Secretary Duncan delivered the last of his four policy speeches today at the annual conference of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. Overall, it was a good talk. He probably was a bit too effusive in his praise in parts, but it was certainly balanced by a number of points that surely caused consternation among those gathered (I hear he was booed more than once!). Here are the highlights.

At the beginning, after reminding the audience that he had gotten tough with the charter school crowd, he gave the NEA some of the same medicine:

It’s not enough to focus only on issues like job security, tenure, compensation, and evaluation. You must become full partners and leaders in education reform. You must be willing to change.

Regarding the administration’s position on new forms of compensation, he used the phraseology that unnerves reformers and soothes labor leaders:

The President and I have both said repeatedly that we are not going to impose reform but rather work with teachers, principals, and unions to find what works.

We’re asking Congress for more money to develop compensation programs “with” you – and “for” you — not “to” you.

He then turned tougher. In talking about fixing failing schools, after saying that everyone needs to work together, he continued:

But if we agree that the adults in these schools are failing these children then we have to find the right people and we can’t let our rules and regulations get in the way. Children have only one chance to get an education. This is not about adult jobs. This is about children’s education.

He then did an interesting verbal pirouette on seniority and tenure, praising then mildly criticizing each in turn, then ending with a firm stand:

We created seniority rules that protect teachers from arbitrary and capricious management, and that’s a good goal. But sometimes those rules place teachers in schools and communities where they won’t succeed, and that’s wrong.

We created tenure rules to make sure that a struggling teacher gets a fair opportunity to improve, and that’s a good goal. But when an ineffective teacher gets a chance to improve and doesn’t — and when the tenure system keeps that teacher in the classroom anyway — then the system is protecting jobs rather than children. That’s not a good thing. We need to work together to change that.

...When inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules that we designed put adults ahead of children then we are not only putting kids at risk — we’re putting the entire education system at risk...These policies were created over the past century to protect the rights of teachers but they have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets.

Toward the end, Duncan had two of his most potent lines:

A recent report from the New Teacher Project found that almost all teachers are rated the same. Who in their right mind really believes that?

Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions. That would never make sense. But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.

A month ago, I wondered what Sonia Sotomayor might think about teacher tests, as the more rigorous ones typically have a “disparate impact” on minorities; African-American and Hispanic candidates fail them at much higher rates than whites do. Now that the Supreme Court has decided the Ricci v DeStefano case, I decided to ask school law expert Joshua Dunn, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, co-author of Education Next’s Legal Beat column, and co-editor of the forthcoming Fordham/Brookings Institution Press volume Schoolhouse to Courthouse, for his opinion. Here’s what he had to say:

It appears that as long as states take care in crafting their tests and showing they are job related they should be safe from litigation.  To sue over teacher tests, plaintiffs would have to produce a test that accomplishes the same objectives but does not have a disparate impact.

What might such a test look like? Perhaps performance assessments—whereby teachers give model lessons for groups of evaluators—might not result in a “disparate impact.” But I haven’t seen any research that shows that such assessments are strongly predictive of teacher effectiveness, as tests of verbal ability are.

So like Josh says, states are probably in safe legal territory with their teacher tests. But they will likely play it even safer by keeping the cut scores on said tests fairly low, so their “disparate impact” is not so extreme. (If virtually everyone passes the test, it can’t be said to have a disparate impact.) And while that might be good legal strategy, it’s not the best public policy for our kids.

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.

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

The administration released its 2010 budget proposal yesterday. Check out the specifics here.

Just a few highlights…

First, it has slightly higher discretionary spending than the 2009 budget (but remember that the ARRA is pumping nearly $100 billion through ED on top of 2009 and 2010 funds).

Second, in non-K-12 news, it includes a small increase in the maximum Pell grant award and adds lots of new money for early childhood programs.

Third, there is a relatively small $10 million for the “Promise Neighborhoods” initiative.  This is the administration’s attempt to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone.  This money will support planning grants for cities that want to create their own versions. I’m VERY skeptical of this initiative because HCZ is extraordinarily expensive, its early results were very questionable (it took lots of rethinking and reworking to get it right), and such extensive wrap-around services are neither necessary nor sufficient to bring about improved student achievement. I would prefer the feds stay out of this business.

Fourth, there’s a big increase for the Teacher Incentive Fund (up to $517 million from under $100 million in 2009), which incentives states and districts to experiment with performance/merit pay. This is good news, but the devil will be in the details: will ED end up funding truly innovative programs or more status-quo oriented proposals (i.e. those favored by unions)?

Fifth, there’s a huge ($1 billion) increase for School Improvement Grants. This program is designed to help fix struggling schools. I’m VERY, VERY, VERY, concerned about this. At some future date, I’ll elaborate, but in short, there is a mountain of evidence showing that turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing broken urban school districts. This evidence is confirmed by tons of evidence from other industries showing that turnaround strategies always have low success rates. I think this enormous funding increase should only be supported as far as it requires schools in restructuring to be closed and then replaced by new schools.  (In fairness, Duncan closed some persistently failing schools in Chicago, so maybe he agrees that turnarounds/reconstitutions/restructurings seldom work.)

Sixth, the administration is asking for $100 million for a “What Works and Innovation Fund.” This would continue or add to the work begun with the $650 million “Innovation Fund” in the ARRA. The idea is to scale up successful programs already underway. Getting this money would be a coup for Secretary Duncan: $100 million that he could direct to his favorite programs.

Finally, the Charter School Grant Program gets an additional $52 million, which is a big increase in relative terms but pennies compared to the increases in the Teacher Incentive Fund and the School Improvement program.  (During the campaign, President Obama promised to double charter school funding, so he’s about $150 million short.)

(As a reminder, this is just the administration’s budget proposal.  The congressional appropriations process will ultimately determine final amounts.  That should be complete by Oct 1, but it hasn’t worked that way in years.)

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

If you’ve ever hired anyone, you know that that colleague you get is nearly always quite different than the candidate you interviewed—sometimes better, sometimes worse, but always different.

This interesting paper about teacher quality adds to the substantial but far-from-conclusive literature on what makes for a great teacher. In short, a few previously unstudied teacher characteristics appear to correlate with improved student achievement, but nothing revolutionary.

If you’re looking for something on the same subject but with a reduced wonk factor and more talk about college football (seriously), check out this New Yorker article by author of all things curious, Malcolm Gladwell. Other professions face the same recruitment challenge, but they address it differently than those in the teacher-hiring business; instead of big barriers to entry and few back-end check-ins, they open up the floodgates on the front-end and then weed out along the way.

Arne Duncan spoke to a packed room last night at the Education Writers Association conference, and got some chuckles by promising not to use his three favorite words during the speech: extraordinary, dramatic and incent.

He spoke a lot about truth and transparency in education and said he feels an “urgency” to improve the system - using both carrots and, when needed, sticks. Some interesting tidbits:

• He gave journalists props for pushing the country to talk about uncomfortable topics like performance gaps and teacher quality. Our friend Elizabeth Green from Gotham Schools asked him to expound on the teacher quality portion of that. He said teaching is a very private profession and there’s a need to “de-privatize” it; open it up so that teachers freely discuss their strengths and weaknesses and learn from those who are more successful.
• He said the name No Child Left Behind is “toxic” and we should change it. He talked about aspects of the NCLB law that he likes (the focus on disaggregating data), and those he definitely does not (it’s overly prescriptive; too “loose” on the goals and too “tight” on how you get there).
• He complained about state test results being a lot higher than NAEP scores and how that amounts to “lying” to children and parents. (Hmm...if you’d like to see another example of how misleading the current setup is, check out Fordham’s report, The Accountability Illusion).

Here are a few more thoughts on the speech, from the Indy Star, Kalamazoo Gazette, and Detroit News.

It’s well-documented that school funding, generally speaking, is too opaque. District budgets mask differences in teacher pay from school to school, just as they often fail to show differences in how other centrally-controlled resources are deployed in schools. These accounting shortcuts (or cover-ups) mask deep inequities in funding between schools, often at the expense of those with poor and at-risk students.

Greater transparency and clarity in district- and school-level budgets would help, so I whole-heartedly agree with the New York Times editorial board that Secretary Duncan should push for this in return for the $13 billion in Title I stimulus funding:

Arne Duncan, the education secretary, will need to make sure that states and localities clearly understand what he means when he asks them to report per-pupil expenditures school by school.

To the extent possible, the new reporting standard should take into account extra programs that are sometimes parceled out to affluent schools but not to poor ones — from administrative budgets that are billed to, say, the school district’s headquarters.

Most important, the local districts should not be allowed to persist with sloppy bookkeeping that masks teacher salary differences in high poverty versus low poverty schools. Those differences are often indicative of the fact that poor children are being taught by less-qualified, less-experienced teachers.

I wouldn’t go so far as to equate a teacher’s salary with his or her effectiveness, but I do think funding should be rebalanced among schools to the benefit of those whose teacher-salary budgets are shortchanged. If those schools could use the additional dollars flexibly, they might hire more teachers to reduce class sizes; use teacher aides to help in larger classes; or invest in their curricula, facilities, and anything else that would make the school more attractive for better teachers.

Perhaps most importantly, if Duncan succeeds in making plain the real funding gaps between schools, the outcry could lead to worthwhile reforms to fund schools and students equitably – reforms like weighted student funding . It would be terrific if the stimulus could be a federal nudge in that direction.

President Obama and Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland are pushing their school reform agendas hard. Sitting in Ohio, one can’t help but compare and contrast these efforts. There are similarities but also some interesting differences. Here’s what we see from the Buckeye State.

Where there is agreement: Both the governor and the president want to spend more money on public schools; both, also, want new investments in early education. These are long-standing Democratic positions so no surprises here. But—and this is new—each is seeking more seat time in schools for kids. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan could have been speaking for both Strickland and Obama when he said recently, “I fundamentally think our children are at a competitive disadvantage. The children in India and China who they are competing [with] for jobs are going to school 25, 30 percent more than we are.” Gov. Strickland wants to add 20 days a year to Ohio’s school calendar.

Where they disagree in kind: Both Strickland and Obama say they see quality teachers and better teaching as pivotal to improving student achievement. Here, Strickland’s plan is less bold than Obama’s, but controversial enough that it has garnered the ire of the Ohio Federation of Teachers. The governor’s plan seeks to overhaul teacher tenure (making tenure decisions in nine years, up from the current three), and his plan would create new teacher licensure requirements and a teacher residency program.

President Obama goes further and challenges one of the central orthodoxies of teacher unionism when he proposes merit pay. The president has even hinted at the possibility that such pay should be connected to student test scores. Obama acknowledged that the teacher unions don’t like his plan when he told Hispanic business leaders recently, “Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom.”

Where they disagree in full: In both his 2007 and his 2009 budget proposals Gov. Strickland sought to cut funding to charter schools while increasing their regulatory burdens. He has also sought to ban for-profit school-management companies from operating in the Buckeye State. President Obama, on the other hand, has been an advocate for more federal charter school spending and has spoken openly about his support for charters.

The president told a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer recently, “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.” Further, Education Secretary Duncan, when CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, built one of the country’s premier portfolios of charter schools-which now serves about 23,000 students. This included a 1,450-student school operated by the for-profit charter operator Edison Learning. It also included holding schools - both those run by for-profits and non-profits - to account for results.

From where we sit in Ohio, President Obama seems serious about school reform while Gov’ Strickland seems committed to his largest interest group - the teacher unions.

I’ve finally had a chance to read the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future’s latest report. It’s garnered some media attention but in case you haven’t read it, here is the apocalyptic gist (and nothing sells newspapers better, right?):

The traditional teaching career is collapsing at both ends. Beginners are being driven away by antiquated preparation practices, outdated school staffing policies, and inadequate career rewards. At the end of their careers, accomplished veterans who still have much to contribute are being separated from their schools by obsolete retirement systems. In five years, two-thirds of the teachers we entrust our children to in America’s classrooms could be gone.

NCTAF’s solution is rather straightforward: “cross-generational teaching teams.” These teams would provide space for veteran teachers at the ends of their careers to stay in the classroom part-time as mentors while providing the support and advice needed by beginner teachers that would hopefully inspire them to stay in the classroom longer. This, they argue, solves the problem of losing the expertise and experience of older teachers, takes the immediate stress off pension systems, puts less pressure (human resource and financial) on schools to constantly be recruiting and training new teachers (an expensive endeavor), and would lower beginner teacher attrition rates by giving them better support. Sounds like we can all go home, right? Not so fast.

Their attention to teacher quality over quantity is notable and welcome. For too long, we’ve emphasized the latter over the former to disastrous results. And as NCTAF is right to point out, some of the highest performing schools use team teaching effectively (although the positive effects might not be as strong as NCTAF would like us to believe). But I’m not sure that team teaching can or should work the way NCTAF envisions it. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that NCTAF is trying to fit a square hole with a round peg—i.e. trying to find a place for retiring teachers when they’re really not the problem and keeping them around might make things worse.

Here’s the thing: mentor teachers don’t have to be 20-30 year veterans. A mountain of research shows that the correlation between teacher effectiveness and experience levels off after about five years in the classroom. (See here for an overview of this conversation.) At the same time, newbie teachers are leaving the classroom right around that time—just when they’re becoming their most effective. So why not kill two birds with one stone? Create these teaching teams out of newbie teachers (i.e., first and second year teachers) and 5-6 year “veterans.” Not only will these younger veterans have sharper memories of what it was like to be a new teacher, but you might even get them to stay in the classroom longer with the new challenge of a leadership role. Add a monetary incentive to becoming a mentor, like many systems already do for hard to staff schools or subjects, and you’ll get lots of volunteers.

And that gets me to the money part of this scenario. NCTAF rightly points out the impending stress on teacher pension systems if all the baby boomer teachers retire at the same time. But their solution—to keep those teachers in the classroom part time as mentors—doesn’t solve it, since those teachers are still going to have to retire someday. Putting that day off for a few years doesn’t fix the Ponzi scheme that is government “defined benefits.” (Mike and Rick talked about this on last week’s podcast.) The fact is that the pension system needs some serious reform and somebody is going to get socked by the solution. Either we punish current retirees by cutting their benefits or we take more money out of the pockets of current teachers to fulfill pension obligations. In either case, we’ll have to cut benefits of future retirees. It’s unlikely that any of these options will go anywhere since they’re so politically unpopular but the problem still remains. We can only hope the solution includes turning “defined benefit” systems into 401(k)s. They might be subject to market forces but they’re also mobile, which means that teachers who feel pressured to stick around waiting for their big payout can change careers and take their partial pensions with them. Not only does this spread out the pain of having a huge number of teachers retire all at the same time, but it also eases up the problem if older teacher burn out. Sounds like a win-win situation.  

But pensions are only part of the problem. NCTAF claims that “pay is not the deciding factor on why so many new teachers are leaving.” I wish they’d give us some data on this one because I’m simply not convinced. Sure, a starting salary of $47,000 and change (the rates in DC) for an entry level job is great (although you can ask any first year DC teacher how hard they worked for every penny!). The problem is that the system a) rewards the wrong things (like graduate degrees, which have virtually no relationship to teacher effectiveness and are an expensive 2 years out of the workforce) and b) plateaus off at the 10 year mark. I can’t speak as a teacher but I can speak as a “young person.” The 20-somethings are not enticed by promises of big payouts in 30 years (the exact promise that got so many baby boomers into the classroom in the 50s and 60s, explain NCTAF) and we’re not enticed by pay scales that plateau just as we’re starting families and buying houses.

I don’t know what to tell states straining to pay current teacher retiree benefits but maybe you shouldn’t have made promises you can’t keep. I can tell you that there is some mobilization around this issue and there’s already been some consideration of how changing pay structures might improve teacher quality. NCTAF does get one thing right: there is a huge opportunity for reform here...so what are we waiting for?

Image from Flickr user pic fix.

So there was this report written to help a major US city improve its public schools. Local leaders had gone to Boston to learn about a number of groundbreaking reforms that had generated some pretty impressive results. They came back particularly impressed by Boston’s new types of schools, well-trained teachers, and well-respected administrators.

The most controversial part of the report was its recommendation to make it easier to fire bad teachers. The report noted that while most of the city’s teachers were “faithful, well-educated, and conscientious,” “too many ... are incompetent and unfit for their work.”

To solve this problem, the report recommended an extended probationary period for new teachers and a tough examination for those who made it through to ensure that all of the city’s classrooms were led by highly qualified educators. The report conceded, however, that no written exam could ever fully reflect all of the “essential qualities for successful teaching.”

The report was attacked by “organized teachers’ groups.” “The educational reformers applauded it, but they were as yet too few to muster political support for drastic changes.” The report was turned into legislation, which ultimately failed; the city’s superintendent remarked: “There is little probability of its ever passing on account of the opposition of interested parties.”

The year?

1891

If you ever have the time, pick up Fordham Trustee Diane Ravitch’s stellar The Great School Wars. Though a 1974 history of New York City’s public schools beginning in the early 1800s, every few pages you’ll come upon a story (like this one from pages 118-119) that could’ve happened yesterday.

There really is nothing new under the sun.

Watch out Massachusetts; your little neighbor to the south is poised to become the next big school reform powerhouse. The Ocean State already benefits from forward-thinking governor Don Carcieri and entrepreneur-turned-school-reformer Angus Davis. Well, they’ve been looking for a butt-kicking state superintendent to round out the trio and have found her: Deborah Gist, who is currently the District of Columbia’s “state superintendent.”

The main thing to know is that Gist has been quietly revamping D.C.’s teacher certification and evaluation system to focus on crazy notions like quality, performance, and effectiveness. No doubt she’ll bring this thinking to Rhode Island, where the outgoing state superintendent has laid down an ultimatum around these issues, at least for the city of Providence.

So will DC be left in the lurch? Not necessarily; I’m hearing that Kerri Briggs, formerly an Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education under Margaret Spellings, will be taking Gist’s place.

Photograph from DC State Superintendent website

That’s the title of a longish piece on merit pay in the latest Christian Science Monitor. This article, part 1 of 2, takes a look at Denver’s ProComp and the difficulty of figuring out two things: how to use merit pay systems to get rid of bad teachers and how to tie bonuses to the results of individual teachers. It also makes the case that younger teachers are not enticed to the profession by the promise of a cushy retirement. They want to see their rewards now, not later. Since the (large) size of teacher pensions (in a sour economy) have turned into a hot potato issue recently, this might prove fodder for arguing to readjust the pay scale. It’s a good read for anyone unfamiliar with the debate.

Another couple recommendations from my finally shrinking to-read stack.

This superb 2006 Brookings teacher quality report from Gordon, Kane, and Staiger graphs the influence teachers have on student learning.  The whole report is worth reading, but if nothing else, check out figures 1, 2, and 4.  They clearly make the case that we ought to be agnostic about what type of preparation program a teacher comes from and instead focus on his/her achievement effects.  The variation among the products of different preparation programs is much greater than the differences between the programs.  (The very same thing can be said of school types.)

This interesting Education Next article from West and Woessmann finds that Catholic populations a century ago in various countries have a bearing on the number of Catholic schools still operating in those nations today.  More importantly, the competitive pressure generated by these schools appears to have improved student achievement and school efficiency in both public and private schools.  Lots of interesting implications but the one that springs to mind first is that this suggests that America’s urban school systems would be even lower performing and more expensive today were it not for the influx of Catholic immigrants in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

President Obama delivered a major, long (over 4,500 words), and substantive speech on education this morning. Transcript here; coverage here and here.

The media will likely focus on the several issues certain to raise the ire of unions, such as performance pay, firing weak teachers, and strong support for charter schools. But there are many other noteworthy points throughout the speech as well as some standard fare and a few passing references that will need more filling out.

The speech had familiar anchors: achievement gaps, personal responsibility, and international competition. It also made use of the common Obama tactic of framing his positions as inhabiting the sensible middle ground between polarized parties and being beyond the ideological battles of the past. Interestingly, he twice made the point that money alone would not solve our education problems.

As for the substance, it was built around “five pillars”: 1) early childhood, 2) standards and assessments, 3) recruiting, preparing, and rewarding outstanding teachers, 4) promoting innovation and excellence, and 5) higher education

In early childhood, he touted funding in the stimulus for Head Start and child care programs. He also challenged states to raise the quality of their early learning programs.

In the standards and assessments section, he avoided taking a position on the dominant issue of the day (national standards), which might be a position in itself (opposed?). He lamented that US curriculum is less challenging than other nations’, and that we have 50 different accountability systems. The President encouraged “tougher, clearer standards,” and called on governors and state chiefs to develop systems that measure “21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking, entrepreneurship and creativity.” (No mention of whether this should be 50 different systems, several regional systems, one organically developed system, one federally created system…)

He also checked two important boxes on data, speaking highly of systems that “keep track of a student’s education from childhood through college,” (“K-16” or “K-20” data systems) and those that “track how much progress a student is making and where that student is struggling” (value-added systems). The most striking part here, however, was his noting that value-added systems (presumably with teacher identifiers) can “tell us which students had which teachers so we can assess what’s working and what’s not.” This will not make the unions happy.

In the recruiting, preparing, and rewarding outstanding teachers section, he made a Teach for America-style call for “a new generation of Americans to step forward and serve our country in our classrooms.” This, however, was followed by an ambitious but overly general list of new, unnamed programs (I’m guessing these will be in the fleshed out in the 2010 budget?), including initiatives to “prepare teachers for their difficult responsibilities and encourage them to stay in the profession,” create “new pathways to teaching and new incentives to bring teachers to schools where they are needed most,” “offer extra pay to Americans who teach math and science,” and build “on the promising work being done in South Carolina’s Teacher Advancement Program.”

The most striking part of this section and probably of the entire speech was his taking aim at underperforming educators:

…that means states and school districts taking steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom. Let me be clear: if a teacher is given a chance but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.

In the promoting innovation and excellence section, he praised charter schools and called on states to remove their charter caps. This is a major statement and an unequivocal position. He also called for longer school days and school years, saying our current school calendar is a relic of a bygone age that puts our students at an international disadvantage.

The higher education section focused on affordability and accessibility issues, such as making Pell Grants a mandatory spending program (and indexing maximum awards above inflation) and expanding federal loan programs.

Big speech. Provocative points. Let the debate begin…

The Cincinnati Public Schools have been praised (including by yours truly) for embarking on top-to-bottom overhauls of the district’s most persistently underperforming schools. Student academic performance was seen as driving the district’s tough decisions to dismiss whole staffs and fundamentally redesign one elementary school last year and three more schools this year. Today, however, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports that the “professional atmosphere” in the schools also played a part in the decision making:

Under the federal law, 10 city schools fit the bill for a total overhaul. Those schools failed to meet mandatory improvement goals for six consecutive years or more.

But districts have several options to comply with the law, and the total staff replacement is only one option.

Rothenberg, Mount Airy and South Avondale schools, in addition to the poor test scores, also had teachers and workers who weren’t responding to management directives and didn’t work as a team, according to the notes.

Seven other schools, while statistically similar, were spared the radical redo, thanks in part to what CPS leaders saw as good attitudes and “cohesive” and “positively focused” staffs.

For instance, Rockdale Academy, just four blocks from South Avondale, scored worse on last year’s Ohio Achievement Test than South Avondale, and just marginally better than Rothenberg.

However, Rockdale has “excellent relationships amongst staff and administration,” a “true love and concern for students,” and a “collegial atmosphere,” according to notes from a Dec. 12 meeting.

On the other hand, Rothenberg has a “dismal environment” and was “not embracing elementary initiative” (the district’s intervention plan for its worst buildings). Also, at South Avondale, there was “not a sense of community in the building.”

Mount Airy, meanwhile, is struggling “academically and interpersonally,” according to the notes.

Positive attitudes and good relationships among staff are important in the workplace, but when that workplace is a school, they aren’t the most important things. The positive professional atmosphere in these schools didn’t spur an improvement in student academic performance for the past six-plus years, so it’s hard to believe it will make any difference now.

So here’s an inspirational article about a once-struggling Florida school that pulled itself up from a “D/F” rating to an “A” rating two years in a row (and they expect a third “A” this year). The article explains just how Blanton Elementary—one of the poorest schools in Pinellas Park—managed to make the shift. A large part of the piece showcases the motivation and leadership of the principal, Deborah Turner. And the piece argues that the school actually isn’t alone—apparently “nearly 1 in 4 elementary schools across Florida with poverty levels above 70 percent have improved as much if not more than Blanton in the past five years,” according to a St. Petersburg Times review of FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) scores. Of course it isn’t easy at all—it takes time to get the right people and processes in place, says Oscar Robinson a former area superintendent who originally broke the F news to Turner. But looking at Blanton’s story, it does seem to be very possible.

I’m delighted to report that our debate was so powerful and compelling that the AEI staff, after reading our comments, arranged an event to dive deeper into these very matters!

(Just kidding, though we shouldn’t underestimate the far-reaching powers of this blog!)

Two responses to Mike. First, I stand by my contention that Wilson could have challenged these charters on their recruiting practices. Yes, Mike is right that Wilson was reporting on what they do. I don’t fault Wilson at all for giving us the lay of the land—as a matter of fact, his findings are very interesting and important. But he could’ve followed that by saying, “this is a suboptimal strategy for the following reasons,” instead of assuming that their practices are correct and then lamenting where that leaves us.

Second, I acknowledge Mike’s second point. Based on the numbers, even if my strategy were employed and proved to be successful, we would still have too few teachers to staff all urban schools. But I didn’t mean to suggest that my strategy was the full solution. I was suggesting that the universe of potentially great “no excuses” teachers extends beyond ivy-covered walls and that the cohort of top graduates of non-elite colleges is one place to look. But there are many other fertile fields, too, I suspect.

The glory of Teach for America (TFA) is that it showed that the universe of talented young people interested in teaching in underserved communities is much, much, much bigger than anyone would’ve ever guessed 20 years ago. One of the many glories of chartering is that it showed that the number of highly talented people interested in starting schools for underserved students is much, much, much bigger than anyone expected.

What did TFA and chartering do differently? They recast the industry. TFA framed teaching in low-income areas as an exciting, rewarding, nation-serving way to begin your career. And people came running. Chartering showed that education could be a place for ambitious, entrepreneurial, community-minded citizens. And people came running.

The point is we need to stop assuming that there isn’t enough talent out there. There are other quarries to mine and wells to dig. We need to find the pockets of talent—wherever they are—and show them why working in this industry will scratch their personal and professional itches.