Can schools rekindle the American work ethic?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / January 25, 2012

The front page of Sunday’s New York Times featured a pair of articles, each of which was informative and alarming in its way but which, taken together, produced (in my head at least) a winter storm—as did Tuesday evening’s State of the Union message by President Obama.

The longer, more informative, and more alarming, of the articles was an extensive account of why Apple’s iPhones are now made in China rather than the U.S. The short version is that “the flexibility, diligence, and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”

Flexibility, diligence, and industrial skills. Hold that thought.

Simply put, although the President spoke of restoring millions of manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores, it’s hard to picture Apple (or similar firms) responding.

The second article previewed the President’s speech which, as predicted, focused heavily on the U.S. economy and ways to boost it. His proposals do, in fact, include some education and job-training initiatives, as well as macro-economic policies, several of them noted in the speech itself. But mostly what Mr. Obama did was trot out a bunch of government programs and rattle

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Can schools rekindle the American work ethic?

For both classroom and computer learning, content matters

Steven F. Wilson / January 26, 2012

The charter-school movement lost much of its first decade to faulty educational designs. Will digital learning follow that precedent?

The charter-school movement lost much of its first decade to faulty educational designs. Will digital learning follow that precedent?

With the passage of the first charter laws in the early nineties, hundreds of school entrepreneurs rushed to open schools fashioned on the usual progressive pedagogies. Many focused on creativity and collaboration, often to the detriment of core subject knowledge. These new schools, their founders effused, would be child-centric and engage the whole community. Students would learn “authentically” and would “discover” the knowledge that “they need.” Teachers would act as “facilitators.” Never mind that there was scant evidence that this sort of thing worked, especially for children in poverty.

After the doors of these new charters opened came a long and painful reckoning. Mismanagement and poor execution were widespread, and the pedagogical choices, so compelling on paper, often proved heartbreaking in practice. In too many schools, classrooms were unruly, learning activities chaotic, and test scores an embarrassment. At many, parents pulled their children; founders were pushed out. To stay in business, boards of trustees drove a wrenching process of remaking the schools around proven practices.

A decade into the charter movement, as states and the federal government ramped up their results-based accountability policies across public education, charter advocates strained to find evidence of the outsized educational effects they had so confidently promised. Yet the damage was done. Policymakers began to lose faith in the promise of charters as a tool of school reform. The fault, however,

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For both classroom and computer learning, content matters

Picking the wrong fight

Tyson Eberhardt / January 26, 2012

California Governor Jerry Brown’s State of the State address last week got the anti-reform crowd all atwitter (and a-Twitter) when he called for scaling back testing and reducing the federal and state roles in California education. Diane Ravitch swooned, writing in a blog post that Brown and his Sunshine State compatriots “may provide the spark that ignites a national revolt against the current tide of bad ideas.” In one respect, both Brown and Ravitch have it right: Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top and conditional NCLB waivers mark a high-water mark for federal intrusion in K-12 education and it is understandable for governors to chafe at such strong-arming from Washington. But California is hardly the place to look for good ideas. Its student achievement results trail other states’ by a mile, and its poor and minority students are doing terribly compared to their peers in other, more reform-minded states. (Texas and Florida come to mind.) We have no qualms with mid-course adjustments to the reform agenda (getting test results back in an expedited manner, for example—something Brown championed). But let’s not just toss all school reform efforts into the Sacramento River, either.

“Brown differs sharply from Obama on education policy,” by Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2012

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Picking the wrong fight

Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform

Daniela Fairchild / January 26, 2012

Part narrative, part analysis, this seventeenth edition of ALEC’s education-policy report card offers reformers a hearty pat on the back—and then delivers a swift kick in the pants. Split into five chapters, the report rehashes reform victories (in the areas of school choice and teacher quality, mainly) from the past year. As authors Matt Ladner and Daniel Lips note, these reformy ideas have hit the mainstream (exemplified by Obama’s embrace of charters and meaningful teacher evaluations). But, they also remind us, saying and doing are distant cousins. In a subsequent chapter, they showcase states’ meager academic-achievement gains on NAEP, breaking these gains down by race and socioeconomic and disabled status. (Florida, unsurprisingly, fares best on these metrics.) And then comes the pain: Using a revised set of indicators (based on last year’s report-card metric), Ladner and Lips rank states’ overall education-policy scores (yes, much like our own city-based analysis from summer 2010) on six categories: academic standards (measured by cut-score rigor), charter laws, homeschooling regulations, teacher-quality policies, virtual schools, and private-school choice. The unexpected upshot: Missouri has the strongest education-policy package out there. Florida and Minnesota round out the top three with B-pluses, both. Indiana—even with its top-notch reform package this year—earns a B (as does Ohio). The average grade for the states is a depressing C-plus. A detailed methodology is absent (how were the six indicators weighted; how, specifically, was cut-score rigor assigned?). Can this be oversight, as Missouri’s top marks (and Indiana’s lower scores) are sure to raise eyebrows (or, in our case, little buggy antennae).

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Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform

Preparing for Change: A National Perspective on Common Core State Standards Implementation Planning

Kathleen Porter-Magee / January 26, 2012

Last week, Education First and the EPE Research Center released a report entitled Preparing for Change. It’s the first of three that will look at whether states have developed Common Core implementation plans that address three key challenges:

• Developing a plan for teacher professional development,



• planning to align/revamp state-created curricular and instructional materials, and



• making changes to teacher evaluation systems.

Many CCSS supporters cheered at the main finding, which indicated that all but one state—Wyoming—“reported having developed some type of formal implementation plan for transitioning to the new, common standards.” There is cause for excitement—this is a clear indication that states are taking CCSS implementation seriously and that they are working to reorient their education systems to the new standards.

That said, while developing implementation plans is an essential step, it’s far more critical to ensure that those plans are worth following—that they properly identify the gaps in teacher knowledge and skills so they can target state-led PD efforts, for example, and that they prioritize the essential components of the CCSS in state-created curricula and instructional materials. This report doesn’t get into these questions of quality—though Education First and EPE will release two follow-up reports in the coming months that, they promise, will address the quality of the state plans.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is reason to be nervous that states may be spending a tremendous amount of time and energy developing and implementing plans that might not address the essential

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Preparing for Change: A National Perspective on Common Core State Standards Implementation Planning

Voices of Determination: Children that Defy the Odds

Layla Bonnot / January 26, 2012

This second book from former D.C. councilman Kevin P. Chavous is much lighter on education policy than his first writing, but his own convictions emerge clearly indeed: To succeed, students need school choice and supportive adults. Chavous’s easily digested book features ten inspired stories of diverse students (from immigrants to adult-learners) who encounter sundry obstacles during their school careers, from gangs, drug addiction, and abusive parents to teenage pregnancy, homelessness, and just plain awful schools. In each tale, a student’s life trajectory arcs for the better when a supportive adult appears. Ronnie from Baltimore, for example, avoids a life of crime and drugs in the projects through the support of his grandfather and eighth-grade English teacher. Read beyond the stories and you’ll see clear rationale for—and virtue of—school choice. Jamie, for example, finds her niche in school only when her parents move her to a strong charter in her neighborhood. And Chardi finds support at St. Mary’s urban Catholic school. Frequent typos aside, those who carp that schools (and the dedicated workers in them) can’t trump a family’s influence would be wise to thumb this book.

Kevin P. Chavous, Voices of Determination: Children that Defy the Odds (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012).

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Voices of Determination: Children that Defy the Odds

The 2012 ABCs of School Choice

Lisa Gibes / January 26, 2012

Those engaged in National School Choice Week (which started Monday, in case you somehow failed to notice) have much to celebrate. In 2011, eleven states added or expanded their choice programs (vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts), bringing the total number of such programs up to thirty-four. This Friedman Foundation primer documents the what, where, and how of each such initiative, including student and school participation data, eligibility criteria, and voucher-value information. As state legislatures and school-choice advocates return to work after the holidays, those in the choice camp must remain diligent. (The lawsuits—like that against the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program in July 2011—documented in this primer prove that need.) 2011 saw exciting gains on this front. Let’s make Milton proud and keep that wheel spinning in 2012 and beyond.

Paul DiPerna, editor, 2012 ABCs of School Choice (The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, January 2012.)

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The 2012 ABCs of School Choice