ObamaFlex: Too much tight, too little loose

Michael J. Petrilli / September 29, 2011

Followers of Fordham’s work know that, for the better part of three years, we’ve been advancing an approach to federal education policy that we call “Reform Realism”—a pro-school-reform orientation leavened with a realistic view of what the federal government can and cannot accomplish in education. It’s founded on the idea of “tight-loose” (tight on results, loose on means to achieve them) and heralds incentives over mandates and transparency over accountability.

Two weeks ago, Senator Lamar Alexander and a handful of colleagues introduced a legislative proposal that embodies Reform Realism. As I wrote then, it demonstrates a combination of thoughtfulness and humility that is rare in federal policymaking.

	Rather than finding the Golden Mean, the Obama Administration has created golden handcuffs.

Obama Administration officials, for their part, haven’t been slouches when it comes to Reform Realism. Secretary Arne Duncan has appropriated the “tight-loose” terminology, and the Race to the Top symbolized the triumph of incentives over mandates (even if it was a carrot that felt more like a stick).

Which is what makes the administration’s new plan for conditional NCLB waivers so worrisome. ObamaFlex pulls too taut both the “tight” and the “loose.”

First, let’s talk tight. To be eligible for waivers, Duncan et al. are asking states either to adopt the Common Core or demonstrate that their own reading and math standards indicate college

» Continued

ObamaFlex: Too much tight, too little loose

The unilateral repeal of NCLB and the 2012 election

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 29, 2011

The Obama administration’s new waiver plan doesn’t officially repeal the No Child Left Behind Act, but it is tantamount to making large-scale amendments to it. Which it does unilaterally, without even a thumbs-up from Congress.

Though the specific conditions that the White House and Secretary Duncan are attaching to statewide “flexibility waivers” are consistent with the administration’s long-standing “blueprint” for reauthorizing NCLB, and also happen to be conditions that I think generally have merit, they amount to changing the law, not just waiving it. This raises constitutional as well as statutory issues—though the administration’s response, not surprisingly or implausibly, has been that “if a do-nothing Congress won’t act to solve problems, we’ll solve them ourselves as best we can.”

Yet the changes themselves—at least their timing and high-profile release—are motivated at least as much by election-year political considerations as by policy. This is not the first example, and surely won’t be the last, of appealing to key constituencies by undoing, suspending, or waiving government practices that they find onerous and unpleasant. Consider the non-deportation of illegal aliens who haven’t committed crimes. Hispanic (and other immigrant) voters will surely applaud this move and likely thank the administration in November 2012.

Last week’s announcements mean that teachers and parents (and school-board members and administrators) also now can breathe a sigh of relief at the suggestion that the president and his education secretary are taking the heavy hand of unrealistic achievement targets, embarrassing school labels, and unwanted accountability burdens off their frail shoulders.

And they’re partly right, for the promised waivers, once issued, really do ease some of the most painful

» Continued

The unilateral repeal of NCLB and the 2012 election

Is college the best ticket to the middle class?

September 29, 2011

College readiness has become the cause célèbre for many education reformers and policy pundits. High-performing charter networks like KIPP and Achievement First chant the “college-ready” mantra to their students daily. Within his first six months in office, President Obama announced a desire to have 60 percent of young Americans be college educated. Yet a recent analysis by Complete College America finds that, despite valiant efforts to increase our college-enrollment rates (which have upped from 36 percent to 41 percent of young Americans over the past decade), our college-completion rates have stagnated—and are unacceptably low. In Texas, for example, 79 percent of public-college students enrolled at a community college—yet fewer than 5 percent of those individuals earned their associate degree on time. And the numbers for four-year colleges are no better: Only a quarter of Lone Star students enrolling in a bachelor’s program graduated in four years. Double that time frame and 60 percent of those who matriculated graduated. Better preparing students for the rigors of post-secondary academic work will do much to up these numbers. But these findings raise another important question: With this many college dropouts, are we right to pursue the “college for all” strategy singularly? Preparing students for trade programs and apprenticeships (or the military) may prove just as valuable to shoring up a strong middle class and giving decent futures to individuals. We suspect that many who

» Continued

Is college the best ticket to the middle class?

Redshirting Kindergarten

September 29, 2011

They grow up so fast
(Photo by Dan Previte)

Nearly 10 percent of parents are opting to “redshirt” their Kindergarten-eligible sons and daughters, waiting an extra year to start their schooling. The underlying assumption of the decision is that a more emotionally and mentally mature youngster will have a leg-up on his or her weaker peers. (Recall that Gladwell made this argument about Canadian hockey players in Outliers.) But, according to neuroscientists Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, these parents are wrong. Older Kindergarteners may start out slightly ahead, but their younger classmates catch up in math and reading quickly—and these “redshirted” students actually perform worse by high school. This is a strong argument for starting school early, especially for the youngsters who don’t interact with older children or challenging content at home (the two main spurs of cognitive development, according to Wang and Aamodt). But don’t raise that “early-Kindergarten-for-all” placard, just yet. Child development can be catalyzed through all sorts of avenues outside school. And engaged parents deserve the right to choose whether four or five is the right age for little Susie to take her first school-bus ride.

Click » Continued Redshirting Kindergarten When the Best is Mediocre Tyson Eberhardt / September 29, 2011 Unfailingly, Americans express distain with America’s underperforming public education system, while simultaneously raving about the education their own children receive from it. This new analysis by Jay Greene and Josh McGee takes a hatchet to that comforting illusion—showing that even wealthy suburban schools aren’t up to snuff in world terms. Working with the George W. Bush Institute, the two compared math and reading performance of nearly every U.S. school district to its respective state, the nation, and then also to other developed countries. The upshot: Complacent suburban parents should start getting a little angry at the state of our education system. None of America’s affluent, overwhelmingly white districts perform at a level that would place them in the top third of developed nations. And many do considerably worse: In math, ritzy Beverly Hills scores at the 53rd percentile relative to other developed nations, despite the fact that the scores from those countries include non-affluent schools. And posh Evanston, IL finds itself in the 48th percentile. (If you’re interested in seeing how your own district matches up, check out the report’s accompanying “Global Report Card,” an interactive online database of all the report’s findings.) To be sure, the analytic methods used here, while inventive, are shaky, as Greene and McGree acknowledge. They had to compare scores on different tests taken by students of different ages—and couldn’t mute all the statistical “noise” generated by these discrepancies. The question is: Do suburban parents want to wait for more rigorous data to become available before acknowledging that they, too, have a school problem? » Continued When the Best is Mediocre Education, Demand and Unemployment in Metropolitan America September 29, 2011 Since the second quarter of 2009, U.S. GDP has nosed upward—yet unemployment rates haven’t budged. To understand the cause of this discrepancy, Brookings analysts explore the relationship between unemployment rates and educational attainment in America’s largest metro areas, both before and since the Great Recession. (While the researchers collected Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data for all 366 U.S. metropolitan areas, the report mainly focuses on the largest 100 of these.) Unsurprisingly, analysts found that cities with decently educated workforces boast a lower unemployment rate than those with large “education gaps” (between the average schooling of the workforce living there and the average schooling needed to perform the jobs of the metro area). Madison, WI (home of Wisco), for example, has the lowest education gap of the largest 100 metro areas and only a 5.3 percent unemployment rate. Yet, in Modesto, CA, a city with one of the widest education gaps, the unemployment rate is 16.7 percent. Anyone skeptical of the role education plays in defining a city’s economic viability should take a gander at these pages. And it wouldn’t hurt for recent college graduates on the job hunt (and willing to move) to do the same. Jonathan Rothwell and Alan Berube, “Education, Demand, and Unemployment in Metropolitan America” (Washington, D.C.: Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institute), September 2011. » Continued Education, Demand and Unemployment in Metropolitan America The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling Laura Johnson / September 29, 2011 This Science magazine article makes for a weak counterargument to those who extol single-sex education (including Wake County, which recently announced its intention to open two single-sex public schools). The authors declare that single-sex schooling (SSS) is an unproven reform—because they can find no empirical evidence establishing that it lifts student achievement—and thus should be scrapped. Thing is, that argument could just as easily be made in reverse. SSS was, effectively, illegal until 2006, when a re-interpretation of Title IX by the federal Office of Civil Rights began allowing single-sex public school classes. Thus, there is also no evidence that SSS hinders (or even holds constant) student achievement. (Co-ed schooling fits this bill too, as we barely have anything but it in the public sector.) Going further, the authors assert that SSS “increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.” A tough claim to make in conjunction with the assertion of inadequate research on the effects of single-sex schooling on student achievement. We expected more from Science. “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling,” by Diane F. Halpern, Lise Eliot, Rebecca S. Bigler, Richard A. Fabes, et al., Science, 333(6050), September 23, 2011. » Continued The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling Unleashing the Potential of Technology in Education September 29, 2011 To exploit technology’s potential effectively, this paper from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) argues, schools must integrate it within a “closed-loop” system—one that has a deeply aligned set of educational objectives, standards, curricula, assessments, interventions, and professional development. To prove this point, they highlight some universities and school systems that are incorporating technology into such a closed-loop approach. Victoria, Australia is said to be the best example of this at scale. And Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI), also lauded, embeds frequent assessment and real-time, continuous feedback into its courses. The paper ends with a set of basic (and reasonably vague) recommendations for shifting from our current approach to education to a technology-based closed-loop one, focusing on teacher empowerment, student engagement, and research and infrastructure development. A titillating paper geared to the savvy follower of digital learning, this is not. But it is a helpful resource for those just dipping their feet into the refreshing waters of digital learning. Allison Bailey, Tyce Henry, Lane McBride, J. Puckett, “Unleashing the Potential of Technology in Education” (Boston, MA: The Boston Consulting Group, Inc., 2011). » Continued Unleashing the Potential of Technology in Education Announcements March 25: AEI Common Core Event March 21, 2013 While most discussion about the Common Core State Standards Initiative has focused on its technical merits, its ability to facilitate innovation, or the challenges facing its practical implementation, there has been little talk of how the standards fit in the larger reform ecosystem. At this AEI conference, a set of distinguished panelists will present the results of their research and thoughts on this topic and provide actionable responses to the questions that will mark the next phase of Common Core implementation efforts. The event will take place at the American Enterprise Institute in D.C. on March 25, 2013, from 9:00AM to 5:00PM. It will also be live-streamed online. For more information and to register, click here. 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