Education Gadfly Weekly
Volume 12, Number 21
May 31, 2012
Opinion + Analysis
Opinion
High standards, but at what cost?
Calculating the bill for implementing the Common Core
By
Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D.
,
Chester E. Finn, Jr.
Opinion
In defense of the F-word in K-16 education
Success requires failure
By
J. Martin Rochester
Briefly Noted
Waiving requirements and wasting time. Connection?
By
The Education Gadfly
Reviews
Brief/Report
A Mission to Serve: How Public Charter Schools Are Designed to Meet the Diverse Demands of Our Communities and Diverse Charter Schools: Can Racial and Socioeconomic Integration Promote Better Outcomes for Students?
Two timely takes on a tricky topic
By
Lisa Gibes
Report
What Teacher Preparation Programs Teach about K-12 Assessment
The short answer: Almost nothing
Documentary
The Experiment
A compelling story, no matter how many times you hear it
By
John Horton
Gadfly Studios
Podcast
Amercia the Beautiful
Mike and Rick break down the flaws in the latest Race to the Top and explain why Obama and Duncan really aren’t twins when it comes to ed policy. In her Research Minute, Amber analyzes Podgursky’s latest insights on pensions.
Video
Pricing the Common Core: How Much Will Smart Implementation Cost States and Districts?
Featured Publication
Putting a Price Tag on the Common Core: How Much Will Smart Implementation Cost?
Patrick J. Murphy , Elliot Regenstein / May 30, 2012
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts and mathematics represent a sea change in standards-based reform and their implementation is the movement’s next—and greatest—challenge. Yet, while most states have now set forth implementation plans, these tomes seldom address the crucial matter of cost. This report estimates the implementation cost for each of the forty-five states (and the District of Columbia) that have adopted the Common Core State Standards and shows that costs naturally depend on how states approach implementation.
High standards, but at what cost?
Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D. , Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 31, 2012
As states and districts strain their budgets, the cost of the impending transition to Common Core State Standards has generated a disconcerting lack of attention from state policymakers. At a time when money is a key element in education-policy discussions, the dearth of such cost projections is not only alarming, it has left the entire standards effort vulnerable to opponents eager to spread fears about—inter alia—its fiscal viability. Those who are still pushing states to repudiate the Common Core would have us believe that its price tag is huge—and that all those costs are new. Wrong. Most states have been implementing their own academic standards (good, bad, or mediocre) for years and money that they’re already spending for that objective can (and should) be repurposed for Common Core implementation. Nor do all implementation strategies carry the same costs. Which, especially in an era of tight budgets, is why the nuanced findings of Fordham’s latest study, Putting A Price Tag on the Common Core: How Much Will Smart Implementation Cost?, come at a crucial time.
 Watch Amber Winkler explain how much Common Core implementation will cost. |
Our analysts (Patrick Murphy of the University of San Francisco, Elliot Regenstein of EducationCounsel LLC, and Keith McNamara) targeted the three
High standards, but at what cost?
In defense of the F-word in K-16 education
J. Martin Rochester / May 31, 2012
Recently I received an email from a student unlike any message I have received in forty years as a college professor. It is worth quoting for what it says not so much about this student as about the culture we have now created within K-16 education in America. Commenting on the failing grade I gave her in a course, the student wrote: “I have never received an F for as long as I have been in college, I complied with the paper and the two tests, and you mean to tell me I did not get anything from the class. I will appeal this because who is the failure? You are the teacher whom I relied upon to teach me about a subject matter that I had no familiarity with, so in all actuality I have been disserviced, and I do expect my money back from the course, you did not give me any warning that I was failing! You should be embarrassed to give a student an F.”
 It is no longer sufficient to hold a student by the hand. You must now literally hand them a diploma. Photo by gadgetdude |
Never mind the punctuation errors and illiteracy of the email; we have all come to accept
In defense of the F-word in K-16 education
Waiving requirements and wasting time. Connection?
The Education Gadfly / May 31, 2012
The Department of Education announced the latest wave of NCLB waivers this week, bringing the grand total of states freed from the law’s most cumbersome strictures to nineteen (counting D.C.). While myriad challenges remain for those winners, Congress is by far the biggest loser; round by round, the Obama Administration is making Washington’s role in education increasingly the product of executive-branch decision-making.
The “digital divide” in access to technology of the 1990s has morphed into a “time-wasting” gap reports the New York Times, with children whose parents lack college degrees exposed to 90 minutes more media daily than their wealthier peers. While the government’s proposed response is misdirected—$200 million to create a “digital literacy corps”?!—this is a useful testament to policymakers that technology is no panacea and to parents that it’s time to turn off the TV and put away the Wii.
Waiving requirements and wasting time. Connection?
A Mission to Serve: How Public Charter Schools Are Designed to Meet the Diverse Demands of Our Communities and Diverse Charter Schools: Can Racial and Socioeconomic Integration Promote Better Outcomes for Students?
Lisa Gibes / May 31, 2012
Yesterday, the Century Foundation and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council released a report touting the benefits of racial and socioeconomic diversity in charter schools. For a variety of reasons, charter schools are more likely to serve a high-poverty population than traditional public schools. The authors stress the need for this fact to change because, they claim, poor students fare better in low-poverty versus high-poverty schools. The report profiles seven high-performing charters that have tackled racial and socioeconomic integration in different ways. Diversifying charter schools is an attractive—and noble—idea, but one that creates a policy conundrum as feasible integration of schools often proves to be a prickly challenge. (Think about parents’ reactions to busing in Wake County, for example.)
A recent policy brief from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (which profiles many of the same schools as the Century Foundation report) offers a smart alternative. NAPCS recognizes the value in fostering high-performing charters that serve either homogenous or socioeconomically diverse communities—and the value of letting parents choose to send their child to one or the other. Both reports make recommendations for policy changes that will be more hospitable to diverse charters. NAPCS urges the federal government to loosen restrictions on charters’ admissions practices—to permit weighted lotteries (which allow for a more diverse or targeted student body). The Century Foundation recommends that states provide incentives to integrated charters akin to those created for high-poverty charters.
A Mission to Serve: How Public Charter Schools Are Designed to Meet the Diverse Demands of Our Communities and Diverse Charter Schools: Can Racial and Socioeconomic Integration Promote Better Outcomes for Students?
What Teacher Preparation Programs Teach about K-12 Assessment
May 31, 2012
Collecting student-level data is a necessity for schools and districts looking to track and improve achievement. But it is not sufficient. To realize the transformative power of data, teachers must know how to analyze and utilize this information to inform instruction. Yet teacher-preparation programs provide woefully inadequate training on this front, according to this National Council on Teacher Quality report. The authors evaluated 455 courses in 180 undergraduate and graduate teacher-prep programs along three needed “areas of knowledge”: assessment literacy (whether the course teaches how to measure student performance), analytical skills (whether it teaches how to analyze data), and instructional decision-making (whether it informs the use of data to plan instruction). The upshot: Teacher-preparation programs are doing a lousy job on all of these fronts. NCTQ offers recommendations to rectify this situation. For example, the federal government should invest in research, states should tighten the accountability screws on these programs, and foundations should develop institutional datasets on which prospective teachers can practice during the course of their prep programs. Most interesting is the recommendation that districts leverage their hiring power to influence the syllabi and course-offerings of teacher-prep programs. Districts flexing their might to change education-school norms. What a novel idea.
SOURCE: Julie Greenberg and Kate Walsh, What Teacher Preparation Programs Teach about K-12 Assessment (Washington, D.C.: National Council on Teacher Quality, May 2012).
What Teacher Preparation Programs Teach about K-12 Assessment
The Experiment
John Horton / May 31, 2012
Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has emerged as an education-reform laboratory, a grand experiment in parental choice and teacher accountability where 70 percent of schools are charters and 1,700 students take advantage of vouchers (a program now being supercharged—throughout the whole state—under Governor Jindal’s new education-reform plan). This new documentary follows five children (from supportive families) in the middle of this experiment for one year—among them, a KIPPster, a student in a Recovery School District school, and a child attending Catholic school thanks to a voucher. The story is compelling—if not altogether unfamiliar. And it offers a boon for those new to the education-reform arena and craving a fast, painless tutorial on the ins and outs of education in the Big Easy today. But the film also reminds the viewer that the future of that city’s bold education reforms is far from certain. For example, Ben Lemoine, the film’s director, profiles local detractors who would curb the city’s charter sector and turn school governance back to the traditional district. Not such a “big easy” initiative, after all, but the film is well worth viewing.
SOURCE: Ben Lemoine, director, The Experiment (Covington, LA: Fleurish Productions, 2012).
The Experiment
Announcements
March 25: AEI Common Core Event
March 21, 2013While 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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