Last week I made the fairly obvious argument that GOP governors are the key to the Republican Party’s renewal, including on the education issue.

Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, agrees:

I believe renewal and reform will come from the states. There will be, in Washington and New York, a million symposia, think-tank confabs, op-ed pieces, columns and cruises; there will be epiphanies on the Amtrak Acela while delayed at Wilmington; there will be polls and books, and pollsters’ books. All fine and good, and a contribution. But the new emerging Republicans are likely to come in the end from the states, because that is where “this is what works” will come from. It is governance in the states that will yield the things that win-better handling of teachers’ unions,* better management, more effective, just and therefore desirable tax systems. And, of course, more clean lines of accountability.

So what bold reforms could energetic governors embrace, particularly in a time of economic distress? Here are three ideas; if you have others, please post them below or send them to me at mpetrilli@edexcellence.net.

— Put great curricular materials into the hands of teachers, via the Internet. This is an easy win, doesn’t need to be terribly expensive, but is sorely needed. Ask your Department of Education to partner with curriculum developers to take your state standards and turn them into usable, clickable resources for the classroom. Include lesson plans and videos of master teachers delivering them; embedded assessments; readings; digital snippets; the whole shebang.

— Make schools’ finances and results transparent, via the Internet. Empower taxpayers and parents with easily accessible information. It’s a crime that nobody knows how much individual schools spend. Change that. Put it online, down to the last penny. And link spending with results, displayed in user-friendly ways.

— Provide excellent coursework to students, via the Internet. Lots of states are already doing this, of course, via virtual schools, virtual charters, and the like. But there’s still a ton of room for growth, and some gubernatorial leadership could ensure that the resources provided to kids are top-notch, paid for by the state in a way that will keep them getting better, and accessible to the children who need them most.

And yes, this soup has a theme. One thing the Internet is really good at is creating efficiencies. And we all know that we need those now. So get to it, guvs.

* GOP heads-of-states might learn a thing or two about that from a couple of Democrats in that non-state called the District of Columbia.

Here’s more on how Google, blogs, etc. supposedly turn our brains into grape Jell-o. (Previous post here.)

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.

Folks like Mark Bauerlein, and probably Checker, won’t like this.

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.

Video games supposedly made America’s youth lazy and fat; maybe video games can make them active and lean.

The Styles section features a piece about online services that let parents track their kids’ grades in real time. Not surprisingly, the author reports that in many places a new brand of parent-cum-Big Brother is causing “exacerbated stress about daily grades and increased family tension.” Here’s an idea: employ the real-time monitoring once a student shows signs of struggling, but not before.

Also, a front-page article on Turkish schools in Pakistan, which offer a milder brand of Islam and more rigorous academics than many Pakistani madrasas.

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?

The website RateMyProfessors.com has been the subject of much criticism as it has grown in popularity. For instance, a professor from Central Michigan University ran some numbers and found that “the hotter and easier professors are, the more likely they’ll get rated as a good teacher.”

Inside Higher Ed reports today, however, on a couple studies that have found high correlations between RateMyProfessors.com and official university student-evaluation systems:

A new study is about to appear in the journal Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education and it will argue that there are similarities in the rankings in RateMyProfessors.com and IDEA, a student evaluation system used at about 275 colleges nationally and run by a nonprofit group affiliated with Kansas State University.

What is notable is that while RateMyProfessors.com gives power to students, IDEA gives a lot of control over the process to faculty members. Professors identify the teaching objectives that are important to the class, and those are the measures that count the most. In addition, weighting is used so that adjustments are made for factors beyond professors’ control, such as class size, student work habits and so forth—all variables that RateMyProfessors doesn’t really account for (or try to account for).

And at least some professors, it seems, find the reviews on RateMyProfessors.com useful for evaluating their own teaching strategies:

“I’ve been an instructor for 10 years. I look at it,” he said, adding that he has found insights “that weren’t on my teaching evaluations and I have thought: ‘Wow. I believe what the student has said is valid and perhaps I can change the way I teach.”

The obvious question here is, Could this work in K-12 education? There have been various efforts already to harness the power of Web 2.0 to improve K-12 schooling—see GreatSchools.net, for instance. But none have really reached the critical mass necessary for a collaborative online source of information to be of much use to people.

There’s also the question of whether 13-year-olds’ opinions of their teachers would be as reliable as those of college students. Surely, as in the case of RateMyProfessors.com, there would be plenty of mean-spirited comments. But done right it could be a powerful tool for gauging teacher and school quality.