage of participating students by subgroup who have daily access to effective and highly effective teachers” is problematic in the way that it potentially limits the innovative staffing models possible to serve students if educator is defined as one being co-located with the student. With the advent of widely available online curriculum and delivery models, all students can learn from the world’s most effective educators regardless of location.

In innovative student-centric environments, there is a high likelihood that students will interact with a range of adults who impact their learning and have differentiated teaching roles. Some educators may be content experts; others may be those best at one-on-one student coaching, designing project-based learning, or creating well-matched small groups, for example. The competition’s current emphasis on teacher evaluation obfuscates this important point. The provision that an LEA must have a data system that has an individual teacher identifier with a teacher-student match may be too limiting as an eligibility requirement. As students gain access to curricula and teaching from multiple sources, having an individual teacher identifier with a teacher-student match will likely restrict needed innovation in teaching models. Given where the technology stands at this moment, this seems an overly prescriptive and not inherently useful requirement—and focuses on the wrong end. Similarly, that the LEA must design its own teacher evaluation system is too prescriptive, as it implies a one-size-fits-all evaluation system for all of the schools and programs in its domain. Different schooling models may find that different evaluation systems make sense for their purposes. If mandating this type of input remains important, more appropriate language might require that participating entities implement evaluation systems appropriate for their specific programs.

Furthermore, language that suggests that all participating educators must participate in the same type of training is misguided; instead the emphasis should be on insuring that all educators can receive the training that is relevant for their specific job given the model in which they are working. This section also seems to imply that teachers will always lead assessments, when in fact automated assessment and data engines may help significantly in these areas.

Beyond teaching structure, the definition of “personalized learning plans” is too specific. The executive summary prescribes a formal document. This input requirement implies a flat document. Loosening the definition would allow for a dynamic and changing personalized learning plan embedded in a digital platform. Thanks to adaptive technology, a learning plan could be something students access daily to view their goals and playlists of lessons and exercises for the day. To this end, the input-based metric of weekly student access to the learning plan ought to be removed, not because it is bad per se, but because it is more likely to encourage compliance-driven plans rather than thoughtful ones based on a coherent program. If this is something the Department deems important in and of itself, however, then better language might be that a personal learning plan must be updated at least weekly based on a student’s progress so that it is an active and useful tool, not a check-the-box criterion that merely encourages compliance for its own sake. Most sound would be language that suggests this as one possible element of a strong and coherent plan but does not require it and therefore force an incoherent plan where it might not make sense.

We suggest that the Department consider revising those parts of the summary that make specific reference to classroom structure, teacher responsibilities, and technology specifics.

—

Overall, we are pleased to see the Department encouraging student-centered and personalized learning and are pleased to see that the Department has created a possibility for additional funding for LEAs that target areas of nonconsumption (Sec. F.1.), which are ripe for disruptive innovation. We applaud the Department for its ongoing hard work and commitment to educational innovation.

Submitted by Michael B. Horn, Executive Director, Education, Innosight Institute.

The findings are described in a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Peterson and co-authors William Howell and Martin R. West.

Read last year’s PEPG-EdNext survey report here.

So I watched the news last night with a worried eye after CNN told me that the exit polls in Wisconsin showed a tight race, with each candidate expected to get 50 percent of the vote.  Wow! I thought.  So all the polls leading up to election day were wrong.  Only the Democratic pollsters, Public Policy Polling, came close with their prediction that the race had tightened to within 3 points, indicating that either side could win.  Did our Education Next poll get it wrong?  Had the Wisconsin electorate shifted against the governor?  Had there been no shift against public sector unions after all?

In the days leading up to recall day, it seemed that Walker would win the race fairly easily, because Real Clear Politics (RCP), which calculates the average of all publicly reported polls, said that Walker had a 6.7 percent margin, and I had learned from earlier elections that the RCP average is better than any one poll at predicting the result.

So what was the final result?—a Walker win by 6.9 percent.  The RCP average was much, much better than the exit polls administered after the voters had cast their ballots!

Talk about a home run!  Congratulations to Real Clear Politics!

Never believe any particular poll (other than the Education Next poll, of course), but do believe the average of a bunch of polls.  Right now, the RCP average tells us Obama is leading Romney by 3 percentage points.  That number does not tell us what will happen on election day, but it does tell us that the incumbent president has a slight advantage today in a race that remains highly contested.

-Paul Peterson

Behind the Headline
The Public Weighs in on School Reform
Education Next  | Fall 2011

A new public opinion survey finds that the percentage of people taking a negative view of teacher unions is growing, with more of the public saying that that teacher unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Among teachers, the percent holding negative views of unions nearly doubled to 32% from 17% last year.The results from last year’s Education Next-PEPG poll appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next.

Petrilli looks at how Romney’s platform compares to President Obama’s approach to education policy and notes the challenges Romney will face if he takes on teacher unions.

Petrilli wrote about Romney’s education plan on the Ed Next blog last week in The Romney Education Plan: Replacing Federal Overreach on Accountability with Federal Overreach on School Choice.

Just to be eligible, districts by the 2014-15 school year will have to promise to implement evaluation systems that take student outcomes into account—not just for teacher and principal performance, but for district superintendents and school boards. That’s a big departure from the state-level Race to the Top competitions, which just looked at educators who actually work in schools, not district-level leaders.” [Emphasis added]

How very refreshing, even exhilarating, the inclusion of superintendents and boards in a results-based accountability system, rather than the customary focus only on schools and their principals and teachers (and sometimes the kids themselves). Will the NSBA and AASA react angrily to this goring of their own members’ oxen? Or will they—as they should—welcome this logical and potentially powerful widening of the theory and practice of accountability?

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

Today, there’s not a single Republican in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, or running for president willing to defend federal accountability mandates. The GOP conversation has shifted to transparency, in line with what we’ve called Reform Realism. What a difference a decade makes.

The thrust of Romney’s speech, however, wasn’t his fresh view of accountability,  but a major proposal on school choice. Romney wants to make Title I and IDEA dollars portable—a form of “backpack funding” from the federal level. (This one’s very much in line with what the Hoover Institution’s K-12 Education Task Force proposed in February. It’s also close kin to what Ronald Reagan and Bill Bennett proposed for Title I back in the late 1980’s.) He said:

As President, I will give the parents of every low-income and special needs student the chance to choose where their child goes to school.  For the first time in history, federal education funds will be linked to a student, so that parents can send their child to any public or charter school, or to a private school, where permitted.  And I will make that choice meaningful by ensuring there are sufficient options to exercise it.
To receive the full complement of federal education dollars, states must provide students with ample school choice.  In addition, digital learning options must not be prohibited.  And charter schools or similar education choices must be scaled up to meet student demand.

There’s a lot to be said for making federal dollars follow disadvantaged children to their schools of choice:

• It provides incentives for good schools to attract needy kids;
• It helps those kids exit dreadful schools;
• It promotes integration by allowing federal funds to flow to schools that are socio-economically-mixed; and
• It encourages states to make their own funding more portable (a la weighted student funding) – with all manner of benefits around equity, choice, and more.

But it’s not without its drawbacks:

• It could move federal funds away from high-poverty schools (which get most Title I dollars today) to low-poverty ones;
• The money ($1,000-2,000 per pupil) isn’t enough to pay for actual private-school tuition, so that part isn’t apt to get much real traction;
• By giving parents “private accounts” to spend on digital learning, tutoring, and the like, it could weaken schools’ larger improvement efforts, which are mostly funded by these federal dollars.

The biggest concern, though, comes with having Uncle Sam try to use his 10 cents on the education dollar to force major changes on the states. We’ve seen how that works (or doesn’t) in the context of accountability; why do we think it will work better in the context of school choice?

See this passage, in particular, from Romney’s education white paper:

To expand the supply of high-performing schools in and around districts serving low-income and special-needs students, states accepting Title I and IDEA funds will be required to take a series of steps to encourage the development of quality options: First, adopt open-enrollment policies that permit eligible students to attend public schools outside of their school district that have the capacity to serve them. Second, provide access to and appropriate funding levels for digital courses and schools, which are increasingly able to offer materials tailored to the capabilities and progress of each student when used with the careful guidance of effective teachers. And third, ensure that charter school programs can expand to meet demand, receive funding under the same formula that applies to all other publicly-supported schools, and access capital funds.

Note especially the phrase, “Will be required.” We’ve been down that road before! And note how far this proposal is from the “let states do whatever they want with their federal dollars” approach of House education committee chairman John Kline.

A better idea might be to take a page from the Obama Administration handbook and make funding portability voluntary. Give states the option to “voucherize” their Title I and IDEA funds. Make them take the steps above in order to participate in that option. Maybe offer a little extra money on top. And see if you get any takers. That’s a way to promote innovation and choice without falling into the same federalism trap that snared No Child Left Behind. And states that opt into it would very likely make their own dollars portable, too.

This plan is a good start. You’ve got 5 ½ months till Election Day, Governor Romney, to make it even better.

-Mike Petrilli

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.

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).

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.

HT: Jay Greene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Alyson Klein reported on her Education Week blog,

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

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

- Peter Meyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are now entering the fourth and final year of the first term of the Obama administration. Enough time has elapsed to provide an opportunity for at least an interim assessment, even though anything more definitive must await the voters’ judgment as to whether a second term is warranted.

At first glance, it looks as if President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have made surprisingly deft moves, both in terms of policy and politics. Even while Republicans are whacking the president “like a piñata,” as one pundit put it, they are treating his K–12 education record with kid gloves.

Senator Lamar Alexander has commented that he has “a lot of admiration” for Obama’s education secretary and “respect” for the president’s “positions on kindergarten through 12th-grade education.” Former House Speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich admitted that this is “the one area where I very much agree” with him. New Jersey governor Chris Christie exclaims that the president has been a “great ally” on education reform. Former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney acknowledges that “some of his education policies” have been “positive.”

Is that for good reason? Is President Obama as strong on education reform as these comments suggest? On the surface, at least, the president has a compelling record. His Race to the Top (RttT) initiative catalyzed a chain reaction of legislative action at the state level, securing key reforms on issues ranging from charter schools to teacher evaluations to rigorous standards. His stimulus and “edujobs” bills seemed to maintain a critical level of investment in the public schools during a time of difficult budget cuts and financial strain. His administrative action to provide flexibility on No Child Left Behind’s most onerous provisions bypassed a paralyzed Congress and partially fulfilled his campaign promise to lift the law’s yoke off the backs of decent but maligned schools. And in Arne Duncan he’s got a popular, attractive education secretary to boot, one of the leading stars of his cabinet.

Plenty of these accomplishments are more than skin-deep. For example, both the Common Core State Standards effort and the move toward rigorous teacher evaluations could lead to dramatic increases in student achievement, if implemented faithfully by states and school districts. Neither of these reforms would have been adopted so quickly, in so many places, were it not for the president’s leadership.

Beyond these success stories, however, lie some very real weaknesses—soft spots in Obama’s education record—that raise doubts about the long-term impact of the administration’s efforts.

Wasteful Spending

There’s little reason to doubt that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—the 2009 stimulus bill—will long be remembered, along with health-care reform, as Obama’s signature accomplishment. For Democrats, the law saved the nation from a profound depression. For Republicans, as they made clear in the 2010 midterm elections, it constitutes a massive spending program that contributes to a national debt of historic proportions, with few results to show for it.

Accounting for nearly $100 billion (or about double the typical annual federal appropriation for education), the education portion of the stimulus package was one of its central components. In fact, setting aside the bill’s tax cuts, education spending represented the largest piece of the stimulus pie. These dollars were split into a few large categories: supersized spending for the Title I and special-education formula programs, and a “state stabilization fund” that essentially amounted to revenue sharing. (It also included funds for the $4 billion Race to the Top program, discussed separately below.)

Ostensibly, the intent of the education stimulus was to keep teachers from losing their jobs. The macroeconomic argument was that the last thing a damaged economy needed after the 2008 shock was to have hundreds of thousands of public school teachers getting pink slips, going on unemployment, and defaulting on their mortgages. And the nation’s schoolchildren would benefit as well. Protecting education jobs would keep good teachers from getting laid off and class sizes from skyrocketing. In February 2009, Secretary Duncan warned U.S. News & World Report about the consequences if the stimulus bill were not enacted. “My concern is that hundreds of thousands of good teachers, not just bad teachers, are going to go, and that would be devastating. It is to no one’s advantage if class size skyrockets or librarians get eliminated or school counselors disappear.”

This line of reasoning has two problems, as Duncan himself later admitted. First, good teachers were laid off because union protections required districts to implement reductions in force via “last in, first out.” If schools could have used the recession and budget crisis as an opportunity to cut their least-effective teachers, student achievement would actually have risen. As Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has shown, there is no quicker way to lift student improvement than to encourage the lowest-performing teachers to pursue other lines of work. Duncan himself does not disagree. In March 2011 he said, “Layoffs based only on seniority don’t help kids. We have to minimize the negative impact on students.’’

Second, there is little, if any, evidence that a modest increase in class size would have devastating consequences. Class size has fallen markedly over the past few decades. The year Obama was elected, the average number of pupils per professional in the public schools was 15, down from 19 in 1980 and 26 in 1960. In fact, even major layoffs would only return schools to the staffing ratios of the late 1990s, not exactly the Dark Ages, and a time of great progress in raising student achievement nationally. And again, even Duncan admitted as much when he later said that “class size has been a sacred cow and we need to take it on.”

Even when we evaluate the stimulus package on its own terms, protecting teachers’ jobs and keeping classes small, the costs seem wildly in excess of any benefits obtained. According to the Obama administration’s calculations, the stimulus package and edujobs bill kept about 400,000 teachers on the payroll who would have otherwise been terminated. That works out to approximately $150,000 per job, an exceptionally bad deal for taxpayers considering that the average new teacher (who would have been first in line for a pink slip) makes considerably less than half that in salary and benefits. Even if we accept the estimate of teachers’ jobs saved, we have to ask, where did the rest of the money go?

There is evidence that a significant portion of the funds did not go to stemming layoffs. Media reports indicate that some districts used the money for teachers’ raises and bonuses. The Government Accountability Office cited one North Carolina district for using edujobs dollars to pay for movie tickets, fast food, and a water park visit for students. This was in the midst of the worst economic downturn in six decades, when most Americans were either losing their jobs or barely treading water.

The design of the laws may, in fact, have aggravated the funding crisis at the local level. Forced to spend the funds relatively quickly, districts added staff, made new investments, and otherwise increased their costs, which will make the coming “funding cliff” that much more painful. At a time when tough-minded superintendents should have been preparing for leaner times by negotiating concessions from their bargaining units on salaries and benefits, federal policy cut them off at the knees.

Lackluster Results

Race to the Top is President Obama’s most vaunted win. The name itself connotes progress, forward movement, even competition. And there’s plenty of substance for the president to brag about: more than 45 states signing onto rigorous common standards; dozens of states getting serious about teacher evaluations; key jurisdictions removing caps on charter school expansion. This is what New Yorker contributor Steven Brill called “a sweeping overhaul” of the system. Look closer, put the Race to the Top’s results into context, and the scorecard changes considerably.

Secretary Duncan likes to say that RttT is part of a “quiet revolution” in education, with states creating “bold blueprints for reform [that] bear the signatures of many key players at the state and local level who drive change in our schools.” He’s right that the program led to a flurry of reform-friendly legislation. But did the 2009–10 period, when states were competing for RttT funds, see the most reforms ever enacted? No. That distinction belongs to 2011, after the 2010 midterm elections swept historic Republican majorities into office in state after state. While a similar number of states (5) made sizable progress on charter school caps in 2011 as in the previous two years, the number of states that moved forward on teacher evaluations, layoff policies, and vouchers increased significantly (see Figure 1).

Race to the Top wasn’t meant just to catalyze legislative changes. Winning states made bold promises about implementing their proposed reforms, and Obama and Duncan issued stern statements about their intention to pull dollars away from jurisdictions that fell short. How has that effort fared?

In short: not so well. Eleven states and the District of Columbia won first-round grants of up to $700 million from the $4 billion RttT pot in 2010, promising to deliver a range of ambitious programs and results. A little more than a year later, every one of those grantees has amended its plans at least once, with the Department of Education approving a grand total of forty-seven amendments to date. Maryland asked for another year to finish its teacher evaluation system, while North Carolina opted for a more modest teacher-retention bonus program. Time and again goals have been lowered and timelines extended. When in late 2011, in response to Hawaii’s stalling Duncan finally threatened to cut off the Aloha State’s funding, it marked a sharp and belated shift from the dozens of accommodating letters of approval that states wavering on their commitments have received from Washington.

Scaled-back ambitions are only half the problem: many states seem to have barely started putting their plans in motion. As of May 2011, a year after the first RttT awards, just over $80 million of the $4 billion in funding had actually been spent. While it’s at least reassuring that states haven’t been burning through the money, the urgency of the “Race” petered out once the awards were made. With the latest round of RttT grants awarded with little fanfare, the Obama administration’s signature effort is losing steam.

Federal Micromanagement

Complaining about an overbearing federal role in education is a mainstay of Republican campaigns, particularly during primary season, when the battle cry of “local control” most resonates with likely voters. The current nomination contest is no exception, with all of the GOP candidates calling for a smaller federal footprint, if not the outright closure of the Department of Education.

This message is more problematic during general elections, when voters (especially all-important independents) can easily equate a conservative’s plea to “pull back” as an indication of disinterest.

But in skillful hands, painting Uncle Sam as school-yard bully could work.

“We’re going to let states, schools and teachers come up with innovative ways to give our children the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future,” promised Obama when announcing his NCLB waiver plan. “Because what works in Rhode Island may not be the same thing that works in Tennessee—but every student should have the same opportunity to learn and grow, no matter what state they live in.” Duncan echoed, “instead of being tight on the goals and loose on the means of achieving them, [NCLB] is loose on the goals but tight on the means. We need to flip that and states are already leading the way.”

But for all the talk of state discretion, the Washington screws are actually being tightened. Take the Race to the Top, which one of us once characterized as “a carrot that feels like a stick.” Rather than invite states to present their own compelling reform plans, Obama and Duncan asked governors and state superintendents to develop plans that complied with federal guidelines set forth in excruciating detail. Or take their approach to NCLB waivers, in which they set constitutionally suspect conditions on the flexibility craved by the states (see “Obama’s NCLB Waivers,” forum, page 56). As Senator Alexander remarked, the Obama administration had states “over a barrel.”

And when it comes to federal control, nothing is more troubling than the declaration that a disproportionate percentage of white students in Advanced Placement (AP) classes constitutes evidence of racial discrimination. That’s the administration’s stance, thanks to the Department of Education’s civil rights branch, led by poverty warrior Russlynn Ali. At the very time Duncan was espousing the virtues of state and local flexibility, he and Ali were doubling down on 1960s-style top-down regulations. One stated objective was to address the “disparate impact” of policies that might lead to racial minorities taking fewer challenging classes than their peers, totally ignoring the obvious fact that African American and Hispanic students are, on average, much less prepared for AP courses by the time they reach 11th and 12th grade. Never mind that closing this preparation gap requires a long-term effort starting in elementary school, if not before. The federal government put districts on notice that if they had a disproportionate number of white students in AP classes, they could be immediately subject to civil rights enforcement. This is tight-loose?

Obama and Duncan have been good on education reform, certainly better than any of their Democratic predecessors. But to ignore the shortcomings of the president’s K–12 education-reform record entirely would be a mistake, we think. And it would also be bad for the country. The administration deserves to be pressed on the cost-effectiveness of its education system bailouts, on the results of its Race to the Top initiative, and on the wisdom of its approach to federalism and separation of powers. Education may not play a major role in the 2012 election, but that doesn’t mean that Obama’s education policies should be given a pass.

Michael J. Petrilli is research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where Tyson Eberhardt is a research fellow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

It’s no surprise that, 28 years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, school-reform efforts have generated so little effect. Our schools have proven, over the past century, quite adept at resisting change.

Recent attempts to inject accountability and innovation have brought us to an important opportunity. No Child Left Behind helped add transparency, and Race to the Top (RttT) motivated states to rethink teacher evaluation, charter limits, and more. The Investing in Innovation fund (i3) has seeded some promising innovations and helped attract more private investment to public education.

But none of these initiatives hits at the reasons that education has proven itself so innovation-resistant: governance and compensation. Further, there is good reason to believe a third impediment—the absence of useful data—will persist even through the Common Core State Standards initiatives.

Finland serves as a model for many reformers. There is a single curriculum; teachers are well educated and well respected. Their system reflects Finnish ideals and builds on Finnish strengths, and their students score at the top of international tests like PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study).

But a top-down system will continue to be the wrong approach in this country, whether on a national or state level. It doesn’t reflect American values or culture, nor does it address the size, diversity, or income disparity of the United States. (Finland has half as many students as New York City, and only 13 percent live in poverty.) In a country of 300 million people, a top-down approach makes substantive change virtually impossible. To fix our schools, states have to stop trying to fix them; the quickest way to raise performance is command and control, but over the long run martial law does not even work well for generals.

States can create a more agile, more American, system of governance that eliminates impediments to improvement, empowers schools to innovate, and uses data to help families find the right schools for their children. The federal government should encourage them to do so.

None of the proposals below address the role of profitmaking companies in K‒12 education (though my bias might be clear, as I have run education companies for 30 years). It is important not to conflate marketplace with for-profit. It is also important to recognize that it takes time for deregulation and a newly formed marketplace to work. The breakup of AT&T and the telecommunications bill of 1986 did little to help consumers in the very short term, but they cleared the path for lower costs and technologies including the Internet and the cellphone. Occasionally efforts to create a marketplace don’t work at all, as happened with banking deregulation. As education is a public good and requires public funding, proposed structures should be measured by the incentives they will create for schools, districts, and teachers to produce great student outcomes at reasonable expense.

Empower Schools

Although our ultimate goal is a system of schooling that naturally evolves and improves, it’s important to keep in mind that the capacity for experimenting and innovating resides in individual schools, not in central offices. Under the current system of governance and funding, schools have too few resources and too little discretion for experimentation. Without the dollars to implement novel ideas and to discover what works and what doesn’t, most schools look for, at most, incremental improvement.

Right now, every state distributes state and federal funds to districts; in turn, the districts distribute funds to schools. Imagine that states instead channel funds directly to schools and require that the schools contract with a school support organization (SSO) for an array of services similar to what its district’s central office now provides (see Figure 1). There are many ways to implement such a plan, but the recent transition of New York City schools to its empowerment model might serve as a useful example, even though the city may be losing its resolve to change.

Ideally, existing school districts would be spun off as independent nonprofits and freed to compete with other districts, as well as with the new SSOs in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, for schools and dollars. University of Washington research professor Paul Hill and others have proposed variants of this concept.

Since most schools (especially those in small and wealthy districts) would probably keep their existing districts as their service providers at first, the initial shift would be subtle. But before long the roles and behavior of schools and districts would begin to change. Freed to choose a district or other SSO based on service, cost, and philosophy, schools would demand more for less, and SSOs would step up to pull schools away from their local districts and compete by differentiating themselves from their competitors. Perhaps they would charge less for similar services; perhaps they would deconstruct the services, providing only busing, technology, or financial/purchasing support. Eventually, districts and SSOs would also vie for schools based on their track records of learning outcomes.

Under this proposal, districts would become providers of services rather than owners of geographic zones. With their schools acting as clients rather than dependents, districts would be forced to compete for them, thereby becoming more innovative and cost-effective.

Concrete results would take a while to materialize, but they would come. The current system of big-district purchasing, for example, favors large textbook publishers, which play it safe. School-level purchasing—with proper financial controls—would allow smaller, more responsive companies to compete for business.

Charter schools are the one reform initiative of the past three decades that has addressed the issue of K–12 governance and gained some traction (some 5 percent of public schools are now charters). This proposal builds on some of the lessons learned from the charter school movement and would allow effective charter networks like Green Dot, KIPP, and North Star to operate as school support organizations on a level playing field with districts, with equal funding and authority. A great deal of innovation today is coming from charter networks; this change would encourage districts to match them.

Most states would need to implement significant initiatives to prepare school principals for their new role, and to recruit new principals with the right skills; education schools and programs like New Leaders for New Schools could participate in this effort. Further, states would need to balance power between districts and schools; for example, districts should have the power to reject association with a poorly performing school. Both schools and districts should be pushed to improve themselves and their products and services.

Accountability would become simple (and imperative) under this model. The newly empowered schools should live or die by their performance; similarly, SSOs would lose their customers if they proved unable to support high achievement (which is how the stock of K12, Inc., lost 40 percent of its value following a single critical article in the New York Times). Accountability goes hand in hand with empowerment; promoting one without the other will not succeed.

Empowering schools would also mean encouraging parental choice. After the district’s monopoly is broken up, it would be critical that states create intelligent, consumer-friendly systems to support parents in choosing their children’s schools. Any number of successful models exist, all of which would provide transparency and could be used to balance families’ desire for schools within reasonable distance with their desire for the right outcome.

This is not an easy change; further, many districts are already well run and don’t need change at all. But this proposal would remake the relationships between schools, districts, and states into a far more efficient and effective model, one that would increase agility and remove regulations that limit the autonomy of school leaders. (As Arizona congressman Jeff Flake once asked, “Who out there can sing their district fight song?”)

Offer Teachers a New Deal

Once we’ve empowered schools, we’re ready to address teacher compensation. Many people believe that teachers unions are a major cause of whatever they think is wrong with our schools. It’s not that simple; plenty of research suggests that districts without unions do not perform better than those that have unions, and are only slightly less expensive.

To be sure, pensions and tenure are huge impediments to organic change. But two parties signed the contracts putting them in place: the union, whose job is to get its members more pay for less work, and the district. It was the side representing kids—the districts and state legislatures—that failed. Demonizing unions and teachers is unfair and counterproductive.

The problem isn’t the total compensation; if anything, teachers are underpaid. It’s the structure of that compensation, a series of long-term obligations that severely limit agility while creating off–balance sheet debt that would make Wall Street blush. (According to district budget figures, New York City, for example, spends as much on teachers who no longer teach as on those who still do.)

Ending tenure without ending the current pension system would create some impossible pressures; teachers nearing certain vesting thresholds, for instance, would have a target on their backs. To create an agile system, states must end both tenure and pensions. We can take a big step down this road without reneging on commitments made to a generation of teachers who have accepted lower base salaries for long-term benefits. The starting point, in fact, is something many teachers would embrace.

States should give each teacher the right to choose an alternative contract that contains terms and benefits consistent with those in the private sector (e.g., an at-will contract with standard health-care benefits, 401k, etc.), and sits outside of the existing teacher pension system. Choosing this alternative contract would convert any existing pension to a lump-sum 401k contribution. In return, the new contract would have a far higher base salary; in fairness, states should require districts to hire an auditor to determine the savings that can be expected from each alternative contract teacher, and give that savings to the teacher as increased pay.

Under this plan, no current teachers would be forced to change their contracts. If a state chooses to implement this policy change on a school-by-school basis, teachers who choose the current traditional contract might be offered a transfer or be grandfathered, that is, allowed to continue under their current contract. But the alternative contract could be attractive: depending on the state or district, the expected pension-related savings over a standard contract could be as much as $25,000 per year per teacher. In New York City, for example, a teacher might choose her current contract and a $65,000 salary, or the alternative employment terms with a $90,000 salary but with no tenure guarantees. This change would not reduce costs overall, but it would begin to curb the practice of paying operating expenses with long-term, off–balance sheet debt.

Conversion specifics will vary by state; obviously, those with huge unfunded liabilities will have a tougher time finding an elegant solution to converting past pension obligations for teachers nearing vesting milestones. Some percentage of teachers will refuse to switch; every teacher who does switch, though, will reduce the scope of the long-term problem. Many teachers will prefer to have their retirement funds fully in their control, along with a higher base salary, over a pension subject to fierce political pressure.

So which teachers might choose the alternative contract? My hunch is that newer teachers, who would appreciate the extra cash, and high-performing teachers, who would be unconcerned about the decreased job security, would be likely converts. If that’s true, it’s probable that schools with the highest-need students (who traditionally have the least-experienced faculty) would be most likely to convert over to the new contract, and might thereby be able to attract higher-performing teachers.

Schools operating under the alternative contract would be free to evaluate teachers based on student performance and evaluation, as well as classroom observation and other evidence. These teachers could be empowered to shape their schools, by taking part in choosing the curricula they use in their classrooms and the formative assessments they use to measure student progress, for example. Giving teachers a voice in decisions that affect their work is a logical complement of recognizing and compensating them as professionals rather than as assembly-line workers.

Does this proposal solve the compensation problem? Not entirely, though it would take us halfway there. If we also clean up our accountability systems, we could compare the performance of teachers under each contract and adjust the compensation system to include performance metrics as appropriate.

Align Assessment to Curricula

For all their deficiencies, assessments of student learning are an indispensable component of an evolving school system. Without accurate assessments aligned with curricula and standards, education innovators would be flying blind.

The multistate Common Core State Standards project is an improvement over the patchwork of past state standards. But the standards are not the source of flaws in state accountability systems; the culprits are the state tests.

Tests used by international organizations, like TIMSS and PISA, and also our own NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), can measure performance because they’re both broad and deep; they use a reasonable number of items (many of which are constructed responses) against a large number of standards. But that design makes those tests too long to give to one student. Instead, they’re matrixed; 10 students might each take one-tenth of the test. A few thousand well-selected subjects might give us an accurate picture of 4th graders in a state, but these types of tests cannot be used to measure the performance of a student or school.

A state or national test, on the other hand, can only last an hour or two in each subject. Because such tests must contain several items per standard to be accurate, it will measure only a fraction of the standards. And since a test must be reliable from year to year, it will measure that same subset every year. This limitation encourages schools to narrow their curricula to only those standards likely to be measured and gives rise to illusory performance gains. At present, various groups of states are trying to work out this problem. In the end, they’ll trust that the testing companies will solve this problem, and once again, they’ll be disappointed. There’s a better path.

Imagine if states stopped commissioning their own tests and instead created a small set of requirements for each curriculum provider:

• Adopt or create a secure summative test for each grade level. This test should align closely to the curriculum, and every school using that curriculum would use that test to measure student performance.

• Work with client schools to administer NAEP (or some other matrix-based test aligned to the standards) to 2,000 students each year in key grade levels; use their performance to set the curve for the summative test (think of this as “Curriculum NAEP,” the equivalent of the current state NAEP testing).

• Set the curve for tests on a standard score range that facilitates value-added analysis.

This new way of thinking about summative testing would retain the advantages of the Common Core project and the best state tests while eliminating most of the disadvantages. States would retain the authority to determine the curricula they might subsidize or even allow; they might adopt only one for some subjects and grades (say, for K–6 math); in this case, the world would look a lot like it does now. States would be better off, however, allowing schools to adopt curricula, along with the corresponding summative tests, that best fit their students’ needs. Again, it makes sense to empower schools at the same time that we hold them accountable for student performance. Either way, states could continue to compare schools, since each curriculum would be scored on the same curve and the scores equated through Curriculum NAEP.

This proposal would eliminate most gaming around test scores. There would be no incentive for a provider to dumb down its test, since Curriculum NAEP scores (and therefore the curve) would leave scaled scores unchanged. Moreover, the proposal would create a true alignment between curricula and tests, by removing the state as intermediary. Rather than teach to the state test, schools would teach a curriculum, and then test students accordingly.

Best of all, this regimen would encourage differentiation and competition among curriculum providers. In the end, the curriculum generating the best results for a particular cohort (say, middle-school Latina students) would likely be adopted by schools with large groups of those students.

That competition would extend to the tests themselves. A test should be judged not only by its accuracy, precision, and reliability, but also by its ability to promote learning. Many educators believe that authentic assessment (asking students to perform complex tasks rather than answer multiple-choice questions) encourages better teaching and learning; if this proves true, then curriculum providers using authentic assessments would dominate the market, despite their higher costs.

Finally, this approach would save money. Curriculum providers will find much more agile ways to connect to assessment providers than any state consortium has found so far.

Let the Data Flow

If our schools are to continually improve, we need to gather data and make it available not just to schools, school districts, and parents, but also to independent researchers, who can comb the databases for correlations and any underlying causal connections. Our goal should be to create a veritable education genome project open to all appropriate parties, with proper security measures to address privacy concerns.

We currently gather data through a 1970s-era approach that is slow and expensive. As data move from classroom to school to district to state to the federal government, the details that would allow us to draw meaningful conclusions about things like the effectiveness of a textbook, a supplemental services provider, or an afterschool program are lost. Meanwhile, Google and others manage much more data with far less cost and difficulty. We need to adapt their processes to education data.

The testing companies already collect data from individual schools, as they send and collect test booklets either directly or through the district. These vendors are technically savvy and have the incentive to maintain participation in a lucrative assessment market. States should require their testing vendors to collect data from each school in a standard format, including at least the curricular materials used in each classroom, the calendar and schedule in use at that grade level, the background of the teachers, and any academic interventions used for particular students. The companies should be required to then forward these instructional data, along with test scores, subscores on specific components of the test, and student demographic information, to the state in a standardized format. The state, in turn, should publish a database with accounts allowing schools, districts, education consumers, and (in a privacy-ensured format) researchers to access at will.

There are obvious privacy concerns about publishing personal data in a state database. However, these data are far less sensitive than other data that are commonly secured and made widely available. (Just what would someone do with your son’s 5th-grade math grades?)

Thousands of researchers would surely exploit the resulting database. Curriculum providers would look for evidence of their (or their competitors’) effectiveness. Policymakers would examine the results of various interventions, including afterschool programs, changes in class and day length, or class-size reductions. Teacher preparation and in-service training programs would know whether and where they were having an impact. Parents would be able to make informed choices about where to send their children to school.

Most states would save money by making use of this more efficient way to collect data. At the same time, it would spawn a wave of innovation, as various players start using the data.

Innovation and the New ESEA

All four of these proposals would move us away from a command-and-control education system, and toward an agile education marketplace that encourages innovation and excellence. But even if these proposals sound reasonable to you, you’re probably still wondering how and when they might ever come to pass.

The answer is through the next iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA); by attaching the mind-set of RttT and i3 to the billions of dollars of annual education aid to states, we can use incentives to encourage the right behaviors quickly and inexpensively. Title I channels $14 billion per year to states, which pass it along to districts along with their own funding. Imagine if the new law leads states to channel that money, along with their own funds, directly to schools, and discourages them from holding to the status quo. With a small tweak (for example, an increase or decrease in funding of 10 percent), the feds would give states a $3 billion push in the right direction.

The language enabling schools to choose a district or SSO should be simple. Each state should find its own path to empowering schools. Perhaps some states would empower high-performing schools first, while others might put failing schools into governors’ districts like the one currently proposed in New Jersey. Perhaps states with higher population density would create statewide choice systems, while others would favor parents who sought short travel times. There are many mechanisms imaginable for allowing a school community to vote on its district or SSO affiliation and for states to license and monitor school support organizations.

Similarly, Title II provides roughly $3 billion per year for professional development. The federal government could limit those funds to states that give teachers the right to choose the alternative contract. Again, though, the new ESEA should allow states great latitude in structuring that right (for instance, they could give that choice to individual teachers, or allow a school-by-school vote); regardless, each state will have to figure out what to do with its pension obligations to teachers who switch to the new contract.

The process by which Common Core states are creating math and English tests is well under way; it may result in top-notch exams that lead to dramatic performance increases. The easiest place to implement an assessment marketplace, then, is in science, history, and language courses. ESEA should establish a group that registers curricula in those areas; if this marketplace proves effective and states struggle with the Common Core tests, this marketplace can easily expand to incorporate math and English.

The accountability provisions of ESEA should require testing companies to phase in collection of school-level instructional and background data. Initially, the testing companies could provide the data to client states for analysis; perhaps down the road, states or foundations will find it useful to run studies across multiple data sets.

None of these proposals is expensive; in fact, most will save money in the short and long term. And although some might be politically inexpedient, none would have the natural and well-funded opponents of other commonsense reforms. Further, this is not an exhaustive list. Every reader of this article could probably come up with additional reforms that would create a more responsive education system.

This plan places a great deal of faith in competition and innovation, though within the construct of a robust public school system. As I’ve noted, this faith could be misplaced: perhaps education truly is different, and there simply is one immutable right way to run schools. But there is something to be said for empowering our schools with transparency, choice, and agility. American ideals shouldn’t just be taught in the classroom; they should shape that classroom.

John Katzman is the executive chairman of 2tor, Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

-Joshua Dunn

Terry Moe was interviewed by Mike Petrilli for the Education Next book club podcast here.

Richard D. Kahlenberg: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s campaign earlier this year to significantly curtail the scope of bargaining for the state’s public employees, including teachers, set off a national debate over whether their long-established right to collectively bargain should be reined in, or even eliminated.

If you’re a Republican who wants to win elections, going after teachers unions makes parochial sense. According to Terry Moe, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) gave 95 percent of contributions to Democrats in federal elections between 1989 and 2010. “Collective bargaining is the bedrock of union well-being,” Moe notes, so to constrain collective bargaining is to weaken union power. The partisan nature of Walker’s campaign was revealed when he exempted two public-employee unions that supported him politically: those representing police and firefighters.

But polls suggest that Americans don’t want to see teachers and other public employees stripped of collective bargaining rights. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that by a margin of 61 to 33 percent, Americans oppose ending collective bargaining for public employees. A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll discovered that while Americans want public employees to pay more for retirement benefits and health care, 77 percent said unionized state and municipal employees should have the same rights as union members who work in the private sector. Is the public wrong in supporting the rights of teachers and other public employees to collectively bargain? I don’t think so.

Richard D. Kahlenberg

The NEA has existed since 1857 and the AFT since 1916, but teachers didn’t have real influence until they began bargaining collectively in the 1960s. Before that, as Albert Shanker, one of the founding fathers of modern teachers unions, noted, teachers engaged in “collective begging.” Educators were very poorly compensated; in New York City, they were paid less than those washing cars for a living. Teachers were subject to the whims of often autocratic principals and could be fired for joining a union.

Some teachers objected to the idea of collective bargaining. They saw unions as organizations for blue-collar workers, not for college-educated professionals. But Shanker and others insisted that teachers needed collective bargaining in order to be compensated sufficiently and treated as professionals.

Democratic societies throughout the world recognize the basic right of employees to band together to pursue their interests and secure a decent standard of living. Article 23 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides not only that workers should be shielded from discrimination, but also that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

Collective bargaining is important, not only to advance individual interests but to give unions the power to serve as a countervailing force against big business and big government. Citing the struggle of Polish workers against the Communist regime, Ronald Reagan declared in a Labor Day speech in 1980, “where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.”

The majority of Americans believe that citizens don’t give up the basic right to collective bargaining just because they work for the government. In free societies across the globe, from Finland to Japan, public school teachers have the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining.

In the United States, only seven states outlaw collective bargaining for teachers. Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia authorize collective bargaining for such employees, and another nine permit it. It is no accident that the seven states that prohibit collective bargaining for teachers are mostly in the Deep South, the region of the country historically most hostile to extending democratic citizenship to all Americans.

Terry Moe finds that collective bargaining for teachers has strong support among candidates for school boards. He writes, “the vast majority of school board candidates, 66 percent, have positive overall attitudes toward collective bargaining. Even among Republicans—indeed, even among Republicans who are not endorsed by the unions—the majority take a positive approach to this most crucial of union concerns.”

Nonetheless, some (including Moe) would prefer that collective bargaining for teachers be severely curtailed, or even outlawed. Ironically, one argument advanced by critics is that collective bargaining is undemocratic. The other major argument is that teacher collective bargaining is bad for education. Both claims are without basis.

Those who argue that collective bargaining for teachers is stacked, even undemocratic, say that, unlike in the private sector, where management and labor go head-to-head with clearly distinct interests, in the case of teachers, powerful unions are actively involved in electing school board members, essentially helping to pick the management team. Moreover, when collective bargaining covers education policy areas, such as class size or discipline codes, the public is shut out of the negotiations, some assert. Along the way, they conclude, the interests of adults in the system are served but not the interests of children.

But these arguments fail to recognize that in a democracy, school boards are ultimately accountable to all voters, not just teachers, who often live and vote outside the district in which they teach, and in any event represent a small share of total voters. Union endorsements matter in school board elections, but so do the interests of general taxpayers and parents and everyone else who makes up the community. If school board members toe a teachers union line that is unpopular with voters, those officials can be thrown out in the next election.

Indeed, one could make a strong argument that any outsized influence that teachers unions exercise in school board elections provides a nice enhancement of democratic decisionmaking on education policy because teachers, as much as any other group in society, can serve as powerful advocates for those Americans who cannot vote: schoolchildren. The interests of teachers and their unions don’t always coincide with those of students, but on the really big issues, such as overall investment in education, the convergence of interests is strong. Certainly, the interests of teachers in ensuring adequate educational investment are far stronger than they are for most voters, who don’t have children in the school system and may be more concerned about holding down taxes than investing in the education of other people’s kids.

American society consistently underinvests in children compared with other leading democratic societies. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the child poverty rate in the United States is 21.6 percent, the fifth-highest among its 40 member nations. Only Turkey, Romania, Mexico, and Israel have higher child-poverty rates. Put differently, we’re in the bottom one-eighth in preventing child poverty. By contrast, when the interests of children are connected with the interests of teachers, as they are on the question of public education spending, the U.S. ranks close to the top one-third. Among 39 OECD nations, the U.S. ranks 14th in spending on primary and secondary education as a percentage of gross domestic product.

Some critics argue that strong teachers unions make for inefficient spending and bad education policies in the instances when teacher and student interests diverge. For example, it is frequently claimed that teachers unions, through collective-bargaining agreements, protect incompetent members and prevent good teachers from being paid more.

This sometimes occurs, and when it does, it is troublesome. But a number of reform union leaders, going back to Al Shanker, have embraced “peer review” plans, which weed out bad teachers in Toledo, Ohio; Montgomery County, Maryland; and elsewhere. These reform plans put the lie to the notion that the average teacher has an interest in her union protecting incompetent colleagues. To the contrary, dead wood on the faculty makes every other teacher’s job more difficult. Likewise, numerous local unions have adopted pay-for-performance plans, when the measurement of performance is valid and incentives are in place to encourage good teachers to share innovative teaching techniques rather than hoarding them.

Moreover, many of the things that teachers collectively bargain for are good for kids. The majority of students benefit when teachers can more easily discipline unruly students, for example. (Principals, by contrast, often want to take a softer line so the school’s suspension rates don’t look bad.) Higher compensation packages attract higher-quality teacher candidates and reduce disruptive teacher turnover.

If collective bargaining were really a terrible practice for education, we should see stellar results where it does not occur: in the American South and in the charter school arena, for example. Why, then, aren’t the seven states that forbid collective bargaining for teachers (Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) at the top of the educational heap? Why do charter schools, 88 percent of which are nonunion, only outperform regular public schools 17 percent of the time, as a 2009 Stanford University study found? Why, instead, do we see states like Massachusetts, and countries like Finland, both with strong teachers unions, leading the pack?

Opponents of collective bargaining will immediately point out that poverty rates are high in the American South, and low in Finland, which is an entirely valid point. But doesn’t that suggest that the national obsession with weakening teachers unions may be less important than finding ways to reduce childhood poverty?

Moreover, scholarly studies that seek to control for poverty find that collective bargaining is associated with somewhat stronger, not weaker, student outcomes. Sociologist Robert Carini’s 2002 review of 17 studies found that “unionism leads to modestly higher standardized achievement test scores, and possibly enhanced prospects for graduation from high school.” Even Terry Moe, an outspoken opponent of collective bargaining for teachers (see “Seeing the Forest Instead of the Trees,” book reviews, page 77), suggests that research on the impact of collective bargaining on student outcomes “has generated mixed findings (so far) and doesn’t provide definitive answers.”

For a variety of reasons, collective bargaining for teachers should not be constrained, much less eliminated. Indeed, if teachers are to be partners in innovative education reform (see “A Different Role for Teachers Unions?” features, page 16), the scope of collective bargaining should be expanded. When the United Federation of Teachers first began to bargain collectively in the early 1960s, Albert Shanker was distressed that the New York City school board was willing to discuss only traditional issues like wages and benefits and rejected the idea of bargaining over broader policies that the union proposed, such as the creation of magnet schools.

Shanker saw that by reducing the scope of collective bargaining, critics created a political trap for unions. Union leaders were told they could only address bread-and-butter issues and then were criticized for caring only about their own selfish concerns rather than student achievement or larger policy issues. Moreover, Shanker believed that teachers had a lot of good ideas that could be incorporated into collective bargaining agreements, such as teacher peer review, suggestions for the types of curricula that work best in the classroom, and what sorts of programs would lure teachers into high-poverty schools. He also knew that reforms that draw on teacher wisdom are more likely to be effectively implemented when the classroom door closes.

In the end, Shanker’s frustration with the traditional constraints of collective bargaining spurred him to propose, in a 1988 speech at the National Press Club, the creation of “charter schools,” where teachers would draw upon a wealth of experience to try innovative ideas. Much to Shanker’s dismay, the charter school movement went in a very different direction, becoming a vehicle for avoiding unions and reducing teacher voice (and thereby increasing teacher turnover). And charters still educate a very small fraction of students.

Expanding collective bargaining for teachers to more states and to more education issues will give educators greater voice, and in so doing, indirectly strengthen the voice of students. Overall, the evidence suggests that Scott Walker has it exactly wrong, and the American public, which overwhelmingly supports the right to collective bargaining, has it right.

Jay P. Greene: Asking if teachers unions are a positive force in education is a bit like asking if the Tobacco Institute is a positive force in health policy or if the sugar lobby is helpful in assessing the merits of corn syrup. The problem is not that teachers unions are hostile to the interests of students and their families, but that teachers unions, like any organized interest group, are specifically designed to promote the interests of their own members and not to safeguard the interests of nonmembers. To the extent that teachers benefit from more generous pay and benefits, less-demanding work conditions, and higher job security, the unions will pursue those goals, even if achieving them comes at the expense of students. That is what interest groups do. Unfortunately, a public education system that guarantees ever-increasing pay and benefits while lowering work demands on teachers, who virtually hold their positions for life regardless of performance, harms students.

Collective bargaining is the primary vehicle through which the unions enact their preferred policies regarding pay, benefits, job security, and work conditions. It is also the mechanism by which unions collect fees from teachers that provide them with the resources to prevail politically. Until the ability of teachers unions to engage in collective bargaining is restrained, we should expect unions to continue to use it to advance the interests of their adult members over those of children, their families, and taxpayers.

Teachers unions only won the privilege of engaging in collective bargaining in the last 50 years, about when student achievement began to stagnate and costs to soar. A return to the pre–collective bargaining era may be the tonic our education system needs to return to growth in achievement and restraint in costs.

Jay P. Greene

The nature and function of organized interest groups is widely known and understood. Of course, there is nothing wrong with people organizing interest groups to advocate for themselves. That is an essential part of the freedom of assembly, protected by the U.S. Constitution. If people dislike what an interest group is advocating, they can organize other interest groups to compete in the marketplace of ideas and advocate for other concerns. The normal process of checks and balances among competing interest groups, however, has failed when it comes to education.

There are three factors that have contributed to the failure of other groups to check the power of teachers unions. First, there is an asymmetry in the ability of groups to organize in education, significantly favoring the teachers unions. Teachers unions have a huge advantage in organizing and advocating for their interests. Employees of the public school system are physically concentrated in school buildings, making it easier for them to organize. And because current employees are in a good position to know how they can benefit from the system, they can be mobilized relatively easily to advocate for those policies. Parents, taxpayers, and members of the general public are geographically dispersed, making it harder for them to organize. And because they are not immersed in education matters, they cannot easily envision how policy changes might help or hurt, making it harder to mobilize them on those issues. It is hardly unique to education that concentrated interests have an advantage over diffuse interests, but this is one factor contributing to teachers union dominance.

Second, teachers unions have fooled a large section of the general public and elites into thinking of them as something other than a regular interest group advocating for their own concerns.

The teachers unions have worked hard to convince people that they are a collection of educators who love our children almost as much as the parents do. They’re like the favorite aunt or uncle who dotes on our children. This image of the teachers unions as part of our family is facilitated by the fact that virtually every college-educated household (the households with the greatest political influence) has at least one current or former public school teacher sitting at the dining table when they gather for Thanksgiving. This impression is also fostered by ad campaigns featuring teachers buying school supplies out of their own pockets and movie portraits of heroic teachers believing in students, even as their parents have abandoned them.

Of course, some teachers really do buy school supplies with their own money (which should make people wonder what kind of education system would make that necessary after spending an average of more than $12,000 per student each year). And some teachers really are like the doting aunt or uncle who sticks with kids, even when the parents have given up. But loving children and being part of the family is certainly not what teachers unions are about. They are about accumulating the power necessary to advocate for the interests of their members. In a moment of candor, Bob Chanin, former general counsel of the National Education Association, explained the key to the union’s effectiveness: “Despite what some among us would like to believe, it is NOT because of our creative ideas. It is NOT because of the merit of our positions. It is NOT because we care about children, and it is NOT because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.”

The disarming image of teachers unions as Mary Poppins has begun to morph into that of a burly autoworker, as teachers union advocacy has become more militant in recent years. As states attempt to trim very generous benefit packages for teachers, the unions have organized large demonstrations, occupied state capitols, and chanted angry slogans. The public image of teachers unions fighting like autoworkers for the benefit to retire at 55 with full medical coverage and 66 percent of their peak salary while the economy is in shambles and the quality of their industry stagnates has done much to undermine the doting aunt or uncle meme. The angry slogans emanating from Diane Ravitch’s and Valerie Strauss’s Twitter feeds may soothe disgruntled teachers, but they are eroding the public perception that teachers unions are somehow different from other interest groups. Media and policy elites are increasingly treating teachers union claims with the same skepticism that they used to apply only to other interest groups.

A third factor is that unions have significant influence over who is elected or appointed to negotiate with them over pay, benefits, and work conditions. In the private sector, the power of unions is constrained by the competing organized interests of management. When they sit down to negotiate pay, benefits, and work conditions, members of management are inclined to represent the interests of shareholders, not those of employees. But in education, as in other public-sector collective bargaining, the interests of employees are represented on both sides of the table. The employees, as citizens, can organize, finance, and vote for elected officials who favor the union’s interests. It is precisely for this reason that public employees historically did not have collective bargaining rights.

But didn’t the lack of collective bargaining rights sometimes leave teachers vulnerable to arbitrary and discriminatory treatment by school administrators? Yes, but unionization and collective bargaining were neither necessary nor efficient means of correcting those abuses. We can look to other public employees, such as members of the armed forces, who still do not have collective bargaining rights, to see how progress could have occurred without unionization. The military, like public schools, was once racially segregated. African American servicemen and servicewomen were treated horribly. And sometimes officers treated all soldiers in an arbitrary and unfair manner. These abuses were not corrected by unionization and collective bargaining in the military. They were corrected by executive orders and changing legislation governing those public employees. The same path could have been taken with public school employees without the political distortions that public employee unions introduce by virtue of having their interests represented on both sides of the bargaining table.

It may have taken longer than many would like to integrate the military, expand the roles of women in the armed forces, and end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but we were able to achieve all of those through an open, public process of changing laws and regulations. Unionized collective bargaining might also have addressed those issues, but it would have been done mostly behind closed doors and would have been accompanied by provisions to protect the narrow interests of the unions at the expense of the public interest. Perhaps the use of drones would have been restricted because it displaces jobs for Air Force pilots; perhaps there would be caps on the hours soldiers could engage in combat. Who knows what else a unionized military might have produced? The point is we rightly restrict the ability of members of the armed forces from unionizing and engaging in collective bargaining, just as we once did and could again for teachers. The claim that public employees have a “right” to unionize and collectively bargain and that exercising this “right” necessarily advances the public interest is obviously false.

The proper mechanism for improving compensation and work conditions in the public sector is through changes in law and regulation. The salary, benefits, job security, and work conditions of public employees are just as much a matter of public policy as the work that those employees are supposed to do. We don’t allow smoky backroom deals arrived at in collective bargaining to dictate the goals, structure, or existence of the public education system, so neither should we use that process to determine compensation and work condition policies.

What evidence is there that teachers unions have actually had negative effects on students and the education system? The research literature generally finds that unionization is associated with higher per-pupil costs and lower student achievement, but those findings are not very large and are sometimes inconsistent. A 1996 article by Caroline Hoxby in the Quarterly Journal of Economics is widely considered the most methodologically rigorous analysis of the issue. Claremont Graduate University professor Charles Kerchner described Hoxby’s study in a literature review prepared for the National Education Association as “the most sophisticated of the econometric attempts to isolate a union impact on the student results and school operations …” Hoxby finds that unionization is associated with higher student dropout rates as well as higher spending.

But the reality is that it is very hard to produce rigorous research on the effects of teachers unions on education. For one thing, teachers unions are powerful and active almost everywhere. Even in states without collective bargaining, the unions push state legislatures to put into law what is normally put into collective bargaining agreements. This is less than ideal for the unions, because they don’t collect dues in exchange for pushing through legislation like they can for representing members to achieve the same ends through collective bargaining. Unions operate these money-losing operations in right-to-work states to make sure that there is no meaningful policy variation on their key issues. They’d rather that we not discover that the world does not end without a mandatory step-and-ladder pay scale, fair dismissal procedures, and favorable work rules. The lack of policy variation hinders researchers, because outcomes are not likely to be very different where the policies are not very different.

But we don’t need a wealth of evidence on teachers unions specifically as long as we know about the effects of interest groups and recognize that teachers unions are indeed interest groups. Seeking to produce evidence on the effects of each interest group separately, especially when there are empirical challenges to doing so, is a bit like trying to prove that gravity operates in every room of a house. We could drop a bowling ball in each room to see if it hits the floor, but sometimes there are tables, couches, or beds in the way. If we don’t get the result we expected, it doesn’t mean that gravity only applies in certain places; it just means that research constraints prevent us from seeing in a particular situation what we know to be true in general.

In general, we know that interest groups advocate for the benefits of their members, even if it comes at the expense of others. We know that teachers unions are interest groups. And we know that the interests of teachers unions are not entirely consistent with the needs of students and taxpayers. Thus, teachers unions are likely to be negative forces for the education system and certainly should not be seen as helpful. The most rigorous research that does exist bears this out, but we also know this from our more general knowledge of how interest groups affect policy.

It is not currently practical to forbid the unionization of teachers, as we forbid the unionization of members of the armed forces. But if we want to limit the ability of teachers unions to advance their own interests at the expense of children, their families, and taxpayers, we need to consider ways of restricting their ability to engage in collective bargaining. Restricting collective bargaining would force teachers unions to pursue their interests through the legislative process, where competing interests might have a better chance to check their power. And forcing unions to operate through legislation rather than backroom collective-bargaining negotiations would improve transparency, which could also place a check on the unions’ ability to satisfy their own interests at the expense of others.

RDK: Jay Greene’s opening line, comparing teachers unions to the Tobacco Institute, is very telling about his overall analysis. He’s right, of course, that both are “interest groups,” but does he not see a massive difference between an entity that is devoted to getting more kids addicted to deadly cigarettes so they’ll be lifelong clients and a group representing rank-and-file teachers whose life’s work is educating children?

Greene complains that teachers unions have become “more militant in recent years.” But teacher strikes, which were quite common in the 1960s and 1970s, dropped 90 percent by the mid-1980s and are now, as one education report noted, essentially “relics of the past.” To the extent that teachers have rallied, it’s in response to unprecedented attacks on them in places like Wisconsin, where a half century of labor law was radically rewritten. Astonishingly, Greene would go further than Wisconsin Republicans and “return to the pre–collective bargaining era.”

Greene says providing teachers with better pay and benefits is bad for kids, but where is his evidence? Don’t better compensation packages attract brighter talent, or are the laws of supply and demand suddenly suspended when it comes to teachers?

Finally, Greene is correct to suggest that teacher and student interests are not perfectly aligned, but who are the selfless adults who better represent the interests of kids? The hedge fund managers who support charter schools and also want their income taxed at lower rates than regular earned income, thereby squeezing education budgets? Superintendents who sometimes junk promising initiatives for which they cannot take credit? I’d rather place my faith in the democratically elected representatives of educators who work with kids day in and day out.

JPG: Richard Kahlenberg places his faith in “democratically elected representatives of educators,” that is, the teachers unions, to safeguard the interests of children. Note that he does not say the democratically elected representatives of the people, or the voters. Kahlenberg is perfectly comfortable with a school system whose policies and practices are dominated by its employees, not by the citizens who pay for it or by the families whose children are compelled to attend it. Rather than seeing a system controlled by its employees as one characterized by self-interested adults maximizing their benefits at the expense of children, Kahlenberg sees it as the ideal.

In my ideal vision, we would put our faith in parents, not teachers unions, to represent the interests of children. If we had a robust system of parental school choice, I would have no problem with teachers unions and collective bargaining. In the private sector, if unions ask for too much, at least they experience the natural consequences of destroying their own companies or industries (to wit, the auto industry). But in the public sector, unions are almost entirely insulated from the consequences of making unreasonable demands, since governments never go out of business. Public sector unions can drive total revenue for their industry higher without any improvements in productivity simply by getting public officials to increase taxes.

Unfortunately, we lack a robust system of school choice and instead have to rely on democratic institutions, like school boards and state legislatures, to determine most school policies and practices. But unless we also restrict the collective bargaining rights of school employees, teachers unions will dominate the decisions of those democratic institutions, given their advantages in funding and organization, to distort elections and policy decisions.

Teachers unions almost certainly raise salaries and benefits, as Kahlenberg suggests, but that doesn’t necessarily attract better teachers if the salary schedule does nothing to reward excellence. Similarly, union-imposed dismissal procedures make it virtually impossible to fire ineffective teachers. The alignment that Kahlenberg sees between teachers unions’ desire to increase education spending and the interests of students would only be a real concordance if the unions facilitated the use of those funds in ways that actually improved outcomes.

…Put another way, lopsided majorities voted to cut retirees’ pension benefits in a union-dominated state where Democrats have controlled the legislature since the eve of World War II.

The bill, which Governor Chafee is expected to sign next week, will face court challenges. Its enactment is a bitter, life-changing event for retirees and workers who spent their lives expecting a retirement benefit they now won’t get in full. And taxpayers are only avoiding far higher pension costs in the future, not saving huge sums.

Make no mistake, though: the bill is an extraordinary – and unlikely – achievement for the three leaders most responsible for shepherding it through: Chafee, House Speaker Gordon Fox and, most of all, Treasurer Gina Raimondo….

The lion’s share of the credit for the pension overhaul will go – justly – to the treasurer. The political newcomer and former financier is already winning glowing national media coverage, making her the darling of anti-pension warriors from coast to coast.

What that misses, though, is the nuance of her approach to the issue. Raimondo didn’t push to scrap defined-benefit pensions because like many experts, she thinks defined-contribution accounts alone don’t provide “retirement security.” She shined a bright spotlight on the funding shortfall and used her considerable speaking skills to push it to the top of the state’s agenda. She won over Chafee, lawmakers, the business community and many members of the public with her ideas for solving the problem. And she came up with a complicated plan that just may do the job.

As Nesi notes, the bill has real and painful consequences, especially for retirees who could see their annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) frozen for up to 19 years. Still, the the Rhode Island plan is thoughtful, comprehensive, and mostly succeeds in sharing the burden. Current teachers take on more risk. Taxpayers, although they pay less annually, pay over an extended term. Retirees bear the greatest load of all: as the years pass without a COLA, those with small pensions will see their buying power decrease.

Other states continue to ignore these issues or have tried to address pension shortfalls through gimmicks or delays. Some, like Illinois, slashed the pensions of new teachers and will use the contributions of these teachers to subsidize current teachers and retirees — in effect robbing the future by making it more difficult to recruit new teachers. And others want to use shortfalls as an excuse to try to gut public employee benefits altogether.

Rhode Island’s political courage offers an important example, not only to pension problem-solvers in statehouses, but also to those in our nation’s capital trying to solve another massive financial dilemma.

PHOTO: Ms Marianne Heikkikä teaches physics in Tikkurila High School in Vantaa, Finland

American teachers unions are increasingly the target of measures, authored by friends and foes alike, intended to limit their power, or even eviscerate them. Looking at this scene, one would never guess that the countries that are among the top 10 in student performance have some of the strongest teachers unions in the world. Are those unions in some way different from American teachers unions? Do unions elsewhere behave differently from American teachers unions when challenged to do what is necessary to improve student performance? To explore these questions, I compare teachers and their unions in Ontario, Canada and Finland with their U.S. counterparts.

In the United States, the modern labor union grew out of bitter strife between workers and owners in the early years of the 20th century. The Wagner Act, passed in 1935, guaranteed workers the right to organize and strike. Modern labor relations date from the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which modified the Wagner Act mainly by defining the rights of employers in the framework it had provided. These laws applied only to workers in the private sector.

The Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts reflected the mass-production systems that the United States embraced more fully than any other industrial nation. In this arrangement, management figured out how the work was going to get done; workers were regarded as interchangeable; and skilled craftsmanship was minimized. The “skill” was in the machine, not the person operating it. And because the work was largely unskilled, pay was low.

The Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts gave workers the right to organize to bargain for wages and working conditions. They also obligated the unions to defend their members against management when conflicts arose. The assumption was that the relationship between the union and management would be adversarial; the laws provided the rules under which that adversarial relationship would be conducted. Courts later ruled that the unions and management could not collaborate.

In northern Europe at that time, the mass-production system was not so widely embraced, the era of the craftsman did not abate, and work was less routinized and rule-bound than in the United States.

After World War II, management and owners in many Western European countries wanted to deny communism any opportunity to gain ground among workers, and so they gave labor a seat at the table. Thus three “social partners”—government, labor, and management—would frame social policy together, as equals. In many countries, the law also provided for work councils made up of workers elected by their peers at the firm level to adjust the national agreement to local conditions.

Indeed, in countries with labor parties in Europe today, it is not unusual for the labor party, when in power, to put a brake on wage growth in order to forestall inflation, or to resist calls for more benefits when productivity growth does not justify increased benefits.

In many European countries, by law, workers sit on the boards of directors of major firms. When that happens, workers sometimes offer to hold wages steady or even reduce them if management agrees to invest the savings in capital or in research and development. Workers understand that if the firm cannot make the investments required to be more competitive, it may resort to layoffs.

Senior European executives are often puzzled when their American counterparts talk about a desire to greatly weaken or even eliminate trade unions. The Europeans, while often eager to acquire more power vis-à-vis their unions, do not generally talk about eliminating them. They view the unions as an instrument for giving a voice to a key sector of the society. They generally believe that if labor were not provided a voice through the union, it might eventually become a direct threat to democratic capitalism.

The Case of American Teachers

Prior to the 1960s, the National Education Association (NEA) was an alliance of educators, not a teachers union. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), founded in 1916, had always been a union, but it was much smaller, and not particularly militant. But, during the ’60s, teachers’ compensation declined significantly relative to that of other occupations requiring a similar level of education. In the racial battles of the era, teachers were sometimes made the target of public anger in a way that was unprecedented and seemed quite threatening. As a result, the AFT became appealing to many teachers to whom it had not been before. The NEA shed those members who were not classroom teachers and traded its identity as a professional organization for a new one as a trade union.

The newly energized teachers unions appealed to the AFL-CIO for help in getting state legislatures to pass laws that put teachers on much the same footing as those in unions representing workers in the private sector. The AFL-CIO was stronger then than it is now, and the teachers could put more feet on the ground in legislative political campaigns than any other single constituency. This was particularly true in the northern part of the country, where organized labor was strongest at the state level.

In the beginning, the lawyers that management hired were happy to negotiate contracts that closely followed common practice in the industrial sector. Some of these provisions simply made a teacher’s life a little easier, like lunchtime free of student responsibilities. But others had major consequences for the quality of teachers and for instruction. Among the most important of these provisions were those defining the hours of work, using seniority to determine who could transfer to jobs within the system as they opened up, and the order in which people would be laid off when staff size was reduced.

Many now think of these seniority-based rules as the result of collective bargaining. But such practices began in other industries in the 1920s—before there was any national legislation mandating collective bargaining—and were part and parcel of the mass-production workplace. Management wanted rules that were easy to administer, and, in a world in which all workers were treated as interchangeable, such a system worked well for managers in most industries.

In the case of the schools, management’s attorneys, like management’s attorneys everywhere, saw these demands as reasonable, because they were easy to administer and cost the district no money. But the organizational costs were substantial. Although the unions knew this, the school boards’ attorneys apparently did not. Thus, school boards and management gave away control over who could be hired in a school, who could fill leadership positions, how much time was available for professional development, and much, much more.

Few citizens were aware of the significance of the concessions that school boards made to unions over the years. Both school boards and the unions greatly feared teacher strikes, knowing that there were few things that could anger parents as much as not being able to put their children in school when they had to go off to work in the morning. While the teachers unions could seek higher compensation at the negotiating table, they quickly discovered that they would lose public support if the school board sought the authority to pay for raises by floating new bonds, for example. So the unions and the boards often settled their differences by negotiating changes in “working conditions,” thereby avoiding teacher strikes.

When times were tough, it was often easier for both management and labor to negotiate increased benefits, particularly retirement benefits, than increased cash compensation, because, again, the public focused on current costs rather than on obligations that would not have to be paid for many years. The unions typically negotiated benefits that would be most attractive to their longest-serving members. Over time, the compensation package got more and more expensive but less and less attractive to talented young people making decisions about which occupation to pursue.

Over the course of several decades, teachers unions in the United States progressively constrained management’s ability to select staff, promote staff, deploy staff, discipline staff, train staff, and let staff go when they were not doing the job. In the context of American-style labor relations, and the politics of American schooling, this was probably inevitable. The adversarial model of labor relations embodied in the national labor laws initially applied only to the private sector, but when President Kennedy, in an executive order, allowed members of the federal workforce to organize, state legislators adopted the private-sector model for public employees. Public-sector unions were told by their attorneys that their members could sue if they did not defend the teachers in court against school district management seeking to deprive them of their jobs. So the union lawyers routinely made it as difficult as possible to fire teachers, even those widely regarded as incompetent. Given the adversarial nature of the relationship, there was never any real possibility of teachers accepting joint responsibility for student performance outcomes, as was the case with unions in northern Europe, where the relationship has never been hostile. In the United States, student performance was the responsibility of management, not labor.

Today, American teachers want to be viewed as professionals, but their experience tells them they need their membership in the union and the clout that they have in the state legislature, even in states that do not allow them to organize. Without the unions, they might lose ground economically and be at the mercy of management that often does not treat them as professionals.

The Collaborative Model

These dynamics set the stage for the current confrontation in the United States between the unions and the teachers on one side and, increasingly, school district management, legislatures, governors, and the public on the other.

The unions are perceived to be standing in the way of badly needed reforms, protecting incompetent teachers, and putting up barricades to prevent the erosion of pension benefits the public can no longer afford. But as the unions come under increasing assault, teachers see themselves being blamed for system failures that should be attributed to others, including school boards, parents who are not supporting their children’s learning, and politicians who preside over a society in which an ever-greater number of students come to school unprepared to learn. It is hardly surprising that teachers and their unions are circling the wagons to salvage as much as possible of what they have gained since the 1960s.

It does not have to be this way.

Finland is famously a world leader in student performance. It also has some of the strongest unions in the world, and that includes its teachers unions. More than any other advanced industrial nation, Finland’s education strategy is to give teaching the highest status and make it the most desirable job in the country. The winning combination is top-quality recruits, first-rate training, and teachers with the kind of autonomy—read trust—typically accorded to other professionals but rarely to teachers. There are no top-down accountability systems in Finland, with their implied distrust of teachers, of the sort that dominate the discussion in the United States. It is hard to say which came first, the trust in the teachers or their quality, but they clearly go hand in hand. Finland’s teachers and their unions have not engaged in confrontational politics; the unions have been at the reform table for years as essential social partners.

In Ontario, Canada, one of the great PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) success stories, the current provincial administration took over from one that had instituted a province-wide curriculum and matching assessments, along with a tough accountability system. But the Conservative government that put these policies in place had gone to war with the teachers and their unions, cutting funding, reducing professional development by half, and taking out television ads demonizing teachers. The result was a highly polarized environment, with teachers resorting to strikes and lockouts to defend what they could of their prerogatives, and no improvement in student performance.

The administration that took office in 2003 reversed course. Premier Dalton McGuinty took the view that he was not going to get the kind of student performance he was looking for if he did not have the trust and confidence of the teachers, and he would never gain their trust by continuing the war that the previous administration had begun. He and his top aides spent a lot of time to talking with teachers in classrooms and school lunchrooms. They brought teachers and their unions to the table for discussions of education reform strategy and won their trust by listening hard to what the teachers had to say and then providing the needed support. The reform strategy that they adopted assumed that teachers wanted to do the right thing but lacked the capacity to do it. So the McGuinty government focused on building that capacity. By trading trust for manifest distrust, the McGuinty government laid the base for the collaborative relationship with teachers and their unions that it saw as the prerequisite for improving student performance.

American Translation

What can one reasonably conclude from this comparative description of the development of unions in the United States and northern Europe and the approaches taken to reform in Canada and Finland?

My conclusion is that the current impulse to curtail the influence of the teachers unions may return some powers to management that over the years have gravitated to the unions. But that victory is likely to come at the price of deeply alienating many teachers from the larger cause of education reform.

Teachers know that if they lose their unions during a fiscal crisis, they will have no protection at all as long as state and local officials face enormous pressure to cut teaching jobs, compensation, and benefits. A determined, widespread effort to weaken or destroy the institution teachers are counting on to protect them economically will force them into retirement or to hunker down and wait in brooding resentment for a change in the political weather.

As we have seen, this is precisely what happened when they came under a similar attack in Ontario, Canada. That is hardly a formula for successful education reform.

The alternative is the one taken by Ontario’s premier McGuinty: convince the teachers that they have the trust of government and enlist their unions in seeking to improve student performance. As the Ontario case shows, this does not mean that government has to give the unions whatever they want. McGuinty certainly did not do that: He made it clear where his bottom lines were. He insisted on a strong curriculum, competitive standards, and new assessments that matched them. And he was not about to break the bank.

But he invited the teachers and their unions to the table. He listened to them with respect. Where they told him that they needed support to improve outcomes for students, he supplied it wherever he could. The mutual trust that grew out of this relationship persuaded the teachers and unions to make concessions that they would never have willingly made under savage attack.

Reforming the Contract

Management will have to revisit the provisions of the contracts that school boards have negotiated over the years. Concessions will be necessary on unfunded retirement plans and on the use of seniority to govern many aspects of school-district operations. The more-or-less-unexamined move to apply the structures of the Wagner Act and the Taft-Hartley Act to the public sector needs to be reassessed. State labor legislation that mimics national labor law in its insistence on a confrontational stance between management and labor should be rewritten.

Getting to where these issues can be productively addressed requires first a relationship of trust between government and labor. Each side says that experience has taught them not to trust the other party, and so each states that trust depends on the other side making the first concessions. Someone has to go first.

Some will argue that the possibilities represented by the European model are simply not available in the United States. But our politics are not so different from those of Canada. The idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is so different from the rest of the world that lessons learned elsewhere do not apply here—had a certain allure when we were far ahead of our competitors. But it is very dangerous for a country that is falling further and further behind.

Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and editor of Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems (Harvard Education Press, November 2011).

LAUSD is being sued by a group that includes Alice Callaghan, a member of the Episcopalian clergy and the manager of Las Familias del Pueblo, a community center for the poor and homeless in downtown Los Angeles. Back in 1996, Callaghan organized 70 Spanish-speaking immigrant parents, who boycotted the Ninth Street Elementary School — calling for an end to failed bilingual-education methods and instead demanding that the school system teach the children of immigrant garment workers academic English as soon as possible.

Callaghan and this different group of parents are suing to enforce the Stull Act. The law goes back four decades and says that the board of trustees of each school district shall evaluate teachers, at least in part, by their student’s performance on the state’s standards-based tests. The law says “shall,” not “may.” It is mandatory that each district do this.

(The law is named for its sponsor, now-deceased Republican Assemblyman John Stull of San Diego, who received bipartisan support at the time for this statutory requirement that teachers be held accountable for the academic achievement of their pupils.)

The attorneys for the plaintiffs are Kyle Kirwan, a prominent Los Angeles litigator, and Scott Witlin, both partners at the law firm of Barnes & Thornburg. Their request for a court order was drafted in consultation with EdVoice, a Sacramento-based education-advocacy group. Before going to court, the plaintiffs sent a letter on Oct. 26 asking the district to comply. The letter stresses that for years the district has engaged in wanton lawlessness. In the letter, the plaintiffs’ attorneys say that the district “refuses to implement the Stull Act in complete abdication of its responsibility to its students, their parents, and the taxpayers of the district.”

The letter says that the district has never evaluated the teachers using student test scores, and, as a consequence, has never told teachers where they stood and counseled them on how to improve in terms of increasing their students’ learning – all of which are required by the law. “In short, the district has never complied with the Stull Act.”

The letter also points to the involvement of the teachers’ union United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) in this lawbreaking. Compliance with the law, the letter says, has been “deliberately evaded” through a series of “complicitous” collective-bargaining agreements between the LAUSD and UTLA, at the expense of students — who deserve effective teachers.

Specifically, the district has been pretending that it can avoid compliance with the Stull Act by making collective-bargaining agreements with the teachers’ union that overrule a statute (the Stull Act) passed by the state legislature. It doesn’t work that way. Valid contracts are written under and within the law, not in violation of the law. The lawsuit seeks to end this make-believe in the service of lawbreaking.

In their Nov. 1 petition for a court order, the plaintiffs’ attorneys say that the UTLA has treated the public school system in Los Angeles as “a taxpayer-funded jobs and entitlement program” for adults, even when a teacher‘s performance would be considered “demonstrably unsatisfactory” when judged by pupil results.

The petition described how the teachers’ union adopted a strategy of “stonewalling” when it came to putting the Stull Act into effect. “In collusion with the District‘s governing boards and superintendents,” the petition says, the teachers’ union has blocked lawful evaluation of teachers and the “corrective action” needed to ensure that students get effective teachers.

As a consequence, “the adults‘ collective employment and political interests” are turning the children’s opportunity for learning while in school “on its head” and instead the system is providing job guarantees to teachers as well as “preserving the political power of the Board and the Superintendent.” All of this comes at the expense of children — particularly the “socio-economically disadvantaged.”

These shenanigans by the district and the union have been presented to the public in a way that is designed to pull the wool over people’s eyes: “The result has been a perversion of the evaluation system and a knowing effort to deceive the public using educational jargon.”

Witlin, one of the attorneys, told education policy analyst and blogger RiShawn Biddle: “The school district is supposed to exist for the benefit of the children and not for the adults.”

The teacher evaluation program that is in place in Los Angeles, according to the petition, “does not comply with the Stull Act” and “perpetuates a fraud on the community” by letting teachers get high evaluation ratings whether or not their students are learning the material listed in the curriculum-content standards.

The petition cites damning statements from LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy in which he condemns his own evaluation program for teachers. For example, he recently said: “I would argue that nobody has told me that the current system of evaluation, which is performance review, helps anybody. It is fundamentally useless. It does not actually help you get better at [your] work and it doesn‘t tell you how well you’re doing.”

Superintendent Deasy also stated: “One would have to argue: ‘So … there are schools where 3 percent of the students are proficient at math and 100 percent of the teachers are at the top rating performance.’ That doesn‘t make sense to me whatsoever. And it doesn‘t make sense because the rating performance does not actually help teachers get better.”

In terms of what actually happens, the district is condemned out its own mouth.

Back on March 13, 2011, retired Los Angeles school district teacher Doug Lasken and I wrote an opinion column for the San Francisco Chronicle about non-compliance with the Stull Act in Los Angeles and other California districts – so I could not be happier about this lawsuit, which may finally bring some justice for Los Angeles schoolchildren after years of the district’s deliberate dodging of the law. Success in Los Angeles will mean that districts across California will have to begin evaluating teachers properly and getting struggling employees the extra help they need to become effective teachers.

LAUSD has been negotiating with UTLA to try to put in place a pilot program with three percent of district teachers, who would be evaluated in part on student performance on the state’s standards-based tests. But these negotiations are deadlocked because of the refusal of UTLA to even study the idea of complying with the law.

The plaintiffs in this case reject the proposed pilot program, which has no guarantee of ever having meaningful evaluations that actually count, even for the volunteer participants in the pilot. They point out that LAUSD has a record of “years of non-compliance” with the Stull Act and that there is no reason to believe that the pilot would even expand to the other 97 percent of teachers. “Sadly, the District has abdicated its duty to the children.” The plaintiffs demand instead that LAUSD comply with the Stull Act as soon as practically possible “in its entirety.”

-Bill Evers

Liberal reformers and prominent editorial pages are raging mad about the Harkin-Enzi bill’s supposedly weak approach to accountability in its ESEA update. Are they right to be? And is it true that Republicans have become teacher union stooges when it comes to federal education policy?

Let’s start by examining the language that’s causing all of the hullabaloo. Here are the main options on the table when it comes to identifying schools that are eligible for interventions:

• The Administration’s waiver package. In order to opt-out of ESEA’s Adequate Yearly Progress metric, states must propose accountability systems that “set new ambitious but achievable [Annual Measurable Objectives] in at least reading/language arts and mathematics for the State and all LEAs, schools, and subgroups.” In other words, states must set a goal for each year in terms of the percentage of students reaching the “proficient” standard on the state test. States must also identify “Title I schools with the greatest achievement gaps, or in which subgroups are furthest behind.”

• The Harkin-Enzi bill (as passed out of committee). Under the new ESEA, states would have to develop accountability systems that expect “the continuous improvement of all public schools in the State in the academic achievement and outcomes of all students, including… subgroups.”

• The Lamar Alexander-Johnny Isakson bill. Under this bill introduced by Senate Republicans, states would have to establish “a system of identifying and differentiating among all public elementary schools and secondary schools in the State based on student academic achievement and any other factors determined appropriate by the State [that] also takes into account achievement gaps…and overall performance of all students and of each category of students.”

So the Administration’s plan (which civil rights groups like) requires annual targets for all kids and all subgroups. The Harkin-Enzi bill, on the other hand, just asks for “continuous improvement” (whatever that means). And the Alexander-Isakson bill would leave it up to the states to design their own systems—and determine whether they want to use annual targets or not—though such systems must consider subgroup performance, too.

You could be forgiven for reading these subtle differences and wondering what the heck is the big deal. None of these approaches maintains AYP as we know it. And none of them eliminates the federal mandate around accountability entirely. This is a debate being held between the 45-yard lines.

Personally, I favor the Alexander-Isakson approach, for two reasons. First, we know that setting annual (and ever-rising) targets in NCLB put pressure on states to keep their “cut scores” modest so they didn’t unintentionally label every school in their jurisdiction as failing. I worry that the continued use of targets will either encourage the Common Core testing consortia to set their cut scores low—or that the combination of high cut scores and annual targets will cause lots of states to bail from the Common Core project entirely.

The second reason is more straightforward: We don’t know what the ideal accountability system looks like so why not give states the latitude to innovative? Asking them to consider subgroup performance is appropriate, but there are lots of ways to do that without looking at annual performance targets, per se. Why tie our hands unnecessarily?

The reason “why not,” contends the liberals, is that states cannot be trusted. Don’t we remember the days of heel-dragging, whether it be desegregation in the 50s and 60s or ESEA implementation in the 90s?

It’s hard to answer such an ideological argument with anything but ideology. (Can we trust the states? Yes we can!)

But how about we take the rhetoric down a notch? Including achievement targets in the next ESEA wouldn’t be the end of the world. Neither would excluding them. Come on folks, let’s get this reauthorization done.

-Mike Petrilli

* Yes, astute readers, the “A” in ESEA actually stands for “Act.”

** The short answer to “what’s at stake?” is “not much.”

This post also appeared on Flypaper.

When we asked our readers whether they favored or opposed school vouchers, 42 percent said they favored them, just a bit more than the 39 percent of the general public who gave a similar answer.

Our readers are more likely to have opinions on charter schools than the public as a whole (all but 7 percent take a position in contrast to the 39 percent of the public who take a pass on this item), but the ratio of support to opposition is roughly the same: about 3:1.

The same is true with learning online. All but 5 percent of our readers are ready to take a position on the issue, as compared to just 26 percent of the public as a whole.  But the ratio of support to opposition is, again, close to 3:1 among both readers and the national public.

Ed Next readers are also more likely to take a position on merit pay. All but 4 percent choose one side or the other, as compared to 26 percent of the public as a whole who take no position.  Readers are supportive of the idea but not by as wide a margin.  They are 15 percentage points more likely to support the idea than oppose it, as compared to a 20 percentage point difference among the public as a whole.

But as for teacher unions, readers are more likely to think they have done more harm than good.  While the public as a whole is split down the middle, readers are nearly twice as likely to think they are a stumbling block to school reform.

So I guess the editors of the journal can claim we are influencing public opinion.  The public thinks as our readers think, and our readers’ understanding is shaped by the facts and figures Ed Next reports.  But as one of our presidents once said, that would be wrong.  No such conclusion can be drawn.  All that can really be said is that our readers are more ready to take a position on the issues, and that our readers appear to constitute a cross-section of the thinking in the larger society.

-Paul Peterson