Flypaper is the source for this Chroncle of Higher Education story, which profiles McCain’s education team. We revealed McCain’s edvisors last week, here.

With overwhelming votes in its House and Senate, South Carolina is racing to revamp its state assessment system and, apparently, lower its standards dramatically. The Spartansburg Herald Journal says:

The change could drastically increase the number of schools meeting NCLB requirements. Currently, only students who score proficient or advanced attain the proficient level required under NCLB. Under the new system, those who score “met” or “exemplary” would qualify.

It’s a shame, but perhaps not surprising, as South Carolina currently boasts some of the toughest proficiency standards in the country. Its legislators are only reacting to No Child Left Behind’s perverse incentives. Secretary Spellings: are you willing to let go of the “100 percent proficient by 2014″ madness yet?

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist/political cartoonist David Horsey comments on the now-disbanded Office of Equity, Race, and Learning Support of Seattle Public Schools.

The director of the office, Caprice Hollins, gained notoriety for a variety of offensive acts. Most noted was the page she put up on the district’s Web site that asserted Seattle’s public schools bought into the belief that such things as planning for the future, emphasizing individualism and defining standard English were examples of cultural racism.

Horsey has a follow-up blog post here.

Matthew Ladner writes about how Catholic schools in Arizona are surviving.

For those who doubt that competition has positive effects on public-school systems, this article, from the Houston Chronicle, is instructive. The Houston district’s enrollment is dropping; meanwhile, charter schools there, such as KIPP, can’t keep up with demand (this is occurring in other cities, too). HISD school board member Diana Davilla told the Chronicle about KIPP, “They’re attracting more students than we are. Somewhere, we’re missing something because they’re building schools and we’re closing them.” The district hopes to change that:

Leaders said they’re also working on ways to use data, including performance pay information, to create a profile of ideal teaching candidates. They plan, for instance, to use the data to determine which universities are producing HISD’s best teachers.

Good ideas. None of which would have germinated without healthy competition.

To see but one example of why we can’t trust local school boards to lead meaningful reform efforts, see this post from the National School Boards Association (NSBA). Regarding this recent Wall Street Journal article on No Child Left Behind’s lack of “bite”* for failing schools, NSBA says:

If the system that judges school performance is innately flawed, should we be rushing to sanction these “failing” schools or should we be rushing to fix the system? Until NCLB gets its diagnosis right, schools should not be forced to make radical changes that are disruptive to students and their learning environment.

Well, yes, NCLB surely labels some schools as “needing improvement” that are pretty decent, such as those that are succeeding for most of their students but not for kids with learning disabilities, or those that are not up to standards yet but are making big gains over time. But all evidence indicates that the vast majority of “failing” schools are just that, and we shouldn’t waste any more time (or come up with any more excuses) before we intervene aggressively in them. NSBA’s proposal is a prescription for paralysis. Which is fitting, because most local school boards have resisted real reform forever.

Update: *As Liam notes below, Washington, D.C.’s, school system is instituting real reform. And guess what? It reports to the mayor, not the school board. Hardly a coincidence.

Plenty of bad ideas make their way from the business world to education, but here’s a good one: replicate successful school models via franchising. That’s the argument made by business writer Julie Bennett in an essay in the new Education Next. 

In the business world, when the owners of restaurants or retail stores want to expand, they choose between two models: corporate-style growth with central management or franchising. Chains like Starbucks scale up corporately; each of its 7,087 U.S. stores is owned by and managed from its Seattle headquarters. Others, like McDonald’s, follow a franchise model. Though they look and feel much the same, the vast majority of the 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the United States are operated by a founding franchisee. The advantage of franchising is that it allows an organization to grow rapidly without putting its own intellectual and financial capital at risk. While franchisees are building individual units, the central organization can spend its resources on promoting the brand and developing new products and services.

Bennett goes on to explain that KIPP, the Big Picture Company, and EdVisions Schools belong in the franchise bucket, while Lighthouse Academies, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools are closer to the corporate model. (All of these are non-profit organizations with chains of high-quality charter schools.) Both approaches have their advantages and drawbacks, but KIPP, the Mac Daddy of education franchises, has grown the fastest.

No, schools aren’t businesses and kids aren’t burgers, but neither is education the first field to grapple with replicating success. Which means that our k-12 system shouldn’t be so insular as to ignore lessons from outside its realm. In this instance, a little McHumility might go a long way.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story titled “No Child Left Behind Lacks Bite.” Not in Washington, D.C., it doesn’t.

Someone once wrote, “You can’t trust Alexander Russo to report on a school bake sale and give an accurate account of the price of brownies,” so one hesitates to put much stock in this post. It is nonetheless peculiar that a gaggle of bloggers would criticize other bloggers for blogging, or that they would inveigh against time-wasting while sitting on a panel, discussing blogging. Certainly Flypaper’s frequent posting is a benefit to our readers, who desire timely analysis and opinion on the day’s education issues. And for those who would rather imbibe an occasional off-the-cuff observation or two, perhaps about baseball or Howard Stern, other outlets exist.

School Funding’s Tragic Flaw, a new paper from Education Sector’s Kevin Carey and Marguerite Roza of the Center on Reinventing Public Education is a nice, quick introduction to the reasons that school funding is often inequitable and unfair and under-funds the neediest schools. Carey and Roza contrast two schools (one in Virginia and the other in North Carolina) that serve similar kids but have drastically different budgets to show why inequity persists.

They point to a number of problems. Federal Title I funding is skewed toward the wealthiest states, and at the district level, its sneaky “comparability” provision effectively erases differences in teacher salaries between schools, giving schools with more experienced teachers more than their fair share of dollars. (District budgeting practices are to blame for that, too.) And some states are far better than others at making up for local property wealth differences.

Carey and Roza call for some sensible solutions, including changes to Title I and for districts to let money follow the child—that is, to “allocate a standard amount of money per student to each school.” These ideas may not be new to Flypaper regulars, but this paper is worth checking out because it plainly explains some complicated problems.

It’s tough to capture a summer internship at Fordham. Expectant mothers often email us tabula rasa resumes on behalf of promising blastocysts, in fact, to be updated as Embryonic Emmy and Zygote Zach grow and garner accomplishments over the impending score. This summer, however, we have an unexpected internship opening! Click here (quickly) for more information.

To further illustrate the point that contamination may have occurred among Reading First and presumably “non” Reading First schools, a point I made in my piece in today’s Gadfly, Connie Choate, the director of Arkansas Reading First, writes:

I believe the design of the Impact Study is flawed.  The study compared funded Reading First schools with non-funded RF schools within the same district.  However in their RF proposals districts were required to include a plan for spreading the RF methodology to non-funded schools.  States were also required to do the same.  For example, all teachers across the state were invited to participate in ELLA, Effective Literacy, Summer Reading Camp, and several other professional development opportunities that are part of Reading First.  We aligned all of this professional development to SBRR.  So, even non-funded schools have benefited from RF.  One example is the revision of the State English Language Arts Frameworks. The knowledge gained from the National Reading Panel Report and Reading First enabled the state to revise the English Language Arts Framework to align with SBRR.  All professional development offered by the state is now aligned to SBRR.  This should align curriculum and instruction in all schools to SBRR, not just our RF funded schools.  We have created many materials in Reading First and have made them available to all schools. 

Ms. Choate got me thinking that it would be a good idea to take a look at the feds’ application for state RF grants. And sure enough, what she says rings true. Consider this from page 1:

Each SEA may reserve up to 20 percent of the Reading First funds it receives for State use. These funds will assist States in building and maintaining statewide capacity to effectively teach all children to read by third grade. States may expend up to 65 percent of these reserved funds for activities related to professional development... This unprecedented and significant funding will provide States with the resources and opportunity to extend this reading initiative and to improve reading instruction beyond the specific schools and districts that receive Reading First subgrants (emphasis added).

And should there be any confusion, page five includes the selection criteria for awarding grants. Potential state grantees, in a section called the State Professional Development Plan, are to answer this question: “How will teachers statewide receive professional development in the essential components of reading instruction, using scientifically based instructional strategies, programs and materials, and using screening, diagnostic, and classroom based instructional assessments?”

Again, it’s a great idea to spread the instructional reading wealth among state schools, but it sure makes it all the more difficult to assess what is really happening in this evaluation, which sought to draw a line in the sand between treatment and comparison schools.

It’s not quite as bad as Marion Barry embracing vouchers, but is it necessarily a positive development that the United Way has selected dropout prevention as one of its three key initiatives? As the Washington Post reports,

The United Way of America, alarmed at the nation’s fraying safety net, will announce today that it will direct its giving toward ambitious 10-year goals that would cut in half the high school dropout rate and the number of working families struggling financially.

Curbing the dropout rate certainly deserves attention from the nation’s charitable donors, but the chances don’t appear high that a mainstream, let’s-all-get-along group like the United Way will tackle the underlying problems that lead to massive educational failure. Will the charity push for rigorous state standards or even national standards? Will it work to put pressure on failing school districts by supporting charter schools and other forms of parental choice? Will it tangle with recalcitrant teachers’ unions? Such actions are hard to imagine, which is why savvy observers should get ready to watch a whole lot more private money go down the tubes.

Check out this New York Daily News column about career and technical education (formerly vocational education).

Not only is career and technical education nothing to laugh at, it’s a way to replace the unrealistic “college for all” bias of public schooling with a greater degree of practical preparation for lucrative and rewarding careers in fields like nursing, desktop publishing, computer networking and the building trades.

This is encouraging:

And here’s the kicker: Two-thirds of CTE students go on to college, and when they do, there’s research suggesting they outperform other students. Those that go straight into the world of work are generally getting jobs in fields where the pay is good and demand is strong.

This week’s Gadfly is now available for public consumption. Fordham’s nascent research director, Amber Winkler, makes her Gadfly debut with a smart editorial about Reading First (she says it’s not yet dead). And former Massachusetts Commissioner of Education David P. Driscoll and the former chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Jim Peyser, write in to talk MCAS and standards and college readiness.

Nice to see that at least one state is trying to exorcise its anti-Catholic demons. If the country cares about saving its Catholic schools, it should hope Florida’s efforts are elsewhere replicated.

The American Enterprise Institute’s education scholar, Rick Hess, has a new piece out about mayoral control of district schools. Basically, Hess concludes that mayoral control is no panacea for a city’s educational problems... so cross it off your “Educational Panacea” list.

Amber and Christina discuss the good and bad of the Reading First interim evaluation report:

Terry posted earlier today on the pressure mounting on attorney general Marc Dann to quit office in light of recent scandals.

He’s just resigned.

Back when the controversy over unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers exploded (no pun intended) in the middle of the 2008 Democratic primary, Senator Barack Obama used an unfortunate analogy to defend his association with the bomb-thrower:

The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George. The fact is, is that I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions. Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn’s statements? Because I certainly don’t agree with those either.

Umm, as about a million commentators said at the time, this is hardly moral equivalency. Ayers tried to blow stuff up and then refused to apologize for it. Coburn is making a public policy proposal. (One I’m not crazy about, by the way.)

But that hasn’t deterred Eduwonkette, the anonymous blogger and proud member of the American Educational Research Association. I wondered if she might want the governing council of that group to strip Ayers’s membership, before he takes office as one of its vice presidents. (See my post about that here.) Her response:

Mike believes that Ayers’ presence reflects badly on the whole association, but guilt by association is a shaky principle. I don’t judge Mike Petrilli, whose colleagues at the Hoover Institution include upstanding guys like Ed Meese and Donald Rumsfeld, based on his association with them, nor do I believe that AERA is tainted by having Ayers among its leadership. Mike might argue that Meese and Rumsfeld have records of accomplishment that justify their affiliation with Hoover. The same is true regarding Ayers and AERA.

The loony left’s “war criminals” charge against Rumsfeld aside, this is hardly moral equivalency, either. If Hoover puts a former terrorist on its board, I promise you, I won’t stand by idly and cheer.

At the very least, probably it could fix our schools’ cafeterias.

Google announced yesterday that it will launch Friend Connect, a free service that will allow any website to operate as a so-called “social website,” in the mold of Facebook and MySpace.

Friend Connect is aimed at the millions of Web sites that could benefit from having members interact but can’t enable such connections because of a lack of technical expertise or hardware.

If anyone struggles from a “lack of technical expertise,” it’s district and state education agencies, whose websites often recreate for those seeking meaningful information the experience of a drugged mouse struggling frantically and usually in vain to find the cheese at the end of a maze.

Wouldn’t it be great if, say, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District pasted a bit of Google code into its trainwreck of a website and allowed users to build a community that either a) collaborated to make sense of the content for everyone or b) bypassed the content altogether and built a kind of parallel knowledge base that became much more useful for the average visitor to the website?

Ohio AG Marc Dann isn’t the only one coming in for a beating. Take a look at this analysis of the recent Reading First interim evaluation study from Dr. James Salzman, the co-director of the Ohio Reading First Center.

To paraphrase Mark Twain: There are lies, damned lies, and the latest Reading First report. The report is methodologically flawed, statistically glamorous, and ultimately meaningless in terms of its conclusions. It’s caused the usual sharks to roil the waters as if chum were being served. And in the end, it says nothing about the positive impact of Reading First in Ohio.

Makes Fordham’s critique of the evaluation and defense of the program seem dispassionate and reserved. The key Ohio points:

- Students in Ohio have gained more than a year’s reading achievement for each year that they are in the program....If students stay within the program, they are able to catch up to benchmark scores in fluency, even though they start significantly behind.
- Students have closed the gap on state performance on the third grade Ohio Achievement Test (OAT) over the past four years.
- Teachers have helped students close the achievement gap for students of color.
- Equally importantly, Westat’s (2008) independent evaluation of Reading First Ohio has documented that the more time that students spend in Reading First schools the more they outperformed their peers in comparison schools across the state.

A message to my friend Russ Whitehurst (Institute for Educational Sciences director): Whenever you’d like to post a response to these critiques, this blog’s all yours.

Mushy Mike knows it’s not news that college graduates live longer than high-school graduates. The article to which he refers is a comment on the lousy healthcare that many poor Americans receive, and it really doesn’t have much to do with getting a college education. To assume (as Mike seems to) that if we directed more academically unprepared pupils onto ivied campuses we’d see a marked drop in healthcare disparities is, for sundry reasons too numerous to expound upon here, an incredible oversimplification. College attendance, of course, does not cause disparities in health, wealth, happiness, etc. as much as it reflects the disparities that already exist. And I do not believe universities have the redemptive powers to magically reshape anyone who attends their classes.

K-12 schools are supposed to be places where students, regardless of their backgrounds, can garner the information they need to succeed at college or in the workplace. K-12 schools, not colleges, are supposed to be the equalizers. Obviously, America hasn’t yet structured the k-12 system to work as it should, and we keep graduating 18-year-olds who can’t read. Therfore, ed reformers, having so far failed to markedly improve k-12 classrooms, are shifting their aspirations for k-12 schools onto colleges. It’s a foolish strategy, and it will have bad consequences.

A post from guest blogger and Fordham Vice President for Ohio Programs & Policy Terry Ryan.

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann is embroiled in serious scandals and faces impeachment. His own political party (the Democrats) has disowned him, and he is under intense pressure from the Governor, the statehouse, and the media to resign immediately.

We take no joy in Dann’s troubles, but his leaving office would raise some interesting questions. In September, Dann held a press conference to announce lawsuits aimed at closing two Dayton charter schools (he subsequently added two more schools). Dann cited the state’s charitable trust laws and alleged that the schools had violated their “charitable” missions as 501(c)3 organizations because they were underperforming academically (see Gadfly’s take on the first lawsuits.) One of the schools originally targeted by Dann has subsequently closed, but the second has vowed to fight the lawsuit. Oral arguments for that case are set for May 15 in Dayton.

If successful, this novel theory of trust law would effectively turn the state attorney general into a charter-school prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. Under Dann’s legal theory, his office would determine whether a school is successful or not, thereby usurping the regulatory authority of the General Assembly, the Ohio Department of Education, and individual charter school sponsors. If the AG gets this authority, observers wonder what would prevent him from determining that nonprofit colleges and universities aren’t up to snuff and should be closed? Or hospitals? Or any other nonprofit unloved by political supporters of the attorney general, whoever that might be? And why not then in other states, too?

Will the AG’s potential impeachment or resignation impact the Attorney General’s Office in this case? It’s far too early to tell, but one good thing that could come from this bad situation is a more thoughtful approach to dealing with troubled charters than having them killed off by a hard-charging AG.