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.)

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.

Do you miss reading the work of Liam Julian, who until he left Fordham last year was one of Flypaper’s most prolific and talented writers? Then get your fix with this New Atlantis piece on virtual schooling. If you hate the idea of cyber-schools, you’ll love Liam’s argument that these settings are terribly suited for kids with motivation problems—i.e., many of the kids who have been “left behind.” And if you love the idea of cyber-schools, well, you won’t hate his argument that “individualized virtual learning is one promising path to incrementally improving modern American education.” Of course, true techno-enthusiasts, who think virtual learning will “transform” our system, will scoff at the word “incremental.” So be it; incremental change looks a lot more likely to me.

After an onslaught of anger from Wisconsonites about his Green Bay Post-Gazette piece blasting the state’s testing and accountability system, our own Mike Petrilli has issued a statement saying “he never meant to offend the great people of Wisconsin” and donned the outfit pictured to the left as a sign of his sincerity. “I regret the whole episode. Go Packers!”

Consider that these sorts of politics might be in play. There’s little doubt that the Obama political operation will want Governor Strickland to still be Governor Strickland in 2012. And there’s little doubt that Governor Strickland sure could use several  hundred million dollars in discretionary federal education funds to help him maintain his popularity. But there’s also little doubt that the Governor is pushing against education reform in almost every manner possible. It’s going to be a game of chicken. Who will blink first: Ted Strickland or Arne Duncan? Stay tuned.

As I wrote in today’s Education Gadfly, this new policy paper by the Broader Bolder coalition on school accountability is “eminently sensible.”

That’s a big surprise, for in the past this coalition has appeared eager to refight old battles about whether schools can be expected to help poor kids reach high standards. Now, however, it’s arguing for a broader look at school success—what might be termed “test scores-plus.” They would keep test-based accountability, tweaked in various ways (with progress-over-time measures, better assessments, a more robust NAEP, etc.) and supplement it with school inspectors. These inspectors would guard against lousy practices, such as “an undue emphasis on test preparation,” and catch schools engaged in good ones, like “a collegial professional culture in which teachers and administrators use all available data in a collaborative fashion to continuously improve the work of the school.”

I don’t know; this sounds reasonable to me. What am I missing?

I hear from friends in Tennessee that the main reason the state legislature strengthened its charter school law recently was the arm-twisting of Democratic legislators by Arne Duncan and the arm-twisting of Republican legislators by Lamar Alexander. The old double-secretary-of-education one-two punch!

Some will call this federal intrusion, others will celebrate a creative use of the bully pulpit. Either way, charter schools—and kids in Tennessee—are the victors.

At first blush it didn’t make any sense: Why was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speaking about school turnarounds at the big National Charter Schools Conference this morning? Charter school people generally hate the idea of turning around failed public schools, and for good reasons. Namely: it almost never works, and then the failed public schools have the name “charter school” attached to them to boot.

But if you dig into his speech and connect the dots, his strategy begins to become clear. He knows that lots of turnaround efforts won’t work—and he needs for there to be new charter schools to serve the students left behind.

Now, he couldn’t just come right out and say that. As he straddles the Democratic divide on education, he had to pay homage to the teachers unions (”We are beginning a conversation with the unions about flexibility with respect to our most under-performing schools. I expect they’ll meet us more than halfway - because they share our concern. They understand that no one can accept failure.”) and speak fervently about his intent to resuscitate thousands of failing schools (”We can start with one or two hundred in the fall of 2010 and steadily build until we are doing 1000 per year.”).

But as I wrote last week, most of these initiatives will fail because they are addressing the symptom and not the disease. They are trying to fix individual schools when it’s the dysfunctional system that’s broken, but addressing that problem means blowing up collective bargaining agreements, civil service protections for central office staff, antiquated funding streams, dubious curricular models, and more. None of which is likely.

With all of that in mind, read this passage about the “last of our four turnaround models,” which is “simply to close under-performing schools and reenroll the students in better schools.” (Note to Arne: how is that a turnaround?)

This may seem like surrender - but in some cases it’s the only responsible thing to do. It instantly improves the learning conditions for those kids and brings a failing school to a swift and thorough conclusion.

Well, it instantly improves the learning conditions for those kids if they have somewhere better to go. Which is why he needs a lot new high-performing charter schools—unencumbered by charter school caps—ready to pick up the slack.

A Republican secretary of education would have just said, “Let’s close the worst public schools in this country and hand the keys over to well-run charter school networks.” A Democrat has to “try” to fix the schools first (”investing” several billions of taxpayer dollars along the way) before “not surrendering” and shutting them down. While inefficient, the Democratic strategy ends up in the same place as the GOP one, just a lot more slowly. Which is perhaps the best we can hope for.

Photo credit: jorgeq82

Several of us at Fordham (and some of our friends and associates in the larger ed policy world) have heard recently from James Garner, the former director of Research and Training Associates in Belleville, New Jersey. He’s upset because Leo Klagholz’s year-2000 Fordham monograph, Growing Better Teachers in the Garden State, failed to credit Garner for the ideas embedded in New Jersey’s alternative certification program, circa 1982.

We’re not inclined to re-open this (very old) can of worms. But readers might find this little bit of school reform history quite fascinating. (I did.) Here’s a snippet of Garner’s correspondence to Checker Finn here at Fordham:

My February 28, 1982 letter to the Star-Ledger marked the first publication of a proposal for the “alternate route” for teacher certification, about a year and a half before any announcement by Klagholz and the Kean administration. My letter outlined both the alternate route and the rationale for it in their major conceptual features.

The context further demonstrates my priority in this idea. My letter was actually a criticism of the revised teacher certification procedures then proposed by Klagholz (Star-Ledger February 7, 1982). He noted the low SAT scores of education majors, but had missed their significance. Klagholz wanted to increase the liberal arts requirements in teacher training programs (laudable), but the resulting rules still systematically prevented our better college students, who did not generally enroll in teacher training programs, from teaching in our public schools. It is the recruitment of these better students that is essential to the alternate route, and there was no hint of it in Klagholz’s proposals at the time. That was the point of my letter.

And the letter to the editor, while just a letter, was quite prescient. Garner argued:

Dr. Klagholz of the Department of Higher Education is right to dispute the contention that brighter students avoid teaching because the profession has no pay-off in job opportunities. The new standards, Dr. Klagholz said, seek to produce “broadly educated, intelligent young men and women with enough experience in actual school practice to know whether they really have an aptitude for teaching.” Providing actual school practice is the easy part; producing broadly educated and intelligent young men and women is the hard part. But we already have these young men and women. Instead of using the bureaucracy to keep them out of our public schools, shouldn’t we find some way to let them in?

Keep in mind that this was 1982—eight years before the launch of Teach For America. And Garner was right—we do have these young men and women; we just had to find a way to let them into our schools.

Andy wonders if he’s being naive again to think that a rise in test scores is a bad thing. At issue is the new Center on Education Policy report which shows that, in most states, scores are up at all three of NCLB’s “performance levels”: basic, proficient, and advanced.

Now, before I answer Andy’s question (in the affirmative of course!), let me state that the inquiry CEP pursued is a worthwhile one, and its researchers seem to have approached it responsibly—with some important caveats (see below).

Flypaper readers know that we at Fordham are also interested in knowing whether students at all levels of performance—and particularly at the highest levels—are making gains under NCLB. The fear is that the focus on getting “bubble kids” over the “proficient” bar might lead schools to ignore kids who are well below or above it. (The sociologist formerly known as Eduwonkette thinks this sort of triage is happening in DC.)

We addressed this question a year ago in our major report, High Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind. In it, Tom Loveless examined NAEP results at the 10th and 90th percentiles, and found the low-performers making big gains and the high-performers making minimal ones. (His exact phrase for the progress of the high-performers was “languid.”) Helpfully, he also provided a literature review of the handful of other studies that have looked at this “triage” question (i.e., is there evidence that schools are focusing on the bubble kids to the detriment of others?). Here’s how he summed it up (see pages 14-15):

These three studies yield no clear conclusion as to whether NCLB-style accountability encourages educational triage. In particular, it is unclear how high achievers fare under such systems. They gained (Springer), lost (Reback), and experienced mixed results (Neal and Schanzenbach).

Add Loveless’s study, and this new one from CEP, to the mix, and the take-away is the same: no clear conclusion.

So why did Tom find “languid” progress for high-achievers while CEP found “gains in 71% of the trend lines at the advanced level and declines in 23%”? (Keep in mind, though, that the gains were even more pronounced at the proficient level.) Here are a few thoughts—and the caveats to keep in mind.

First, there’s plenty of reason to believe that even the “advanced” level set by many states is rather low. Since these tests are designed to get a very accurate read at the “proficient” level—and since that level is set so ridiculously low by most states—it’s unlikely that the advanced level is high enough to accurately measure our top students. They simply max out on the tests, getting virtually all of the questions right. So the progress made at the advanced level could be real, but might be an indicator of how above-average students are doing, not our highest-performers. Contrast this to the Loveless study, which used NAEP (whose range goes much higher), and which examined the top ten percent of students.

And second, in the CEP report, a trend line could be positive without students making very strong gains. This would be consistent with Tom’s findings, in that high-achievers made gains, but they were “languid.”

So here’s my bottom line: It’s still likely that lots of schools are engaging in triage and focusing on the bubble kids. These kids tend to be low-performers, since the proficiency bar itself is set so low in most states. However, a stronger focus on core reading and math skills probably does “lift all boats.” And furthermore, the affluent suburban schools with the bulk of the highest-performing students probably don’t engage in as much of this triage, because their students are going to pass the state tests no matter what. Faced with different pressures and incentives, they focus on getting more of their kids to the advanced level. (We see this in the Washington suburbs.) So if you’re affluent and attend a homogenous school in the suburbs, you’re probably not subjected to NCLB’s downsides. But if you’re poor and high achieving, and attend a school with lots of low-performing kids, well, you are flat out of luck.

Andy, still optimistic?

This week has provided a nice natural experiment about which kinds of studies the media finds newsworthy. Four major reports, each of which might normally lead the news in a typical week, battled it out for attention. And there were clear winners and losers.

First out of the gate was the CREDO charter school report, which garnered coverage on the U.S. News blog and in many local papers, including the Los Angeles Times. That’s pretty solid, though it was hardly the Diana Jean Schemo/NAEP fracas all over again.

Speaking of NAEP, results from the new arts assessment came out next. And this hit the big time: at least 200 articles, including in the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today.

Then a very interesting new study by Gary Phillips of AIR, which “internationally benchmarked” state NAEP results against other countries’ TIMSS results, limped out of the gate and picked up just Education Week coverage.

Finally, Jack Jennings’s Center on Education Policy released its annual look at state test score results under No Child Left Behind, and got a spattering of stories in local papers, mostly in Florida it appears.

I see three lessons. First, never go up against NAEP, even if it’s just the arts assessment. Second, bad news (arts, charter schools) sells better than good news (NCLB hasn’t hurt scores at the advanced level, CEP claims) and non-news (our states’ student achievement doesn’t look so great compared to other countries’). Eduwonk makes this point too. And third, don’t be in such a rush to get news out before the end of school/beginning of the 4th of July vacation. A slow newsweek in the dead of summer beats a crammed news week in June, at least if you want a lot of coverage.

And yes, if you want analysis of the merits of these studies, and not just this thumb-sucking exercise, watch for that here on Flypaper and later today in Gadfly.

Photo credit: cursedthing

There’s a lot of buzz in the policy community right now around scaling up high-performing charter schools and turning around low-performing public schools. That’s mostly because Arne Duncan has been talking up these issues and indicating that he wants to put big bucks behind both efforts.

I’m more enthusiastic about the former than the latter, but there’s reason to be skeptical about both. That’s because I don’t hear a lot of straight talk (except on Flypaper, of course). Let me try to offer some.

First, when it comes to scaling up great charter schools, we usually ask the wrong question: how can we take a fantastic charter school and replicate it many times over? The right question to ask is: what kind of charter school model lends itself to scaling-up? And my answer is that such a model wouldn’t rely entirely on “superstar teachers” that are inevitably in short supply, particularly outside of a handful of hip cities where lots of young people want to live. Instead, we should be looking for charter schools that get solid results with mere mortals, perhaps through creative staffing strategies, the smart use of technology, a strong curriculum, etc. Show me a charter school model with good test score gains and teachers who work no more than fifty hours a week, and that’s the one I would fund to take to scale.

Second, when it comes to turning around failing schools, we should recognize that a failing school is a symptom and not the disease. The disease is the dysfunctional school system, with its poorly aligned incentives, bureaucratic proclivities, civil-service-style job protections, inequitable funding formulas, out-of-date data and management systems, and cumbersome union contracts. You can fix a failing school, just as you can treat a cough or a headache, but if you don’t fix the system (or remove the school from the system by, say, turning it into an independent charter school), you won’t cure the underlying ill, and eventually the school will be failing once again.

The challenge is that fixing dysfunctional systems is really hard, and there’s no evidence than any big city district leader has succeeded in doing it. That’s why, on the whole, I’m more optimistic about scaling up good charter schools—but only if we tackle that task honestly and thoughtfully, too.

Photo credit: marinegirl

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced last night that he’s making a big bet on the NGA and CCSSO Common State Standards initiative, putting up $350 million to fund the tests that will be used to assess those standards. He told the Associated Press:

Resources are important, but resources are actually a small piece of this puzzle. What’s really needed here is political courage. We need governors to continue to invest their energy and political capital.

To that end, he said in his speech:

The fact is—higher standards will make some of your states look bad in the short term—because fewer students will be meeting them.

So I will work with you to ensure that your states will not be penalized for doing the right thing.

And in reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the administration will work with you and with Congress to change the law so that it rewards states for raising standards instead of encouraging states to lower them.

I always give NCLB credit for exposing the achievement gap but the central flaw in the law is that it was too loose about the goals and too tight about how to get there.

As states come together around higher common standards, I want to flip it - and be tighter about the goals - but more flexible in how you can meet them.

(Boy, that argument sounds familiar.)

And now about the assessments:

Our next step is to work together to find a better way to measure success - and that brings me to the real point of this speech—which is the assessments.

Once new standards are set and adopted you need to create new tests that measure whether students are meeting those standards. Tonight—I am announcing that the Obama administration will help pay for the costs of developing those tests.

As you know, we have $5 billion dollars in competitive grant funding under the Recovery Act to help advance these four reforms.

Congress carved out $650 million dollars for the What Works and Innovation fund - which is for districts and non-profits that are pushing reform.

The administration will dedicate up to $350 million in the remaining funds to help develop new assessments.

We haven’t worked out all the details yet - but in the coming months, we will develop an application process that supports this effort.

We need tests that measure whether students are mastering complex materials and can apply their knowledge in ways that show that they are ready for college and careers.

We need tests that go beyond multiple choice - and we know that these kinds of tests are expensive to develop. It will cost way too much if each state is doing this on its own.

Collaboration makes it possible for this to happen quickly and affordably.

Pinch me—but it looks like national standards and tests might just happen. Now let’s pray that the standards and tests are solid—and that the Administration, NGA, and CCSSO are wise enough to aim for more than just preparing students for college and work. We also need to prepare students to be citizens in this great democracy. Now, we wait and we watch.

Photo credit: cristic

Congratulations to David Whitman, who not only is heading into the Administration to write Arne Duncan’s speeches , but also just won the prestigious "American Independent Writing Prize for the Most Significant Book of the Year" from American Independent Writers for Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner City Schools and the New Paternalism .

As the publisher of said book , we are very proud of David’s accomplishment. Now that George Will , David Brooks , and AIW have heartily endorsed the book, isn’t it time that you give it a read yourself? Head to Amazon today and order this gem before your summer vacation commences.

I finally watched Charlie Wilson’s War last night (we have a toddler at home; we’re not in the movie-theater stage of our life!). Toward the end, the Philip Seymour Hoffman spook character tells Tom Hanks’s Charlie Wilson, “Charlie, you’re a hard man not to like.” And I have to say, that’s how I feel about Arne Duncan too. There he is, day after day, saying the right things, earnestly trying to do good, enthusiastic about the “transformative” possibilities of the federal stimulus package.

Granted, I’m actually quite skeptical that any of this is going to make our schools better, but that’s no reason to root against Duncan. And he surely deserves praise for a couple of provocative statements he made this week.

First, in a press call that was like manna from heaven for charter school advocates, he said flatly that “States that do not have public charter laws or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools will jeopardize their applications under the Race to the Top Fund,” referring to his $5 billion carrot-qua-kitty. (That wasn’t enough to put a Maine charter school bill over the top, but that sort of rhetoric seems to be helping in Illinois, Tennessee, and Massachusetts.)

Then he told Libby Quaid of the Associated Press that “to somehow suggest we should not link student achievement to teacher effectiveness is like suggesting we judge sports teams without looking at the box score.” That’s a pretty good line, though I wish he and other reformers would talk about giving principals some discretion to make salary decisions, rather than hinting at formula-driven approaches to bonuses or salary enhancements. In other words, it’s stupid to try to robotically link test scores to bonuses for teachers, for lots of good reasons, but just because it’s hard to measure teachers’ effectiveness doesn’t mean we can’t differentiate among them and make pay decisions accordingly. Lots of businesses (including the think tank business) have results that are hard to quantify. But bosses still get to manage their employees using basic tools like pay.

What remains to be seen is whether all of this talk will translate into action. Will Massachusetts really not get “Race to the Top” funds if its charter school cap remains in place? What will the Administration do if the Hill ignores its request to boost funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund, which supports pay-for-performance and “combat pay” initiatives, as Rep. David Obey and Sen. Patty Murray seem wont to do?

Still, we’ll bring out the Reform-o-Meter from its closet* to give Duncan some credit for these statements: a Warm even. (If he had said that no states with charter caps were getting Race to the Top funds, period, then he’d deserve a Red Hot.) But since it’s just talk at this point, I’m only ranking it a 3 out of 10, which doesn’t move our cumulative R-o-M past neutral.

What do you think? Cast your vote below.

* With most of the major staff appointments made, and the real news coming out of the U.S. Department of Education slowing to a trickle, we’re going to turn the Reform-o-Meter into an occasional feature. And that means taking it down from Flypaper’s sidebar. But loyal Reform-o-Meter fans, don’t worry. When big federal policy news breaks, we’ll be here to pick up the pieces, and to offer our take.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction just released the state’s preliminary school ratings under the No Child Left Behind act, and a mere 79 schools were found to be “needing improvement.” That’s about three percent of all public schools in Wisconsin—practically a rounding error! Wisconsin has figured it out. It has virtually no failing schools!

Or wait, maybe the state has just made it almost impossible for schools to be snagged by NCLB’s net. As we wrote in The Accountability Illusion:

In a few of the 28 states we studied, such as Wisconsin and Arizona, almost all of the elementary schools in our sample made AYP; in other states, such as Massachusetts and Nevada, almost none did. To put it colloquially, most of the schools in our sample would be considered failures in some states but just fine, even deserving of praise, in others. These are the same exact schools, mind you. Same students. Same teachers. Same achievement. What’s different—sometimes drastically different—are the arcane rules that vary from state to state.

Or as we wrote in Education Week, “officials in Madison have gamed NCLB’s accountability provisions in almost every way possible, by setting low passing scores on their tests, adopting rules that exempt many schools from accountability for minority students and other ’subgroups,’ and using statistical gyrations that have the effect of lowering standards even further.”

But see for yourself. Play our “Fix that Failing School” video game. Here’s a hint: If you always move the school to Wisconsin, you’ll never go wrong.

UPDATE: Wisconsin has also closed the achievement gap in math! Wow, what a story!

Photo Credit: dwallick

As you may recall, last week brought news that math scores were up across the great state of New York. I responded warily, expressing concern that this development probably was the result of teachers and students getting used to the tests, not that “the kiddos are learning more math.”

Joel Klein’s folks weren’t happy with this take, and Andy didn’t like it either:

NYC just reported significant gains on the measures they’re held accountable for: state reading and math scores. Maybe I’m naive, but that seems like more reason for encouragement than cynicism.

I wish Andy were right (I really do!) but check out this New York Daily News article from yesterday. The headline says it all: “Math exam scores have risen—but it’s because tests have gotten easier.” Give this a read:

It’s the state exam version of grade inflation. Soaring scores on the state math test don’t necessarily add up to better schools or smarter kids. That’s because it has gotten easier to teach to the test as the questions have gotten easier to predict, a Daily News analysis revealed. And, the tests may also be easier.

“It’s the lesson of the financial crisis, and it’s the lesson here—you can’t just trust the numbers, you have to look at what the numbers mean,” said Columbia University sociology doctorate student Jennifer Jennings [aka Eduwonkette]. “If you can always make pretty good guesses about what’s going to be on the state tests, teachers aren’t stupid and we’re putting them under a whole lot of pressure, so basically they’re strategic about what they teach.”

Only a fraction of the simple arithmetic, algebra and statistics that kids should learn every year has been tested, Jennings found, looking back to 2006, when the state rejiggered the test. Nearly identical questions have even appeared each year, Jennings found. In 2009, at least 14 of the 30 multiple choice questions on the seventh-grade exam, for example, had appeared in similar form in previous years, she said. Only 54.7% of the specific math skills the state requires seventh-graders to learn were ever tested in the four years the exam has been given.

That’s pretty compelling. (And not just because I happen to think Eduwonkette is generally brilliant. Is she the first person to ever make her way up the media food chain, from blogger to official newspaper analyst?) Yes, there are other explanations, including that kids know more math. But this starts to explain the “Buffalo Miracle”—the phenomenon whereby the “City of Light” made the same amount of progress as the Big Apple on the latest math test. You know, Buffalo, that hotbed of reform.

Andy, are you hyper-skeptical yet, too?

Photo credit: colleeninhawaii

Those of us in the education world are used to thinking about “competitive effects” thusly: The public education system will do nothing to reform itself unless forced to do so. So we try to force it to do so by threatening to take away students, dollars, and union members by offering parents options outside of the system (via vouchers, charter schools, etc.). With enough competitive pressure, it is hoped, the system will accept true reform as its least worst option.

Now turn to today’s New York Times column by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. He’s talking about health care, and writes: “History shows that the insurance companies will do nothing to reform themselves unless forced to do so.”

Sound familiar? Except where does he think that competition should come from? “A public plan that Americans can buy into as an alternative to private insurance.”

Now nobody is proposing that Americans be forced to get their insurance from the government. The “public option,” if it materializes, will be just that - an option Americans can choose. And the reason for providing this option was clearly laid out in Mr. Obama’s letter: It will give Americans “a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep the insurance companies honest.”

You mean just like creating charter schools will give Americans “a better range of choices, make the education system more competitive, and keep the teachers unions honest”?

So in education, where the government is the major player, we’re trying to create competition via the private sector. But in health care, where the private sector is still a major player, we’re trying to create competition via the public sector?

Weird.

Update: Greg Forster chimes in with an excellent post on the subject, too.

That’s what Steve Barnett charged. He thinks Checker is arguing to “hold back” the middle class so that poor kids can catch up and close the achievement gap. Needless to say, Checker doesn’t agree with that characterization, but admits that he agrees with (not-so-far-left) liberal Bruce Fuller, who believes in targeting resources on poor kids rather than spreading them around.

Sara Mead points to evidence from Oklahoma that universal preschool is helping poor kids the most. And anyway, what’s so wrong with giving middle class parents a way to help their kids?

Checker responded: Sure, if funds were unlimited, it’s not such a bad thing to use tax dollars to subsidize middle class parents who are already putting up the funds. But if resources ARE limited, why not start by providing intensive programs for the children who need it most? (Is that a far-left view? Your call.)

Steve admits that there’s nothing wrong with “starting” with targeted programs and going from there. “But we’ve been starting with targeted programs for 40 years.” It’s straining his patience. There are ethical, educational, and economic reasons to serve all kids, he says.

Photo of Che Guevara by Alberto Korda and from photosthatchangedtheworld.com.

Sara Mead of the New America Foundation is taking her turn. She started by holding up Checker’s book and commenting (correctly) how similar its cover looks to that of her favorite children’s book, The Little Engine that Could. (Still, trust me, don’t show Checker’s book cover to a small child. It will make them cry.) See for yourself.

Sara agrees that we need to beef up programs targeted at the poor, but that we also need to go universal. That’s because as long as we only have small, targeted programs, k-12 educators won’t view them as important and highly relevant to their work.

She’s also increasingly optimistic that policymakers are developing metrics around pre-k programs and are starting to hold them accountable for results.