Amidst the Race to the Top excitement this week, an important story may have gotten lost in the buzz. On Wednesday, my colleague Jamie Davies O’Leary, a 27 year-old Princeton grad, liberal Democrat, and Teach For America alumna described her surprise bookshop encounter with former Weatherman and lefty school reformer Bill Ayers.

[Ayers] answered a young woman’s question about New York Teaching Fellows and Teach For America with a diatribe about how such programs can’t fix public education and consist of a bunch of ivy leaguers and white missionaries more interested in a resume boost than in helping students. Whoa.

And:

As someone who read Savage Inequalities years ago and attribute my decision to become a teacher partially to the social justice message, I almost felt embarrassed. But that was before I learned a bit of context, nuance, data, and evidence surrounding education policy debates. It’s as if Bill Ayers hasn’t been on the planet for the last two decades.

Almost as soon as Jamie’s essay was posted, the Klonsky brothers (Fred and Mike—both longtime friends and associates of Ayers, both involved in progressive education causes) went after her. Fred posted a missive titled, “File under misguided sense of one’s own importance.”  Mike tweeted that her depiction of the encounter was a “fantasy.”

What Ayers and the Klonsky crew don’t seem to understand is that Jamie and the rest of TFA Nation are, by and large, their ideological soul mates—their progressive progeny, if you will. Here’s a group of young, idealistic, politically liberal people trying to “shake up the system” to address inequality and the lack of social justice in our nation.

Granted, when Ayers and company tried to shake things up, they wanted to bring down society’s power structures themselves (with real bombs, no less). The TFA types, I’m surmising, mostly accept America’s form of democratic capitalism as it is, but want poor and minority kids to have a shot at succeeding within it. You can call that misguided or even naïve, but it’s a respectable position, and reflects the world the TFAers have grown up in. America in the 90s and 2000s—when Jamie and her peers came of age—was a very different place than America in the 60s and 70s: less racist, more meritocratic. Not perfect, but much improved.

Here’s my guess: if Bill Ayers and Fred and Mike Klonsky were 22 again, they would be signing up for Teach For America, volunteering to work in America’s toughest schools, going on to start charter schools and “shake up” the system. Bill, Fred, and Mike: today’s young Turks aren’t your enemy. They are you.

-Mike Petrilli

We’re days away from learning the names of the Race to the Top finalists. Most governors will be thrilled if they make it through the first round. But what about Charlie Crist of Florida and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana?

As this perceptive Atlantic article points out, GOP governors are in a bit of a pickle when it comes to accepting stimulus funds (or not). Crist, of course, is in a tight primary race with Tea Party hero Marco Rubio, who has attacked him for praising the stimulus. Jindal, on the other hand, is trying to court the Tea Party types by turning down parts of stimulus funding.

So if Florida and Louisiana make it through to the champions’ round (as most pundits expect), how will these governors react? Will Crist celebrate bringing home the bacon, or be forced to tread lightly? Will Jindal fly to Washington to help make the pitch for the Bayou State, even though he’s “against” the stimulus?

You know what they say, sometimes it’s possible to lose by winning.

Update: The Gradebook at the St. Pete Times weighs in (and with a great headline too).

-Mike Petrilli

“This is the best opportunity we have had to have really substantial change in how we meet the educational needs of our kids. Congress would love to go home and say, ‘We fixed No Child Left Behind.’”
—Rep. George Miller, D-California

“Lawmakers to launch bipartisan effort to rewrite No Child Left Behind,” Washington Post

$731 million
The proposed cut to Virginia’s education spending over the next 2 ½ years.

“Deep cuts to Va. schools, social services proposed,” The Associated Press

Clipping Arne Duncan's sails?

Maybe it’s because I live in Washington and am thus immersed in the daily political horse-race (who’s up? who’s down?), but it’s hard not to get the sense right now that the Democrats are in free fall. Evan Bayh’s retirement is like a major aftershock to the earthquake that was Scott Brown’s election. Now there’s talk about the GOP taking over both houses of Congress in the fall, and of a primary challenge to President Obama in 2012.

To be sure, a month from now, and certainly six months from now, lots could change, and we might be talking about an Obama-led Democratic resurgence. If unemployment starts coming down, Americans’ optimism starts to go up, and Republicans start sounding like extremists again, this situation could flip once more.

That said, this tumultuous political environment is bound to affect all policy areas, including education. At a time when the Tea Party, anti-big-government, pro-Sarah Palin types have the momentum, it’s hard to imagine Congress embracing another Washington-knows-best, let’s-fix-our-schools-from-the-shores-of-the-Potomac approach to ESEA like it did with the No Child Left Behind Act (or even with last year’s stimulus). It’s also easy to picture conservative politicians demagoguing the “national testing issue,” like Texas Governor Rick Perry has been doing so effectively.

It’s often noted that No Child Left Behind was passed only after 9/11 and the anthrax scare, with both parties in Congress wanting to show the world that America could still do business and get things done. But that’s not all; the energy behind NCLB came from the late 1990s, when peace and prosperity reigned and confidence in government was much higher than it is today. Those conditions have changed; reformers who think the Congress–or the public–is in the mood for anything as audacious as NCLB just aren’t paying attention.

Arne Duncan often talks about “transforming” our education system; expect his rhetoric to get a lot more measured in the months to come.

(Photograph by David Jakes from Flickr)

–Mike Petrilli

Today is budget day; all of Washington is abuzz. The U.S. Department of Education’s budget details are here. What to make of them?

I hate to disappoint readers who enjoy a real slashing of the Administration, but the budget is pretty good. Very good, actually.

• • There’s more money for charter schools, for example, and in a manner that will allow dollars to flow to authorizers* and networks of schools, not just individual school start-ups.
• • There’s LOTS more money for innovative pay programs for teachers and principals, including merit pay.
• • And big formula funds are either level-funded (including Title I) or reduced (including the Teacher Quality State Grant, which would take a $500 million hit). That’s smart because additional dollars in those formula programs don’t make a bit of difference in terms of driving reform, while well-designed competitive programs can leverage a lot of change.

To be sure, I’m not gaga over all of it. The new money for Race to the Top is surely premature, and I agree with Andy that additional funds for school turnarounds will mostly be wasted. But still, let’s be honest: this is an education budget that a Whole Foods Republican could love.

* Our sister organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, authorizes schools in Ohio. Though, for the record, I’d be strongly opposed to taking federal money, even for this worthy enterprise!

-Mike Petrilli

On primary-secondary education, as on most topics, Mr. Obama stayed at 30,000 feet. The main themes he sounded, however, are fine: use federal education dollars to reward success, not failure; apply Arne Duncan’s “race to the top” reform priorities to the mega-bucks Elementary/Secondary Education Act; and keep a “competitive” element in this rather than simply distributing dollars via formula. All extremely hard to do but all worth doing.

Later in the evening, his deputy chief of staff got a bit more specific on the White House blog. She reported that:

The President’s 2011 budget supports a new framework for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that will foster innovation, reward excellence, and promote reform in our schools, as well as invests an additional $1.35 billion to continue the historic Race to the Top program to open it up to districts in order to spur innovation and additional progress. At the same time, the Administration is moving to consolidate ineffective policies and practices. The President’s Budget eliminates six programs and consolidates 38 others into 11 new programs that emphasize using competition to allocate funds, giving communities more choices around activities, and using rigorous evidence to fund what works.

Four points here bear noting:

1. Despite the proclaimed “freeze” on federal discretionary spending, education is going to continue to get lots more money than pre-Obama. It’s apparently being “frozen” at record high levels. (During the current school year, experts estimate, Uncle Sam is bearing 15 percent of the nation’s K-12 costs, dramatically up from the historic average of 9 percent.)
2. The administration doesn’t want to let reform-minded school districts miss out on Race to the Top funding just because their states are recalcitrant dinosaurs in the grip of teacher unions,etc. So they’re going to try something unusual: channeling dollars AROUND the states and directly to districts. This is probably good for education reform but almost certainly bad for the 10th Amendment.
3. It seems they ARE moving forward this year, as Duncan has hinted, to reauthorize “No Child Left Behind“, aka the Elementary/Secondary Education Act, seeking to make major changes in it–and to get bipartisan support in doing this. One can only wish them well, but reworking this monstrously complex statute is apt to prove almost as challenging as health care–and by the time Congress is done it could come out as badly.
4. Every president in memory has tried to eliminate and consolidate dumb education programs in the name of efficiency, economy and effectiveness. Few of those efforts have succeeded on Capitol Hill–and those that did have been undone within a few years. Everybody knows the federal government has way too many separate “categorical” programs that accomplish exactly nothing other than spending money. But this tar baby is mighty sticky.

-Checker Finn

Picture by richkidsunite from Flickr

Ed Week’s Michele McNeil broke the news last week that Arne Duncan has decided not to release the names of the “Race to the Top” reviewers–until after the competition is over and grants have been announced. Rick Hess has been all over this (here and here), which forced a bloggy response from Duncan and made Eduwonk Andy schizophrenic.

The Department of Education won't tell who's reviewing the "Race to the Top" applications.

Here’s my advice, Mr. Secretary: release the names, release everything, and right away. Here’s why: sooner or later, you’re going to get a dreaded call from the White House, probably from Rahm Emanuel himself. He’s going to say something like, “Look, Arne, we understand that all of the first-round grants are going to red states, and that’s a problem.” Or, maybe this fall, when the second round of grants are due, “Look, Arne, our friend Ted Strickland is locked in a tough re-election race, and we really need him in place for 2012. We understand that, legally, the review panels are just advisory; that you as Secretary have the discretion to fund anyone you want. So…can you help?”

And if you’ve released everything–the applications themselves, the names of the reviewers, all of the instructions given to the panels, etc.–then the whole policy community will be able to see for ourselves which states most deserve the money. There will be some close calls, for sure. But if a state with a mediocre (or worse) application gets the money, we’ll know there’s been funny business. And then you can say:

“Rahm, I hear you, but it’s clear as day to everyone that [State X] doesn’t deserve to get the money. If we do this, it will be obvious, and be seen as transparently political. It will engulf the President in a huge scandal. There’s just no way around it.”

Release the names, publish all the nitty gritty details, and buy yourself some insurance. Trust me, this kind of stuff happens.

-Mike Petrilli

Photograph by Flowery *L*u*z*a* from Flickr

Just 24 hours ago I wrote about the news that President Obama will propose to freeze discretionary spending in his State of the Union address tonight. While word had leaked that education would be exempt, I reasoned that k-12 schools still wouldn’t see much of an increase in an era of tight budgets.

Well, never mind. Today the Washington Postreports that schools will receive a $4 billion boost, including one billion to aide with the overhaul of No Child Left Behind. (HT to MW.) I guess Eduwonk Andy was right: the $110 billion of education stimulus money wasn’t enough to bribe the education groups into going along with a reform proposal; they needed to add a few more billion into the kitty too. (Though Andy now wonders if $4 billion is enough; come on, Andy, these groups can up the ante without your help!)

You can be sure of two things: when it comes to education funding, Congress will do whatever it wants to do, and the education groups will scream that they still want more.

-Mike Petrilli

Well that didn’t take long. Just a few weeks ago the conventional wisdom was that federal education spending would go up, up, up forever. (After all, it went up 50 percent in just one year.) Then Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat, giving us a glimpse of the new New Normal, defined by a big populist backlash to big government and big spending. And now* President Obama, reading the Tea Party leaves, is changing course and proposing a three-year discretionary spending freeze. It’s not entirely clear yet whether education spending will be frozen too, but it certainly implies the end to astronomic increases.**

Frozen, like Obama's spending plan

Eduwonk Andy bemoans this development, as he thinks it will make it that much harder to pass a strong ESEA reauthorization bill, since education interest groups are used to being bribed in return for reform. Sure, it will complicate things on the Left; but Andy, remember, once upon a time laws passed Congress with support from Democrats and Republicans; no doubt this will help on the Right. (Plus the education groups have already been bribed with the $110 billion education stimulus.)

But if federal education spending does plateau, it will mean that local school districts–facing huge shortfalls now that the housing bust is translating into lower property tax collections–need to face the music and figure out how to do more with less. Their leaders might want to give these papers and video–from our recent A Penny Saved conference–a good look.

* Though the timing of his proposal seems calculated to respond to the Brown upset, if this is the policy spelled out in his FY 2011 budget, it must have been decided long ago–by Thanksgiving at the latest–because it touches on the detailed budgets of almost every domestic agency, and that stuff takes months to develop.

** A reader pointed me to this Wall Street Journal article, which reports: “Administration officials said the cap won’t be imposed across the board. Some areas would see cuts while others, including education and investments related to job creation, would realize increases.” Still, I’ll be surprised if there’s room for BIG education increases when he’s trying to hold the line on domestic spending overall.

UPDATE: Alyson Klein turns in a great overview of the news at Ed Week’s Politics K12. As she points out, the President can propose a spending freeze but Congress doesn’t have to go along with it.

(Photograph by Chewonki Semester School from Flickr)

-Mike Petrilli

That’s the title of my editorial in the brand-new Education Gadfly. You might give it a look, though discerning readers will notice that it pulls heavily from Wednesday’s Flypaper post, as well as this one (from over the holidays). Let me spare you the suspense and get right to the point:

Scott Brown’s remarkable victory in Tuesday’s special election has turned American politics upside-down, and is already reshaping debates around health care, energy, and spending. But might it also foreshadow a major shift on federal education reform?

Up until Monday night, it seemed likely that Uncle Sam’s role in education would continue to grow larger ad infinitum. With states desperate for cash, the feds capable of borrowing it from China, and the apparent success of the Race to the Top in pushing a broad reform agenda, a new era of federal dominance in education appeared to be upon us.

But…

The odds of an ever-expanding federal role are a whole lot lower today than they were last week. That’s because Brown’s election could be the leading edge of a widespread backlash to big government, and in particular big, costly federal government. And federal education spending–and the prescriptive, top-down Washington-knows-best rules that tend to come along with it–could become a big fat target for wanna-be Representatives and Senators looking to ride taxpayer anger into office.

Which, as I explain, wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Read the whole thing here.

-Mike Petrilli

Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts last night jolted the political world, and may spell the end for President Obama’s health care legislation. But Flypaper readers want to know: what are the edu-implications? My take is this: before yesterday it seemed conceivable, even likely, that the federal role in education would continue to grow indefinitely. With states desperate for cash, the feds capable of borrowing it from China, and the apparent success of the Race to the Top in pushing a broad reform agenda, a new era of federal dominance in education seemed to be upon us. It appeared quite possible that within a few years the federal share of education spending could go up to 20 or even 30 percent, and lots of strings would come along with it.

All of that might still happen; the states are going to remain broke for the foreseeable future, and the public isn’t keen on seeing class sizes rise or their favorite teachers laid off. But if Brown’s election represents a widespread backlash to big government, and in particular big, costly federal government, then this expanded federal role in education could be washed away along with universal health care. This anti-big-government revolt also makes it all the trickier for the national standards effort to thread the needle politically.

Here’s my prediction: the Obama Administration will go out of its way, with its ESEA reauthorization proposal, to show that it is returning significant authority to states and local districts, to get out front of this wave. (Or maybe that’s just my wishful thinking.)

UPDATE 1/20/10: The Washington Post’s Jay Matthews riffs on this blog post in his own blog post.

-Mike Petrilli

Image from Wikipedia Commons

Quotable:

“This district can be rightly criticized for the promotion of ineffective teachers over the years. That is about to change. We do not owe poor performers a job.”
-Ramon C. Cortines, Superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District

“L.A. schools chief orders weak new teachers ousted,” Los Angeles Times

Notable:

$23 Billion:
Amount appropriated to education in the new jobs bill the U.S. House of Representatives passed this week.  The bill, which still needs Senate approval, passed without a single GOP vote.

“New Jobs Bill Offers $23 Billion for Education,” Education Week (subscription required)

Here we go again. As Politics K-12 reports, the Administration is foreshadowing a second stimulus package, this one likely to focus on bailing out local and state governments, including and especially public school systems. Rather than lay out all the reasons why such an infusion of federal cash may actually impede reform, I’ll simply point to this prescient piece by three brilliant education analysts from 11 months ago.

But the case against Round Two is even more compelling. Last year a serious argument could be made that our economy was at risk of entering a deflationary cycle, and laying off a bunch of teachers didn’t make smart economic sense. (Well, not too serious a case. Would a couple of hundred thousand teachers losing their jobs really have been the “tipping point” that would have led to worldwide gloom and doom?) But nobody can make the case today that giving the pink slip to thousands of teachers is going to wreck our economy and usher in the second Great Depression.

I know this sounds heartless. Don’t get me wrong; the pain is real in many states. In our home state of Ohio, budget woes might put a stake through the heart of many charter schools, and cripple many urban public schools. That’s not to be celebrated. And Kevin Carey was right that most states and districts would respond to budget shortfalls in stupid ways, such as implementing across-the-board cuts and/or letting go of their youngest teachers. (Though a few–Washington, DC comes to mind–have bucked this trend.)

But at some point our education system is going to have to reckon with the fact that the fat days are behind us. Yes, the economy will recover, and state revenues will too. But with Baby Boomers retiring en masse, there’s about to be enormous pressure on budgets at all levels of government. At the state and local level, that’s especially because of the unaffordable retirement promises we’ve made to public sector employees, including teachers. I predict that most school districts will never see a return to the double-digit annual budget increases that some became accustomed too, especially during the housing boom.

So what will they do? It’s quite clear; just read this, from Politics K-12:

Already, education organizations are letting congressional leaders and the administration know what they want to see in the potential jobs package. The National Education Association, a 3.2 million-member union based in Washington, sent a letter to members of the House of Representatives Dec. 3 asking that members consider including an education jobs fund in the new legislation. Here’s a snippet of the NEA’s argument:

Critical to such a package is the inclusion of an Education Jobs Fund to help save and create jobs that help students achieve, run our schools, and strengthen the middle class, while blunting the consequences of a funding cliff after the expiration of funds provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

The education establishment will push for more and more and more from the Federal government. And that government will likely comply, borrowing more money from China (and our kids) so that our education system can avoid making the painful but necessary changes needed to become more efficient and effective. This perpetual stimulus will go on for years, but at some point, I also predict, the money will run out. Eventually there will be a day of reckoning. Smart districts will prepare for it now, rather than later.

-Mike Petrilli

Cartoon by James Montgomery Flagg from Wikimedia Commons

Let me admit upfront that I don’t know Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott hardly at all; I think I’ve been in the same room with him once or twice. But his reputation is as a thoughtful policy wonk and adept administrator-a “good government,” non-ideological type. Little did I know that a hard-edged “states rights” conservative boiled within him. But check out this letter he sent to Texas’s Congressional delegation (as reported by the Austin-American Statesman today):

November 25, 2009

Dear Senator Cornyn:

I am writing to express my deep concerns regarding recent efforts by the U. S. Department of Education (USDE) to adopt a national curriculum and testing system in the United States. This effort can be seen as a step toward a federal takeover of the nation’s public schools.

As you are likely aware, a number of entities that develop and market education assessments and materials and several non-profits have banded together in an effort they have named the “Common Core Standards Initiative.” I believe that the true intention of this effort is to establish one set of national education standards and national tests across the country. Originally sold to states as voluntary, states have now been told that participation in national standards and national testing would be required as a condition of receiving federal discretionary grant funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) administered by the USDE. The effort has now become a cornerstone of the Administration’s education policy through the USDE’s prioritization of adoption of national standards and aligned national tests in receiving federal funds. The Secretary of Education has already reserved $650 million of ARRA funds for the production of these national tests.

In short, because Texas has chosen to preserve its sovereign authority to determine what is appropriate for Texas children to learn in its public schools, the state is now placed at a serious disadvantage in competing for its share of ARRA discretionary funding. Billed by Secretary Duncan as the “Race to the Top,” (RTTT) it appears that the USDE is placing its desire for a federal takeover of public education above the interests of the 4.7 million schoolchildren in the state of Texas by setting two different starting lines – one for nearly every other state in the country and one for Texas.

Texas has consistently maintained that states should retain their authority to determine the curriculum and testing requirements for their students. The elected Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) sets the standards Texas students are supposed to meet for each subject taught in the public school system. Texas law requires the direct participation of educators, parents, business and industry representatives, and employers in the development of the standards. Through this process, Texas has recently adopted college-ready math, English language arts, and science standards and will soon complete work on the social studies standards. The state has purchased new textbooks, created targeted professional development for our teachers, and developed new assessments aligned with these new standards. Joining the national standards and national testing movement would require Texas taxpayers to re-spend at least $3 billion.

If the USDE has its way, Texas’ process, along with every other state that has a similar process, will be negated. With the release of the RTTT application, it is clear that the first step toward nationalization of our schools has been put into place. I do not believe that the requirements will end with the RTTT; I believe that USDE will utilize the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to further the administration’s federal takeover of public schools, including withholding billions of dollars from our disadvantaged and special education students.

Ronald Reagan once said, “I believe a case can be made that the decline in the quality of public school education began when federal aid to education became federal interference in education.” Having the federal government use Washington-based special interest groups and vendors as proxy for the USDE in setting national curriculum standards and then using ARRA federal discretionary funds to develop national tests for every child in the nation represents unprecedented intrusiveness by the federal government into the personal lives of our children and their families.

I encourage and invite you to stand with me against national curriculum standards and national tests. The authority to determine what students in our public schools should learn properly resides with states, local school boards and parents. The federal government should not be engaging in activity that seeks to undermine our ability to determine what will be taught in our schools.

Sincerely,

Robert Scott
Texas Commissioner of Education

Wow, that’s fire-breathing stuff. The “nationalization” of our schools. Texas’s “sovereignty.” A “federal takeover.” Even a quote from Ronald Reagan!

Of course, there are politics at work here. As the Statesman reports, Scott’s boss, Texas Governor Rick Perry, is locked in a bitter primary battle against U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson; Perry’s strategy is to peg his opponent as a “Washington Insider.” So the issue of a “federal takeover” of Texas’s schools must be seen as the perfect wedge issue to rally Lone State conservatives to his cause.

Not that Scott doesn’t have some valid points. Texas has just updated its standards and is investing big bucks in getting them to the classroom. We don’t know yet if the Common Core standards will be any good. And as I told the Statesman, Texas would have a pretty good shot at winning Race to the Top dollars were it not for the points it will lose because it’s not playing ball with the national standards effort.

Still, were it not for the politics, Scott would simply do what every other state chief has done: sign a letter promising to “participate” in the Common Core effort, all the while knowing that the state could always back out later. So when Texas doesn’t get its piece of the RttT pie, blame the timing of Texas’s governor’s race, not the Common Core effort itself.

-Mike Petrilli

Photograph from the Texas Education Agency

Theodore R. (Ted) Sizer, who passed away last week after a long and valiant battle with cancer, was a towering figure in American education-and a wonderful guy. The youthful dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education–indeed, Ted had a youth’s vivacity, optimism and looks for decades longer than anyone has a right to–succeeded Frank Keppel when the latter went to Washington as Commissioner of Education for presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He was an historian, an educator, an educator of educators, and an education leader with few peers.

He went on from Harvard to serve as headmaster of Phillips Academy (Andover) and later as founder and head of the Coalition of Essential Schools , professor at Brown University and I cannot remember what all else. (I’m writing this mid-ocean, far from all reference materials.) He authored scads of perceptive and influential books, perhaps the best known of which, Horace’s Compromise , may fairly be said to have launched the modern era of high-school reform. Along the way, of course, he served on umpteen commissions, boards and such.

I didn’t always agree with Ted. He viewed education through the eyes of a teacher more than a policymaker and he had boundless faith in the capacity–indeed the necessity–of educators to make and remake their own schools. But he also wisely understood that while state and federal policy and programs had their place, they often did harm as well as good, getting in the way of good teaching and learning more than they fostered it, tending to turn educators into automatons and worshiping overmuch in the temple of testing.

He wasn’t Pollyannaish about educators. He knew how hard it was to create and sustain a first-rate school yet saw no viable shortcut, no real substitute for educators themselves engaging in the hard labor of designing and, as need be, redesigning places that worked well for teachers and students alike. Not for him a sweeping Arne Duncan-esque pronouncement that states and districts must “turn around” 5,000 faltering schools. He just didn’t believe that such top-down commands could work. That’s probably why the Coalition of Essential Schools, respected as it was in American secondary education, never (to my knowledge) contained more than a few hundred schools. Though all shared some core principles, each was hand-crafted by its own faculty and leaders, more an artisanal product than the result of mass production. Though most were (and are) public schools–now including many charters–their intellectual and organizational heartbeats arguably closer to Andover’s than to the assembly-line output of public policy and bureaucracy.

Some “essential” schools are a little loosey-goosey for my personal curricular taste but my chief anxiety about Ted’s approach to education reform isn’t that there’s anything wrong with the schools; it’s that this approach is not easily replicated or scaled. To which he, of course, would reply that no other approach will actually succeed, at least not when it comes to delivering bona fide education (which he never confused with embedding basic skills in scads of kids).

Yet one didn’t have to agree with Ted Sizer to appreciate and like him. Never was there a nicer, keener, more visionary or gung-ho educator. With his wife and soul mate (and sometime co-author) Nancy Faust Sizer , they welcomed thousands of ed school students and others into their homes and their lives. I first arrived there in 1965, fresh from college, a 21-year-old MAT candidate brimming with dreams, certainties and self-importance as well as inexperience. The War on Poverty was a year old; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the Higher Education Act were creaking through Congress. Vietnam was ablaze. And America was just entering that period we not-so-fondly recall as the “late sixties and early seventies.” That was the era of my graduate education.

I wasn’t a very good high-school social-studies teacher but Ted created an atmosphere at the Harvard ed school, and recruited faculty to it, that made almost anything seem possible, including my own shift from retail to wholesale education. When several colleagues and I resolved to seek newly-available federal dollars to launch one of the country’s first “Upward Bound” programs to serve disadvantaged Cambridge teenagers, he was happy to see this into being under ed school auspices. (It didn’t do the kids any visible harm; for me, it was an early lesson–Irving Kristol might have said a “mugging by reality”–in the limits of ambitious government programs seeking to alter individual lives. In retrospect, one might say Ted Sizer understood this intuitively.)

Among the new faculty he brought to HGSE was professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, fresh from the  Johnson administration (and the uproar over his prescient report on “the Negro family”). Pat didn’t yet have any doctoral advisees, and I needed a senior faculty member willing to sign his name to the unstructured research-and-policy doctoral program I yearned to enroll in.

Ted facilitated this matchmaking and in time served on my dissertation committee, nudging me to get the damn thing done even though I was working ridiculous hours as a junior member of the White House staff (on the Moynihan team there). He participated in an exceedingly well-lubricated lunch-and-after “thesis defense” that Pat organized one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1970 when we all were in Cambridge. And a month or two later, clad in full regalia, he handed me my doctorate.

We saw less of each other in subsequent years–conferences, meetings, a few shared speaking platforms–but corresponded throughout, including trying to persuade one another of the merits of our differing approaches to education reform. (During this time, he and Nancy raised a large, successful and loving family.) Neither of us changed the other’s mind but I gained a clearer understanding of how educator-led reforms could coexist with and reinforce the policy-driven kind-more comfortably, I would say, with choice policies than with standards-based reforms.

When I wrote a memoir two years ago, my publisher asked who might “blurb” it. Ted Sizer came immediately to mind. I emailed a request. Though he was already deep into the discomforts of “chemo,” he cheerily encouraged me to send along the page proofs. Of course he found therein an explanation of–as I saw it–the frailties as well as the virtues of the “essential schools” approach. At least a few paragraphs must have made him wince. Yet generous as he was to the very end, from his sickbed he sent via Nancy an apt and gracious jacket blurb.

This was one terrific guy and American education is much diminished by his absence.

Photograph from the Coalition of Essential Schools website

Update: A previous version of this post misidentified the outreach program at Harvard Graduate School of Education as “Outward Bound,” a well-known outdoors program. The program was actually “Upward Bound,” a federal college preparation program for low-income students and first-time college goers.

Republican George Allen and Democrat Paul Goldman (Virginians both) have teamed up to write an interesting piece in the New York Time s urging Congress to modify certain tax credit rules so that they include school renovations. By so doing, they believe private investors would be induced to buy school buildings, renovate them for the tax savings, and then lease them back to the districts. There is some precedent for this, they explain:

When Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia was the mayor of Richmond, he used this basic sale-leaseback arrangement to update a local school, Maggie L. Walker High, built during the Depression, and transform it into a regional magnet school that reopened in 2001 and now serves the top students in Central Virginia… Mr. Kaine saved local taxpayers millions in this $20 million renovation because Virginia has a 25 percent state historic rehabilitation tax credit, on top of the 20 percent federal tax credit. Other states have their own special incentives, and more are now considering them.

Of course there’s an obvious public-relations problem, they acknowledge:

Critics may scream that our approach “sells our schools” to the private sector. But what national interest is served by denying local officials access to private capital to provide schoolchildren the opportunities they deserve?

And no national interest is served by closing off creative methods for dealing with the budget shortfalls that states and districts are facing from coast to coast—shortfalls that will get worse when stimulus money runs out. Schools need as many fiscal ideas as possible, so kudos to Allen and Goldman for surfacing this one.

Check out this week’s Ohio Education Gadfly to read about our upcoming conference, “World-Class Standards in Ohio.” We’re excited to welcome an impressive lineup of education experts and state leaders, who will discuss Ohio-specific standards issues (timely, since the state is mandated to revise its academic standards by 2010) as well as examine high-performing states and the national (“common”) standards movement. Terry is spot on when he says “Ohio, and indeed the country, is at a pivotal moment in the development of standards-based education.”

Next, Jamie brings us an informative piece exploring education tax credits (and deductions) and their potential to raise (private) money for education in Ohio. Given Ohio’s gaping budget hole, might Ohioans consider this vehicle for school choice?

Also featured in the Ohio Education Gadfly is a video by Mike and Eric in which Ohio Rep. Lynn Wachtmann discusses the current crisis facing Ohio’s pension systems. Finally, it wraps up with Flypaper’s Finest, and timely recommended readings from Eric, Kalli, and Emmy.

Fordham has had a keen interest in the Ohio State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) since 2007. We frankly were not surprised last month when it came out that the STRS was facing serious funding shortfalls. As we have worked hard to better understand this issue and talk thoughtfully about it, we reached out to experts in Ohio and beyond.

One of the most thoughtful people in the Buckeye State on this now is Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, who also happens to sit on the State Retirement Study Council.

His perspective and insights on the challenges facing the STRS and the state’s four other retirement systems are important for all who worry about these systems’ sustainability and their impact on things like new talent recruitment.

Mike Lafferty recently sat down with him to discuss his perspective on the STRS and retirement systems in the state of Ohio.

Eight months into the Obama administration, the White House has been mute on its intentions regarding the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, George W. Bush’s signature education accomplishment–and a statute that nearly everyone in America believes needs a makeover. Of course there’s no consensus as to what that makeover should look like–one reason that Messrs. Obama, Duncan, et al have been avoiding it, even though the 2001 statute is already two years overdue for reauthorization. The bipartisan team that Bush 43 assembled behind this measure on Capitol Hill is long gone and the Obama team has been plenty busy with other matters. In a speech today , Secretary Duncan makes clear that he’s in no hurry to dive deep into NCLB. He’s inviting more input and advice as to how to set it right. (Never mind that there’s already a five-foot shelf of books and studies regarding NCLB’s shortcomings and needed repairs.) But he is sticking a toe into these turbid waters, aligning himself with the goals of this contentious statute and declaring that we must use its current tools–including standardized testing–until we develop better ones. He tipped his hand a bit more when he declared–correctly, in my view–that "we should be tighter on the goals… but…looser on the means for meeting those goals." Translation: America needs national standards and measures but should leave it to states and districts to operate their own schools. The former is apt to draw catcalls from the GOP side of the aisle while the latter will alarm his fellow Democrats. Mr. Duncan and the President face plenty of heavy lifting on this front–whenever they get serious about it.

This commentary is also posted at the National Review Online’s "The Corner " blog

Some interesting news this week. Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, is the new chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. The post had been vacant due to the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy. Read more about it here.