Education may not be making the national political scene (whatever Palin’s personal opinions) but it’s far from off the states’ radar, reports the National Conference of State Legislatures. In fact, fifteen states have dozens of referendums, constitutional amendments or citizen initiatives dealing with education on the November ballot. The topics range from upping funding sources with more slot machines to scrapping education staples affirmative action and bilingual education. But before we call up the Gates Foundation and tell them to reconsider Ed in ‘08, consider this. It takes months for these kinds of proposals to make it onto the ballot. And the economy is still a hard act to upstage at this point, despite the lure of more casinos. EdWeek has the whole list of topics.

Whew, it’s quite an issue this week, folks. Announcing the release of our Red Tape Report pilot study on—you guessed it—red tape, Amber explains the study’s framework and invites your feedback (email all comments to redtapereport@gmail.com). Then Stafford investigates the GPA and some worrisome recent conversations on its calculation; perchance it’s time for a standard GPA metric? What would such a metric look like? These questions and more... Further in,  you’ll find Massachusetts ratcheting up its graduation standards and a look at the much hallowed, but perhaps biased, NACAC study on standardized tests for college admission. Add to all this a rather stupendous podcast, and the flatscreen TVs (and on-site dry cleaning) of the LAUSD headquarters, and you may have your socks blown right off! It’s all here.

It is only once in a rare blue moon that we get news like this. The irony is almost palpable. Detractors jump up and down with glee. Latent metaphors abound. It’s simply... beautiful.

What has me roaring with laughter before lunch?

The funders of Ed in ‘08, also known as Strong American Schools, are cuttin’ the dough. Oh yes, that’s right, the Gates and Broad Foundations have decided Ed in ‘08 is kaput!

But with Nov. 4 looming, education appears to have relatively low visibility. And the Gates and Broad family foundations have stopped contributing to the [Ed in ‘08] campaign after putting in a total of about $24 million.

I hate to say “we told you so,” (actually, I have no problem saying this at all) but really, we did. And if killing the initiative wasn’t enough, the excuses are PRICELESS.

“If we spend less than the maximum, it is because it is a reflection of the strategies we are executing,” said Marie Groark, senior program officer with the Gates Foundation. She acknowledged that it’s a tough environment for the issue to gain traction. “We are aware that there are significant competing priorities on the agenda,” she said.

This is just too good. “[T]he strategies we are excuting”? That’s corporate mumbo-jumbo if I’ve ever heard it. And “significant competing priorities,” huh? You mean like the fiscal crisis, the two front war, the multiple hurricanes and the blossoming deficit? Those priorities?

Or this,

For its part, the education campaign, branded “Ed in ‘08,” says it has been successful in steering the direction of the presidential dialogue toward education - if only temporarily - and that the Republican and Democratic nominees have cited its policy positions, particularly in recent weeks.

“Policy positions”? What policy positions??! As the wise and venerable Judge Judy once said, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

Well, folks, what’s the lesson to be learned here? Fordham knows what they’re talking about, fo’ serious. 

(Thanks to Alyson Klein for brightening my morning.)

Cram schools seem to be popping up everywhere. Korea has them as does Flushing, Queens. The newest market? India. But where Korean schools are a post graduate addendum to improve university entrance exam scores, Indian cram schools are a high school addition. The goal is admission to one of the highly selective Indian Institutes of Technology and the cram schools only teach what will be on the test: math, physics and chemistry. Traditional Indian public schools are complaining that the best and brightest are leaving their ranks for these schools (uh, hello? maybe these students are leaving for a reason?). On top of it all, these students still have to graduate from high school—while attending cram school at the same time, it seems. 

Local schools [in Kota, the cram capital] also have benefited: Cram students have to attend regular classes so they can pass their high-school exams and graduate. Some high schools have early morning classes so cram students can finish early and move on to cramming. 

Kota is in the throes of natural urban renewal as a result of the cram schools’ popularity. The hoards of students need places to live, supplies and meals to keep them going 18 hours a day. It’s like a cramming industry... or, cram-dustry! 

But on a more serious note, everything about these schools would seem repulsive to the American education worldview. Teaching to the test? The horror! Teenagers studying from 7am to midnight? The outrage! Ignoring literature, foreign languages, music and art? Crisis! But do these schools work? Seems so. Students graduating from Bansal Classes, the grandaddy of cram schools in Kota, are being accepted to the IITs in droves. And what does a degree from IIT mean? Admission to the educated elite. (And it must be noted that the Wall Street Journal claims IITs are statistically more difficult to gain admission to than either Harvard or Cambridge.) Most importantly, these students are choosing to go to these schools; they want to spend hours upon hours studying to get into these colleges. 

It’s highly unlikely we’ll be creating American cram schools anytime soon (although SAT prep seems to come to mind on that score) but it would be rather refreshing if we witnessed the same drive to excel as appears in our Eastern neighbors. This isn’t about replicating the extreme education vision we see in India; it’s about how much education is respected—understood—as the ticket to success. I know there are a host of other problems facing our country right now, but do we really need another Sputnik to see the renaissance of education as a top priority?

Today on Forbes.com, Checker explains why he finds reforms in LA, NY and Denver promising instances of thinking outside the box. It’s all about the numbers—of the test score and dollar variety. When the old ways aren’t working, shouldn’t we try something new? Absolutely.

Mike may catch the attention of governors and superintendents, but school boards are deaf. John Deasy, Superintedent of Prince George’s County, is set to resign. We hope his replacement is as reform-minded and result-oriented.

Update: I am not implying that the school board forced Deasy out (they did not) only to joke that Mike, who has caught the eye of district officials in the past (see above examples), was shockingly not consulted!

This blog has seen various commentary on why Michelle Rhee’s plan, “Capital Gains,” to pay students for good behavior and good grades was a bad idea (try here to see the ongoing conversation). Liam, in particular, was vehemently opposed to it in its New York City and Washington DC manifestations. Well it didn’t work (or had “mixed results,” ahem-hem) in NY and it doesn’t appear to have worked in DC, either. When will Fryer, the plan’s mastermind, give it a rest? 

Today’s Washington Post reports that behavior has improved but grades have not. The program has now completed a two week test run (where it appears no money was rewarded, only the points system was implmented to demonstrate how the system would work) and started officially (in all its glitzy, perverse incentivizing glory) yesterday. I enjoyed, in particular, this tidbit: 

Betts and his staff did a two-week trial run this month to give teachers practice with the scoring system and to give students an idea of what would be expected to earn points. He said that the sixth- and seventh-graders were “right into it” and that attendance and punctuality ticked up. Grades did not. 

Eighth-graders, he said, are “crafty folk” and are likely to wait until the program ramps up before they make many changes. “They’re like ‘Jerry Maguire’: ‘Show me the money,’ ” he said. 

And there, my friends, is the whole problem. Yes, this plan will tap into the little Jerry Maguires in all of us, but it will teach these kids zilch. And when the $2.7 million that has miraculously survived the recent advent of Great Depression Round II runs out, we’ll be back at square one.

Looks like Catholic schools are taking on a new role in urban France.

(We’ve written on the importance of Catholic schools in the US, too.)

I don’t always agree with Jay Mathews, but he has written an excellent column this morning. The crux of his argument is particularly well put:

This is a difficult choice and a hard time for D.C. teachers. They are fine people who have chosen a tough profession and put their hearts into their work. Many fear being judged by principals who, unlike Hayes, were not skillful teachers themselves and have little clue as to what helps kids learn and what doesn’t. But I don’t see any way the city’s children are going to get the instruction they deserve — the imaginative, fun-loving, firm teaching found at schools like KEY — unless principals are given the power to hire and fire teachers based on demonstrated skill and improved learning in class.

Rhee is likely to pick a few principals who fail, much as Hayes erred in hiring the two teachers. But the great virtue of the approach used at KEY and similar charter schools, the approach Rhee wants to adopt, is that achievement results — not friendships, not union rules, not inertia — would determine which principals and which teachers keep their jobs. If Hayes and other KIPP principals don’t show learning gains, they are out. Rhee says her principals will also be gone if they don’t show good results. (my emphasis)

Kudos to Jay Mathews for writing this:

When fixing schools, beware of miracle cures. Every week people send me ideas they say will change the future of education and lead all humanity to enlightenment. So, when management expert William G. Ouchi let me look at his new work on the surprising power of total student loads per teacher, or TSL, I was skeptical. 

As you should be, Jay, as you should be. But on to the meat of the article: TSL, Ouchi’s newest addition to the alphabet soup of acronyms. Yes, that’s William Ouchi of the widely read Making Schools Work, which rightly espouses the idea of weighted student funding, or (alphabet soup!) WSF. We’ve written on this topic too and we think it a darn good idea—but, like its reform-minded brethren, not a panacea. At first read, TSL sounds like an interesting concept. Ouchi does his homework, too, which makes me much more likely to read this forthcoming book (when it is published—unclear when that will be) with an open mind. 

Here’s the problem, though. Ouchi (according to Mathews, who it must be noted is the only one, it seems, who has read this elusive “chapter” of the forthcoming book he alludes to) seems to be advocating hiring teachers across the board. Teacher quality? Nah.

Could other factors, such as increasing teacher quality, explain the test score gains?  Ouchi and his researchers analyzed three years of student performance. They looked at the effect of class size, teacher experience, teacher credentials, professional development, time devoted to math and reading instruction, and a few dozen other factors. “Among these, only TSL had a noticeable effect on student performance in every district, and that effect was large,” Ouchi says. 

Hmmm. Not buying it. After introducing his column so promisingly (standing up against “miracle cures” and the like), I’m surprised Mathews doesn’t call Ouchi out for this. You can’t tell me that hiring lousy teachers just to reduce TSL is going to improve student achievement. Having 5-7 classes a day and student loads of 170 (New York City) to 225 (Los Angeles) students is stressful, sure, but you still have to teach them something while you’ve got them in the desks! More promising? Ouchi (and Mathews) see the connection between WSF and TSL: 

“One school, for example, may not need or want security guards or professional-development staff, while another may not want attendance clerks or registrars,” [Ouchi] says. Principals, unlike central office managers, know which jobs have been rendered obsolete by new technology and which jobs exist simply because they have always existed. 

Absolutely, as long as they’re hiring good teachers instead.

You won’t want to miss this week’s Gadfly. Checker and Stafford explain why community schools (as espoused by the Broader, Bolder folks and Randi Weingarten over at the AFT) are the antithesis of David Whitman’s paternalistic model. Mike has no sympathy for a schools in a struggling economy—fire bad teachers, quoth he! Then, get the deets on a strange new safe haven law in Nebraska, which is redefining “child” to be all youth up to age 19, and the new Tom Loveless study on the sad state of algebra.

When I first read this article, I was skeptical. Giving bonuses to teachers and principals at failing schools? Doesn’t that undermine the whole concept of merit pay—as in, rewards for meritorious performance? But perhaps not. 

Lest we get strapped to an imaginary bar—and thereby eliminate the idea of improvement—Bloomberg and Klein just may have taken the right approach. These schools are failing, yes, and they will be closed as a result, but they’re still open now. And since they’re still open, they still have students, who, it must be pointed out, are not mere numbers in a statistical study. In that sense, that these teachers still have an incentive to keep working with the students they have, even if only a third of them are proficient, is a positive thing. That’s not to say that strong standards are somehow less important in situations such as these. But sometimes balancing short term and long term goals require seemingly contradictory policies.

When times get rough, why do school districts cut the good stuff? It’s a very good question and one we should be outraged about, explains Mike. Read the whole argument on National Review Online.

“Stand-up desks provide a firm footing for fidgety students“

“Teachers report improved focus, behavior”

Arrival was on time; blog notification was not. Nevertheless, the issue is spectacular. Lesson from this week? Everybody’s reading Fordham material. Terry argues that based on his speech in Dayton last week, Obama just may have snagged an advanced copy of the Fordham report Accelerating Student Learning in Ohio: Five Policy Recommendations for Strengthening Public Education in the Buckeye State. We can’t prove it, of course, but we have our suspicions. Then, Mike compares Detroit to AIG and gets the attention of Governor Granholm. Elsewhere in the issue, we see tales of bats taking domicile in a school attic in Utah and a popular New York City elementary school getting the big fat F from Chancellor Klein.

Or so Liam argues in the Weekly Standard. With his usual panache, Liam reviews Charles Murray’s new book, Real Education.

Mike shares his pearls of wisdom on a September 9th NCLB NBC special.

It’s about time.

Liam takes to the pages of the Washington Times to explain why paying children cash to behave in school is nothing more than bribery. In a vegetable inspired analogy, he explains: 

What sort of unintended consequences might this experiment yield? Here’s but one: Think of the parents who, rather than exert strong discipline over their vegetable-averse child, pay him $100 each month to choke down his brussel sprouts. It’s a safe bet that they will create a rules-shirking monster and one who will learn nothing important and enduring about nutrition, behavior, obedience, personal responsibility, or authority.

Similar monsters are birthed through an educating strategy that pays pupils to do that which is legitimately expected of them.

Indeed, continues Liam, the message behind a “pay-as-you-go” plan such as this one is even worse than turning our children into brussel sprouts eating monsters. Such a plan actually promotes the deleterious and false message that there are students who are so hopeless they will only attend school when being paid to do so. Read the whole editorial here.

My doubts were unfounded. Kathy Cox, the state superintendent of Georgia, is officially smarter than a fifth grader and is $1 million richer to prove it. The money will go to three special needs schools in her home state.

Did you routinely win the estimate-the-weight-of-a-pumpkin contests at the state fair? Always know how to sneak on an already too crowded train? You may be stupendous at math! Or so a new study from Johns Hopkins, which as found a link between number sense—the ability for humans to estimate numbers—and math ability, concludes. Don’t run out and spend all your money on those jelly bean jar raffle tickets to practice, though, since researchers have not yet figured out if number sense can be learned.

Joanne Jacobs takes aim at the disparities between charter and traditional public school performance standards. She writes, 

Ohio is closing two chronically low-performing charter schools. That’s good. But the perform-or-else rule applies only to charters. Fourteen district-run schools would be closed if the same standards were applied. All will remain in business.

Perhaps we can shed light on Rhee’s obvious confusion of KIPP and American dollars with the following factoid, also revealed this morning at the Reporter Roundtable: Michelle Rhee pays her children to do their chores. It seems, then, that her insistance on paying children to do the tasks they should be doing already (making their bed, doing their homework, showing up to school) started at home. Not only does this transferance of her own parenting techniques onto the school system contradict her zealous outburst in support of parental choice (especially in regards to the choices made by the Obama or Palin families come January) but I fear that she suffers from an overactive optimism about the application of economies of scale.

Nothing new to report from the RNC:

Education is the civil rights issue of this century. Equal access to public education has been gained. But what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice, remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work.

When a public school fails to meet its obligations to students, parents deserve a choice in the education of their children. And I intend to give it to them. Some may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private one. Many will choose a charter school. But they will have that choice and their children will have that opportunity.

Senator Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucracies. I want schools to answer to parents and students. And when I’m President, they will.

She wasn’t forthcoming on the policy side, but she did say something, at least. Talking about her newest child, Trig, who has Down Syndrome, she opined:

And children with special needs inspire a special love.

To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters.

I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House.

Nothing we didn’t predict but I’m curious what policies she’d advocate.

I was surprised by how strongly Rick Kahlenberg attacked the new Ed Sector report on interdistrict public school choice, since the study really has nothing new to offer us other than some really neat maps. Instead of keeping things in proportion, we get Kahlenberg waxing poetic on the basic standards of “Social Science 101″ and methodology nitty gritty in an excessively long winded diatribe. Of course, Dillon actually spends quite a bit of time explaining her choices (try page four, which Kahlenberg calls “the fine print in a sidebar”-it’s actually an entire page-or the Appendix). I’ve extricated his two main points from the overblown rhetoric: Dillon makes two inappropriate assumptions, which cause her findings to be unnecessarily pessimistic, and she’s giving fodder to choice’s opponents.

Kahlenberg doesn’t like Dillon’s first assumption, a 20 minute driving time as her outside radius for finding high performing receiving schools, because it’s too confining. I could spend time arguing with this but I’ll let Dillon explain it herself (from page four, naturally): “We chose a 20 minute driving distance to represent the time most students spend commuting to school-according to data from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey, the average commute to school is 18 minutes”. Oh look the data is from 2001, before gas prices skyrocketed; I’d say that Dillon may have overestimated how far parents are willing to drive at a $4.50/gallon. Districts all over the country are even cutting back on or eliminating routes because of fuel costs.

His second critique is even worse as he condemns Dillon’s assumption that schools can increase their enrollment by 10%. His reasoning (as he explains to Education Week) is nothing but childish: I don’t know how we should cap school enrollment so Dillon and Ed Sector must not know either. On his blog, he elaborates with rhetorical gusto:

Social Science 101 suggests that when a variable - in this case, school capacity - is unknown, researchers don’t simply assume the validity of an arbitrary figure.  Instead, a careful social scientist would consider the known variable - empirical findings about the number of schools within a reasonable driving distance - forthrightly admit that the capacity variable is unknown, and then calculate the impact under various assumptions about increases in available space (e.g. 10% capacity, 20% capacity, 30% capacity etc.).

Yes, and why don’t we crunch the numbers at 11%, 14.7% and 64.8998345% of capacity too? I would even call Dillon’s estimation liberal, seeing as many schools have neither the capacity nor the willingness to expand capacity. But according to Kahlenberg’s “Social Science 101″, we should throw all studies that necessarily restrain themselves for the sake of cogent data analysis out the window. The truth is that the only reason he takes issue with Dillon’s methodology is because the study doesn’t find what he wants it find. At the end he whines, “it provides timid politicians with yet another excuse” to fight school choice programs. Dillon’s study adds nothing to the choice debate besides some cool looking maps; a long winded whiny post trying to be some defender of statistical purity is not going to change that.

While taking the Washington Teachers Union to task today, the Post is mostly spot on. They are right to point out that the union is largely acting against the interests of its members, especially in terms of how much money is being offered to all teachers, green and red track alike. They run into some trouble near the end, however, when they address the issue of seniority. Professing they find the opposition by older experienced teachers “perplexing”, the Post editors ask: “Isn’t the argument for the seniority pay scale based on the notion that experienced teachers do a better job?”

At first glance, this seems nothing more than a stock rhetorical question getting at the heart of a contradiction—experienced teachers should be “better” and therefore benefit from and support merit pay. If experience is correlated with performance, we should be seeing the younger teachers up in arms. They’re not, of course, and that’s the point, argues the Post. But there’s a bigger issue here, and one that reveals why the unions and senior teachers have much to lose by Rhee’s plan. The Post points out the problem without even realizing it: “Isn’t the argument for the seniority pay scale based on the notion that experienced teachers do a better job?” These senior teachers wouldn’t just be putting their own jobs at risk; they would be confirming the illogicality of the seniority pay scale and in large part, the seniority based structure of teachers’ unions (and unions in general) all together. The senior teachers lose their non-monetary perks, the unions’ power structures are undercut. Their opposition doesn’t seem so “perplexing” after all.

Just when New York says its cash incentives program for good grades isn’t working (original article here), DC decides to go ahead and try it too. Now really, Michelle, seriously?

Liam had some interesting commentary on this yesterday.

Since the blog has taken a more serious turn as of late, I proffer you this:

“Ga. Schools superintendent to appear on ‘5th grader’”

We discovered last week that not only is Debbie Phelps the principal of Windsor Mill Middle School in Maryland, but that Windsor Mill didn’t make AYP last year. And only recently home from Beijing, school starts on Monday for Principal Phelps. We trust that the experience of spawning the most celebrated swimmer in history will assist her in making the transition to principal of six-hundred hormone-crazed tweens. Perhaps her recent crowning as Johnson’s Baby Mom of the Olympic Games by Johnson & Johnson and subsequent TV ad (comes out on Sunday) will inspire her. It seems appropriate since the campaign, which will donate to a group of global charities in Debbie Phelps’ name, chose her because “Debbie represents every mother that has helped her child to succeed.” We hope that success reaches into her middle school classrooms.