The Education Gadfly
A Weekly Bulletin of News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
April 16, 2009, Volume 9, Number 13
New from Thomas B. Fordham Institute: The Accountability Illusion policy brief
This concise version of our recent study provides a snapshot of the most salient findings. The key question is, Would a school deemed "healthy" under the No Child Left Behind Act be similarly judged if it were moved to another state? The answer, by and large, is no. It appears that location trumps quality when it comes to school rankings. But it took us 400 pages to explain all that so we figured you might appreciate a short edition.
This week on the Education Gadfly Show Podcast: Friends don't let friends campaign for them
Contents
From Checker's Desk
News and Analysis
Recommended Reading
Flypaper's Finest (The best from Flypaper, Fordham's blog)
The Education Gadfly Show Podcast
Short Reviews
- Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics and the Future of American Education
- Making a Difference? The Effects of Teach for America in High School
- Balanced Scorecards and Management Data
- School Choice and Home Prices: Evidence from Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Announcements
From Checker's Desk
Patriotism, education, and the Obamas
Barack and Michele Obama seem to be exemplary parents. They're sending their daughters to a fine D.C. private school (while withdrawing similar options from hundreds of low-income Washingtonians). They left the girls home where they belonged--with Grandma and teachers--instead of carting them off to Europe. They reportedly insist that the kids make their own beds and eat healthy food. A swing-set was recently installed on the South Lawn. And after a judicious interval, and with help from Senator Kennedy, they've even delivered the long-awaited--and now much publicized--post-election puppy.
When it comes to many core American values--telling the truth, working hard, holding oneself to high standards, persevering, walking the dog, etc.--I'll bet the First Parents are also doing right by their children, both talking the talk with them and walking the walk. One gets a partial sense of this by watching Michelle Obama inspire other young people in schools from Anacostia to London. She's dazzling in this role.
I wonder, though, how they approach the value of patriotism. How are their two young daughters being taught to view the United States? More important, what examples are the Obamas setting for fifty million other American kids and their teachers and parents? What walk are they walking?
Is America, in their eyes, "the last best hope"? A place that doesn't always live up to its ideals but comes closer than anyplace else? A place worth defending from all enemies, foreign and domestic? And is that something they believe is important for grownups to impart to children? Or do they think it's the proper role of parents and teachers to emphasize the country's shortcomings?
One recalls without pleasure Michelle Obama's remark during last year's campaign (February 18, 2008, in Milwaukee, to be precise) that "for the first time in my life I am proud of my country." Though aides hastily corrected the record and (presumably) admonished her to choose her words more carefully, it's hard to imagine such a sentiment being uttered in the first place by someone who didn't actually believe it.
Then there's the President's "major foreign address" in Prague, during his recent Europe/Turkey/Baghdad swing, the speech in which he committed the U.S. to a world without nuclear weapons. As Charles Krauthammer observed in a trenchant column last week, "Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world." In geopolitical terms, Krauthammer notes, the President got very little in response--though he got plenty of applause for his friendliness, humility, eloquence, cooperativeness and, above all, his Not-George-W-Bush-ness. Otherwise, it seems, his apologetic approach didn't pay off. But it got me wondering--should get us all wondering--what that approach may signal about his view of the nation that he leads. And what example does it set for tomorrow's citizens and those who teach them today?
To be sure, he thanked the troops in Baghdad and made clear that he's grateful to them. In no way do I suggest that he's unpatriotic. But that's not the same thing as signaling to one and all that he loves and is proud of his country and wants his kids and our kids and grandkids to feel that way, too. Insisting that they understand what evokes that pride as context, in part, for understanding what still needs to be set right.
Though it may well be true, as Bill Bennett and others have suggested, that patriotic values are ingested with the air and water supply in the United States, we also know from innumerable assessments and other indicators that civic and history education in American schools leaves much to be desired. Young people are ignorant of how our government works, where our core values come from, and what happened during the country's two-century-long efforts both to implement and to defend those values.
As the "greatest generation" passes from the scene, and its progeny, the boomers, retire from school and university classrooms, it's the post-Vietnam crowd that's shouldering responsibility for raising and teaching tomorrow's Americans. When the country chose Barack Obama over John McCain, it opted for a member of that crowd and for the youth and change and energy that come with it. Well and good. The President certainly has his hands full on many fronts and one can only wish him well. Nobody expects him to be the national K-12 curriculum director, too. But he and his wife are inevitable role models. How he views America matters in a thousand ways, including--though surely not limited to--how our children and teachers will view it. His children, too, come to think of it.
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News and Analysis
Missed opportunities
The recent saga of the District of Columbia's federally-funded "Opportunity Scholarship Program" is one of opportunities missed or squandered, mostly by the Obama Administration. That's not meant as an indictment of its overall performance; with very little staff, too little time, and an enormous stimulus bill to implement, Arne Duncan and his team are doing a respectable job of keeping it all together at the Education Department. When it comes to the voucher program, however, they've made some early mistakes. The key question now is whether they will learn from them--and possibly salvage a valuable little program that is accomplishing some of their major objectives.
Their first blunder was underestimating the symbolic importance that both sides of the school choice wars assign to the D.C. program. It's a little bit like Vietnam: on the surface, it's small and strategically insignificant. But both proponents and opponents seem to believe in a sort of domino theory of school choice. If vouchers make it in the nation's capital, goes the thinking, they might spread like kudzu to other locales.
How else to explain the conflagration over an initiative that serves fewer than 2,000 students? Why else would the National Education Association send Democratic members of Congress a thinly veiled threat that they had better kill this program or face the music? How else to explain the heat that certain Congressional Democrats put on Duncan et al. after the Secretary voiced his sensible view that the students currently in the program should be allowed to remain in their schools? It looks so petty and mean-spirited that it's hard even to understand unless these folks truly believe that D.C. is a harbinger of things to come.
The Obama team's second (related) mistake was to suppose that it could triangulate between the position of Democrats on the hill ("kill the program") and voucher supporters ("extend it") and somehow oblige everyone. (As Ruth Marcus wrote this week, the President has yet to pick a real battle with the Hill, but needs to do so soon. She channels Machiavelli: "it's better to be feared than loved.") They seemed surprised that choice opponents on the Hill were strongly displeased by their statements about protecting current students. And then they got rolled over when Congress passed its Omnibus Appropriations Bill (which Obama dutifully signed) without any provision to help even current scholarship recipients.
Now they have tacked left again, trying to appease Congressional appropriators by rescinding scholarship offers to 200 low-income families who thought their children would be attending private schools come fall. I'm not sure whether that placated the Hill, but it sure did enrage the right. Now, on this issue, Team Obama is neither feared nor loved, and rightly so.
But perhaps the biggest mistake--and greatest missed opportunity--came when the program's evaluation results were released a few weeks ago. President Obama and his team had a chance to live up to their rhetoric about following the evidence. Remember what the President said while campaigning: "If there was any argument for vouchers, it was 'Alright, let's see if this experiment works,' and if it does, then whatever my preconceptions, my attitude is you do what works for the kids. I will not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn." Well, now the D.C. findings are in, and they are mostly positive, which is unusual for gold-standard studies. So why not "do what works" for kids?
I suspect that he and Duncan and their teams didn't even pause to consider whether they should adjust their position on vouchers (they're busy these days, remember). Instead, they plowed ahead with the spin that "students from low performing schools, the program's target group, continued to show no improvement." Well if that's the standard, Mr. Secretary, let me warn you that about 200 of your Department's programs (in other words, virtually all of them) don't measure up. Do you plan to axe them, too?
Now Messrs. Obama and Duncan find themselves in a Vietnam-style quagmire. They've crushed the hopes and dreams of 200 low-income D.C. families while staking out the otherwise-reasonably-decent position that 1,700 youngsters already in the program should be protected until they graduate. Yet even that outcome is in doubt, as the program's enemies strive to kill it outright. Meanwhile, both are vulnerable to personal attacks, with the President's children in an elite private school and the Secretary admitting that he chose a (public) school outside the District for his daughter because he didn't want to "jeopardize my own children's education."
The time has come for both to learn some key lessons. First: though it might look like a teapot, the D.C. voucher program is capable of causing a major tempest that isn't going to end anytime soon. Second: if you want Congress to cough up funds to keep the program's current students in their schools, it's going to take a fight--an affirmative fight by you in defense of vouchers that work for poor kids! And third: don't fear such a fight, because the facts--not to mention a compelling human narrative--are on your side.
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Recommended Reading
Should principals walk the plank?
No child likes to be sent to the principal's office. Some students in Tucson, Arizona must be thanking their lucky stars. As the district contemplates an 18 percent budget cut, it seems some schools may cut their vice principals, share principals, or even abolish the school-leader position altogether. But will this plan be as successful as the Maersk Alabama without its captain? The move is not without precedent: there are approximately 80 teacher-led charter schools operating around the country with varying rates of success, according to an Education Next article (not Phi Delta Kappan, as erroneously cited by Ms. Bodfield). But unlike most Tucson schools, these teacher-centric schools tend to be tiny. Even strong supporters of the model admit it's neither replicable on the large scale nor the solution for large districts' budget woes. After all, principals do more than just walk the halls handing out high-fives; most successful schools owe their dynamic results in large measure to high energy, smart, dedicated leadership. This idea may deserve the Navy SEAL-pirate treatment.
"Principals: Do schools need them full time?," by Rhonda Bodfield, Arizona Daily Star, April 11, 2009
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An island of excellence
While the 2004 moratorium on new Rhode Island charters expired last June, it's taken months longer for state dollars to catch up. The Ocean State currently has a paltry 11 charters serving 3,100 students--and the waiting list to get in is almost as long. The good news is that Governor Carcieri has put $1.5 million for new charters into his 2009-2010 budget, including some funds for a home grown charter variation: mayoral academies. These schools were cooked up by the mayor of Cumberland, RI, Daniel McKee, in response to accusations that RI charters are charter-lite, with very little autonomy. State charter law subjects principals to a host of rules and regulations, which means they have little control over teacher salaries, retirement policies, and tenure. McKee's network of mayoral academies, which draw students from regions rather than municipalities, will be free from these stipulations. With a green light from the legislature, let's hope the reform rubber is finally on the Rhode.
"Charter schools compete for financing," by Jennifer D. Jordan, Providence Journal, April 13, 2009
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A swing and a hiss
Adults, beware this age-old problem: the childhood tendency to take your words literally. That's what's happened to one poor bloke in Palm Harbor, Florida. After a particularly nasty losing streak, the coach of a high school baseball team told his players they were "snake-bitten" and needed to turn themselves around. The team thought they might just end their losing streak if they beat a cowering serpent into submission--literally--and buried it in their pitcher's mound. So they did. Coach apparently wasn't around when the alleged incident took place (the snake carcass has yet to be found) but he has been temporarily relieved of his duties. While we commiserate with the poor snake, we're just glad the coach didn't call his team a bunch of kittens.
"Fla. baseball team kills snake to stop losing," Associated Press, April 9, 2009
"PHU players kill, bury snake to stop losing streak," by Bob Putnam, St. Petersburg Times, April 9, 2009
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Flypaper's Finest (The best from Flypaper, Fordham's blog)
Cleveland rocks!
Andy Smarick
With all of the attention directed toward the DC voucher program, we could be misled into believing that this represents the current and future of the private school choice debate. Not so. For my money, this story from Cleveland captures the logical-and exciting-next phase of not only choice but also urban education reform...Read it here.
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Re: supplant or supplement?
Stafford Palmieri
As Eric just reported, Loudoun County is playing games with its stimulus dollars. Specifically, it's asking schools to return county dollars and replacing them with federal dollars, presumably to help plug holes in other areas of the county's budget. The net result is that school spending is staying roughly the same...While Duncan has warned that these sorts of shenanigans will be dealt with swiftly and harshly, Loudoun's decision might not be such a bad thing...Read it here.
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The Education Gadfly Show Podcast
Friends don?t let friends campaign for them
This week, we welcome guest co-host Andy Smarick. He and Mike discuss the DC voucher program's slow death, Obama's overseas mea culpas, and Tucson's plans to ditch principals. Then, Amber tells us about the updated Calder study on high school TFA teachers and Rate that Reform talks old-school poisoning. Click here to listen through our website and peruse past editions. To download the show as an mp3 to your computer, click here (no iPod required--this link will play through any music software on your computer, including Windows Media Player or RealPlayer).
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Short Reviews
Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics and the Future of American Education
Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb
Jossey Bass Publishers
April 2009
The long-awaited and very fine new Chubb-Moe book is now out and you surely ought to read it. Written under the aegis of Hoover's Task Force on K-12 Education, it takes the discussion of technology's transformative effect on education to a new level, well beyond Christensen's influential Disrupting Class. The authors aren't just blue-skying about what technology could do if given a chance. What's most interesting in this book is its explanation of how technology will transform the politics of education and thus rewrite the rules by which it is determined what is given a chance. To oversimplify outrageously, they believe that inherent in the new technologies is the capacity to triumph over the usual forces of resistance to reform and renewal in primary-secondary education. They cite half a dozen essential characteristics of technology--geographic dispersion, individualization, transparency, choices, organic evolution, etc.--that will alter power relationships, end-run or weaken traditional barriers, and empower agents of change. You can pick up some of this from their recent debate with Larry Cuban in the pages of Education Next but to get the full benefit--and provocation--of their analysis you'll want to see the book itself. Start here.
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Making a Difference? The Effects of Teach for America in High School
Zeyu Xu, Jane Hannaway, and Colin Taylor
The Urban Institute and CALDER
April 2007 (Revised March 2009)
When this report was released two years ago, it was the first of its kind. Nothing has changed since then, including the positive findings, though this version is even stronger methodologically and includes more data. (The authors went back and shored up their argument in response to accusations of statistical problems.) By using longitudinal data from end-of-course tests in 23 North Carolina districts from 2000 to 2007, it estimates the effects on student achievement of having a TFA teacher (versus the traditional kind). As before, the authors find that TFA teachers are more effective than traditional teachers, even those with more experience. In fact, the "TFA effect" on student achievement is 2-3 times greater than that of 3-5 years of teaching experience (and other studies show that the relationship between teaching effectiveness and experience typically diminishes after that point). These positive results held across multiple subjects, but were especially strong in math and science. Because the key research question was "whether or not the TFA program can provide effective teachers to supplement the existing teaching force," the study did not control for college selectivity or teacher licensing scores; it did control, however, for teacher experience, gender, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and classroom environment. In other words, this study does not address what is driving TFA effectiveness (though we know TFA'ers tend to hail from the most competitive undergraduate institutions), but it does make a wise suggestion: we should be just as concerned with recruitment as we are with retention--and certainly shouldn't be barring the gates.
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Balanced Scorecards and Management Data
Frederick M. Hess and Jon Fullerton
Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University
February 2009
If FedEx does it and baseball teams do it, why can't school systems do it? The "it" in question, of course, is using data analysis to aid managerial decision-making. After all, "data driven" is a hot term in education and states are tracking student achievement and financial information more than ever. The problem, argue Hess and Fullerton, is that these data are collected as a "measure of performance," not as a measure for performance--i.e., to be analyzed for future decisions. Instead, we should be using a balanced scorecard approach, where managers view goals and data in one place and can compare how the latter stack up against the former. But poor quality IT systems, lack of incentives to collect better data, and a culture of status quoism make it hard to. This last piece might prove the most important since if data-driven practices are ever to succeed, superintendents and their lieutenants must understand and be willing to try them. This essay is one slice of the complex world of education data, explained more fully in Fordham's A Byte at the Apple, where Hess and Fullerton's idea first appeared. You can read their new paper here.
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School Choice and Home Prices: Evidence from Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Marcus Winters
SCDP Milwaukee Evaluation
March 2009
It's no secret that the quality of local public schools heavily influences the residential choices of parents and can impact housing prices, too. This study examines the effect of widespread school choice provisions on the residential housing market. It's part of a larger group of studies on education in Milwaukee, a fitting laboratory because it is home to one of the nation's largest voucher programs, a bevy of charter schools, and an intra-district public open enrollment program. But despite the extent of choice in that city's education system, a significant positive relationship can still be found between home value and average test scores of the nearest elementary school. A 1 percent increase in average scores produces a 1.35 percent increase in home prices. Put simply, Milwaukee's choice programs haven't socioeconomically integrated the city's residential areas. Unfortunately, as acknowledged by the author, the study suffers from methodological limitations, not least the fact that home price information is not available before 2002, though Milwaukee's private and public choice programs were implemented well before then. You can find it here.
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Announcements
National standards get international tutoring
Fordham's May 5 conference, "International Lessons about National Standards," is quickly filling up. This affair will be held at the Capital Hilton in downtown D.C. and explore lessons-learned about national standards from our international neighbors. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is the keynote speaker; Michigan State's William Schmidt will offer major new findings. RSVP to Christina Hentges at rsvp@edexcellence.net.
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Congress comes to K Street
They're out of favor but not out of ideas--the GOP, that is. Want to know what they're thinking? Come to the next in our Great Debate series on April 27 from 3:30 to 4:30 pm, "Resolved: What should Republicans seek in education (with a focus on the federal role)?" Representing three points of view on this question are three GOP Congressmen who are knee deep in education issues: Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Representative Mike Castle (R-DE). Please join us on April 27 from 3:30-4:30 pm in Fordham's own event space. RSVP to Christina Hentges at rsvp@edexcellence.net.
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About Us
The Education Gadfly is published weekly (ordinarily on Thursdays), with occasional breaks, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Regular contributors include Amy Fagan, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Kyle Kennedy, Mickey Muldoon, Jamie Davies O’Leary, Eric Osberg, Stafford Palmieri, Emmy Partin, Michael J. Petrilli, Laura Elizabeth Pohl, Terry Ryan, Janie Scull, Saul Spady, and Amber Winkler. Have something to say? Email us at thegadfly@edexcellence.net. Would you like to be spared from the Gadfly? Email thegadfly@edexcellence.net with “unsubscribe gadfly” in the text of your message. You are welcome to forward Gadfly to others, and from our website you can also email individual articles. If you have been forwarded a copy of Gadfly and would like to subscribe, you may either email thegadfly@edexcellence.net with “subscribe gadfly” in the text of the message or sign up online here.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a nonprofit organization that conducts research, issues publications, and directs action projects in elementary and secondary education reform at the national level and in Ohio, with a special emphasis on our hometown of Dayton. (For Ohio news, check out our Ohio Education Gadfly, published bi-weekly, ordinarily on Wednesdays.) The Institute is neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.
