Halting a runaway train

October 20, 2011

The education field has traditionally clung to the belief that true “professionals” are those teachers who stick with this work for their entire careers—ten, twenty, thirty years, usually in the same school or school system and certainly in the same state. To recruit and retain such teachers (and in lieu of more generous salaries), school districts and states have long depended on the ability to promise them generous benefits—including pension and health-care plans—when they retire.

	These [defined-benefit] pension systems...are burdening state and local education budgets across the land, particularly at a time of broader economic frailty, and at a time when Baby Boomers are starting to retiring en masse.

Recently, however, it’s become clear that fewer of today’s teachers plan to remain in the classroom (or in the state) for their entire careers. The traditional defined-benefit (DB) pension system—which builds retirement capital slowly at the outset of a worker’s career, and often cannot be merged with other retirement plans after a job or geographic switch—now appears ill-suited to the work, lifestyles, and needs of a younger and more transient teacher population.

Besides which, the DB pension system is almost always very expensive, and getting more so, both for taxpayers and (depending on the structure of the plan) for its future beneficiaries. These pension systems (often unfunded or underfunded), plus ancillary

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Halting a runaway train

Harkin-Enzi's hodgepodge

Michael J. Petrilli / October 20, 2011

We finally have a serious, thoughtful ESEA reauthorization proposal in the Senate, one that should gain support from both sides of the aisle and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. But here’s a warning: It’s not the bill that the Senate is currently marking up.

Like the guy in green, the Alexander-Burr proposal
is just plain stronger. (Photo by Hector Alejandro)

No, that bill, authored by education-committee chairman Tom Harkin and ranking member Mike Enzi, is a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that should alarm folks on the right and the left.

And sure enough, progressives have already made their opinions clear on why the bill should be stopped dead in its tracks. But it should offend conservatives (including the Reform Realists among us) too, though for very different reasons. Such conservatives should back the aforementioned proposal put forward by Senators Alexander, Burr, and others, instead.

Here are the Harkin-Enzi bill’s major offenses:

• An expansive new reach into high schools. While the legislation deserves credit for handing many accountability decisions back to the states, it would launch a whole new series of federal interventions in the nation’s worst high schools. Targeting “dropout factories” might sound like a good idea until you consider the Department of Education’s capacity

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  Harkin-Enzi's hodgepodge

Age of Aquarius meets the Age of Austerity

October 20, 2011

This is the dawning of the Age of Austerity.
(Photo by Dottie Mae)

Since his election as Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel has pushed hard on several education-policy fronts—including lengthening the city’s inexcusably short school day and expanding all-day kindergarten access. It’s not just what he’s fighting for that’s exciting (though lengthening the school day is long overdue). Nor is it whom he is fighting against (though it does always tickle Gadfly when Democrats buck the unions). What makes Rahm so promising is the refreshingly pragmatic manner in which he is waging these battles. Noting that “the cost of putting political choices ahead of practical solutions has become too expensive,” Emanuel has exerted concerted campaigns to deflate bloated departments and reroute the recouped dollars to targeted initiatives. To pay for that all-day kindergarten, for example, he lopped $400 million off the city’s schools’ bureaucracy. Best of all is his refreshing rhetoric. About the 2003 teacher-union contract (signed by Arne Duncan, by the way), he said: “Chicago teachers got a double-digit pay raise and a shortened school week. The result was that politicians did not get a teachers’ strike and teachers did get better pay. But can anyone tell me what the kids got? We are going to design a system where the kids get something.” Yes, yes, yes!

A monopoly meets market demand

October 20, 2011

Monopoly meets the real world.
(Photo by Mike Fleming)

Public-school systems are notoriously insensitive to parental demands. When they do offer popular programs that parents want, they are often oversubscribed—and yet officials almost never take the obvious next step and expand or replicate the offering. Not so in St. Louis. In response to swollen market demand for its standout magnet school, Kennard Classical Junior High, the district has created a second magnet school—by transforming an undersubscribed school slated for closure. Mallinckrot Academy—and its gifted-education program—are meant “to capitalize on the demand for accelerated learning that Kennard alone cannot satisfy.” These programs, which are largely geared toward middle-class families, are designed to keep these folks (and their tax-base dollars) within city limits. Which, in Gadfly’s view, is a worthy goal. Other struggling urban districts would be wise to follow suit.

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A monopoly meets market demand

Strong Support, Low Awareness: Public Perception of the Common Core Standards

Daniela Fairchild / October 20, 2011

While adoption and implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have spurred a hailstorm of activity across educator and edu-wonk circles alike, the general public remains clueless even as to what the standards are—never mind how they are being implemented or what the long-term implications of their adoption might be. Through this national poll (given to 800 registered voters), the folks at Achieve find that a whopping 60 percent of Americans have never heard of the Common Core standards—and another 21 percent have heard “not much.” Further, among voters who have heard peep about the Common Core, impressions are mixed: Thirty-seven percent view them favorably while 34 percent hold an unfavorable opinion (the rest are undecided). Despite this mixed reaction to the CCSS specifically, Americans overwhelmingly approve of the idea of common academic standards for all states: sixty-six percent support vs. 31 percent opposed. (Even a majority of Republicans like the notion of common standards.) But with so few people in the know, it’s clear that Common Core remains fragile politically. The good news, however, is that public-school teachers (most of whom have heard “a lot” about the Common Core) like the idea of common standards: Sixty-five percent of them are in support. That’s a promising indication that these standards might actually have some staying power in the classroom—if the public doesn’t come to dislike them first.

Achieve, Inc. “Strong Support, Low Awareness: Public Perception of the Common Core State Standards” (Achieve, Inc., October 2011).

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Strong Support, Low Awareness: Public Perception of the Common Core Standards

The Gateway to the Profession: Assessing Teacher Preparation Programs Based on Student Achievement

October 20, 2011

Would-be elementary teachers deciding whether to enroll in the education school at Antioch University or the University of Puget Sound: Go with the latter. According to this new report by Dan Goldhaber and Stephanie Liddle, Puget Sound graduates are much more effective at boosting their students’ achievement levels than Antioch. For this analysis, Goldhaber and Liddle tapped a database of roughly 8,700 elementary teachers in Washington State and linked them to about 293,000 students for whom value-added data could be garnered. They found significant differences between individual in-state Washington teacher-training programs: In reading, the average difference in student performance between teachers from the most- and least-effective programs is equivalent to that seen in students without learning disabilities and those with. Hiring an alum from a program in the 84th percentile versus the mean is as effective at upping student test scores as reducing class size by five to ten students. (Surely, some of these differences can be attributed to selectivity of school. But Goldhaber and Liddle found this not to be the overwhelming factor.) However, the authors also found little or no difference between teachers that were trained inside or outside the state of Washington. The authors jump through a long-course of statistical hoops when formulating these analyses—and these mixed results leave more questions than they answer. The biggest might just be: The Data Quality Campaign reports that thirty-five states have enough available data to conduct this same type of research—why haven’t more studies of this ilk been conducted?

The Gateway to the Profession: Assessing Teacher Preparation Programs Based on Student Achievement

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Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race 1900-1954