There’s been a development in New York City’s “rubber room” controversy. According to the Daily News, the Department of Ed has agreed to hire more arbitrators and tighten investigation procedures in an effort to expedite the cases of teachers put on prohibition for misconduct.

New York City’s experiences in the last couple weeks reinforce my belief that the notion that we can “hold public schools accountable for results” is questionable.

No one bought the district’s announcement that test scores have dramatically improved. And why should they have? The doubters seem to understand that politicians who pledge to raise student achievement are heavily motivated to make it appear that they’ve raised student achievement—even if they really haven’t.

What puzzles, though, is that this sage observation seems to have died at the doorsteps of Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein. The skeptics blame these particular politicians as if the perverse incentive to varnish test scores afflicted only certain snaky individuals rather than all holders of public office. Why is that? Why when public servants invariably fall prey to the sinister tug of politics do we blame the individuals and never politics?

“3 of 4 City Students Say They Took No Art Class This Year”

Update: NYC Department of Ed press secretary David Cantor writes in the comments section:

This New York Sun headline from today’s edition is inaccurate, and the Sun will be publishing a correction.

The Sun misread our student survey, publishing the percentage of students who said they participated in arts activities before or after school rather than the number who said they took classes.

In reality, 46% of students said they took at least one class in visual arts this year; 37% of students took at least one music class; 15% of students took at least one dance class; and 12% of took at least one theater class.

To supplement these classes, many students said they participated in arts activities before or after school or during free periods, including 27% in visual arts programs-the number from which the Sun’s headline derives. Here’s the link to the survey.

Given that New York City high school students are required to take only one year of arts, these participation rates for last year are good news.

David Cantor
Press Secretary
NYC Department of Education

Even as he announced an initiative yesterday to educate more mathematicians and scientists, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg thought it necessary to point out that anti-immigration policies pose a grave threat to our economy.

Evidently fearless in the face of controversy, Liam writes today on the touchy subject of so-called “Raza Studies” in Arizona on National Review Online.

KIPP schools mostly serve the middle grades and thus spend much of their time plugging the gaps in knowledge and skills that students picked up early on in traditional public schools. But imagine if the youngsters entering KIPP middle schools came from KIPP elementary schools. The mind reels at the possibilities.

The New York Times marks the midway point of Newark mayor Cory Booker’s first term with a supportive editorial. Meanwhile, Booker spent yesterday evening at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Newark to welcome incoming superintendent (and former D.C. schools chief) Clifford Janey.

The well-seasoned Janey (he’s 61) sounded the right notes. For instance:

“It makes no sense and is actually harmful to move students along and provide them with a phony diploma,” he said to one burst of applause. “We will not only look at the standards but the promotion policies from elementary right through high schools.”

That’s a highly worthwhile undertaking. As Checker and Liam pointed out in Gadfly a few weeks ago, most states and districts struggle to maintain meaningful academic standards when lots of students can’t meet them. Holding back or denying diplomas to 50 percent of your pupils is not very palatable, politically or otherwise, so typically you end up either watering down tests so more kids can pass or simply waiving the exams altogether and accepting a “portfolio of work,” or some such empty alternative instead. The result of which, of course, is that graduating or moving on to the next grade in no way signifies that a student has reached a certain level of skill or proficiency.

The problem for Newark, though, is that Janey promised the same thing in D.C., and his plan never blossomed. In 2004, Gadfly reported that the incoming supe was keen on implementing high school graduation exams and “replacing the city’s lax academic standards with fine models from Massachusetts or California.” He never did either.

Maybe it’s not entirely his fault; life as a big-city superintendent is precarious, particularly when one is pushed into the ring without a powerful mayor in his corner—a luxury that Janey’s successor, Michelle Rhee, enjoys with Mayor Fenty. But the situation doesn’t favor him much more in Newark, where the schools are run from the more-of-the-same state capital instead of by the everything-must-change Booker. One wants to believe Janey will deliver on his promises, but it’s hard to imagine he’ll be able to follow up a tepid tenure in troubled D.C. with a revelatory reign in shattered Newark.

The newest issue of The Economist has a piece on international comparisons that offers a couple interesting lessons. The first is to be wary of them. In a recent analysis of Finland’s PISA scores, which routinely top those of all other comers, Jarkko Hautamäki and his colleagues at Helsinki University found

only one big policy element that could easily be replicated elsewhere: early and energetic intervention for struggling pupils. Many of the other ingredients for success that they identify—orthography, geography and history—have nothing to do with how schools are run, or what happens in classrooms.

In Finnish, exceptionally, each letter makes a single logical sound and there are no irregular words. That makes learning to read easy. An economy until recently dependent on peasant farming in harsh latitudes has shaped a stoic national character and an appetite for self-improvement. Centuries of foreign rule (first Swedes, then Russians) further entrenched education as the centrepiece of national identity. So hard work and good behaviour are the norm; teaching tempts the best graduates (nearly nine out of ten would-be teachers are turned down).

So American education wonks are missing the point when they say, for instance, that we should emulate Finland and make teaching more tempting to college graduates.

Some argue, though, that PISA has at least been successful inasmuch as it has increased the pressure on countries to improve their education systems to avoid humiliation.

[Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research], says international comparisons teach a crucial lesson: what is possible. “In 1995, at the first meeting of OECD ministers I attended, every country boasted of its own success and its own brilliant reforms. Now international comparisons make it clear who is failing. There is no place to hide.”

This should sound familiar, of course, as most people argue that NCLB’s only clear success so far has been to shine a light on failing schools and get people worked up enough to do something about it.

Does anyone out there believe that the dramatic test-score increases coming out of the Empire State are legitimate? Sol Stern, for one, highly-knowledgeable on all educational goings on in New York, is with the naysayers. He points out in a piece on the City Journal website that

almost none of the dramatic improvements in the state tests show up in the most recent tests administered by the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as the “nation’s report card.” NAEP scores in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and eighth-grade math in New York State remained flat from 2005 to 2007.

Many critics have jumped on this embarassing comparison already. But Stern also illuminates this dubious idea of “rigorous peer review,” which state schools chief Richard Mills has used to try to deflect the inevitable charges of test-rigging:

One of the slides in his PowerPoint presentation was titled ENSURING THESE RESULTS ARE ACCURATE and claimed that “New York’s testing system passed rigorous peer review by [the] U.S. Dep’t of Education.” But this “rigorous peer review,” which all 50 states now undergo under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), is less impressive than it sounds. I was told by a federal education department official that the review covers only the general process used by the states in establishing a reliable system of standards and assessment. It does not constitute a federal seal of approval for the accuracy of any state’s particular tests.

That’s not really a surprise, considering how forgiving the feds have been on pretty much all of NCLB’s most important requirements. What is suprising is that most everyone still believes this unwieldy law can be dramatically improved during the next go-round and that, somehow, politicians at all levels will lose the motivation to game high-stakes tests.

The X Prize Foundation is teaming up with British telecoms giant BT to expand its offerings. The Financial Times says

The next prizes are likely to focus on cancer, renewable energy and oceanography. The foundation aims to revive a spirit of adventure in research, like the 18th-century prizes to measure longitude and the early 20th-century aviation prizes.

I guess I was foolish to expect the article to announce the unveiling of the long-awaited Education X Prize. The foundation’s website shows they have thought a bit more about the idea, though.

I’d wager that stupid immigration policies, which George Will assails in today’s Washington Post, pose a much greater threat to long-term American competitiveness than sub-par schools.

Mayor Bloomberg will announce today that test scores are way up in New York City. But no one, it seems, thinks the gains are legitimate.

Over at National Review Online, Liam reviews the HBO documentary Hard Times at Douglass High, which chronicles the plight of a failing Baltimore high school.

On Wednesday’s NewsHour, John Merrow resumed his series on Michelle Rhee’s efforts to revamp the D.C. Public Schools. This installment centers around Hart Middle School, a chronically-failing institution that landed on Rhee’s radar as a candidate for dramatic restructuring. Merrow interviews teachers, students, and administrators from the school, all of whom resent the threat posed by Rhee’s evident willingness to mix things up. We also hear from William Lockridge, a member of the D.C. Board of Education, who says that Rhee is misguided and hasn’t “taken a thorough analysis of this school district.” All of which adds up to an amazingly widespread and unyielding adherence to the status quo. At a school that has missed AYP five years running, everyone wants more of the same.

Merrow tells us that after the segment was taped, Rhee dismissed all the administrators at Hart and replaced them with a private management company. So far, Rhee has emerged surprisingly unscathed from such controversial adventures; the somehow ever-popular Marion Barry got a taste of Rhee’s teflon when his plan to protest the latest round of school closings fizzled. If the resentment that comes through in the NewsHour segment is any indication, though, Rhee is nurturing a growing opposition. One worries about how long she can keep this all up.

Mike and Checker, who were at the Excellence in Education summit in Orlando yesterday, may have more to say about this. Apparently New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, speaking at the summit, discussed the possibility of his seeking the power to certify principals and teachers, currently the province of ed schools alone. Call him reckless or brash or whatever you will, but Klein has done more than any other district leader in recent memory to bust the monopoly that has stifled change and innovation in public schooling.

There will be vouchers in Louisiana.

Checker and Mike write on National Review Online today about Fordham’s latest report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind.

Nearly missed this article from the latest Economist on Swedish private schools, probably beceause it was in the business section. A bit of background: A 1994 law made it so that

pretty much anyone who satisfies basic standards to open a new school and take in children at the state’s expense. The local municipality must pay the school what it would have spent educating each child itself-a sum of SKr48,000-70,000 ($8,000-12,000) a year, depending on the child’s age and the school’s location. Children must be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis—there must be no religious requirements or entrance exams. Nothing extra can be charged for, but making a profit is fine.

Since the law was passed, the proportion of school-age Swedes attending private schools has jumped from less than 1 percent to about 10 percent, spurred more by the growth of private school networks than by mom-and-pop operators. (USA Today comments today on a similar phenomenon with charter networks in the U.S.) The article compares the biggest such operator, Kunskapsskolan (”Knowledge Schools”), to IKEA:

Like IKEA, a giant Swedish furniture-maker, Kunskapsskolan gets its customers to do much of the work themselves. The vital tool, though, is not an Allen key but the Kunskapsporten (”Knowledge Portal”), a website containing the entire syllabus....

Again like IKEA, no money is wasted on fancy surroundings. Kunskapsskolan Enskede, a school for 11- to 16-year-olds in a suburb of Stockholm, is a former office block into which classrooms, open-study spaces and two small lecture-theatres have been squeezed.

Also fascinating is the way the company manages its teachers:

Teachers update and add new material to the website during school holidays and get just seven weeks off each year, roughly the same as the average Swedish office worker....

Performance monitoring is also important within the company: it tracks the performance of individual teachers to see which ones do best as personal tutors or as subject teachers. It offers bonuses to particularly successful teachers and is considering paying extra to good ones from successful schools who are willing to move to underperforming ones....

“We do not mind being compared to McDonald’s,” [company boss Per Ledin] says. “If we’re religious about anything, it’s standardisation. We tell our teachers it is more important to do things the same way than to do them well.”

This last paragraph will no doubt throw many an American educator into a rage. In the United States, teachers are idealized as public servants and heroes (even if not all of them live up to that ideal). Casting them as assembly-line automatons would not go over well here. But it just might be a viable and effective education model for at least some proportion of American kids.

Checker laments in today’s Ohio Education Gadfly that policymakers in Fordham’s home state have gone soft on education.

Congress looks set to grant D.C.’s voucher program a one-year reprieve. (You have to scroll down a bit to see the story.)

From Sunday’s Washington Post.

Richard Whitmire—USA Today editorial writer, president of the National Education Writers Association, and father of two girls—has started a blog all about “why boys fail.” Find it at www.whyboysfail.com.

Mike thinks I’m overzealous in questioning the zeal with which ed reformers tie America’s sub-par schools to forecasts of economic doom. There is, he argues, compelling evidence that economic growth is influenced by educational achievement, an arena where the United States typically trails lots of other countries. For instance, a recent Education Next article and an accompanying graph suggest that “cognitive skills,” as measured by norm-referenced test scores, correlate positively with economic growth; the authors claim that “a highly skilled work force can raise economic growth by about two-thirds of a percentage point every year.”

They also acknowledge, however, that the United States “has had a higher growth rate [from 1960 to 2000] than would be expected given its test scores and levels of school attainment.” We can thank a number of factors for this lucky bit of American exceptionalism:

...the United States has other advantages, some of which are entirely separate and apart from the quality of its schooling. The U.S. maintains generally freer labor and product markets than most countries in the world. There is less government regulation of firms, and trade unions are less powerful than in many other countries. Put more broadly, the U.S. has generally less intrusion of government in the operation of the economy, including lower tax rates and minimal government production through nationalized industries. Taken together, these characteristics of the U.S. economy encourage investment, permit the rapid development of new products and activities by firms, and allow U.S. workers to adjust to new opportunities.

The United States has some subtler quirks, too, that are perhaps no less important to its economic strength and stamina. It has, for instance, K-12 schools and universities that are less beholden to a central agency than those of other countries, which may contribute to their ability to cultivate eccentric, creative types who revolutionize or spawn entire industries, even if they fail to churn out bevies of exam-acing engineers. It has high levels of productivity that may or may not be culturally rooted in something like the “Protestant work ethic” or the romantic inspiration of the “American Dream.” It has a uniquely diverse population thanks to high levels of immigration, both historically and presently. It has a voracious appetite for consumables and lots of enterprising folks to provide them. It has Wall Street. It has Silicon Valley. It has Hollywood.

Economists try hard to classify and organize the material transactions and social interactions that create growth, and they’re amazingly good at it. But even the most illuminating studies pierce but a little of the darkness that obscures the complex workings of our economy. It is because of our inadequacy as humans of limited intelligence to fully comprehend this mind-boggling complexity, more than anything else, that we should be wary of forecasts of economic catastrophe. For the common result of such alarm-ringing, usually framed in rhetoric much stronger than the prognosticator’s confidence in his actual claims, is an eventual unpleasant confrontation with the beast of unintended consequences. (George Will’s column yesterday on proposed changes to baseball—another exquisite example of American exceptionalism, by the way—offered some eloquent thoughts on this age-old but still neglected phenomenon.)

Mike and the authors of the Education Next piece are surely right that if American students, all things being equal, performed better on tests, the U.S. economy would see added growth. But knee-jerking lawmakers (at whom most of the economic competitiveness laments are aimed) are clumsy and in their attempts to “fix” math and science education won’t leave all things equal. They’re likely to improve scores by a small amount at best and wreak further havoc on the schools, and even the economy, at worst.

Last week the Wall Street Journal editors defended D.C.’s voucher program after the Washington Post reported that its days could be numbered. They made the decent point that “The $7,500 voucher is a bargain for taxpayers because it costs the public schools about 50% more, or $13,000 a year, to educate a child in the public schools.” It would have been an excellent point, though, had they known and let it be known that in reality the district spends closer to $24,000 per pupil.

Last month, the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews mustered strong evidence and taut logic to contest some of the more questionable claims surrounding the prospects for America’s economic competitiveness. The latest issue of The Economist resumes where he left off.