From the Washington Post:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is proposing a contract that would give mid-level teachers who are paid $62,000 yearly the opportunity to earn more than $100,000—but they would have to give up seniority and tenure rights, two union members familiar with the negotiations said yesterday.

Union members

said teachers are opposed to giving up seniority and tenure, no matter the size of their raise, and probably would reject such a proposal.

“You may be trading off your future, your tenure, your job security,” a union member said. “When you trade that, it seems to me you’re not getting much.”

Rhee, who declined to comment yesterday because of the ongoing negotiations, has said she wants a contract that would “revolutionize education as we know it.” She also has said she wants to improve instruction by ensuring that the District “has the most highly compensated and competent” teachers in the country.

Education experts who follow teacher contract issues said that D.C. teachers would be among the highest-paid educators in the nation under Rhee’s plan and that a proposal eliminating seniority and tenure would be groundbreaking.

Checker takes to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages to communicate to Ohioans this message: Wake up.

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

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

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

Speaking of Florida, former Governor Jeb Bush is convening at Disney World today his Excellence in Action education summit. (Aside: For more on past summits of a different sort, read this fine piece from the Weekly Standard.) Ron Matus at the St. Pete Times evaluates how Florida’s education reforms are perceived throughout the country.

Diane Ravitch, Fordham board member and peerless education commenter, writes:

I find myself getting really annoyed when people rage against the teachers’ unions, because they are the organized voice of most of the people who work in schools. The same people who vilify the teachers’ unions never complain about the influence of businesses or foundations, both of which try to steer the public schools by the power of the purse.

It all comes down to whether schools should serve adults or children. Business interests are aligned with producing schools that serve children—they want well-educated students who will eventually become well-educated workers. (It’s true, though, that business-minded school reformers sometimes forget about the importance of curriculum and instruction.) On the other hand, the interests of teachers’ unions directly compete in oh-so-many obvious ways with the interests of students. Furthermore, unions may technically be “the organized voices of most of the people who work in schools,” but they hardly represent the interests of all teachers—especially disadvantaged by union policies are young teachers and good teachers.

What business mostly wants: results-based education, standards, accountability, innovative management, choice, educational markets. What unions mostly want: more money, more teachers (smaller classes), less testing, less focus on educational outcomes. Oversimplification? Slightly (it is a blog post, after all). But mostly true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greg Toppo’s story in USA Today about the rift between two segments of left-leaning education types is noteworthy. Education has for some lengthy period been relegated to the outskirts of political conversation, and it’s refreshing to see it command a little spotlight, however briefly. The story, summed up, is this: Al Sharpton (”a political gadfly,” writes Toppo) and Joel Klein have teamed up to do right by poor and minority children, and part of their agenda might run afoul of teachers’ unions, which have traditionally been partners of civil rights organizations and personalities such as Sharpton. What does Randi Weingarten think about it?

“Too often what happens is that when people get into this, they blame all the people who have been toiling in this field without the resources and without the public focus on it,” she said. “It’s like saying that those of us who have been frontierspeople in this fight for equity for the last 50 years are the ones who should be faulted, as opposed to saying, ‘We’ll join you ready for duty—what can we do to help?’”  

The above is called peevish whining. Weingarten is scandalized, it seems, that some are not ready to “join” her and would rather put forth ideas of their own. But what are Weingarten’s ideas other than sound bites and continuation of the failed status quo? And what does Richard Kahlenberg think about it all?

Education historian Richard Kahlenberg said that while unions’ and civil rights groups’ interests “are usually aligned,” this isn’t the first time they’ve clashed. “It’s been an uneasy alliance over the years.”

Kahlenberg, the author of a recent biography on legendary American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker, said a deep rift between the groups “would be disastrous—these are two groups that are essential to the fight for equal opportunity in society, and more narrowly ... both groups have an interest in making sure schools are properly funded. So to declare war on the teacher unions, I think, would be a huge mistake.”

Kahlenberg’s claim that the interests of teachers’ unions and civil right’s groups “are usually aligned” deserves scrutiny. That was true in the 1960s, but what about today? Sure, both entities are left-leaning and want to see Democratic politicians in power, but what about their core interests and missions? Civil rights groups, as they’re generally and basically understood, are organizations that seek to obtain equal opportunities for black people; many of their leaders believe that the education of today’s young blacks is, in fact, the seminal modern civil rights struggle. Those who claim that teachers’ unions support this goal, that they work on behalf of equal opportunities for black students, are, I think, misguided—at best, a mountain of evidence lies between their claim and the truth.

The education alliance between our friends on the left is uneasy: one faction believes educational progress can come only from the type of innovation that the teachers’ unions stymie, and another faction supports the unions and ascribes k-12’s failures to broken homes, broken hospitals, broken neighborhoods, and broken societies. If the quotes Toppo garnered from Weingarten and Kahlenberg are representative of the level of thought that the latter group is proffering, if this is indicative of the quality of the latter group’s goals, then in this disagreement—I can’t believe I’m writing this—Al Sharpton’s is truly the side of ideas.

Some good news from Boston.

It’s true—it’s tough to predict the future. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should be content to let the progression of technology sweep us up and take us where it may. A strong argument can be made, for example, that books, regardless of whether they can be rendered “obsolete” in a decade, deserve to be taught and protected and cherished. My friend Coby is more sympathetic to industry’s and technology’s whims than I am. He has more confidence that it will do the “right” thing, largely, I think, because Coby is reticent to call one educational path “right” and another “wrong” (though he may disagree with that assessment). Others, however, are less shy about ascribing judgements to change, recognizing it isn’t always positive, and airing their concerns about the direction in which, say, education is heading.

On another note, Coby nails it here.

I don’t know, Liam, what will be the “quality” of the coming decades’ progress. Nor, do I think, does Bauerlein. That’s why I asked, “How can he can plausibly say, utterly ignorant of how the world will look even ten years from now, whether this uncharted future of human cognition will improve or degrade our lives?”

Indeed, the very point of the little river metaphor that sparked your reservations is that, lacking much insight into the standards and mores of the future, we can’t very well judge the quality of progress.

The last paragraph of Coby’s latest post, directly below, contains this: “But once they’re washed downriver by the unyielding tide of technological progress, they’ll sound as quaint as Socrates’ reminiscences about the days before writing.” Progress has both a quantitative and qualitative definition, and one wonders if Coby doesn’t concentrate overmuch on the former.

I still don’t like the snarky title of Mark Bauerlein’s new book on how technology is blunting our reading and comprehension skills, but a recent piece in the Atlantic persuades me that he’s at least right to claim that computers are changing how we think.

What’s really great about the article, though, is that writer Nicholas Carr seriously wrestles with the question of what these changes mean for individuals and for society:

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful”.... Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom)....

Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.

Indeed, what makes Bauerlein’s arguments so difficult to stomach is that the state of affairs he bemoans cannot fairly be judged in the context of a static today; on the contrary, we must consider how it will shape us in the ever-changing and unknowable tomorrow. Bauerlein is almost surely right that technology makes us think differently. But can he really say it makes us “dumber” when his operating definition of that word is rooted in the economic, cultural, and political realities of bygone eras? How can he can plausibly say, utterly ignorant of how the world will look even ten years from now, whether this uncharted future of human cognition will improve or degrade our lives?

On the other hand, how can you not be persuaded by the romantic paean to old-school, know-thyself deep thinking with which Carr closes the piece?

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

These sentences, however, aren’t intrinsically seductive. Almost certainly they appeal to Bauerlein’s generation, and they’re even likely to sweep up a good chunk of twenty-somethings. But once they’re washed downriver by the unyielding tide of technological progress, they’ll sound as quaint as Socrates’ reminiscences about the days before writing.

Photo by Flickr user tmartin.

With the release of every new education report, it seems, we hear from commentators that the findings are promising but certainly do not constitute a “silver bullet” or a “panacea” for k-12’s problems. No longer. This sounds like a bonafide silver bullet to me.

Did you know the Flypaper bloggers do other stuff during the day, in addition to blogging? We do. Ed policy research, charter sponsorship in Ohio, the weekly Education Gadfly newsletter, and more. You can see it all at the Fordham Institute website, edexcellence.net, which has just received a handsome makeover.

Monday’s Washington Post had a fascinating article on new research showing the impact of social networks on smoking. (The research team previously completed a study showing the impact of social networks on obesity.)

In a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the team found that a person’s decision to kick the habit is strongly affected by whether other people in their social network quit—even people they do not know. And, surprisingly, entire networks of smokers appear to quit virtually simultaneously.

Taken together, these studies and others are fueling a growing recognition that many behaviors are swayed by social networks in ways that have not been fully understood. And it may be possible, the researchers say, to harness the power of these networks for many purposes, such as encouraging safe sex, getting more people to exercise or even fighting crime.

“What all these studies do is force us to start to kind of rethink our mental model of how we behave,” said Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist. “Public policy in general treats people as if they are sort of atomized individuals and puts policies in place to try to get them to stop smoking, eat right, start exercising or make better decisions about retirement, et cetera. What we see in this research is that we are missing a lot of what is happening if we think only that way.”

This is hardly news to education researchers, who have long known about powerful “peer” effects in the classroom. A strong indicator of how a student will perform is how his or her classmates perform. But perhaps this networking idea could be taken in interesting new directions. Could social networks be harnessed to encourage more high school students to take challenging courses? Could teachers’ networks be used to get more of them to engage in teaching methods that work? And could parents’ networks be tapped to encourage more of them to engage in helpful “parental involvement” en masse: showing up for teacher-parent conferences, checking on their children’s homework, taking their kids on college visits, filling out financial aid forms, etc.?

The theory is simple but striking: if everyone in your social group starts a new behavior, you’re more likely to follow suit. I speak from personal experience; why do you think those of us at Fordham finally started blogging?

Photo from Flickr user nirbhao.

Eduwonk Andy Rotherham is a business-minded fellow, and yesterday he made the point that as districts downsize, schools close, and some teachers (maybe) lose their jobs, public education will bear the same trials that globalization has brought to many businesses. He writes, “like trade it’s impossible to roll back these forces over time, and even if we could, the benefits of a more customized and performance oriented school system outweigh the costs.”

The benefits of a customized and performance oriented school system definitely outweigh the costs. But it is most certainly not impossible in k-12 education “to roll back these forces over time.” K-12 education is still largely a government-run and government-provided enterprise. Unlike most private companies, which either compete effectively against their competitors or shutter their stores, America’s schools can continue indefinitely and blissfully their assembly line production of poorly educated pupils. Also, think about the farm bill, which has lately been in the news. If bureaucrats will go to such lengths to protect from competition certain inefficient private industries, imagine the lengths they could conceivably go to protect a government industry—k-12 ed—that doesn’t feel nearly the competitive pressure that do, say, sugar and corn production.

As both Checker and Andy said last night at Fordham, education reformers have done much, much good over the past 25 years. Widespread talk about accountability and standards and school performance was not occurring in the 1980s. But continued progress, while probable, is not inevitable. The Regs and Randis of the world are still here. Eduwonk writes that our current education debate “pretty clearly puts on the table the question of whether school systems are educational programs or job programs.” Reg and Randi are with the latter, and they’re willing and able to fight for it.

Photo by Flickr user lhoon.

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.

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.

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?

Although details are still murky, this plan out of Denver, inspired by Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 and New York’s New Visions for Public Schools, seems promising.

The key here will be to keep these schools sufficiently insulated from district regulations. It’s unclear whether they’ll be charter schools, contract schools, private schools, or some hybrid thereof. But as long as they’re truly free to experiment with non-traditional schooling methods—e.g., extended learning time, college-prep culture, rigorous curricula, no-nonsense discipline, variable teacher pay—these schools could make a real impact in the Mile High City.

It’s great to see these bureaucracy-busting approaches catching on around the country.

Photo by Flickr user stevenm_61.

Clay Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and a Harvard business professor, is coming out with a new book that’s sure to create a buzz in the K-12 space, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Its headline-grabbing assertion is that by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught online. (At least that’s the thrust of this Ed Week article, which provides a nice overview.) Christensen thinks that this development is a good thing, and his arguments will surely spark a debate about the merits (and demerits) of online learning. (He also thinks that online innovation will come from outside the traditional public education system—which is almost surely true, though this view might hurt his speaking tour potential.)

But it’s his conception of “nonconsumers” that has me most intrigued. In The Innovator’s Dilemma, he explained how a litany of products (such as transistor radios) appealed to people who couldn’t afford other mainstream products at the time. Upstart companies succeeded not by stealing market share from other companies, but by selling to people (nonconsumers) who weren’t in the market to begin with. Now he applies that theory to education. As explained in Ed Week:

New providers are stepping forward to serve students that mainline education does not serve, or serve well, the authors write. Those students, which the book describes as K-12 education’s version of “nonconsumers,” include those lacking access to Advanced Placement courses, needing alternatives to standard classroom instruction, homebound or home-schooled students, those needing to make up course credits to graduate—and even prekindergarten children. By addressing those groups, providers such as charter schools, companies catering to home schoolers, private tutoring companies, and online-curriculum companies have developed their methods and tapped networks of students, parents, and teachers for ideas.

It’s fun to think about other ways to apply this “nonconsumers” idea to the education space. My favorite: instead of competing directly with traditional public high schools that provide classes from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., why doesn’t someone offer classes from 5:00 p.m. to midnight? No one is “consuming” a high school education during that time (save for doing homework). Surely many teenagers would prefer learning at night, online, over pulling themselves out of bed at 7:00 a.m. and dealing with the many little indignities of high school life. These teens could work a job during the day, or volunteer, or do internships.

What other “nonconsumers” could new education providers reach?

P.S. The Philanthropy Roundtable website has an article by Christensen about his education ideas, a response from Gisele Huff of the Jaquelin Hume Foundation, and another from Dennis Cheek of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, all worth reading.

Coby’s latest spark—that students (or their parents) who rated their teachers online could provide useful feedback—is intriguing. He’s right that such k-12 rating websites exist (see here) but haven’t reached a critical mass of users. Even if they did, though, the whole idea has a major drawback: This.

What is fair criticism and what is insult? What is fair moderating and what is censorship? Do we really want to inject more of this legal mish-mash into the school day?

Ed school professor Brad Olsen writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that “we don’t much hear from, or about, teachers’ experiences in—and perspectives on—what’s happening in schools these days.” Really? Just yesterday we published in The Gadfly this item, about a teacher who thinks “unconditional love” is the solution to k-12 education’s human capital problem. Lots and lots of newspaper articles about education feature quotes from, and the perspectives of, educators. 

Certainly education policy could learn more from the best practices of the best teachers, and certainly more avenues should be available for just that type of exchange. But instead of hearing from teachers in that way, it seems, we’re always hearing from those who “represent” them—e.g., the unions and ed schools, neither of which toils on behalf of kids.

As the world awaits the education X PRIZE, the folks at PETA prove that the X PRIZE Foundation isn’t the only group that can offer rewards for innovative solutions to pressing problems.