Let a new teacher-union debate begin

Chester E. Finn, Jr. , Michael J. Petrilli / November 1, 2012

Everyone knows that teacher unions matter in education politics and policies, a reality that is never more evident than at election time. In recent weeks, for example, state affiliates have been pushing for higher taxes on businesses to boost education spending in Nevada, successfully suing to limit the governor’s authority over education in Wisconsin, and working to sink an initiative to allow charter schools in Washington State. Of course, those instances are but the tip of a very large iceberg. Across the land, unions are doing their utmost to prevent all sorts of changes to education that they deem antithetical to their interests.

The role of teacher unions in education politics and policy is deeply polarizing. Critics (often including ourselves) typically assert that these organizations are the prime obstacles to needed reforms in K–12 schooling, while defenders (typically, also, supporters of the education status quo) insist that they are bulwarks of professionalism and safeguards against caprice and risky innovation.

Yet these arguments have rested on little but anecdote, opinion, and personal observation. There’s been scant real information on how much teacher unions matter, how exactly they seek to wield influence, and whether they wield more of it in some places than others.

There’s plenty of conventional wisdom, to be sure, mostly along the lines of, “unions are most powerful where every teacher must belong to them and every district must bargain with them and least consequential in ‘right-to-work’ states.”

But is

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Let a new teacher-union debate begin

The best bargain in American education

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

Imagine a high school where every course is challenging, all students choose (and are academically strong enough) to be there, discipline problems are few, teachers are knowledgeable and attentive, pretty much everyone earns a diploma, and virtually all graduates go on to good colleges.

For more on this issue, purchase Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools.

How much would you pay to send your son or daughter to such a school? If it's an elite private institution, you might easily fork over the price of an Ivy League degree before your child even sets foot on a university campus.

But this vision isn't a snapshot of a $40,000-a-year prep school. It's the profile of 165 free public secondary schools in the United States, many of them in big cities known for sky-high dropout rates, low test scores, metal detectors at the schoolhouse door, and rapid turnover among teachers.

What distinguishes this small subset of America's 20,000 public high schools is that they are academically selective. Students compete for admission by demonstrating they are qualified (and eager) to do the work.

Sometimes called "exam schools," because test scores are typically part of their selection process and a handful of them rely solely on such scores, they tailor their curricula and teaching

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The best bargain in American education

Transparency and charter autonomy are worth the hiccups

The Education Gadfly / November 1, 2012

An Idaho judge ruled this week that the nonprofit behind $200,000-worth of ads backing state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna’s education reforms must disclose its donors (New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg among them). The incident may end up hurting Luna’s cause by raising populist ire against deep-pocketed contributors. Regardless, education-reform advocates should embrace greater transparency over edu-advocacy spending given who still spends the most.

American science education has plenty of room for improvement and President Obama deserves credit for putting STEM education on the agenda. Less admirable, as a Washington Post op-ed pointed out this week, is that his solution relies heavily on infusing America’s schools with 100,000 more teachers. Making STEM a priority matters little if that amounts to a continued focus on inputs rather than outputs—or turns out mainly to be an election year sop to a key Democratic constituency.

Kentucky is introducing a promising program to allow districts to operate more like charter schools, with greater independence and fewer regulations. That’s well and good, but there’s a simpler way to boost efficiency and creativity through school autonomy: Join the forty states that allow actual charters.

The principal of a failing Florida charter school irked some lawmakers and fired up school-choice critics this week when she received a $519,000 departure payment. (Never mind that district officials

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Transparency and charter autonomy are worth the hiccups

The Resegregation of Suburban Schools: A Hidden Crisis in American Education

Pamela Tatz / November 1, 2012

Gary Orfield is at it again, although this time with a twist: This book, edited by Orfield and Penn State professor Erica Frankenberg, focuses on how suburban areas are handling an influx of poor and minority students—and how they might handle it better. The book profiles six suburbs (located outside Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and San Antonio) as well as Beach County, Florida (which encompasses West Palm Beach and Boca Raton). Each case study analyzes demographic shifts, how the districts are combating their schools’ achievement gaps, and what the political and cultural hurdles are to achieving true racial integration (Orfield’s long-time end-goal). (Prefacing these chapters is a welcome analysis and discussion of the demographics of suburbia at large—showing that, across the board, it’s less homogenous than many people suppose.) The Resegregation of Suburban Schools is a worthy contribution to the academic literature on suburbia and a thought-provoking read on the morality of desegregation. But look elsewhere for concrete policy ideas. In these pages are only vague proposals for affirmative-action programs when hiring educational professionals, amorphous “involvement” of civil-rights organizations like the NAACP in the suburbs, and an increase in magnet schools and student-exchange programs (i.e., busing across district lines). The recent attempts to extend integration programs to the suburbs should stand as a lesson: Racial integration—while a nice idea—can quickly bog down. It might be

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The Resegregation of Suburban Schools: A Hidden Crisis in American Education

The Revisionaries

John Horton / November 1, 2012

When it comes to national elections, political pundits have long asserted that: “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.” The same has oft been said of Texas and the textbook market, one reason that many eyes followed the 2010 debate in the Lone Star State over adding elements of creationism and conservative ideology to the state’s science and social-studies standards. (Certainly the adoption of the Common Core State Standards by forty-five states loosens Texas’s grip on textbook design for English language arts and math—but the more controversial subjects of science and history remain tightly controlled.) This documentary film tracks the lengths to which some members of the Texas Board of Education (Don McLeroy, a dentist, and Kathy Dunbar, a lawyer) went to infuse nonsense into their state’s academic standards. In one scene, the pair work to remove a standard on separation of church and state. In another, they try to poke holes in the state’s science standards dealing with evolution. While slow-moving at points, the overall narrative woven by this documentary is interesting—and the underlying messages are important: Texas’s control of textbook content reaches past its borders (a trend that will continue for many subjects even after CCSS-aligned material is published). Forcing all to pay attention to what happens within them.

SOURCE: Scott Thurman, The Revisionaries (New York, NY: Kino Lorber Incorporated, 2012).

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The Revisionaries

Measuring Quality from Inputs to Outcomes: Creating Student Learning Performance Metrics and Quality Assurance for Online Schools

Daniela Fairchild / November 1, 2012

Digital learning has the potential to revitalize American public education, providing personalized instruction to millions of students. Which doesn’t mean it will cause them to learn much. This report from the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) properly observes that today’s assessment systems cannot provide the data necessary to track the efficacy of online-learning programs. This creates two potential scenarios, both problematic: Digital education could either 1) become ubiquitous but not transformative, as effective programs are not scaled up nor shoddy programs shuttered or 2) be weakly adopted as states restrict options for programs that are unproven. To remedy this situation, iNACOL points to five measures that should be used to evaluate online programs: proficiency levels, individual student growth, graduation rates, college and career readiness (though the authors fail to fully define the term), and reduction of the achievement gap. The authors then offer a number of recommendations for how to operationalize these measures. Among them: Online-education programs need common assessments across most course subjects (and end-of-course exams for all); state data systems must be updated to meet the challenge of collecting, reporting, and passing data between schools and the state; and online-school data should be disaggregated from that of brick-and-mortar schools to assure accurate reporting. For those still unclear about exactly how to go about implementing these changes, this report presents example plans-of-action both for states without online schools and for those that offer individual online courses

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Measuring Quality from Inputs to Outcomes: Creating Student Learning Performance Metrics and Quality Assurance for Online Schools