The election contests that really matter

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

There’s been much twittering, tweeting, debating, and general obsessing in education-land about this year’s presidential election and what difference it will make whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney occupies the Oval Office after January 20, 2013.

In reality, however, while the outcome of this hard-fought contest matters greatly to the nation in many crucial realms, it doesn’t really make much difference for K-12 education. Nor do the parallel races to control Congress.

The presidential election isn't the education race that matters most this fall.  Photo by Joe Hall.

There are, to be sure, nontrivial differences between the candidates regarding future federal education policy, programs, regulations, and budget levels, and they have occasionally tried to underscore these during the campaign (not including Monday evening’s smarmy cries from both that “I love teachers!”). Yet even if those differences are substantial, it still won’t really matter much. Because federal policy, beloved though it is by those inside the Beltway and associated echo chambers, doesn’t really determine much about the conduct of our primary-secondary education system.

Even with his recently enlarged appetite for spending on education and attempts to call more of the shots, Uncle Sam kicks in only about ten

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The election contests that really matter

What’s it mean to be “educated”?

Terry Ryan / October 25, 2012

As Election Day hurtles towards us, it has become all too clear that as Ohio goes, so goes the nation—and the national media are consequently bursting with reports from the Buckeye State. Here’s the story of one Ohio city that carries a lesson for the rest of America: Dayton has a long tradition of innovation (think airplanes, pull-tabs, electric starters, cash registers, and even teacher unions). Yet, as the innovations of one era slip into obsolescence in the next, the Gem City has struggled economically and demographically. The hope for Dayton’s revival comes from innovation. And this time the innovation is in education—how we prepare people for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

By 2018, almost two-thirds of American jobs will require at least a sub-baccalaureate credential, (post-secondary certificate, associate’s degree, state-issued education credential, corporate certificate, or badge among others). Dayton, according to a fine piece in the Lumina Foundation’s fall edition of Focus Magazine, is quickly becoming a national leader in preparing “sub-baccalaureate graduates.”

Dayton’s economic struggles peaked in 2009. That’s when the New York Times reported that the city and its surrounding area faced a vortex of “economic and social change.” Specifically,

the area’s job total has fallen 12 percent since 2000, while about half of its factory jobs—38,000 out of 79,000—have disappeared this decade. Not only have large G.M. and Delphi plants closed, but NCR, long the city’s corporate jewel,

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What’s it mean to be “educated”?

Litigating, debating, penalizing, and prognosticating

The Education Gadfly / October 25, 2012

The Los Angeles Times is suing the Los Angeles Unified School District for access to its teacher ratings in an effort to continue its controversial practice of publishing teacher-effectiveness rankings; even at the risk of inviting a bit of bad press, reform groups should make clear that public shaming of individual teachers isn't a path to educational improvement.

Last week, the Department of Education followed through with one of the most asinine attempts at improving special education that Gadfly can recall, finalizing $36 million in penalties for South Carolina. The state’s crime? Making tough but necessary cuts to all school spending in the midst of the Great Recession, special education included. The perverse lesson for states? Finding ways to boost efficiency in special education literally may not be worth the trouble. The feds will kill you.

Education couldn't stay out of Monday’s presidential debate on foreign policy, to Wendy Kopp’s delight. Unfortunately, we'd all be better served by a genuine discussion of why the U.S. continues to drop relative to its international peers rather than bland agreement that "we all love teachers."

Teachers are backing Obama over Romney but aren't enthusiastically rallying around the cause as the election nears. Can we expect any last-minute bones thrown to the union base to get teachers to the polls?

Online lessons can

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Litigating, debating, penalizing, and prognosticating

Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better

Kathleen Porter-Magee / October 25, 2012

Educrats have long warned of the perils of rote and repetition, lamenting that students can’t learn “how to think” if they’re forced to memorize facts or repeat skills to automaticity. This pedagogical method hamstrings great teachers, too, they argue. But they’re wrong. In his seminal first book, Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov explained (based on thousands of hours spent observing outstanding teachers in action) that great teaching requires the mastery of seemingly mundane but crucially important knowledge and skills. His newest book (coauthored with Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi) builds upon these insights. Drawing on their own experience working to ingrain practice into both school culture and teacher professional development, Practice Perfect offers forty-two rules designed to help people “get better at getting better.” Like the techniques described in Teach Like a Champion, these rules are simple, practical, and grounded in common sense, as well as respect for the practice and repetition that we need to help teachers (and students) achieve mastery. They also present a damning critique of the multi-billion dollar teacher professional-development industry. By shying away from skill repetition, most PD programs offer the equivalent of art-appreciation courses and then ask teachers to paint masterpieces. They simply do not give teachers—eager to learn new skills—the tools to become better educators. Properly conceived, rather than merely giving teachers time to “listen, reflect, discuss, and

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Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better

The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools

Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D. , Daniela Fairchild / October 25, 2012

Schools are comprised of teachers, students, and principals…and nurses, speech therapists, paraprofessionals, and librarians…and administrative assistants, reading specialists, transportation coordinators, and other central-office staffers. This Friedman Foundation report (building off the work of others) analyzes the  ballooning of these “other” education jobs—individuals employed by school districts (and paid with taxpayer dollars) who do not directly instruct children. And the numbers are eye-opening: Between 1950 and 2009, the number of K-12 public school students increased by 96 percent. During that same period, the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew by 386 percent. Of those personnel, the number of teachers increased by 252 percent, while the ranks of administrators and other staff grew by 702 percent—more than 7 times the increase in students. Though this trend has abated somewhat in recent years, these increases remain dramatic. From 1992 to 2009, for example, the bump in school FTEs was 2.3 times greater than that of students, with forty-eight states upping the number of nonteaching personnel at a faster rate than their increase in students. Even where student populations dropped over the past two decades, public school employment increased. Maine, for example, lost roughly 11 percent of its pupils, yet saw a 76 percent increase in the number of non-teaching personnel. Ohio schools saw a 2 percent increase in student population coupled with a 44 percent increase in non-teaching

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The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools

Popularity

John Horton / October 25, 2012

Intelligence, curiosity, and grit: important traits for success in school and life. But so is popularity, argues this working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Tapping Wisconsin Longitudinal Study data for 4,300 males from 1957 (the year they graduated high school) through 2005, authors evaluate characteristics associated with “popularity” and the effects of being well-liked on lifetime incomes. To gauge one’s popularity, authors tallied “friendship nominations,” both the number of friends a student lists and the number of times he is listed by his peers. Overall, authors found that students who are older than their grade-mates and have higher IQs are more popular. (Strong maternal and sibling relationships are also closely connected to social status; so is exposure to larger peer groups, as experienced by increased extracurricular activities.) But one’s family income had no effect on popularity. Linking these findings to one’s own lifetime income data, the analysts report that men in the top quartile of high school popularity have a 10 percent earnings premium over those in the bottom quartile. Moreover, increased social skills (by one decile, based on author calculations) are associated with a 2 percent wage advantage thirty-five years later—roughly 40 percent the return accrued from an additional year of schooling. The authors speculate why: High school “social interaction…provides the bridge to the adult world as [students] train individual personalities to be socially adequate.” There’s much to unpack in this short paper—including its dense methodology.

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Popularity

The White/Black Educational Gap, Stalled Progress, and the Long Term Consequences of the Emergence of Crack Cocaine Markets

Pamela Tatz / October 25, 2012

For much of the 1970 and 80s, the educational future for black students looked bright: The gap between white and black students’ graduation rates was closing rapidly, dropping from 9.2 to 4.4 percentage points over nineteen years (and due mostly to a rise in black attainment). Had this rate of convergence continued, the black graduation rate would have been level with that of whites by the mid-1990s. But everything changed in 1986. Why? Authors of this recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper blame the “stalled progress” on one social phenomenon: the proliferation of crack-cocaine markets. The authors examine the impact of crack-cocaine markets in fifty-seven metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on the black-white achievement gap, with a specific focus on the male achievement gap. Crack markets, the authors find, account for between 40 and 73 percent of the decline in achievement among black males by catalyzing a higher murder rate, a greater chance of incarceration, and more opportunities for employment outside of the “formal” sector (reducing the value of their education). Why, then, have achievement gains among black males not rebounded after the decline in crack cocaine-related violence in the early 2000s? The authors speculate that there may now exist a perverse relationship between prison-intake rates and lower educational attainment: while the former originally caused the latter, the latter could now be driving the former by pushing students to crime due to lack of opportunity. Heady research, fodder for

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The White/Black Educational Gap, Stalled Progress, and the Long Term Consequences of the Emergence of Crack Cocaine Markets