Searching in vain for the “invest-in-the-future” ticket

Michael J. Petrilli / August 23, 2012

It’s not hard to argue that many school-district budgets remain bloated, even after a few tough years of recession. With a major increase in spending since the mid 1990s, and a meteoric rise in the number of adults on the personnel rolls, surely most of our schools still have some cushion to get them through the current malaise. Moreover, the belt-tightening gives innovative leaders a chance to rethink the entire education enterprise in order to get much better results at much lower cost.

Ryan and Romney are right that the Medicare goliath must be slain if we are to avoid a future in which there's no money to pay for education for decades to come.  Photo by monkeyz_uncle

That’s the theory. In reality, Americans say that lack of money is the greatest challenge facing public education today. And few districts seem to be availing themselves of the opportunity to rethink and restructure. Far more widespread is simply slashing: laying off young teachers, shuttering programs.

This only feeds the country’s palpable apprehensions about “national decline”—and the sense that we’re no longer investing in the future.

Enter President Obama, who went after Mitt Romney over the education implications of Paul Ryan’s budget plan this week, tersely

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Searching in vain for the “invest-in-the-future” ticket

Raising the floor, but neglecting the ceiling

Chester E. Finn, Jr. , Jessica Hockett / August 22, 2012

Admission to what was until recently "America's best high school" (as named by U.S. News & World Report) is again under assault from multiple directions. Seven teachers at Fairfax County's acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology allege that the school's famously rigorous selection process has been eased, such that it's no longer enrolling the ablest and best-prepared pupils.

Recent high-profile complaints against TJ overlook widespread failings in American public education.

A federal civil rights complaint filed by a former Fairfax County School Board member asserts that entry criteria at TJ, as the school is known, in conjunction with the district's clumsy handling of "gifted and talented" education in earlier grades, rig the enrollment against black and Latino kids. At the same time, a law professor is pressing his claim that black students are favored over white students in the admissions process.

Any of these allegations could be true. But both complaints about TJ overlook two widespread failings in American public education that give rise to such grievances while also jeopardizing the nation's long-term economic competitiveness.

First, we've been neglecting the education of high-ability youngsters. States, districts, and individual schools, pressed by federal policies and metrics, have concentrated attention and resources on low-achieving and other "at-risk" youngsters, while paying scant heed to the fate of smart, eager pupils. Uncle Sam hasn't helped in recent years by zero-funding the one program intended to strengthen "gifted and talented," or G/T, education for poor and

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Raising the floor, but neglecting the ceiling

Philly shakes up Catholic education—again

Adam Emerson / August 23, 2012

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia announced this week that it is preparing to take the radical step of turning twenty-one of its schools over to independent management. Seventeen high schools and four special-education schools will come under the control of the recently formed Faith in the Future Foundation, which plans to bring a “more metrics-driven management structure” to a school system hemorrhaging money and enrollment. Other experiments in Catholic education, including those in New York, have given some schools more autonomy, but those arrangements generally kept ultimate control within the diocese. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput admitted to reporters that the parochial-school system needs more than fine-tuning and conceded that former Cigna Corporation chief executive Edward Hanway and his new foundation can “provide a level of creativity we wouldn’t be able to achieve on our own, and a broader level of community participation.” Indeed, Faith in the Future is developing university partnerships and digital-learning initiatives that other Catholic-school systems have been slow to embrace. Perhaps more importantly, it is probably better positioned than the Church to raise private dollars and appeal to a Catholic community agitated by dozens of school closures and a roiling clergy sex-abuse scandal. God willing, it will also be able to find an effective, dynamic Catholic-school governance model that can be replicated in other cities.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Archdiocese hands over school management to independent foundation,” by Kristen Graham, Philadelphia Inquirer, August 21, 2012

A version of this analysis appeared on the Choice

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Philly shakes up Catholic education—again

The Obama administration’s class-size doubletalk

Tyson Eberhardt / August 23, 2012

“Mitt Romney says class sizes don’t matter,” warns an ad released by President Obama’s campaign this week, hard on the heels of a new White House report decrying lost teaching jobs that will allegedly swell classes around the country. As the election heats up, the Obama camp clearly sees class size and teacher layoffs as promising lines of political attack and important ways to energize powerful labor allies less than thrilled with many of the White House’s education priorities over the last four years. Unfortunately for the Dems, however, strident infomercials and gloomy white papers can’t undo the now-awkward but still-sound remarks of Mr. Obama’s education secretary on the issue. “Class size has been a sacred cow and we need to take it on,” Arne Duncan correctly said in 2011, a year after arguing that “districts may be able to save money without hurting students, while allowing modest but smartly targeted increases in class size.” The point of this is not to play Politifact. The Obama administration should be commended for challenging interest groups and liberal dogmas in questioning the cost-effectiveness of continually shrinking classes. Sacrificing that record for cheap political points is not only disingenuous (and a potential opening for the Romney camp to cast the president as a flip flopper): It does students and voters a disservice by setting an important debate back four years.

RELATED ARTICLE: » Continued

The Obama administration’s class-size doubletalk

Taking on tenure and tenuous school financing

The Education Gadfly / August 23, 2012

What a difference five years makes: In 2007, 97 percent of eligible teachers earned tenure in New York City; this year, only 55 percent were so rewarded. For decades, unions have defended tenure by pointing out that strong-willed districts can simply deny it to mediocre candidates. New York, to its credit and the benefit of hundreds of thousands of students, is doing just that. Gadfly just hopes districts around the country will have the gumption to follow Gotham’s lead.

Last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times featured a truly frightening look at the influence of the Golden State’s “fourth branch of government”: the California Teachers Association. The CTA’s political clout is hardly a surprise but the Times’s history of its strong arming and backroom deal-making provides sobering perspective on how California ended up in such a dreadful budget bind.

After reading Paul Tough’s thoughtful and thorough look at President Obama’s anti-poverty policies, Gadfly can’t help but conclude that no one really knows what to do about extreme poverty.

Forget the housing crisis: School districts now want to try their hands at reckless borrowing. Education faces daunting fiscal challenges, no doubt, and the public understands that tough cuts are necessary, but some districts, in Southern California and around the nation, are pushing the inevitable pain off onto future generationswith reckless bonds that mortgage the education of

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Taking on tenure and tenuous school financing

Public Education in the United States: A Nation Divided

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / August 22, 2012

Results from the umpty-fourth Phi Delta Kappan (PDK)/Gallup survey of Americans regarding public education released today, and they include some important revelations.

• Support for the Common Core academic standards is strong and opposition weak (50 percent believe the standards will improve the quality of education; 8 percent hold they will decrease it).


• The public divides right down the middle (a 52-48 split) over including students’ academic results in teacher evaluations.


• For the first time, support for charter schools declined a bit since the previous survey (70 percent in favor in 2011, 66 percent this year), and it’s more partisan than before, with Republicans in favor at the 80 percent level, Democrats at 54.


• At the same time, support for vouchers is rising, with 44 percent now positive even though the PDK/Gallup folks relentlessly phrase their voucher question in the most off-putting way possible: Do you “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?”


• Almost two thirds say they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to improve urban public schools. And a plurality (for the first time) says that “lack of financial support” is the biggest problem facing public schools. Yet when it comes to Uncle Sam solving that problem, a whopping majority (60 percent) says that balancing the federal budget is more urgent than improving the education system.


• But not for illegal immigrants! Almost three in five Americans oppose providing them

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  Public Education in the United States: A Nation Divided

Some Assembly Required: Building a Better Accountability System for California

John Horton / August 23, 2012

Spelunking into the labyrinthine depths of school accountability, Kevin Carey explores in this Ed Sector paper what an ideal system could and should look like. California’s endlessly vexed system serves as Carey’s entry-point, though his recommendations echo beyond the Golden State. Carey examines three central components of accountability—the kinds of information used, how it is best interpreted, and how it can most usefully promote student achievement. As he explains, sundry data are now available to link teacher and school performance with student success, not just in K-12 classrooms but in college and beyond. This allows accountability systems to focus on bottom-line outcomes, instead of imperfect proxy measures such as standardized tests. Still, there are limitations to what data can do. They can rate or rank schools (Carey cites Florida’s A-F scale as valuable in providing broad public information), but they cannot self-translate into “authentic action for reform”; they cannot show schools how to improve. To move beyond simply praising or scolding schools, Carey suggests creating an inspection system, modeled after England’s—a recommendation previously supplied by Ed Sector when Carey was there. His new model for accountability—strict adherence to outcomes data coupled with nuanced and thorough human analyses—provide sturdy pitons, thick cord, and a bright torch for those entering the dark cave of accountability.

SOURCE: Kevin Carey, Some Assembly Required: Building a Better Accountability System for

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Some Assembly Required: Building a Better Accountability System for California

Weight Status among Adolescents in States That Govern Competitive Food Nutrition Content

Asa Spencer / August 23, 2012

When the New York City Department of Education banned school-day bake sales and regulated vending-machine goodies as means to curb childhood obesity in the Big Apple, we raised eyebrows. Shouldn’t such decisions fall to school—not district or even state—leaders? This new study in the journal Pediatrics, however, has us doubting ourselves. It evaluated Body Mass Index (BMI) data for 6,300 fifth through eighth graders in forty states between 2004 and 2007, and found that students in states with “strong” anti-junk-food-and-sugary-drinks laws gained .25 fewer BMI units than students in states with no laws. (They were also less likely to be obese.) Laws were rated as strong if they had specific standards and requirements; they were weak if they used suggestive language (e.g., “recommend”). Further, students in states with consistent policies enacted across grade levels were the sveltest. The authors present a reasonable case for regulation of junk food in schools—and maybe even a case for state policies mandating such.

SOURCE: Daniel R. Taber et al., “Weight Status among Adolescents in States That Govern Competitive Food Nutrition Content,” Pediatrics 130 (2012): 437.

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Weight Status among Adolescents in States That Govern Competitive Food Nutrition Content