Secretary Duncan delivered the last of his four policy speeches today at the annual conference of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. Overall, it was a good talk. He probably was a bit too effusive in his praise in parts, but it was certainly balanced by a number of points that surely caused consternation among those gathered (I hear he was booed more than once!). Here are the highlights.

At the beginning, after reminding the audience that he had gotten tough with the charter school crowd, he gave the NEA some of the same medicine:

It’s not enough to focus only on issues like job security, tenure, compensation, and evaluation. You must become full partners and leaders in education reform. You must be willing to change.

Regarding the administration’s position on new forms of compensation, he used the phraseology that unnerves reformers and soothes labor leaders:

The President and I have both said repeatedly that we are not going to impose reform but rather work with teachers, principals, and unions to find what works.

We’re asking Congress for more money to develop compensation programs “with” you – and “for” you — not “to” you.

He then turned tougher. In talking about fixing failing schools, after saying that everyone needs to work together, he continued:

But if we agree that the adults in these schools are failing these children then we have to find the right people and we can’t let our rules and regulations get in the way. Children have only one chance to get an education. This is not about adult jobs. This is about children’s education.

He then did an interesting verbal pirouette on seniority and tenure, praising then mildly criticizing each in turn, then ending with a firm stand:

We created seniority rules that protect teachers from arbitrary and capricious management, and that’s a good goal. But sometimes those rules place teachers in schools and communities where they won’t succeed, and that’s wrong.

We created tenure rules to make sure that a struggling teacher gets a fair opportunity to improve, and that’s a good goal. But when an ineffective teacher gets a chance to improve and doesn’t — and when the tenure system keeps that teacher in the classroom anyway — then the system is protecting jobs rather than children. That’s not a good thing. We need to work together to change that.

...When inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules that we designed put adults ahead of children then we are not only putting kids at risk — we’re putting the entire education system at risk...These policies were created over the past century to protect the rights of teachers but they have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets.

Toward the end, Duncan had two of his most potent lines:

A recent report from the New Teacher Project found that almost all teachers are rated the same. Who in their right mind really believes that?

Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions. That would never make sense. But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.

Education Next has just released an interesting and tantalizing debate on school funds. In the wake of Flores, issues of funding equity have again risen to the fore. It’s lucky then that the participants in this debate, Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth (authors of the tome Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools) and Michael Rebell (author of the forthcoming Courts and Kids: Pursuing Educational Equity through the State Courts) are here to hash it out. Hanushek and Lindseth argue that spending the money already going into education more wisely is the ticket, specifically by reforming teacher pay scales to a performance-based model. Rebell counters that if you take a second look at the numbers, American education funding is actually neither adequate nor equitable. Definitely worth a read!

And if this topic interests you, Fordham (in concert with Brookings) will be publishing its own (slightly more general) contribution on this conversation in the form of the forthcoming book From Schoolhouse to Courthouse. Keep an eye out for its release in August.

There’s another blurb in the WaPo article Andy refers to below that’s worth mentioning:

Although signs of academic success are unknown—this year’s round of standardized test scores has not been released—Green Dot has won praise for making the campus safer and sparking significant increases in attendance and student retention rates. That was enough for Rhee to consider Green Dot as a possible partner.

Parents often will pick a charter school over the neighborhood school for reasons of safety or class size or a host of other tangibles. This makes sense. Though we in the policy community focus on achievement, new charters often perform no better (and sometimes worse) than the neighborhood school. This lag is usually made up for after a few years, but in the meantime, parents often play up the other benefits of a well-run charter school, like feeling relatively certain their child’s classmate won’t bring a gun to school. It also makes sense that school safety would be an important factor for Rhee as chancellor of a notoriously violent school district. She’s made some steps to reign in the most troubled schools, but there’s still a long way to go. But this also underscores something else that Rhee apparently believes in: you can’t have a good school until it’s well-run, or put another way, student achievement depends on good management. Steve Barr’s Locke Senior High School takeover might not have produced stellar test scores yet, but it has whipped the management of the school into shape. And there’s something to be said for that.

I just got finished reading Education Sector’s very interesting report on teachers’ opinion about their unions. I found it enlightening and distressing in turns. For example, the teachers surveyed feel strongly that they need unions to protect them from capricious administrators; therefore, teachers want unions to stay focused on pay, work conditions, job security, etc.

While there are differences between newer and more veteran teachers, their views are more similar than I would have guessed, and those views aren’t so encouraging for those interested in changing the teaching profession.

These are just a few of the fascinating findings; if you have 15 minutes, take a look.

Along these lines, Education Sector just launched an online discussion with teachers to debate the future of teacher unions. Also worth browsing.

Green Dot may be coming to DC to take over a failing high school or two. The full article is worth reading, but, in my opinion, this blurb just about perfectly summarizes the optimism-sans-evidence of the turnaround crowd.

Marco Petruzzi, Green Dot president and chief executive, acknowledged that the company hasn’t proved its ability to dramatically raise academic standards at Locke. But he said the nonprofit group has learned enough to bring its approach to other cities.

Arne Duncan and his fans have been hinting that he’s going to be tough on the teachers union tomorrow at its big annual confab. But will he speak these truths?

“Look, we bailed your behinds out to the tune of $100 billion. So I don’t want to hear any yapping when our No Child Left Behind proposal comes out.”

“Now, about those generous teacher pensions. We value your service, we really do. But there’s no possible way we can afford to pay 60 or 70 or 80 percent of your salary, indexed to inflation, for the rest of your lives. At least without bankrupting our schools. The other option is pushing the retirement age for teachers to 70. Did I mention how I think teaching is a wonderful lifelong career?”

“One last thing: about the teacher obesity epidemic. Come on folks, we need to set a good example here.”

(This is one reason I wasn’t selected to write speeches for the Secretary.)

We’ve arrived at the sixth (perhaps final?) part of the school turnaround debate between our Andy Smarick and Public Impact‘s Bryan and Emily Hassel. Just checking in now? See Andy’s first post and the Hassels’ first response. Then, read the third installment, where Andy addresses five key points, and the fourth, where the Hassels fire back four quick responses of their own. Andy gave his input on those four responses, and now, in this sixth act, the Hassels are back with their final thoughts.

We’ll try to ignore Andy’s assuming of facts and results to support his argument. To be clear: we are not arguing for turnaround efforts like they have been tried in education in the past nor are we making any baseless assertions about their track record in education. Quite the contrary: It is outside of education that the turnaround track record is similar to new starts.  So we looked outside of education to find out how to do a bad-to-great transformation.

Turnarounds in other sectors follow a formula - and not one like any of the education change efforts of the past few decades (e.g., continuous improvement, comprehensive school reform). So why not start with that bad-to-great success formula for school turnarounds?  That’s a key point of our work: education need not work in a silo with turnarounds.  If we try what has worked elsewhere for turnarounds, the results should look similar to elsewhere and be on par with new starts, as in other sectors.  That’s how the new-start sector in education has distinguished itself from run of the mill new schools, and that’s how turnarounds can do the same.  Will they? That depends on whether turnaround schools follow the formula . . .

Losing Ohio’s Future: A Discussion about Ohio’s “Brain Drain” from Education Gadfly on Vimeo.

Tune in to WAMU 88.5 today at noon if you’re able, because our own Mike Petrilli will be a guest on the Kojo Nnamdi Show. They’ll be discussing the challenges affecting local Catholic schools, and some of the efforts to help keep them going. (And if you’d like some background on the situation, we did a report last year on urban Catholic schools).

Before excusing myself from this debate (which was great) and deferring to my forthcoming article, I’ll respond point-by-point to the Hassel’s last post.

1. I disagree with the contention that new starts and turnarounds have the same success rate, especially in education. If you were to take all of the schools that were in restructuring three years ago and compare them today to all of the schools that were started new three years ago, I would bet that the new start quality curve is farther to the right at all points. I’m very confident that this would be especially true at the far right side; that is, the top 25 percent of new starts from three years ago would be higher performing as a class than the top 25 percent of schools in restructuring three years ago.
2. I agree that we have too little good research on the DNA of successful turnarounds and new starts. Having said that, however, from all of the evidence I’ve seen, turnarounds are always going to have a very low success rate. I’m sympathetic to the argument that we ought to try lots of things while we’re looking for the answer, but there’s a limit to that. In my view, the potential of turnarounds is so low that we’d be better off putting our eggs in the new start basket. Speaking of which, everyone who’s so bullish about Green Dot’s turnaround success ought to read this article. Things aren’t so rosy as some would suggest. Moreover, according to the opening on this article Green Dot itself is more encouraged by the potential of its new starts!
3. I think the “we haven’t tried hard enough” argument is the by far the least convincing one out there. The list of interventions used to try to fix chronically failing schools over decades is nothing short of stunning. Yes, in hindsight, some weren’t tough enough, but many, many were significant and continuous.
4. I think my previous points get at their fourth point and explain why I’m in the new start camp. By way of analogy, if I was asked to set a baseball batting lineup and I could choose from among 20 players, 10 of whom had a .350 lifetime batting average and 10 of whom consistently batted, say, .180, I would choose nine of the .350 hitters; I wouldn’t mix it up with some of the .180 guys . I’m not positing that .350 and .180 perfectly match the stats of new starts and turnarounds, only that one is much more reliable than the other. In short, no batter gets on base every time, but if we’re in the bottom of the ninth in game seven, you better believe that I’d feel better with Ted Williams at the plate than Bob Uecker. And if I had to give one of them a $3 billion contract extension, I know who I’d pick.

The Fordham Institute is unique in the school reform sector in that we have offices in both Washington, DC and Ohio. From the Buckeye State vantage point, we see a growing disconnect between reformers inside the Beltway and those toiling in the states. The federal government is flush with money (granted it is borrowed!) and there is big talk about reform; while the states are broke and in the middle of brutal budget cutting that is threatening to set back school reform efforts big time.

Exhibit A: Washington, DC - U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told a gathering at the National Charter School Conference last week in Washington that now is the time to turn around the country’s 5,000 lowest performing schools, and he said the federal government has $5 billion to spend on this effort over the next two years. Sec. Duncan and the President are actively encouraging more charter schools, dramatic school turnaround efforts, common academic standards across the states, and other reforms backed up by federal “Race to the Top Dollars.”

Exhibit B: Columbus, OH - the General Assembly and the Governor are struggling to cut $3.2 billion from the state’s $54 billion budget. At serious risk are all manner of recent school reform - charter schools (especially cybercharters), STEM schools and associated STEM programs, Early College Academies, the state’s innovative value-added assessment system, and any real talk of improving the state’s standards and accountability systems. Education reform in Ohio has been consumed by the state’s fiscal crisis. Reforms and reformers are now pitted against the status quo and long-established educational interests in a life-and-death struggle for scarce dollars. The reformers are apt to lose big time in the Buckeye State.

The story from Ohio is playing out elsewhere across the country as state’s struggle with massive holes in their operating budgets. Today’s Wall-Street Journal reported that “personal income-tax collections, which account for about 36 percent of state revenues, dropped 26 percent in this year’s January-April period.... Sales-tax revenues have swooned, leaving 48 states with a combined revenue shortfall of $166 billion in the coming fiscal year.”

We are seeing a serious shake-out of school reform efforts in the states. What plays out in state capitals over the next few weeks may very well set the direction for school reform in the United States for the next decade or more. This is despite the valiant efforts of the federal government to try and keep education reform moving in the right direction.

Photo credit: jeremybrooks

A month ago, I wondered what Sonia Sotomayor might think about teacher tests, as the more rigorous ones typically have a “disparate impact” on minorities; African-American and Hispanic candidates fail them at much higher rates than whites do. Now that the Supreme Court has decided the Ricci v DeStefano case, I decided to ask school law expert Joshua Dunn, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, co-author of Education Next’s Legal Beat column, and co-editor of the forthcoming Fordham/Brookings Institution Press volume Schoolhouse to Courthouse, for his opinion. Here’s what he had to say:

It appears that as long as states take care in crafting their tests and showing they are job related they should be safe from litigation.  To sue over teacher tests, plaintiffs would have to produce a test that accomplishes the same objectives but does not have a disparate impact.

What might such a test look like? Perhaps performance assessments—whereby teachers give model lessons for groups of evaluators—might not result in a “disparate impact.” But I haven’t seen any research that shows that such assessments are strongly predictive of teacher effectiveness, as tests of verbal ability are.

So like Josh says, states are probably in safe legal territory with their teacher tests. But they will likely play it even safer by keeping the cut scores on said tests fairly low, so their “disparate impact” is not so extreme. (If virtually everyone passes the test, it can’t be said to have a disparate impact.) And while that might be good legal strategy, it’s not the best public policy for our kids.

Our own Checker Finn is opining for National Journal’s just-launched Education Expert Blog, which poses a question every week to a panel of education heavyweights. Checker gets straight to the point in answering this week’s query, “What is the best use of stimulus money?” Checker’s response: “I feel as if contributors are being asked to opine on whether the sun should rise and set tomorrow.” Read more on the Education Experts Blog.

I got deeply involved in the closure/new start vs. turnaround debate because it has a major bearing on the basic argument of my book project. So I started thinking through and researching the various angles several months ago when this was still a relatively sleepy, back-burner issue. Little did I know that the stimulus legislation would include $3 billion for the School Improvement Fund or that Secretary Duncan would make turning around 1,000 schools per year one of ED’s priorities.

As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m concerned that the good intentions and hope motivating the turnaround crowd could lead us to spend inordinate sums of money on a venture that hasn’t worked well to date, and which, based on the evidence, I believe has little potential to do much better in the future.

Since major policy and funding decisions on turnarounds will be made in the months to come, I’ve turned my chapter on turnarounds into an article. The great people at Education Next have accepted it and accelerated its publication; it should be out in print this fall, with the online version available even sooner.

Hopefully this will play a small role in helping ensure this debate gets the consideration it deserves.

Thanks to the Hassels for contributing to this discussion. Later today, I’ll briefly respond to their latest rejoinder.

As this brief explained, it’s unlikely we’ll get much reform out of most of the stimulus legislation’s education funds. But Secretary Duncan could squeeze some more reform out of the law if he’s willing to be bold.

It’s not exactly a trump card, but it’s certainly more than a bluff. Given that we’ve already spent $75 billion, maybe the best card analogy would be pocket jacks when you’re pot-committed.

The school turnaround debate goes on. See Andy Smarick’s first post , Bryan and Emily Hassel’s reply , and Andy’s rebuttal . Here’s another round, again from Bryan and Emily Hassel of Public Impact .

Four quick responses to Andy’s latest on turnarounds .

First, the IES study did not find that school turnarounds are futile, just that there’s not much good research about them.  If you look outside education, success rates for new start ups and for turnaround efforts look pretty similar, in the 20-30% range. There’s just no evidentiary basis for Andy’s belief that new starts are a higher-probability strategy.

Second, all of Andy’s critiques of turnaround research apply equally to research on successful charter schools.  In both cases, we have imperfect knowledge based on success stories. Let’s get better info, but we’d be foolish not to use imperfect knowledge to help kids now. If we accidentally emphasize a few wrong factors (as in Andy’s West Point example), that’s better than doing nothing.

Third, one of the reasons we have so little good research on school turnarounds is that so few real school turnarounds have been attempted.  Most district responses to chronic failure are just the same old warmed over, incremental strategies that may help mediocre schools get better but aren’t up to the task of rescuing chronic failures.  We’ll never build the knowledge base about school turnarounds unless we really start trying them and studying them.

Finally, with the stakes as high as they are for kids in failing schools, why would we myopically limit ourselves to one strategy - new school creation - which is itself limited and uncertain? The magnitude of this problem is so huge, why not vigorously pursue both strategies - when both have worked in other sectors.  Both will fail of be lackluster most of the time. So: Try, Try Again is the key.

Feeling blue about school reform? This riveting no-nonsense address by Howard Fuller at last week’s National Charter School Conference will relieve your doldrums.