Sometimes we bloggers here at Flypaper have something to say and we literally want to say it, not write it. So today we introduce "Speaking of...," our new, occasional vlog (video blog) series in which we spend a minute or two opining on recent education news and issues. In this first video, Mike Petrilli talks about Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s school turnaround plan. What do you think of "Speaking of..."? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

There’s much talk of common education standards these days; recently the Obama administration pledged to put some money towards the tests that will assess those standards. In this CNN segment from June 15, Mike sheds some light on the topic and what we might expect as the common standards effort moves along.

Type “Ohio” and “brain drain” together into Google and you get 86,600 hits.

In 2007, Ohio saw 6,981 more resi­dents between the ages of 25 and 34 leave the state than mi­grate into it.

In 2003, the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that individuals with master’s degrees are more apt to say farewell to Ohio than those with bache­lor’s degrees, and those with doctoral degrees were twice as likely to leave.

Despite these grim statistics, Ohio desperately needs to hold on to its best-and-brightest college graduates. The economy in deep recession, with the state facing a $3 billion budget deficit.  Workers with a bachelor’s degree earn more, and pay more in taxes, than their high-school-diploma-holding peers. Yet, Ohio is lagging nation­ally in keeping and attracting col­lege graduates - the state ranks 30th nationally in the number of citizens between the ages of 25 and 34 with a bachelor’s degree.

Ohio’s future prosperity demands that we do a better job of keeping and engaging our best and brightest. They will generate the economic vigor, new technologies, and other kinds of economic development that will spur the jobs and progress the state needs to modernize, thrive, and ultimately prosper. They and their success are key to the state’s ability to pay its bills and meet its promises.

So, we wondered, why are graduates leaving the Buckeye State?  What would it take to keep them here?  And further, what would it take to get them working in the field of education (both in teaching and in other careers)?  Check out our latest report, Losing Ohio’s Future: Why college graduates flee the Buckeye State and what might be done about it for the answers!

(Video may take a minute to load.)

Ohio is in the midst of a heated debate about the future of school funding. The governor, supported by House Democrats, has presented an “Evidence-Based Model” of school funding that is based largely on the work of professors Allan Odden and Lawrence Picus. This model has been roundly criticized by professor Paul Hill, professor Eric Hanushek, Fordham, and Republicans in the Senate who dismantled the governor’s plan in their version of the state biennial budget.

Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth write in their new book on school funding that such evidence-based models are “simply not credible.” As an alternative to the evidence-based model, Senate Republicans have proposed moving closer toward a system of school funding that funds the child. This has triggered calls from groups like Education Voters of Ohio for “a list of citations that suggest per-pupil funding does a better job than the evidence-based model in determining what an excellent education looks like.”

In response to such calls following is a list of some of the most recent and thoughtful pieces on the advantages of funds following the child:

1)    Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. This peer-reviewed document includes more than 30 separate studies at a cost of $6 million. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the studies involved an interdisciplinary team of more than 40 scholars including many of the country’s best known economists, policy analysts, lawyers, and specialists in school finance, instruction, and educational innovation.

2)    Creating a World-Class Education System in Ohio from Achieve, Inc. and McKinsey & Company. This report drew on a wide range of internationally recognized experts in education and specific best-practice examples from around the world.

3)    Fund the Child: Tackling Inequity and Antiquity in School Finance from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. This bipartisan manifesto on Weighted Student Funding was signed by 75 educators and policymakers from across the country, including three former U.S. Secretaries of Education, a former Secretary of the Treasury, a former Chief of Staff to President Clinton, and two former governors. This extraordinary coalition urged a “new method of funding our public schools - one that finally ensures the students who need the most receive it, that empowers school leaders to make key decisions, and that opens the door to public school choice.”

4)    An Integrated Approach to School Funding Reform in Ohio, a report of the School Funding Subcommittee of the Ohio State Board of Education, adopted by the full board in December 2008. This report from the Ohio State Board of Education provided recommendations to state policy makers for moving toward Weighted Student Funding in the Buckeye State.

5)    Fund the Child: Bringing Equity, Autonomy, and Portability to Ohio School Finance, by Public Impact and the University of Dayton School of Education and Allied Professions. This report provided a detailed plan for how the state of Ohio could move toward Weighted Student Funding. It was authored by leading school funding experts in Ohio (Professors Dan Raisch and Barbara DeLuca at the University of Dayton) and the Harvard-trained (and Rhodes Scholar) school funding expert Bryan Hassel of Public Impact.

6)    Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education they Need by William G. Ouchi. This book drew on the results of a landmark study of 223 schools in six cities, a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Ouchi and his research team discovered that the schools that consistently performed best also had the most decentralized management systems, in which autonomous principals—not administrators in central office—controlled school budgets and personnel hiring policies.

There isn’t much hope at the moment for meaningful, statewide education reform in the Buckeye State, but there are promising things happening at the local level. Last night, the Columbus City Schools’ teacher union approved a two-year contract that includes a new program to pay effective teachers more money to teach in low-performing schools and ties existing merit pay efforts to value-added data. Reports the Columbus Dispatch:

The agreement creates an annual $4,000 bonus for teachers selected to work in certain schools.

Superintendent Gene Harris would hand-pick teachers for classes identified as academically struggling based on testing data.

Teachers with at least five years of experience, two years of improving students’ academic achievement, and their principal’s recommendation would be eligible to apply for the new program, according to the tentative contract. The deadline is Dec. 1 for the 2010-11 school year.

The program would allow Harris to match teachers’ talents to schools’ needs, she said.

“I think it’s very exciting because individuals would have the opportunity to go into this and say, ‘I want to be a change agent,’  ” Harris said. “I would not be arbitrary on this. I want to make good decisions.”

The contract also ties an existing merit-pay program for teachers to “value-added” data. A class of students would have to show more academic progress than expected in a year’s time for their teacher to earn the merit bonus under the Performance Advancement System program.

It’s rare that an Ohio school district rewards teachers for performance or assigns its best teachers in its most struggling schools (though top charter schools have been doing this for years), so it’s quite encouraging to see the state’s largest district — and top-performing urban one — head in this direction.

The American Enterprise Institute is holding an event next Tuesday entitled, “Schoolhouses and Courthouses: Does Court-Driven School Reform Deliver?”

The focus? State court judges have used the “education clauses” of their state constitutions to deem education funding inadequate and force states to dedicate more dollars to it. Has increased funding led to commensurate gains in student achievement? If not, what would it take for these investments to deliver? Stanford University’s Eric A. Hanushek and Alfred A. Lindseth, a senior partner in the law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brenna, will discuss such questions. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, will respond. Our pal Rick Hess will moderate the chat.

You can find more event details on the AEI website.

This LA Times piece tells the story of American Indian Public Charter (and its two sibling schools) in the “hardscrabble flats of Oakland;” schools that are—according to the story’s provocative title—”spitting in the eye of mainstream education.” At the “small, no frills independent public schools,” it explains, students, nearly all of them poor, wear uniforms and are subject to order and discipline similar to that of a military school. Liberal orthodoxy is openly mocked and underperforming teachers are fired, the article says.

On a scale of one to 1,000 on California’s “Academic Performance Index,” which is used as a measuring tool for schools, American Indian Public Charter School scores 967, according to the piece, when the statewide average is below 750 and about 650 for schools with mostly low-income students.

The story goes into a lot more detail, so check it out. And if you’d like to dig even deeper to find out more about this school, check out David Whitman’s book “Sweating the Small Stuff.” Whitman dedicated nearly 30 pages to American Indian Public Charter as one of 6 highly-effective “paternalistic” schools he examined. It’s definitely an interesting read!

The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews dedicates his column today to discussing Checker’s new book “Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut,” in which Checker takes strong issue with the idea of universal preschool. Mathews says that leaders of the movement to expand preschool are “not going to like” the book, but that “its clarity and depth are hard to resist.” He reviews a few of Checker’s main points, disagreeing with him a bit at times. But Mathews concludes:

I haven’t seen enough preschools, good or bad, to decide if Finn is right. But his analysis is a good starting place. There has been much written about the benefits of universal preschool. This report will inspire much more, both positive and negative, and help those of us overwhelmed by conflicting data to figure out the essentials, and see the weaknesses on both sides of the debate.

And if you’re interested in reading more about this debate, Checker wrote an op-ed that ran in the Post  earlier this month.

Don’t forget to register for Fordham’s upcoming event, “The Cons and Pros of Universal Pre-K“, coming up on Thursday, June 4 from 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM. This event coincides with the release of Chester Finn’s new book, Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut. Prekindergarten is one of the most hotly contested topics in American education today. Finn’s book challenges the orthodoxy of “universal preschool” while explaining the key issues that drive and complicate this contentious debate: Which children really need preschool? How many aren’t getting it? Who should provide it—and at whose expense? What’s the right balance between socialization and systematic instruction between education and child care? Where does Head Start fit in? What are reliable markers of quality in preschool programs? Finn concludes by recommending a tightly targeted but intensive (and highly cognitive) approach to preschool for the neediest children. The discussants can be expected to take issue with that conclusion.

Finn will present.  Responding will be Steven Barnett (Co-Director, National Institute for Early Education Research), Neal McCluskey (Associate Director, Center for Educational Freedom, Cato Institute) and Sara Mead (Director, Early Education Initiative, New America Foundation).  Richard Colvin (Director, Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, Teachers College, Columbia University) will moderate.  We’ll convene at the Fordham Institute conference center (1016 16^th Street NW, 7^th Floor).

The first 70 guests will receive a free copy of the book!  To RSVP, please e-mail Christina Hentges at rsvp@edexcellence.net. Video of this event will be online after June 5.

The new “Condition of Education” report released today by the National Center for Education Statistics offers fresh evidence as to why some American kids need more and better preschooling but the “universal” approach is wrong. Fifty-five percent of three- and four-year-olds are already in preschool (2007), up from 47 percent in 1994 (See Indicator 1). Moreover, 33% of four-year-olds are proficient at “letter recognition” and 65% at “numbers and shapes” (See Indicator 3). Thirty-nine percent of four-year-olds are read to daily by a family member—and 50% are sung to (See Indicator 2). Not everybody, it seems clear, needs more than they’re already getting. But some do. Among kids in poverty, African-Americans and those whose parents have less than a high-school education, just one in five is read to at home on a daily basis. And proficient “letter recognition” among four-year-olds ranges from 52 percent for those with a parent who has some graduate education down to 16 percent among those with less-than-high-school-educated parents. This reinforces my contention that intensive but highly targeted pre-school services, starting very young, is what America needs more of; not more middle-class entitlements for those who are already doing okay.

Regarding Mike’s post below, I’m sure it depends on the type of reform. Firing practices certainly become more relevant in hard economic times, but on the other hand, standards-based reforms may fare better when there’s money to pay for them. As the Washington Post reports today, Virginia may join Florida and Georgia in cutting testing budgets:

[Virginia Superintendent Patricia I.] Wright said the $380,000 a year saved through elimination of the [third grade history] exam could be used to construct new kinds of questions for math tests, put fifth- and eighth-grade writing tests online and bolster elementary reading exams.

And Andy points out below that North Carolina is making a similar move, cutting back on tests not required “for high school graduation or by federal law.”

Budget woes would seem to give the anti-testing crowd an excuse they can use.

Back in early January, when the full scope of the Great Recession was just starting to become clear, and the stimulus bill was but a glimmer in President Obama’s eye, Checker Finn, Rick Hess, and I argued that bailing out local school districts would be a big mistake, because it would forestall opportunities for reform:

There’s scant evidence that an extra dollar invested in today’s schools delivers an extra dollar in value - and ample evidence that this kind of bail-out will spare school administrators from making hard-but-overdue choices about how to make their enterprise more efficient and effective...Education, then, cries out for a good belt-tightening. A truly tough budget situation would force and enable administrators to take those steps. They could rethink staffing, take a hard look at class sizes, trim ineffective personnel, shrink payrolls, consolidate tiny school districts, replace some workers with technology, weigh cost-effective alternatives to popular practices, reexamine statutes governing pensions and tenure, and demand concessions from the myriad education unions.

Kevin Carey, writing at Quick & the Ed, referred to that as the “school poverty gambit” and later the “Petrilli school bankruptcy theory of education reform.” And he demurred:

Underlying the larger argument is the idea that the public schools will implement a whole suite of needed reforms if only we can put them under sufficiently terrible financial stress. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that this will work...Are there any examples-any?-of a state or school district that has ever responded to a fiscal crisis with reforms that actually benefited students in the long run?

That’s a reasonable counter-argument. But I’ve suspected that, for example, if districts were forced to lay off teachers, and moved ahead with “last hired, first fired,” parents and citizens somewhere would rise up in revolt, and push to change that and other onerous policies. And guess what? It’s finally happening, in Seattle of all places. Columnist Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times describes the situation:

Maybe it was brought on by lean times. Or maybe long-simmering angst about the state of Seattle schools is finally boiling over on its own.

But the decision this month to lay off 165 of Seattle schools’ newest teachers in a “last hired, first fired” manner has got some of liberal Seattle suddenly sounding more like a conservative red state.

More than 600 school parents have signed an online petition, at supportgreatteachers.com, that calls out the teachers union for causing “great distress and upheaval” in the schools. At issue is the policy of choosing who gets laid off solely by seniority.

“Wake up and see how union refusal to consider merit is damaging the profession and our kids,” wrote one parent.

“We want the best teachers, not the oldest, teaching our kids,” wrote another.

“Teacher unions are an anachronism,” said another.

The organizers of the petition are a group of parents called Community and Parents for Public Schools. They agree what they’re doing is very un-Seattle.

Seattle! Now, this is hardly a national trend (yet!), and who knows if the parents will win this battle. (God bless ‘em, though.) But this is the beginning of something important.

I met with former American Enterprise Institute president Chris DeMuth yesterday, to interview him for a book project I’m starting, and he said something very interesting. Reform doesn’t happen because someone in a think tank somewhere writes a brilliant white paper, he argued. Reform almost always happens as a reaction to scandal. And oftentimes, the scandalous behavior has been going on for years, right out in the open, until suddenly it sparks a populist outrage.

Well, “last hired, first fired” is an outrage. It makes a mockery of meritocracy. It saps the energy from our youngest teachers, and rewards longevity over effectiveness. And it’s been sitting there for a long, long time. Maybe now is the time that it comes to be seen as the scandal it is, and maybe now is the time that it will spark the populist outrage necessary for reform.

Photograph by borman818 on Flickr

Robert Costrell, currently the “endowed chair of education accountability” in the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform (Jay Greene’s shop), and formerly an advisor to three Republican Massachusetts governors, weighs in on our ongoing debate about the meaning of the Bay State’s achievement gains in the face of a “strong union”:

Let me offer some comments as a State House participant in the Massachusetts ed reform battles in 1999-2006. I served Governors Cellucci, Swift, and Romney and worked closely with our Democratic counterparts. I have written about this experience in the past, and Mike Petrilli’s initial post was absolutely correct: the teacher unions were the largest obstacle to education reform in Massachusetts. In this post, let me add a bit more flesh to Mike’s point, and then try to advance the discussion with the further lessons drawn by Massachusetts’ ed reformers regarding the unfinished business in Massachusetts.

It is indisputable that the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) was the largest obstacle to implementing key elements of the reforms, most notably the MCAS exit exams, which were the main driver of Massachusetts’ success. Diane seems to minimize “the current effort to show that teachers’ unions were no help to education reform in Massachusetts,” as if this were some sort of recent revisionist history. But the “current” effort simply reiterates the well-documented history that was established at the time.  The fight against MCAS featured lawsuits, boycotts, demonstrations, and, most famously, the MTA’s $600,000 fear-mongering ad campaign (the ads showed a ticking clock with nervous students, despite the fact that the exams were untimed).

My own contribution to this history was solicited by Diane for her last annual Brookings conference, in 2004, and was published in her edited volume of the Brookings Papers on Education Policy, 2005, pp. 27-37. Tom Loveless’ lead article in that volume identified the unions and other organized interest groups as the major opponents to accountability, and how they had succeeded in state after state. My task was to explain how Massachusetts overcame the MTA-led opposition. At the time, Diane thought my piece was “great.” So I was surprised to read that the lesson Diane now draws from Massachusetts is that “unions do not block academic improvement.” Well, it was certainly not for lack of trying.

Now it is true, as Mike also points out, that the Massachusetts reforms did not meaningfully address tenure, bumping, differential pay, and the like. The 1993 reform law nominally eliminated tenure, but provisions inserted into the bill made it practically just as difficult to remove ineffective teachers as it had been before. So it is certainly reasonable to point out that the success that Massachusetts has enjoyed so far did not require these human resource reforms.

However, the lesson drawn from Massachusetts ed reformers was that these reforms would be required, if the success was to be extended to its failing schools, of which there are still quite a few. This is the knotty problem of “turnarounds.” The 1993 law did not establish an effective method for turning around failing schools, and this unfinished task occasioned considerable effort during the Romney administration. Governor Romney commissioned a blue ribbon panel to examine the issue, co-chaired by Bob Schwartz and Paul Grogan. Their recommendations included the expansion of principals’ powers to remove ineffective teachers from failing schools and to reshape those schools’ workforce. Bob and Paul—both lifelong Democrats (Bob was an advisor to Gov. Dukakis)—testified to the Legislature in support of Governor Romney’s legislation implementing these recommendations. However, the MTA succeeded in blocking the bill, and also Governor Romney’s succeeding bill in 2005 with more comprehensive reforms.

I have not kept up with all developments since I left Massachusetts in 2006 and a new governor took office. But I do know that Mass Insight—an important player in Massachusetts ed reform and currently a national leader in advancing turnaround strategies—is pushing the very type of personnel policies so vigorously opposed by the unions for its Gates- and Carnegie-funded turnaround initiative. True, we do not yet know if these policies will be effective in solving the very tough problem of failing schools. But those who have studied the issue in the context of Massachusetts believe they will improve the odds.

I have not addressed the social science debate in this post, despite the fact that I am an economist. But I was also in the policy arena, and this is the history that I—and many others—lived for those crucial years. In short, the lessons Diane draws from the Massachusetts history about the role of the unions is very different from the lessons drawn by those in both parties who fought the good fight in that state. That role was not benign.

The Massachusetts Miracle debate is back for its sixth round! Sol Stern returns to comment on other debaters’ points. If you’ve missed part or all of this back-and-forth about teachers unions and education reform, you can catch up on it. Here’s Sol:

Despite all of Jay Greene’s nit-picking, the fact remains that when Diane Ravitch presented her Finland and Massachusetts counterfactuals to rebut a widely held theory that teacher unions always depress student achievement, that was (contra to Jay’s assertion) not the equivalent of presenting a full blown alternative theory of her own. I don’t see Diane giving speeches, writing op eds, running to editorial boards, to press a theory that unions never do anything foolish or counterproductive. On the other hand I do see many in the school reform movement doing exactly that to press their claim that wherever we have public schools, unions are out there undermining reform and depressing student achievement. And they have been immensely successful, as any reading of the New York Post and other media outlets will attest. All Diane was saying to the school reformers is give us better proof  (other than Caroline Hoxby’s lone study) to support such an extreme claim and show us specifically how unions depressed student achievement in two of their strongest bastions — i.e. Massachusetts and Finland. I dispute Jay’s claim that good social scientists don’t do exactly that on a wide range of research and policy questions. I also don’t agree with Jay that there are no studies at all that come to more benign conclusions about the effect of unionization on student achievement. If we continue this dialogue I will offer some cites.

I must say, though, that I loved Stuart Buck’s ingenious defense of the Greene-Hoxby thesis — to wit that “achievement in Massachusetts and Finland might be even better without a powerful union protecting bad teachers from being fired.” Yes, Stuart, and graduates of MIT and Cal Tech might be even better mathematicians if their professors didn’t have tenure — but I wouldn’t suggest this as the greatest argument for the theory that tenure for college professors is bad for students.

In March, President Obama told a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter that “the number of children going to the Cleveland Public Schools who are actually prepared to go to college (is) probably one out of seven or eight or ten. And that’s just not acceptable. It’s not acceptable for them. It’s not acceptable in terms of America’s future. And so we’ve got to experiment with ways to provide a better education experience for our kids, and some charters are doing outstanding jobs.”

This week, the woman hired to run the Cleveland Metropolitan School District’s Office of New and Innovative Schools, Leigh McGuigan , was dismissed from her post less than a year after starting her job because she was pushing too hard for reform . The types of reform she was pushing, in a district that has been battling Dayton for the title of lowest performing district in the state for decades, are exactly those being called for by the President and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Specifically, close the most dysfunctional schools, reach out to high quality charters and have them open new schools, work with innovative STEM schools, and partner wherever and whenever possible with organizations that have a legitimate shot at turning around dysfunctional schools.

McGuigan’s sense of urgency was spot on when one considers that almost half of the children attending Cleveland district schools are enrolled in a school the state rated “F” in 2008 . Sadly, Cleveland is following the trend in Ohio, which is not to innovate or seek new solutions, but to simply beg for more money to do more of the same. Hopefully, the federal government will draw a line in the sand and not distribute “Race to the Top ” dollars to states, like Ohio, that are resisting the very reforms that the president himself is calling for.

Sara Mead’s thoughtful blog post responding to my Washington Post op ed is several hundred words longer than my original piece. Mead is smart and perceptive, however, in addition to wordy. Once she actually gets her hands on the book (Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut) on which my op ed was based—due back from the printer in a few days and meanwhile available in pdf form—she will, I think, find that I actually do heed the “factual” points she makes. Perhaps the only fundamental on which we disagree (and it’s indeed fundamental) is whether “universal” pre-K is the right goal for American public policy. But the more interesting area of semi-disagreement concerns the markers and criteria of “quality” in the early-childhood field. Mead acknowledges that the field relies overmuch on input measures and should pay greater heed to learning outcomes. She’s got that right; indeed, that’s one of the book’s major thrusts. But then she more-or-less exonerates the field for this oversight with the lame excuse that preschool programs are so egregiously underfunded that they must worry about inputs before they can afford to worry about results. That’s mostly wrong. Some programs are doubtless underfunded but in the NCLB era they’re going to have trouble making the case for additional resources unless they demonstrate their seriousness about school readiness and other outcomes. And some of the worst offenders—Head Start, for example—aren’t underfunded at all, yet are profoundly resistant to being judged on their school-readiness results. This is a conversation worth continuing, however. I’m looking forward to a face-to-face version of it at our upcoming panel discussion of my book and delighted  that Sara will be on that panel.

Students at Dayton View Academy walk silently through the school halls.

One thing that sets apart Fordham from other education think tanks is our sponsorship of charter schools in Ohio . This week I’ve had the opportunity to tour two of these schools in Dayton, Dayton View Academy and Dayton Academy , as well as two charters sponsored by other institutions. Talking with the students, teachers and administrators and seeing them in action has been a good reminder that beyond all the education policy talk in Washington, there are real people living, learning and trying to make a difference. Here are photographs of a few of the students I met.

(To learn more about Dayton and its education challenges, I recommend reading this interesting Dayton Daily News opinion piece by Terry Ryan, Fordham’s vice president for Ohio programs and policy.)

Dayton Academy students Chloe Tate (left) and RaeAunna Curlett (right) demonstrate how to use EdPAD portable computers.

Lunchtime at Dayton Academy

Listening to the teacher at The Dayton Early College Academy (DECA).

Dayton Academy

Fifth-grade students at Dayton Academy collaborate on a worksheet.

DECA Principal Judy Hennessey hugs a student who just found out she won a college scholarship.

National Standards in Other Nations from Education Gadfly on Vimeo .

This panel discussion on national education standards across the world was sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute at our "International Lessons About National Standards" even on Tuesday, May 5, 2009.

Panelists:

William Schmidt, University Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of the Education Policy Center, Michigan State University

Sigrid Blömeke, Full Professor, Humboldt University of Berlin and National Research Coordinator, TEDS-M and MT21

John Hayton, Counsellor (Education) and Director, Australian Education International-North America, Embassy of Australia, Washington, DC (Australia)

Doo-Jung Kim, Professor of Education, Chungnam National University (Korea) and past President, Korean Society for Curriculum Studies

Moderated by: Ben Wildavsky, Senior Fellow, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Late last week, the Coalition for Student Achievement released Smart Options: Investing the Recovery Funds for Student Success. This document, developed following a convening of more than 30 K-12 national education leaders, including state and district superintendents, was sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. The document provides states with five “big ideas” for investing one-time federal recovery funds that can lay “the groundwork for real student improvement for decades to come.”

Using the Smart Options recommendations as benchmarks, the chart below compares the five recommendations from Smart Options to policies proposed in the pending Ohio budget bill, which was passed late last month by the state House of Representatives and incorporates billions in federal stimulus dollars:

< means Smart Options and Ohio’s budget are closely aligned

> means Smart Options and Ohio’s budget are partially aligned

= means Smart Options and Ohio’s budget are far apart