(Left to right): Fordham staffers in costume: Alice takes a peek through the Looking Glass, Sleeping Beauty catches some Zs, Snow White hums to the birds, Concert Goer #1 chills and a Wake Forest track star stretches.

Following the national trend set by 10-year-olds, some women of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are opting for modest and traditional Disney princess costumes this year and staying away from — what shall we call them? — decidedly more revealing outfits. An expected $5.8 million is to be spent on Halloween this year, up a half-billion dollars from 2007, and this money is being spent on more fabric and less-revealing costumes. As Erica Noonan of The Boston Globe points out, “An era when Halloween costume shopping for girls could be confused with exploring a Victoria’s secret lingerie trunk may be fading” as more consumers opt for “bumblebees, ladybugs and superheroes.” We are all disappointed that Mike did not dress up as the Gadfly.

The National Education Association headquarters in Washington, D.C.

So says Jay Mathews in his Washington Post column today—at least when it comes to education policy.

If you like the education policies (JUST the education policies) of the current president, you will like the education policies of his successor, no matter which man is chosen. If you don’t, you won’t.

How can that be? Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) seem to be very different people, with contrasting views of President Bush. But if you examine carefully what they say they want to do about schools, it is just more of the same.

Mathews rightly points out that surrogates to the candidates chat about a lot of the same ideas, from charter schools to non-traditional routes to the classroom to accountability. And both candidates have been careful to avoid talk of “scrapping” No Child Left Behind. And he’s not the first to notice that there’s a “Washington Consensus” in education that’s long-standing and hard to budge. Yet I’m not entirely convinced that his thesis is correct. If Obama maintains his lead through the weekend and wins the election, we really don’t know where he’s going to come down on NCLB. Yes, he’ll be for “accountability,” but the very broad label covers up a million and one specifics that matter a lot to the day to day operation of schools. It’s obvious that Mathews wants Obama to maintain Bush-style policies on education, but whether he actually will is quite the open question.

White House photo of President Bush by Paul Morse

Fall Intern Molly Kennedy offers up this reading:

With 25,000 students enrolled in charter schools and an additional 21,000 on waiting lists, charter schools in Boston are putting the burn on public schools.  As a result, public school officials are seeking a change in funding practices, arguing that the cost of sending their pupils to charter schools is a burden. Some say the districts should learn a lesson about competitiveness; others wonder why the public should be supporting students outside the regular public school system. School superintendents are supporting bills to be filed in January that are designed “to change the charter school funding formula and make it rely less heavily on regular school districts.”  Read more here.

“A Last Push to Deregulate: White House to Ease Many Rules”

* She was too busy putting out fires.

You gotta love California. Seems the Golden State, worried that their wee toddlers’ arms are too short for proper tree-huggery, will inculcate them with the prerequisite environmentalism another way: through their stomachs. That’s the story coming out of San Diego’s Neighborhood House Association (NHA) Head Start program, where their 3 and 4 year olds will be fed “organic and nutrient-dense” delicacies to satisfy that noon-time hunger. What’s on the menu? No breaded frozen fish sticks or cinnamon muffins for sure. These tots will get “fresh salmon, shrimp, homemade hummus, healthy whole grain bagels and rolls, as well as fresh fruits and vegetables.”

Sounds delicious... for children old enough to eat with proper utensils. I’m all for kicking processed, breaded, fried, and canned foods to the curb. But fresh salmon? And hummus? For three year olds? It’s a bit ambitious (I’ve yet to meet a three year old who’ll eat mashed chick peas), but I’ll give ‘em points for effort since school food is notoriously disgusting.

With California’s budget woes in mind, the plan has bottom line benefits too: NHA Director of Nutrition Services Kristine Smith, RD explains: “We balanced our new menu with more affordable recipes and better ingredients.  Legumes, lentils, rice and pasta are very affordable and can be used as the base of many recipes.  Making food from scratch also saves money and allows us to monitor the nutrient value since we know what is contained in the product.”

And the environment? That’s helped, too. Smith: “Organic foods help preserve our environment. The use of organic and health conscious ingredients is better for our children’s bodies and better for the planet they’ll inherit.” Got a point there. Hey Mike, we say we’re the greenest tank in town... when will Fordham start serving fresh salmon and shrimp for lunch?

Sounds like there’s much to like, even if it doesn’t include the hummus.

(HT to Greg Toppo for this story—and the post’s title.)

Above photograph by hazy_jenius on Flickr

This week, we start off with a double header on the education system’s economic woes—and what to do about them. First Checker explains why districts have so much trouble cutting the fat. Enlightening, surely, but not too surprising. What is surprising, though, is that he used this argument back in 2003, the last time our education system was facing a budget crunch (if you don’t believe me, go read it yourself!). Seems somethings never change. Then guest editorialist, and political director for ConnCAN, Marc Porter Magee gives us six suggestions for what states can do to trim their budgets. Instead of bemoaning the sad state of bugetary affairs, he argues, we should take advantage of the recession-caused political will to start cutting where cutting is needed. Further in, you’ll hear about the Bush Administrations last NCLB gasp—new regulations, specifically, and most problematically, upping graduating rate reporting requirements—and an Ed Trust study that tries the same argument without any more success. You’ll also find out about the proposed gay high school in Chicago and subsequent uproar. Reviewed this week is a new book edited by Rick Hess (who reveals on the podcast that apparently not only does not read the news—as we learned last week—but also doesn’t vote) on educational entrepreneurship and the latest from Notre Dame and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching on the future of Catholic Schools. All this and more.

Fall Intern Molly Kennedy offers up this reading:

In New York City the programs for gifted children have been in the middle of a tug-of-war between multiple parties, with critics labeling them “bastions of white privilege” but proponents seeing them as a reason to stay in the city’s public school system. This year, the number of children entering these programs has dropped by half — despite Mayor Bloomber’s 2005 State of the City promise to “maintain all of the city’s existing gifted programs while creating more in ‘historically underserved districts.’” Read more here.

Ted Mitchell and Jonathan Schorr of the NewSchools Venture Fund take to the pages of Education Week to praise Sara Mead’s and Andy Rotherham’s new blueprint for promoting education innovation via the federal government. Now, I could lambaste Ted and Jon* for holding the same utopian views as Sara and Andy when it comes to Uncle Sam’s ability to do right in education. But I’m just not in the mood today. Instead, let us celebrate the fact that Democrats are debating how to improve U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement, not how to eliminate it. Because when we created our little office six years ago, we worried a lot about whether another Administration would eventually try to kill it. If Team Obama wants to make it better, I’m ready to declare victory!

* But I can’t help but make the “Petrilli argument” one more time, with respect to the “political futility” of trying to harpoon the Historic Whaling Program. Don’t get me wrong, this initiative is a boondoggle, through and through. (“Whales: The other white meat.”) But one of its key sponsors is Senator Edward Kennedy, so what exactly is your strategy? By all means, lure it to another office, but eradicating it entirely will take the single-mindedness of Ahab. And we all know how that turned out.

Above picture from Queensland, Australia, Environmental Protection Agency

Former Ed Truster Kevin Carey loves Education Trust’s trusty new report on graduation rates (timed to coincide with the new NCLB regulations—see, Democrats and Republicans are already working together in Washington!). Said report explores No Child Left Behind’s requirement that high schools reach certain graduation rate benchmarks in order to make “adequate yearly progress,” and bashes (the many) states that set these grad rate targets low or expect too leisurely a pace of progress. Carey implies that this shows states are gaming the system “in an utterly fraudulent, cynical way.”

Well, that may well be true (we’ve not been shy about blasting states for their low expectations), but Carey leaves out a major factor: the definition of a high school “graduate” is malleable, so aiming to get everyone over that bar might result in the bar itself being lowered. This is not a hypothetical situation; it’s exactly the dynamic with NCLB’s requirement that 100 percent of students be “proficient” in reading and math by 2014. While this provision hasn’t caused a “race to the bottom,” it has led to a “walk to the middle” in an environment that discourages states to raise their expectations for what it takes to be “proficient.”

Everyone wants more kids to graduate from high school. But we should also want a high school diploma to mean something. These two objectives are in tension with one another, especially once we start talking about getting “all kids” or “almost all kids” over the graduation bar. (More so when we add students with disabilities to the mix.) An eighty percent graduation rate might be praiseworthy in a state where graduation implies true readiness for college-level work. Carey (and Ed Trust) should say so.

So let’s all remember a key lesson from NCLB: when setting arbitrary targets, beware the perverse incentive.

There’s been a lot of debate recently about the degree to which the feds can coerce states or school districts to do things they don’t want to do (see here, here, and here, for example). Now there’s some new empirical evidence that addresses the question. “Paying for Progress: Conditional Grants and the Desegregation of Southern Schools,” written by Fordham Scholar Nora Gordon and her colleagues Elizabeth Cascio, Ethan Lewis, and Sarah Reber, goes back to the desegregation battles of the 1960s and finds, in essence, that the threat of withdrawing federal largesse can motivate districts to change policies. In this case, the more Title I aid a Southern school district received from Uncle Sam, the more likely it was to play ball. But there are some important caveats: first, the amount of desegregation experienced even in these districts was modest. And second, it took a lot of money to get districts to act—on average, $1,000 per pupil, which was 60% of the total per-pupil costs at the time.

What’s the take-away for the current conversation around federal education policy? I think it’s true that big-time formula funds such as Title I can be used as a club to force states and districts to act, but that strategy only works well when requirements are clear-cut. For example: test all students in grades 3-8 in reading and math. It’s a lot harder when the mandate is fuzzy or complex, such as: turn around failing schools. And when we get into really controversial territory—say, introducing merit pay or experimenting with vouchers—we’re better off making competitive grants available to jurisdictions that voluntarily sign up for the “free money,” rather than forcing everyone to get on board. And, as with the desegregation experience, the dollar amounts have to be significant. Chicago Public Schools (and, more to the point, the Chicago Teachers Union) miraculously agreed to experiment with merit pay recently, but only because of a $27.5 million federal bribe, I mean grant.

(A guest post from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Ohio Education Gadfly)

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland’s office recently shared his “Roadmap for Academic Reforms,” which appears to be the forerunner or prelude to the governor’s long-awaited plan for renewing and strengthening K-12 education in Ohio. The present document, regrettably, is not only devoid of specifics but also brimming with catchy buzz phrases and trendy eduspeak nostrums. As a public service to readers, Gadfly has provided the following translation:

Exciting 21st Century Learning Environments:

Governor’s proposal: Our schools must become collaborative continuous learning organizations that build a culture of strong relationships, professionalism, collaboration, and common purpose for all students.
Gadfly translates: Our schools will be leaderless, directionless centers of feel-goodism.

Governor’s proposal: Our schools must become a place where everyone feels safe, not just through metal detectors, but through high expectations, strong discipline, positive behavior interventions, a nurturing attention to the needs of each person, and a collective sense of responsibility by parents, educators, and community for our students to be competitive in the 21st century.
Gadfly translates: Our schools will not have the intestinal fortitude to rid themselves of misbehaving students or ineffectual teachers.

Governor’s proposal: Strategies to enhance creativity and innovation in the classroom must be encouraged and developed as an integral part of Ohio’s educational system to prepare our students for the 21st century.
Gadfly translates: Students may not learn proper grammar, spelling, or arithmetic but they’ll be rewarded for doing things their own way.

Governor’s proposal: Schools must become a place that acknowledges and recognizes the importance of global awareness and cultural competence. Our diversity in Ohio is an important asset in a global and interdependent world.
Gadfly translates: Let’s focus on the pluribus and forget the unum, along with history, civics, and patriotism.

Governor’s proposal: Schools must create a stronger connection to our families and the larger community to provide the necessary supports and additional opportunities to ensure academic success for our students.
Gadfly translates: If the teachers fail to teach students in school, parents (and “society”) are to blame.

Governor’s proposal: Standards and curriculum must continue to focus rigor and core knowledge but also establish expectations for our students to learn the 21st century skills that will empower them to be successful in an ever changing global marketplace.
Gadfly translates: When their jobs are outsourced to China because they lack sufficient knowledge of science and math themselves, Ohio’s graduates will feel really good about communicating thoughtfully in Mandarin.

Governor’s proposal: Academic performance measures must continue to support accountability but must also utilize multiple measures to provide educators with diagnostic information about the day to day learning of our students and to demonstrate a wide range of competencies and skills.
Gadfly translates: Instead of those nasty standardized tests on which the performance of students and schools can actually be tracked and compared in ways that parents, policymakers, and educators can understand, we’ll use individualized portfolios, performances, and demonstrations which cannot be reliably scored or compared by anybody.

Governor’s proposal: Additional time during the learning day is needed for educators to collaborate and share best practices.
Gadfly translates: The less time teachers spend in actual classrooms with actual pupils, the better. We’ll make sure that gets into the next contract.

Governor’s proposal: Increasing the number of learning days during the year is essential and will provide opportunities for all students to achieve higher levels of success.
Gadfly translates: So long as the grownups’ pay rises commensurately—or maybe more than that.

Governor’s proposal: How teachers teach is critical to the learning process. Students should be able to answer: Why an issue matters? What are the facts of a particular issue? How does the knowledge apply to real life? And, how academic content can be understood, enriched, and applied using creative thinking?
Gadfly translates: We don’t much care if they end up knowing when or why the Civil War was fought, where Singapore is in relation to Tokyo, or how to factor equations with two unknowns.

Governor’s proposal: Effective support strategies must be in place to provide all students with an opportunity for academic success, regardless of their personal situation, and to once and for all eliminate the achievement gap.
Gadfly translates: Schools need more social workers, counselors, and other paid adults.

Governor’s proposal: Educating the whole child, which includes wellness, physical education, emotional development, behavioral development, academic development, arts, music, will enhance the opportunities for student success.
Gadfly translates: We can ease off that annoying focus on reading and math and those nasty tests by which achievement is measured.

Excellent Educators:

Governor’s proposal: There must be seamless alignment between our institutions of higher education and our K-12 classrooms to provide educators with the training and professional development to ensure the success for our students.
Gadfly translates: Teachers need more ed school courses—and let’s crack down on anything that resembles expedited “alternative paths” into the classroom or principal’s office.

Governor’s proposal: The preparation for becoming a teacher must involve a residency experience in which an aspiring educator receives an opportunity to obtain technical knowledge and real world experience in our classrooms.
Gadfly translates: The longer and more complex a teacher’s pre-service preparation, the better for ed schools—and the harder it gets for anyone unconventional to try teaching. Let’s make sure Teach for America and such never want to come to Ohio.

Governor’s proposal: There must be opportunities for our best teachers to remain in the classroom to serve as mentors and coaches for each other by providing opportunities for professional growth and advancement in the profession.
Gadfly translates: But no performance-based pay under any circumstances, the heck with Obama.

Governor’s proposal: Through tracking the annual achievement of students we can improve the whole system by acknowledging successful teachers while encouraging ineffective teachers to leave the profession.
Gadfly translates: We’ll “acknowledge” successful teachers rather than reward them—but even identifying them will be impossible once we get rid of those irksome standardized tests.

Governor’s proposal: We must create a pipeline for talented individuals to enter the profession.
Gadfly translates: And we’ll make sure that pipeline runs through ed schools, “independent” professional standards boards dominated by union members and ed-school faculty, and complex certification procedures managed by state bureaucrats.

Efficient Accountability and Resource Management Systems:

Governor’s proposal: There must be performance benchmarks and high quality operational standards in place to create an equal environment for all K-12 educational institutions that receive public dollars for the state.
Gadfly translates: We’ll regulate the charter schools (and why not private schools and home schoolers, while we’re at it) till they can’t breathe.

Governor’s proposal: Improving the operational and fiscal accountability of all schools throughout Ohio’s educational system is critically important, and must become a hallmark of our approach to organizing and funding the services and programs that meet the needs of our students.
Gadfly translates: We’ll make sure that all non-traditional Ohio schools—charter schools, private schools, STEM schools, home schoolers—toil under the same regulatory constraints and costs that burden conventional district-run schools.

Governor’s proposal: Leveraging the resources and services of our ESCs will improve the day to day operations of local school districts.
Gadfly translates: An expansion of middle management in the public-education system will create yet more jobs for adults and additional intrusions into the operation of schools—while relaxing the pressure on the Ohio Department of Education to do much at all.

Governor’s proposal: Incentivising our schools in need of improvement to pursue aggressive strategies to improve teaching and learning for our students that require the most attention.
Gadfly translates: Devising new means of persuading bad schools to do what they should have been doing all along—but not making any grownups uncomfortable, jeopardizing anybody’s job, or giving the kids any opportunity to flee to greener education pastures.

Governor’s proposal: Create effective communication tools to inform the public about the fiscal and operational condition of the schools that receive public dollars from the state.
Gadfly translates: Like Joel Klein in New York City, we’ll hire lots more public relations flacks to tout the “successes” of our schools and school systems.

Governor’s proposal: Improving our technology system to meet the needs of our students in the 21st Century.
Gadfly translates: We still don’t know how to use the computers that we have but we’ll get some more.

I don’t much cotton to this bloggish practice of holding internal conversations in public view, but this time I think Mike is over the top—and he didn’t ask my advice before “publishing”. He’s right about NCLB’s built-in flaws and the need to rethink the law so as to set them right. A fair amount of that is statutory repair work; some, however, is regulatory. Insofar as it’s possible to repair NCLB unilaterally, i.e. by action of the executive branch alone, most of what the Education Department announced today strikes me as steps in the right direction. Some of it involves imaginative new interpretations of the statutory language and some is trying to rectify the Department’s own regulation/implementation foul-ups the first time around. But better late than never, I say. Why should Margaret Spellings leave office with problems undealt with (the more so when they’re problems she caused or helped to cause)??

Before the 2004 presidential election, it was obvious what the liberal advocacy group Education Trust thought about President George W. Bush. In short, Ed Trust got what it needed from Bush—advocating, as he did, for the No Child Left Behind act, a law that Ed Trust staff played a large role in crafting—and  would be happy to see him go. But for Education Trust and other liberal reformers, the Bush Administration is the gift that keeps on giving, as the NCLB regulations announced today illustrate. Simply put, there is nothing “conservative” about them.

There was a time when the Bush Administration talked proudly about four “pillars” of NCLB, including “flexibility.” Consider these comments from President Bush on January 23, 2001, in announcing his No Child Left Behind proposal at the White House:

The agents of reform must be schools and school districts, not bureaucracies. Teachers and principals, local and state leaders must have the responsibility to succeed and the flexibility to innovate. One size does not fit all when it comes to educating the children in America. School districts, school officials, educational entrepreneurs should not be hindered by excessive rules and red tape and regulation.

Or consider comments from Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings during her confirmation hearing in January 2005:

State policymakers who typically devote more than half their state budgets to education expect that the students in their state will be prepared to compete in our country and the world. They need flexibility to meet the needs of their unique states and communities, and they need to be trusted to do right by their students.

Well. Forget all that. In what may be Margaret Spellings’s last official act as Secretary, the federal government is tightening the screws on the nation’s schools. Rather than learn the key lesson from NCLB’s implementation to date—that the federal government can coerce states and districts to do things they don’t want to do, but can’t coerce them to do those things well—the Bushies have come to believe in the perfectibility of public policy. Districts aren’t taking the federal mandate to overhaul failing schools seriously? Tighten the screws. States aren’t doing enough to monitor tutoring providers? Tighten the screws. School aren’t doing enough to combat high dropout rates? Tighten the screws.

To be sure, not all of the new rules are unreasonable. The requirement that all states measure graduation rates in a common manner makes plenty of sense; it’s criminal that in 2008 we don’t have an accurate read on how many kids in America are dropping out. Ensuring transparency around graduation rates would have been a bold reform. But Spellings and company couldn’t stop there. Imbued with Great Society-style righteousness, and no doubt still trying to impress their “allies” at Education Trust, they will deem every high school in the country a failure that doesn’t get a state-specified number of poor, minority, disabled, or non-English proficient students to graduate on time. This even though the federal government pays almost none of the bills for secondary education and has no clue how schools are supposed to improve graduation rates so dramatically.

Let’s think about how this might play out. States can set their graduation targets wherever they like. But now they know that their schools will have to get the requisite number of disadvantaged and disabled kids over that benchmark. Who thinks this gives states a perverse incentive to aim low? And what will happen to states that currently have high school graduation exams in order to ensure that a diploma means something? Won’t this create an incentive for them to scrap or water down those tests?

The biggest mistake of the original NCLB was to require 100 percent of students to achieve “proficiency” in reading and math but allow states to define proficiency however they like. Now Spellings is creating a dynamic whereby states will say to school districts: you must get a certain percentage of your students, and your minority students, and your disabled students, etc., to graduate, but you can define graduation however you like. Let me make a prediction: graduation rates will rise, and the value of a high school diploma will fall.

There was a time when conservatives worried about these sorts of unintended consequences. Now it’s likely up to Team Obama to do so. I’m not hopeful.

Fall Intern Molly Kennedy offers up this reading:

Alyson Klein of Education Week details a few tight Congressional races in which battling candidates have different views on education issues and how to deal with NCLB. As we all know, the economy has sucked the life out of most other issues and, as a result, despite the need for reauthorization, most candidates offer little more than “broad, largely critical rhetoric on the law without much policy detail,” writes Klein. Read more here.

Last week, Mike explained (in the Washington Times), that NCLB needs to be “flipped” on its head. What does he mean? Well, “Right now, NCLB micromanages the formula and timelines by which schools are labeled and sanctioned, yet it allows states total discretion over the academic standards and tests used to judge schools (and kids) in the first place.” Instead, he explains,

Provide incentives for states to sign up for rigorous nationwide (not federal) standards and tests. Make the results of this testing publicly available, sliced every which way by school and group. But then allow states and districts (or private entities, such as GreatSchools.net) to devise their own school labels and ratings—and let them decide what to do with schools that need help... [R]easonable people on all sides of the issue will see that this approach is better aligned with Uncle Sam’s skill set. After all, Washington is at least three or four steps removed from the operation of local schools. There’s only so much policy-makers can do from Capitol Hill and the federal Education Department, whatever their intentions.

Diane Ravitch agrees—and elaborates. “In his article, Petrilli said that ‘Washington is at least three or four steps removed from the operation of local schools...’ I would amend that to say, ‘Washington is at least 300 to 400 steps removed from the operation of local schools...’ Here is a law written jointly by the Bush administration, and by Senator Ted Kennedy, Congressman George Miller, and their staffs. This group of politicians and their advisers decided how to reform every school in the nation. What experience does Senator Kennedy or Congressman Miller have as school reformers?”

If we reread our Weber, we’d know that the whole point of bureaucracy is to decentralize control—not micromanage. And I think we’d all agree that Washington has bureaucracy down to a science. Hopefully, Washington is also listening to both Mike and Diane.

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli is participating in an online discussion where panelists—even as I type this—are attempting to answer the question “Do we need a new deal for teachers?”  Moderator Steve Farkas, of the Farkas Duffett Research Group, kicked things off by wondering which groups are truly interested in a new deal and who will lead the effort to change the status quo. Will it be teacher unions, new teachers, district administrators or legislators?

Mike took an immediate bite at that apple. He argued that “harsh fiscal realities will be the true impetus” for making a new deal for teachers that looks something like higher pay in return for less job security and more modest retirement benefits.  With baby-boomers’ retirement burdening social security and Medicare, competition for public funds will become fierce, the era of ballooning school budgets will end and policymakers will realize that teachers’ retirement benefits are unsustainable, he wrote. Eventually, the conversation will turn, he said, to a new system of teacher pay—”one that relies more on ‘front-loading’ teacher pay and moving to a 401(k) style retirement system.”

The ongoing discussion runs today, tomorrow and Thursday and is hosted at www.NewTalk.org. Other participants include Philip Howard of Common Good—the non-profit organization that created the NewTalk chat site; Bob Wise of Alliance for Excellent Education; Michael Mulgrew of United Federation of Teachers and Frederick Hess of American Enterprise Institute.

If you’re part of an Administration facing epic unpopularity, one that has led 90 percent of Americans to believe the country is on the wrong track—and more than a few to wonder if the nation’s best days are behind it—perhaps you should be careful with your imagery. Yet here’s Margaret Spellings telling the Associated Press,  “What’s going on right now in our high schools is that kids, lots and lots of minority kids, don’t get to the 10th grade. Rome is burning.”

And she’s going to put out the fire with her new No Child Left Behind regulations, due out by noon today. Stay tuned.

Above: “The burning of Rome” painting by Robert Hubert (1733-1808)

I’m not sure whether his analysis about the McCain campaign is spot-on, but how are we supposed to feel about Rich Lowry’s depiction of us Gadflies?

When you’re a gadfly, you can flit above the substantive debate, because it’s your posture rather than your knowledge of policy that matters most.

Ouch!

Gadflies are loners because they spend so much time offending their own side.

Now that rings true.

A post from guest blogger and Fordham Director of Ohio Policy and Research Suzannah Herrmann.

As Stafford mentioned, we just returned from the National Press Club. Since today’s presentation by the National Working Group on Funding Student Learning has some interesting implications for state policy, I thought I’d throw in my perspective on what this report could mean for policy in Ohio, Fordham’s other base.

The report notes up front that “states will never educate all students to high standards unless they first fix the finance system that support’s America’s schools.” This is not the same thing as calling for more money for schools, but rather it is a call for making sure we get more from the $500 billion Americans already spend annually on elementary and secondary education. This call has special resonance in our home state of Ohio where the Governor has staked his administration’s reputation on “fixing” the state’s school funding system. Ohio is one of 20 states that have been deemed “unconstitutional” by state high-court judges because funding levels were deemed insufficient. This report “Funding Student Learning” notes that between 1990 and 2005, average inflation-adjusted expenditures on education in America increased 29% to almost $11,000 per student. In Ohio, ten years (1997 to 2007) saw state per-pupil expenditures, using inflation adjusted dollars, rise 25% (from $7,500 to about $10,000). We must get more out of our educational spending and this report by the National Working Group on Funding Student Learning provides important guidance on how to start doing this. You can read the whole report here.

We’ve just returned from the School Finance Redesign Project Panel (and were caught in the rain, no less!) Here are some final thoughts:

Great ideas... not so practical. I’ll give you two examples.

In the ideas area, I was struck by Guthrie’s thoughts on the transformation of American education. 50 years ago, he asserts, you could drop out of high school and still get a job and have a productive, comfortable life. Today, those jobs that don’t require education have either disappeared or moved overseas. As a result, we, as a nation, are facing a momentous task: educating everyone and educating them well. He proposes that we’re the first modern, democratic, industrialized nation to confront this challenge. NCLB may be an “awkward instrument” but we are venturing into new territory.

Criticizing NCLB is the new “it” thing to do (presidential election, anyone?). I can almost hear someone saying, “It’s an axe when we need a scalpel”...[cue laughter] The point is that Guthrie is largely right. Most countries don’t even attempt to educate everyone or consider that doing so is a laudable goal. Take Germany, for example. It fits all of Guthrie’s criteria (or those that I managed to scribble down during the event—there may have been more): modern, democratic, and industrialized. Yet children in Germany are tracked from age ten into college-bound, vocational, and remedial schools. There is no assumption in the German education system that every child deserves the chance to go to college. As The Economist so candidly puts it, “The cleverest go to Gymnasien, the main route to university; the ordinary are sent to Realschulen; and the dullards attend Hauptschulen, often breeding-grounds for disaffection.” (Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, is attempting to reform the system, but facing incredible resistance.) “The dullards?” That’s an American lawsuit waiting to happen.

Now, I’m not saying that every student should actually go to college, but children in this country at least exist under the assumption that they could go to college if they wanted to—that they can learn if we figure out how to teach them most effectively. (Some might disagree that we teach students to believe in themselves—the teaching for social justice crowd comes to mind—but I stand by my assertion that this country is a fountain of opportunities spilling over.) We talk about NCLB as if it were the antichrist—dumbing down education, teaching to the test, ruining children’s lives left and right. But what was our education system like before NCLB? Despite its problems of structure and implementation, hasn’t NCLB taught us something, at least? Would we know where to go next if we hadn’t been where we were?

It’s great to contemplate the ideological mindsets behind our schools but when Amber asked how we would couple teacher salaries with weighted student funding, none of the panelists could answer the question. As you can see below, I noted Paul Hill’s response, but Jim Guthrie took a stab at the question first—and didn’t answer it satisfactorily at all (actually if there was an answer in his response, somebody please let me know. I did not hear one). The problem is that we really do need an answer. Why? Under most school funding schemes currently in place, dollars are allocated based on the number of teachers, administrators, and programs (or that’s how I understand it). If we have dollars following children as WSF calls for, how do we a) determine teacher salaries, b) determine teacher pay scales, and c) create collective bargaining agreements? While I appreciated and understood the “real world” aspect that would be injected into schools trying to make a bottom line, I also understand the “real world” aspect of teachers’ unions and their guaranteed objections (read: outrage) to this scheme. I merely wish that Paul Hill and company had taken on this question in their report—and moved beyond the niceties that keep this conversation, again, in the land of policy—instead of practice.

Panelist James Guthrie of Vanderbilt University asked an interesting question that goes beyond the education community: “What do we do when we don’t know what to do? What steps do we take when there is no clear technical guidance for policy?”

As explained by Guthrie, the latest School Finance Redesign Project report advocates:

-Specifying desired goals, but making these goals comprehensive enough to avoid goal displacement (i.e. getting side tracked)

-Making sure our measurement systems are aligned with these goals

-Establishing a comprehensive information system

-Determinig better methods of what works

-Putting the resources near those who deliver services

-Dismantling the current incentive system, which rewards getting as far away from students as possible.

Amber has asked a great question: “How do we marry reforming teacher salaries and weighted student funding?”

University of Washington’s Paul Hill’s response: “Weighted student funding would put restraints on the amount of money a school has and schools would have to determine which teachers they can afford. This adds a real world aspect to this.”

How would one get the unions on board with this? Would there be base teacher salaries? Food for thought...

Right now, Amber, Suzannah and I are at the National Press Club for the University of Washington School Finance Redesign Project’s conclusionary panel. The report being released is the product of five years of work. The basic premise: schools will never provide quality education if the funding system is broken. Jacob Adams, the panel moderator, says the question to ask is: How can we translate resources into results?

It’s going to start with understanding that the school system today is not structured to support ambitious learning goals and then reform the complicated and opaque finance system operations.

To do this, we must answer the following questions:

-How can we effectively deliver, manage and account for dollars?

-What can we do right now?

-How can the policy community support what’s going on in schools?

-How can we learn more about school finance to continue matching dollars to increased student learning.

Sounds like these questions will be answered. Stay tuned...

As a Maryland resident I have to decide how to vote on the state’s Question 2 next week, which would legalize slot machines and use the resulting revenue for education. And while the image of seniors throwing their social security checks down the slot machine toilet leaves me a little queasy, I’ve come to see this as a brilliant solution to the problems identified by radical Robert Samuelson last week. The financial pressure of baby boomers retiring en masse is likely to squeeze tax dollars that otherwise could have gone to the education of our young. So the slot machine solution is perfect, for it simply recoups a chunk of elderly-entitlement spending and hands it over to the next generation. Sure, it’s less efficient than just trimming entitlements in the first place, but politics is the art of the possible, right?

Mike Antonucci wants everyone to know that AFT President Randi Weingarten only makes $350,000 a year.

(You heard it here first.)

Today’s Friday, which means there’s a pretty good chance your child is being taught by a substitute teacher. According to this new study by the Center for American Progress, public school teachers are more likely to be absent on Mondays and Fridays, and on any given day one in 20 teachers is out. Their absences add up to $4 billion a year in substitute teacher payments and associated administrative costs. USA Today’s Greg Toppo reports that study author Raegan Miller suggests paying teachers for unused sick leave. Read more of the study here and read Greg’s report here.

You read that right: Kudos to the NEA. According to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the teachers union and its California affiliate have coughed up $1.25 million to defeat an anti-gay marriage initiative in the Golden State. This is welcome news for two reasons. First, gay marriage is a good idea. (Not that you care what an education wonk thinks about gay marriage, but hey, what’s a blog for?) And second, that’s $1.25 million that won’t be supporting the NEA’s typical nefarious work of combating every promising education reform proposal known to man. It’s a real win-win!

* Mike Antonucci says it was just the California Teachers Association that donated. Well darn, I wanted to praise the NEA for something.

Don Soifer of the Lexington Institute provides some interesting background on the portfolio issue, and why this wonky topic matters.

I really enjoy Andy Rotherham as a colleague and friend (you know, the way Joe Biden loves John McCain), but in this recent post he sounds an awful lot like Greg Marmalard, the Omega President in Animal House who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.

First some background. Last week, Andy and Sara Mead released a Brookings Institution report that called for a new federal role in supporting education entrepreneurs. At the release event, in an Education Week story, and in this post, I criticized Andy and Sara for failing to learn key lessons from the No Child Left Behind experience. Specifically, I found them to be overly optimistic that the feds would be able to convince states and locals to remove obstacles to education entrepreneurs (Jay Greene thinks so too)*; those of us in the Bush Administration sure did try our darndest to do this, particularly in the case of NCLB’s public school choice and supplemental services provisions, to no avail. That’s because, as I argued, the feds have few tools to coerce states and districts to do things they don’t want to do and do them well. And that’s what it takes to open the door to “scaling” promising innovations. I also found Andy and Sara to be somewhat naïve to believe that they could pick winners and losers in their “Grow What Works” fund and not be accused of favoritism or cronyism.

So what was Andy’s responses to these concerns? In a nutshell: Don’t worry, those of us who will serve in the Obama administration will be smarter than you dummies in the Bush Administration. Or in his own words: “Mike’s argument...seems to boil down to a belief that because the Bush Administration really screwed up some things like Reading First and Supplemental Services it means federal efforts in innovation more generally are bound to fail.  That’s one possible explanation, sure, but it means turning the wheel too far one way to get out of a skid.**   Instead, another explanation is that the Bush Administration just screwed some things up and that while there are cautionary lessons to be learned, all is not lost.”

I know it’s been convenient for Andy and other Democratic reformers to blame any NCLB problems on us dummies inside the Bush Administration and “poor implementation.” But now that the keys of 400 Maryland Avenue are (most likely) going to be handed over to Team Obama, it’s really, really important that Andy and his friends get the lessons of the Bush years right, lest they repeat our same mistakes. Take it from me: we should have been more humble and willing to learn some hard-earned lessons from the Clinton Administration and from career civil servants in the Department of Education. Now it’s your turn. Implementation wasn’t perfect, but there’s a problem with “implementation was the problem.” It papers over the real structural impediments that lead to so many unintended consequences when the feds try to do good in education. All is not lost, Andy, but all is not possible from Washington, either.

* Andy insists that he and Sara want to use incentives, not mandates, to encourage states and districts to get out of the way of promising entrepreneurs. But their paper gets very fuzzy on this point. As far as I can tell, most of the new money they are proposing would go to the entrepreneurs themselves, not states or districts. Yet they also want a new Office of Education Entrepreneurship and Innovation to “deploy funding streams at its authority to provide incentives for state and local policymakers to eliminate barriers.” Which funding streams? A more promising approach might be that taken by the (Bush Administration’s!) Teacher Incentive Fund, which basically bribes school districts to experiment with pay-for-performance programs in return for federal largesse.

** Andy also has some fun saying that I’m “like a teenage driver with a disconcerting tendency to over-correct in every turn.” He’s right that I’ve changed my mind about NCLB. Other issues too. In each case, what’s happened is that new evidence has become available, and I’ve updated my views accordingly. Isn’t that what all responsible analysts are supposed to do?

That’s right, the Gadfly is on top of its game this week. First you’ll find Mike responding to the newly minted “Portfoliogate.” Does Obama support portfolios as an alternate form of testing or is his still amorphous position on education in general the lesson of the day? Then you’ll find a heap of Recommended Readings and Short Reviews (Gadfly was a bit of a bookworm this week—kind of like Rick Hess, who we learned via the podcast apparently lives under a rock, eschewing news sources in favor of their heavier leather-bound brethren). So what was on our reading list? Well the new report from AIR caught our attention, as well as the recent report on Australia from OECD. We also bemoaned the sad decision of some districts to move polling places out of schools and expressed our doubt, again, about the first results of student pay programs. And last but certainly not least, don’t miss the plethora of announcements, which are certainly worth a gander! Watch out, in particular, for our newest report... “A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era.”

We know you were waiting with baited breath. All this and more in this week’s ‘Fly.