How the Common Core changes everything

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 27, 2012

It’s well established that the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)—adopted in principle by forty-six states—won’t get any real traction unless they’re comprehensively and faithfully implemented at the state and local levels. (They also have implications for federal policy and programs, of course.)

What we've heard about the Common Core's impact is just the tip of the iceberg . Photo by Natalie Lucier.

But what is comprehensive implementation? True, we’ve heard much palaver about what the Common Core portends for assessment, for teachers’ professional development, and for curricular/instructional materials. All true, all crucial, and all probably the most urgent. But these issues are also just the tip of the CCSS iceberg, most of which remains invisible under water. What I haven’t seen yet is clear recognition that the Common Core, taken seriously, eventually changes everything in American education and that implementation, done right, must be comprehensive.

Which means what? Start with a substantial analogy: World War II. A new book profiles General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who was assigned by General Marshall to the Army’s “War Plans Department” as the conflict loomed and (I quote the Wall Street Journal’s book review) “tasked…with reducing America’s mobilization requirements to a single document.” Then FDR asked Wedemeyer’s team to turn it “into

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How the Common Core changes everything

SAT woes and reform foes make headlines

The Education Gadfly / September 27, 2012

You can explain away yet another (slight) decline in SAT scores by citing the expanding test-taking population and its changing demographics. But let’s face it: The longest-lived and most widely noted marker of American high school attainment continues to flat-line, or worse, despite all the reforming, all the spending, and all the hand-wringing.

The American Enterprise Institute’s resident education gurus, Rick Hess and Andrew Kelly, offer up a clear-headed plan for a conservative federal education agenda in the latest edition of National Affairs. While there are historical oversimplifications (particularly their take on the Reagan and Bush I eras), and there’s far too little attention to the complexities of civil-rights enforcement (and the federal role therein), the essay provides a valuable look at the contradictions of conservatives in the education arena and defines a clear and useful role for the national government that leaders in Washington (and candidates hoping to join those ranks) would be wise to give more than a glance.

Randi Weingarten and Karen Lewis teamed up to defend the teacher union's victory in the recent Chicago strike (and bury any hint of a power struggle?) in the pages of the Wall Street Journal this week. "Solution-driven unionism" is unlikely to win many converts among the Journal's readers but it was a welcome reminder that, while they may have prevailed

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SAT woes and reform foes make headlines

Re: "The Chicago strike's silver lining," September 20, 2012

Michael W. Kelly / September 27, 2012

I thought Checker Finn penned a good commentary on the recent Chicago strike, but one stylistic change is called for. Describing the unions as “selfish” rather than “pursuing their self-interests” tends to make readers think he is accusing them of collective personal flaws. They are bad people because they are…selfish, greedy, etc. The unions exist to represent the teachers and cut the best deal for them. That is solely why they exist. The union does not represent the students, parents, or taxpayers. (Despite their claims to do so.) This does not necessarily make them bad people.

Markets consist of two self-interested parties striking a deal as to price and product. The fair and legal pursuit of self-interest is at the heart of capitalism and the assumption of individual liberty over limited government in the Constitution. The real problem is that there is no counterparty to negotiate with the public-sector union. The structure is rigged because of the rules that allow unions to corrupt public officials through campaign contributions, phone banks, and union-worker armies of organizers for elections. Public officials are supposed to represent the taxpayers, the parents, and the students, but they unfortunately do not because of the political weapons the unions wield. Either those weapons have to be eliminated or the right to organize as a union for public-sector employees has to be ended. While pursuing one’s self-interest may not be a bad thing, corruption in the pursuit of it

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Re: "The Chicago strike's silver lining," September 20, 2012

Won't Back Down

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 27, 2012

In January 2010, California became the first state to offer parents another path when it passed the Parent Empowerment Act, aka “parent trigger” law. This measure allows parents to force turnaround efforts at a school, similar to those framed by the federal School Improvement Grant program, including reconstitution as a charter and replacement of half the staff. Since then, six other states have adopted “trigger” legislation (including Ohio, which passed a pilot program for Columbus City Schools in 2011). Another twenty-plus have considered (or are currently considering) similar legislation. This form of parent empowerment has merit, even if it hasn’t actually happened yet in real places. Indeed, no real school has successfully implemented a parent trigger—for school systems, teacher groups, and other establishment forces have myriad means available to block it.

For a preview of how it might really happen, we turn to Hollywood: This film—produced (and presumably subsidized) by Philip Anschutz’s Walden Media and starring Viola Davis (The Help, Doubt) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart)—chronicles the efforts of two moms (one of them also a teacher) as they struggle to reconstitute their horrific Pittsburgh elementary school under the state's hypothetical "Fail Safe Act." (No, Pennsylvania hasn’t passed a parent-trigger law yet.)

All the essential—and predictable—characters are featured: The apathetic and/or change-averse school-board members; the conniving teacher-union head; the vindictive and heinous principal; the

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Won't Back Down

E Pluribus...Separation: Deepening Double Segregation for More Students

Daniela Fairchild / September 27, 2012

Gary Orfield’s Civil Rights Project routinely presents—and laments—stark numbers on segregation (both racial and socioeconomic) in U.S. classrooms; this latest report is no different. It shows that racial segregation is on the rise, even in the face of the shifting demographics of America’s schools (white students’ “market share” of public school enrollment dropped 25 percent over the past thirty years): Fifteen percent of black students and 14 percent of Latino students attend schools that are less than 1 percent white (and 74 and 80 percent, respectively, attend majority non-white schools). Further, while the typical white student attends a school that is about one-third low income; the typical black student’s school is about two-thirds low income. But what is the role of schools and school systems in arresting or reversing such trends, which have so much to do with housing policy, income, neighborhood demographics, ethnic preferences, and parental choice? Orfield has his own answers, of course: paternalistic policy recommendations that include expanding magnet schools, reversing Supreme Court decisions, and constructing civil-rights policies for charter schools. But forcibly creating diverse schools is as logistically taxing as it is politically unpalatable. Instead of top-down mandates, Orfield and co. might better consider a “controlled choice” approach to diverse schools—treating them as one component of a larger school-choice movement that allows parents to choose a high-performing charter or district-run STEM school,

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E Pluribus...Separation: Deepening Double Segregation for More Students

The Stealth Inequities of School Funding: How State and Local Finance Systems Perpetuate Inequitable Student Spending

Pamela Tatz / September 27, 2012

This Center for American Progress report spotlights “often-overlooked features of school funding systems” that aggravate inequities in per-pupil spending, leaving students in wealthier districts with more edu-dollars than those in needier locales. In Part I of the report, Rutgers professor Bruce Baker offers a succinct primer on state aid formulas, and then details how the formulas of six states (Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas) have created especially "regressive" funding patterns. (In New York, for example, 0 percent poverty districts receive about $2,000 more per pupil than those with a 30 percent poverty rate.) In Part II, NYU’s Sean Corcoran highlights how local-revenue structures—mainly property taxes—worsen such inequities. (Federal Title I dollars, the authors argue, do little to offset the progressive or regressive nature of states’ school-finance systems.) The report helpfully unpacks an important and complicated issue, but its recommendations for change are disappointing. Baker and Corcoran acknowledge that ensuring funding equity must be done at the state level, but they offer few concrete steps for their case-study states to reach this aim. States searching for such a step would be wise to read up on weighted-student funding.

SOURCE: Bruce D. Baker and Sean P. Corcoran, The Stealth Inequities of School Funding: How State and Local Finance Systems Perpetuate Inequitable Student Spending (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, September 2012).

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The Stealth Inequities of School Funding: How State and Local Finance Systems Perpetuate Inequitable Student Spending