Guest blogger

Too often decisions are made and policies are set based on the interests of adults in the system rather than student needs.

As I spend time visiting and studying school systems across the country, I see many bright spots. But I also see far too many places where children are being educationally shortchanged. That’s reflected in the still-enormous gaps between what poor and minority students know and can do academically and the performance of their wealthier, white peers. And it’s also reflected in the growing gap between American students and their peers overseas.

So how did we get here and what do we need to do to give our kids—all our kids—the twenty-first century education they deserve? 

I can’t point to any one policy that is responsible for holding our kids back. But I can assure you that there is an overall approach to education policymaking that is hurting children. And that is this: Too often decisions are made and policies are set based on the interests of adults in the system rather than student needs. 

Consider how we conduct teacher layoffs, when they unfortunately arise. They are almost always tied to seniority rather than a teacher’s work with students. While some say that’s fair to the adults in the system, in fact the policy is unfair and harmful to kids. Research shows that quality-blind layoffs push some of our best teachers out the door. An Urban Institute study found very little overlap between teachers who would be let go under seniority rules and those who would be let go if teacher effectiveness were used. Experience matters, but not more than job performance.

Policies governing how teachers and principals are evaluated also aren’t serving student needs. Too often we conduct these evaluations too infrequently and in a practically meaningless manner. I know scrutiny can be uncomfortable, especially for those who aren’t used to it, but rigorous evaluations can help educators improve and ensure kids are learning at high levels. Teacher evaluations should include, but not be limited to, classroom observations and an objective look at whether students are making academic gains. Principals should be evaluated based on factors such as school-wide student progress, parental engagement and the management of a school.

The list of adult-centered, rather than student-centered, policies in our schools is long.

Another popular policy that isn’t aligned with kids’ needs is the forced placement of tenured teachers “excessed” from one school into another without any regard to whether it’s a good fit or the principal at the new school agrees with the decision. The policy leads to the so-called “dance of the lemons,” because it allows less effective teachers to be moved around rather than getting the professional development they need to improve or, when it's best for children, be counseled out of the profession. 

The list of adult-centered, rather than student-centered, policies in our schools is long, and other examples include how tenure is awarded, how public resources are spent, and the degree to which educational choices are available to families. I urge our nation's education leaders to take a hard look at the policies and practices governing their school systems and consider whether they are first and foremost serving the needs of kids.

The challenges before us are great, but they are not insurmountable. Our organization is working in seventeen states, and, in just a year and a half, we’ve seen real progress in many of them. Most recently, Georgia eliminated seniority-based teacher layoffs and the Connecticut legislature passed a measure that gives the commissioner of education the flexibility to turn around some of the state’s most under-performing schools. Our more than one million members are committed to this idea that we need to put student needs at the center of decision-making in our schools. If we stand by that principle, we can’t go wrong can create schools that give our kids a shot at success.

While editor Peter Meyer is taking a brief sabbatical from his biweekly blog, Board's Eye View is hosting a series of guest blog posts from a range of experts and stakeholders answering The BIG Question: What's the most important governance issue? Meyer encourages readers to interact with our TBQ contributors or contact him directly at pmeyer@edexcellence.net if they would like to submit their own TBQ essay.

Guest blogger Anne L. Bryant is the executive director of the National School Boards Association.

The National School Boards Association (NSBA) held its 72nd Annual Conference in Boston, April 21-23, and more than 5,000 school board members and superintendents enjoyed inspiring remarks by CNN Anchor Soledad O’Brien, Khan Academy Founder Sal Khan, and President of Harlem Children’s Zone Geoffrey Canada. We also held more than 200 sessions and workshops on topics such as the common core standards, new trends in educational technology, community engagement, and strategies to turn around low-performing schools.

But perhaps the biggest star was our 2011-12 president, Mary Broderick, of East Lyme, Conn. In her term as president, Broderick has passionately articulated the need to allow teachers and students the freedom to think, teach, and learn. She’s fascinated by motivation research and for years has studied the impact of federal and state policies, particularly the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), on classrooms.

She began writing a letter to President Barack Obama during her travels as NSBA president, soliciting comments and advice from her colleagues along the way. (Broderick not only saw the need for change as a veteran school board member, she also spends a great deal of time in schools and working with communities in her day jobs as an educational consultant with the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund and also with Community Conversations.) This became the basis for her speech at NSBA’s Conference.

When Broderick started the letter, she wasn’t quite sure how it would evolve. It became a call for a national dialogue for a new direction in federal policy—she notes that “though well-intentioned, the current federal direction is ignoring and working against much of what we know about student motivation and achievement.”

“We have significant challenges in many of our communities, especially those that are underserved, yet we continue to boast some of the best schools in the world,” Broderick wrote. “Our vision should be to empower excellence — to draw out the best in each and every individual in our schools. We should recognize that our children’s brains are our most important resource.”

We are currently too focused on testing and teaching rote memorization rather than inspiring creativity.

During her speech, Broderick hit a home run—or a hole in one—with the crowd when she held up a golf ball and talked about the need for certain products to be built to be consistent shapes and sizes, and perform to specific standards for consistency. On the other hand, children have different inclinations and talents and gifts—“children are not golf balls!”

That’s not to say we don’t want accountability—there is a need for testing and a need to hold teachers and schools accountable for student progress. But we’ve gone too far—we are currently too focused on testing and teaching rote memorization rather than inspiring creativity. Broderick also pointed out that our country “will never be top-ranked in the world on standardized tests—nor should we aspire to be.”

“We simply are not a compliant people willing to absorb facts without challenge,” Broderick noted. “But we have had the most innovative workforce in the world (and now vie with Finland for that top position). Though intended to encourage equity, our current policy is, in fact, driving us toward mediocrity. Our students may be becoming better regurgitators, but what we need is excellent thinkers.”

While editor Peter Meyer is taking a brief sabbatical from his biweekly blog, Board's Eye View is hosting a series of guest blog posts from a range of experts and stakeholders answering The BIG Question: What's the most important governance issue? Meyer encourages readers to interact with our TBQ contributors or contact him directly at pmeyer@edexcellence.net if they would like to submit their own TBQ essay.

Guest blogger Jay P. Greene is the 21st Century Professor of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University.

Being against greater national control over education policy is not the same as being for local school districts. I appreciate Peter Meyer giving me the opportunity in this space to explain what I am for when it comes to school governance.

Fundamentally, I am for parental control over the education of their children, so I guess that I am for as little governance over education as we can manage. In my ideal world, which I’ve tried to explain and justify at greater length in this book chapter, parents would be given as much money as is minimally necessary to fulfill their obligation to educate their children and would choose the location, manner, and content of that education. Since education is just a subset of all of the activities in which parents engage to raise their children to be productive adults, we should defer to parents as much in how they educate their children as how they raise those children more generally. As long as parents do not neglect or abuse their children, the government should have as little role in education as is possible.

But we don’t live in my ideal world and I have no expectation that we will. All that I can hope for is that we will inch closer to my ideal rather than further away from it. With that in mind, I favor governance arrangements that facilitate greater parental choice and control over education over those that would reduce parental choice and control.

I favor governance arrangements that facilitate greater parental choice and control over education over those that would reduce parental choice and control.

So, I have no particular love for local school districts. They just more closely approximate parental choice and control than does granting more power over education to the state or national governments. It would be even better in my view to abolish school districts and have every school be like a charter school—a publicly regulated school of choice that would choose its own method and content of education and would have to attract willing families to generate the revenue to pay for it. But I understand the idea of abolishing school districts and having every school operate as a charter school is only slightly less unrealistic than a virtually unregulated world of parental choice and control.

As unrealistic as making every school a charter school may be, we have been inching in that direction. A little more than two decades ago we had no charter schools. Today charter schools constitute nearly 5 percent of all public schools and educate about 3 percent of all students. And the expansion of parental choice and control has been even greater when one considers the fully array of choices that have been introduced over the last two decades, including vouchers, tax credit funded scholarships, virtual schools, inter-district choice, magnet schools, etc…  My ideal world may be an unattainable fantasy, but my vision of gradual progress toward that ideal has been a fairly accurate description of the trends over the last few decades.

But there are some people, primarily edupundits located within the D.C. beltway, who have very different fantasies about ideal governance arrangements. Rather than shifting arrangements directly toward greater parental choice and control, they dream about measures granting greater control to state and national authorities. They rightly point out the defects of local school districts, but they wrongly see the solution in greater centralization of power rather than in the expansion of parental choice and control.

Their justifications for increasing the power of state and national authorities over education are more like empty political slogans than actual intellectual arguments based on principle. For example, we’ll hear some say that a decentralized system of education cannot meet our needs in the twenty-first century: “The system of schooling we have today is the legacy of the 19th century—and hopelessly outmoded in the 21st.”  Of course, representative democracy is also a legacy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but that doesn’t mean we need to dispense with it to meet the challenges of our brave new twenty-first century world. Saying that the twenty-first century demands certain skills or governance arrangements is just sloganeering and manipulating people to submit to a proposal, not a real argument.

Some attempt to justify greater centralization in education by saying that our current system is too uncoordinated, contradictory, duplicative, and confusing. We need the greater coherence, planning, and order that more centralized control can offer. Do you notice how the central authorities in these proposals are always imagined to be highly competent and benevolent? They never entertain the very real possibility that the central authority might be coherent, well-planned, and orderly in pursuing something awful. Those attracted to central planning in education may want to consider how well economic central planning has turned out.

Those attracted to central planning in education may want to consider how well economic central planning has turned out.

Some attempt to justify granting more power to state and national authorities by looking overseas and claiming that the highest achieving countries have more centralized governance arrangements. Let’s ignore for a moment that these are not accurate descriptions of how many high-achieving countries have structured their governance—Canada and Australia, for example, are high achieving and have decentralized governance arrangements. The more fundamental problem is that the “best practices” movement of imitating some of the practices of others who are successful fails to consider what actually caused others to be successful. Just imitating some of what they do is like the Cargo Cults found in Pacific Islands following WW II, where locals believed that if they built imitations of planes, runways, and control towers, the cargo and plentiful goods that had arrived during the war would return. They didn’t understand that imitating the trappings of an airport doesn’t cause cargo to arrive any more than imitating the trappings of other countries’ governance arrangements will cause high achievement.

Lastly, some advocates of centralization argue that you actually need to centralize certain things in order to facilitate better decentralized control over other things. They describe this approach as “tight-loose,” where the central authority assumes greater control over determining and regulating the goals of education and local authorities are then given greater flexibility over the means for meeting those goals. Of course, ends and means are not so easily separated. Ends often dictate or at least constrain the selection of means. In addition, in what fantasy world would the central authority carefully limit its role to setting and regulating ends once it is given authority over an issue? At least I recognize that my fantasy of parental choice and control is unrealistic. 

While editor Peter Meyer is taking a brief sabbatical from his biweekly blog, Board's Eye View is hosting a series of guest blog posts from a range of experts and stakeholders answering The BIG Question: What's the most important governance issue? Meyer encourages readers to interact with our TBQ contributors or contact him directly at pmeyer@edexcellence.net if they would like to submit their own TBQ essay.

Guest blogger David Harris is the founder and chief executive officer of The Mind Trust, a nonprofit that is driving innovative K-12 education reform in Indianapolis. Under his leadership, The Mind Trust recruits proven programs to Indianapolis, incubates life-changing schools and initiatives, and develops bold plans for systemic change. Since its launch in 2006, The Mind Trust has impacted 37,500 students through its work and raised twenty-seven million dollars.

The Mind Trust's goal is to ensure every child in Indianapolis has the opportunity to receive an excellent education. We believe that dramatically increasing the number of high-quality schools in our city is critical to this mission.

The need for more high-quality public schools in Indianapolis is sizable. Less than half of students in the city’s largest district, Indianapolis Public Schools, meet basic state standards on both math and English portions of Indiana’s standardized test. Less than two-thirds graduate on time.

The need for more high-quality public schools in Indianapolis is sizable.

The charter schools authorized by the Indianapolis mayor’s office have made significant strides at boosting student outcomes. On average last year, those charter schools exceeded the Indianapolis Public Schools pass rates in both math and English on the state’s standardized test by 13 percentage points.

But the charter-school supply is not adequate to meet the demand for the schools. Nearly 1,000 students are left on waiting lists for charter schools in Indianapolis each year. A handful of high-performing district schools provide some parents in the Indianapolis Public Schools district with desirable options. But the capacity of those magnet schools is limited, so those options are available to only a small fraction of the IPS population.

Last year, The Mind Trust undertook two new initiatives to address the need for high-quality schools in our city. In December we released a report proposing a dramatic overhaul of Indianapolis' largest school district. It recommends shifting control of spending and decision-making from a centralized bureaucracy to individual schools. Our report also suggests restructuring district spending to invest in attracting talented teachers, school leaders and new schools to the district and providing all four-year-olds within the district access to pre-K.  We believe that this overhaul of city schools will radically improve the educational prospects of Indianapolis children and serve as a model for urban education transformation throughout the country.

We have sparked a robust community conversation about this district-overhaul plan and its recommendations, and there are a variety of pathways to getting it implemented. In the meantime, we’re moving forward with a separate initiative that will increase the number of high-quality public school options by enticing excellent leaders to Indianapolis to launch networks of great charter schools.

In October, The Mind Trust launched a nationally unique Charter School Incubator. Through it we are awarding million-dollar grants to talented teams who want to start innovative, new charter schools or replicate proven charter models in Indianapolis. Other cities across the U.S. have started charter school incubators, but ours is an especially attractive opportunity. That’s partly because the one million dollars we’re offering teams in start-up capital is four times as large as the next biggest award, and also because we’re investing in teams, not just individuals, to launch entire networks of charter schools.

Each team we select will commit to launching networks of new charter schools in Indianapolis. Over the next five to seven years, we expect the incubator will help to start fifteen to twenty excellent charter schools serving thousands of students.

In the first round of applications, we received an outpouring of interest in the program. Thirty-five teams applied for the awards, with thirty-one of them hailing from eighteen states across the U.S. We will make up to three awards this summer, with plans for additional awards in years to come.

We must do all we can to increase the number of high-quality public schools in our urban core. And we need our traditional public school sector to join in the transformation of urban education by dismantling the barriers to creating high-quality schools.

While editor Peter Meyer is taking a brief sabbatical from his biweekly blog, Board's Eye View is hosting a series of guest blog posts from a range of experts and stakeholders answering The BIG Question: What's the most important governance issue? Meyer encourages readers to interact with our TBQ contributors or contact him directly at pmeyer@edexcellence.net if they would like to submit their own TBQ essay.

As a school board member I confess to deep and continuous agita over the the system’s inability to do the right thing.

I will not pretend to be an expert on teaching, but as a school board member I confess to deep and continuous agita over the system’s inability to do the right thing; rather, its amazing ability to deny reality, which is the prime directive for institutional entropy. (It is not just the reality of good research that is ignored, it’s the reality of crumbling schools and generations of untaught children.) I had a veteran teacher pull me aside one day and almost shout, “They keep giving new names to the same tired and unworkable ideas. Why don’t they just let me teach!”

Since reading E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, celebrating its 25th year in print, I have watched American educators do somersaults to avoid the obvious need for rigorous, fact-based curricula. In fact, the two denials—the effectiveness of direct instruction and the value of content knowledge—go hand in hand and together probably account for most of the national educational malaise. You name it—Clark et al say it goes under various names, “including discovery learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning, experiential learning, and constructivist learning”—our educators are locked on to bad ideas and ineffective pedagogies like cruise missiles to their preprogrammed targets. “Each new set of advocates for unguided approaches seemed unaware of, or uninterested in,” write Clark et al, “previous evidence that unguided approaches had not been validated.”

As my friend Barry Garelick writes about the new Brookings report on the effectiveness of instructional materials:

The report makes this common sense observation and recommendation: "There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning-effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness. But whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming, making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick."

That makes so much sense that it will either be ignored, or the snake oil purveyors who sell Investigations, EM, CMP and the like will claim "We agree! And our products do just that!"

One need not be that cynical about the situation, but willful ignorance is a phrase that often comes to mind when watching such “common sense” prescriptions for change go unheeded. Obviously, those who have been schooled in such notions as discovery learning and are getting paid for using it have little incentive to read the research, much less tell their colleagues about it. And, by the same token, there is no incentive for school boards to change when the money keeps rolling. My colleagues on my school board are education preservers not reformers. Even though their acts serve to reinforce failure, their first instinct is to dig in, to resist change. Why? Well, why not? Over lunch the other day, a board colleague ticked off her list of ideas for creating a good school, including creating a “culture of high expectations.” When I asked, how you go about doing that, she was stumped; rather, she didn’t like the answer, which was to hold teachers and administrators accountable for student performance. She preferred, “It’s the parents.” And so it goes.

Even when angry citizens come to the board, as several did a few weeks ago, their complaints seem to fall on deaf ears.

“We hear all the time, `Don’t rock the boat,’” said one of those complaining parents. “But I can tell you, we are strapped in, and the boat has turned over.” The problem: the kids are drowning, but not the educators.

Complacency is how Hirsch, who tends to see the problem as “bad ideas” rather than “bad people,” explained the problem in an essay two years ago in the New York Review of Books:

The root cause of [the public education] decline, starting in the 1960s, was a by-then-decades-old complacency on the part of school leaders and in the nation at large. By the early twentieth century worries about the stability of the Republic had subsided, and by the 1930s, under the enduring influence of European Romanticism, educational leaders had begun to convert the community-centered school of the nineteenth century to the child- centered school of the twentieth-a process that was complete by 1950. The chief tenet of the child-centered school was that no bookish curriculum was to be set out in advance. Rather, learning was to arise naturally out of activities, projects, and daily experience.

Paying little attention to the results of the “anti-bookish, child-centered viewpoint,” as Hirsch writes, the nation slept while it experienced “a steep decline in twelfth-grade academic achievement between 1962 and 1980, after which, despite vigorous reform efforts, reading and math scores on the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress have hardly changed.”

And now, as Hirsch warns, we are trying to yoke the child-centered anti-intellectualism to our new testing and accountability fetish. "This contradictory and self-defeating situation,” says Hirsch, has lead to even worse practices:

…drills in how-to skills that will prepare [students] to pass tests. Many of the weekly hours that are assigned to language arts in the early grades are now being devoted to practicing reading strategies such as `questioning the author’ and `finding the main idea.’ [Diane] Ravitch describes in detail a highly touted reform in New York City and San Diego called `balanced literacy,’ which requires students to spend a lot of time practicing such reading strategies but does not prescribe any particular books, poems, and essays to practice them on.

The good news is that we have two trends that are gaining ground on the monster that is our education system.

The good news is that we have two trends that are gaining ground on the monster that is our education system:  a renewed appreciation for content (and that is not, as some would have it, a sudden love of “nonfiction”) and the new market mechanisms (i.e. choice) that incentivize innovation and renewal. If we can keep our eyes on the prize of the former, we will sort out the problems of dumbed-down instructional materials and vapid instructional techniques.

As for the latter, David Brooks set out our choices nicely the other day in an essay about our “two economies.”   One economy is that of the free market, which Brooks says has a “creative dynamism” that is both “astounding and a little terrifying. Over the past five years, amid turmoil and uncertainty, American businesses have shed employees, becoming more efficient and more productive. According to The Wall Street Journal on Monday, the revenue per employee at S.&P. 500 companies increased from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2011.”

Public education, for the most part, still lives in the second economy: “a large sector… that does not face… global competition.” Its leaders do “try to improve productivity and use new technologies, but they are not compelled by do-or-die pressure, and their pace of change is slower.” Why?  Because there are no widespread threatened layoffs. No guillotine focusing the mind.

Brooks understands the “conflicts between those who live in Economy I and those who live in Economy II” and how “choice-oriented education reforms” might terrify those clinging to their monopoly guarantees as they face the prospect of an education sector “as dynamic, creative and efficient as Economy I.”

Though most of the public education sector still does not see the “urgent need to understand the interplay between the two different sectors,” there are signs that even in education, increasing numbers of leaders of Economy II are finding ways to make our schools not only responsive to good ideas but to the educational needs of their children. And they are not afraid to light fires of accountability—no more teacher tenure, more value-added evaluations—that mimic the incentives that characterize Economy I. Once parents are untethered from the overturned boat, those not wanting to rock it, like my board colleagues, will understand that they better stop worrying about the weather and start doing what’s needed to stay afloat. Shouted the coxswain: Row!

The Lousiana legislature passed a set of historic reform bills last week.  Photo by Jim Bowen.

…curtail teacher tenure protection, tie instructors' compensation and superintendents' job security to student performance; shift hiring and firing power from school boards to superintendents; create new paths to open charter schools; and establish a statewide program that uses the public-school financing formula to pay private-school tuition for certain low-income students.

It was anything but a cakewalk for the Jindal reform package, as teachers descended on the Capitol to fight the bills and Democrats charged the second-term Republican governor with strong-arm tactics reminiscent of former political tough guys Huey Long and Edwin Edwards. “I make no apologies for having a sense of urgency,” said Jindal. “I was elected to help lead our state. I was not elected just to hold an office."

Even Diane Ravitch made a trip to Louisiana to cheer-lead the anti-reform troops. As she recounts on her Bridging Differences blog, headlined “Bobby Jindal v. Public Education,” the Louisiana governor is…

….in a race to the bottom with other Republican governors to see who can move fastest to destroy the underpinnings of public education and to instill fear in the hearts of teachers. It's hard to say which of them is worst: Jindal, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, or .... There are so many contenders for the title, it's hard to name them all. They all seem to be working from the same playbook: Remove any professionalism and sense of security from teachers; expand privatization as rapidly as possible, through charters and vouchers; intensify reliance on high-stakes tests to evaluate teachers and schools; tighten the regulations on public schools while deregulating the privately managed charter schools. Keep up the attack on many fronts, to confuse the supporters of public education.

Thankfully, an increasing number of parents and voters are not fooled by the rhetoric. And, tellingly, Ravitch leaves off the list of bad guy governors Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, who has proven himself a champion of education reform. Though there have been many fits-and-starts in the reform movement over the last decade, despite Ravitch’s attempt to portray it as a right-wing conspiracy, one of the more noticeable themes has been that movement’s bipartisanship.  Love it or hate it, No Child Left Behind was a bold cross-the-aisle reform hug and there has been a long line of Democratic education reformers, from Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson and Chicago mayor Richard Daley, to Democrats for Education Reform to Chris Cerf, the New Jersey education chief who worked in the Clinton administration, to President Obama and Arne Duncan. Adding Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to the list and, as Lyndsey Layton reported last month in the Washington Post, you have "several Democratic mayors in cities across the country—Chicago, Cleveland, Newark and Boston, among them—who are challenging teachers unions in ways that seemed inconceivable just a decade ago.

There is much to work out on the implementation front in Louisiana (and the AP is reporting many battles to come over vouchers), but Jindal’s new superintendent, a Teach for America veteran who cut his reform teeth under Joel Klein in New York (see my story on White here), is well-prepped for the challenge.

Says White,

This is a momentous day for the families of Louisiana…. All students deserve a fair chance in life, and that begins with the opportunity to attend a high-quality school. These policy changes are aligned with that central belief, and Gov. Jindal and state lawmakers have demonstrated a clear commitment to prioritize the educational rights of Louisiana's next generation above all else.

Congratulations to Louisiana.

In what might be the quote of the day (if not year), Geoffrey Canada tells Anna Phillips of the New York Times that,

Folks are genuinely looking for opportunities to make peace and not war….  And I think that’s terrific. But someone has to make war.

A triumvirate of kumbaya they are not.

Who better to lead the troops than Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Eva Moskowitz, three of the most aggressive education reformers of the last decade, or, if you prefer, as Phillips has it, “some of the most well-known and polarizing figures in public education.”

A triumvirate of kumbaya they are not.

And what they have now done is form a group that intends to raise $10 million annually for the next five years to lobby the New York State legislature to protect the reform initiatives launched by Klein and his mayoral boss Michael Bloomberg in New York City, promote reform throughout the state, and, as Phillips writes,

…neutralize the might of the teachers’ unions, whose money, endorsements and get-out-the-vote efforts have swung many close elections.

Bloomberg’s third (and this time final) term expires at the end of next year. Says Phillips,

[T]he campaign is beginning while advocates of reform have an ally in the mayor. But their eyes are focused on 2014, when a new mayor—most likely one who is more sympathetic to the teachers’ union than Mr. Bloomberg has been—enters office.

In fact, the law to renew mayoral control over Gotham’s schools expires in 2015 and may pose an interesting early challenge for the group: What if, as Phillips suggests, the new mayor is not a friend of education reform?

The group, StudentsFirstNY (no webpage yet) has a bunch of hedge-funders and venture capitalists (not named by Phillips) involved and will be lead by Micah Lasher, the barely 30-year-old “magical wunderkind lobbyist,” as Gotham Schools dubbed him a couple of years ago, when Bloomberg sent him to Albany as the city’s lobbyist.

Let the games—er, battles—begin.

There's a serious imbalance between a principal's accountability and authority.  Photo by Kat.

In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations.

Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school's budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government—none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others.

In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO's but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.

That cannot work well and most of the time does not, save for the occasional superhero principal who must act like a maverick—breaking or ignoring most of the rules—in order to cope with an inherently absurd imbalance.

To top it off, today's school principals get paid barely more than the senior teachers in their schools, though they typically work year-round versus the classic 180-day, nine-month teacher contract.

No wonder principals are retiring in droves. No wonder many of our ablest young educators—such as those emerging from the Teach for America program—shun the principal's office, at least in district-operated schools. (Many gravitate to the charter-school sector, where principals have far greater authority.) No wonder entrepreneurs, risk-takers, and change agents seldom last long as principals, or that many of those who do endure are people who can tolerate (or even welcome) middle-manager roles.

This situation grows worse with every passing year, as federal, state, and district programs multiply and become more rule-bound—by, for example, "special education" and "No Child Left Behind"; judges issue more rulings that bind the principals' hands; union contracts lengthen and become more restrictive; funding levels off; and teacher layoffs become unavoidable, resulting in even less discretionary money at the building level and, because of seniority and tenure rules, less say over who works there.

The underlying causes are threefold.

First, a dysfunctional and archaic governance structure for public education that pays homage to "local control" yet turns into bureaucratic management of dozens or hundreds of schools from burgeoning "central offices," rather than vesting any real control at the level closest to teachers, students, and parents. Setting policy for that system, typically, is an elected school board that itself has grown dysfunctional, particularly in urban America, as adult interest groups manipulate who serves on it. Atop all this sit state and federal agencies—multiple agencies at each level—as well as (in many states) county or regional administrative units.

Second, we've layered so many responsibilities on our schools that the teaching and learning of basic skills and essential knowledge have all but vanished under efforts to rectify injustice; foster diversity; provide multiple services to kids with varying needs; prevent drug abuse, adolescent pregnancy, and obesity; forge character; keep children off the streets; ensure physical fitness; and observe a near-infinity of special events, holidays, and interest-group enthusiasms.

Third, every time something goes wrong anywhere, a blizzard of new rules and procedures descends upon the school's obligations, lest that mishap recur anywhere else. Whether it's bullying or a playground accident, an unwanted intruder or a disgruntled parent, a kid who doesn't get into a particular course or a library book that offends someone, the checklists, regulations, and prohibitions multiply.

What's a principal to do? If his or her state (like Florida or California) has a universal class-size limit, he or she cannot even rearrange student and teacher assignments to make the best use of the school's instructional team. If a state tenure law or district union contract insists that, in a layoff situation, the newest teachers must be let go first, he or she will have no say over who ends up teaching in his or her school. (Never mind that the reduction in instructional force doesn't obviate the class size limit!) If a district policy (or court order) says no student can be suspended or expelled regardless of the offense, simply maintaining order within the school may prove impossible. (In the opposite case, a "zero tolerance" law may leave the principal with no discretion even for a first offender who didn't mean any harm. Remember those six-year-olds who brought TOY weapons for "show and tell"?)

This gigantic mismatch between responsibility and authority has no simple remedy. What's needed is a radical simplification, replacing rules with responsibility on the part of the people running our schools. If we don't give principals the authority to do their jobs, we are going to have few competent leaders for our schools, which means we're not going to have many effective schools or well-educated children tomorrow.

A slightly different version of this essay was originally published by TheAtlantic.com as part of its "America the Fixable" series.

Mark Anderson is a special education teacher in the Bronx. He is originally from California and still trying to convince himself that skyscrapers are equivalent to mountains. Follow Mark on Twitter @mandercorn or on his blog Schools as Ecosystems.

From where I sit—as a special education teacher in East Tremont in the Bronx—it looks to me like the same issues that plague my public school and district plague the school system at large.

It's rare that content knowledge, pedagogical wisdom, or other experiential knowledge is transferred between classrooms, let alone between schools or between districts. It does happen, when those few teachers that establish meaningful relationships with one another talk about a lesson, or ask to borrow something, or ask for help when they are struggling with a concept. But it doesn’t happen often enough.

One would think that this sort of meaningful transfer of information would occur as a result of professional development or prep period time, but professional development largely seems to stand for "paying some institution lots of money so it can come and tell us how to teach." It's rare that anything that is developed through those sessions comes directly from the teachers themselves, and it's rarer still that anything is implemented in an ongoing manner as a result of that PD.

The 20-30 minutes of actual prep period time, after students have been shuttled down stairs and into another classroom and you've walked back up the stairs, is used to hurriedly throw together a trajectory for the next day or week, desperately write out progress reports, work on an IEP, or call a parent.

This is unfortunate. The teachers in my school are an untapped, vast repository of knowledge that are rarely recognized, except intermittently by their own students.

What's missing, at all levels, is genuine dialogue grounded in the professional experience of the classroom.

Sometimes I wonder if this lack of formal and systematic collaboration and professional dialogue—centered upon expertise and knowledge from deep within the field—is the very problem that lies at the heart of the myriad other problems in public education. We have influential leaders like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, who seem not to put much stock in collaboration; vis Klein's recent comment in The Atlantic that “collaboration is the elixir of the status quo.” We have unions that have historically dug in their heels against any and all attempts to professionalize teaching. We have policymakers that use disassociated, disaggregated numbers generated by test-making corporations far removed from the classroom.

What's missing here, at all levels, is genuine dialogue grounded in the professional experience of the classroom. Teachers are a diverse bunch for sure, with wildly divergent values, beliefs, and experiences. But we also possess a wealth of knowledge about the students and communities within which we work. We have deep and lasting relationships with children and their parents. We know what's working and what's not working in our schools. Somehow, this ground level knowledge, this field-based experience, needs to be transferred up to those governing our school systems, and it needs to be transferred in a manner that goes deeper and goes beyond simple numbers tabulated by tests or attendance or graduation rates.

I see two essential things missing from our governance structures in public education: formal and systematic horizontal and vertical channels of professional communication, especially channels that allow feedback; and decision-making that travels upward, not simply downward.

How do we institutionalize “genuine dialogue” at all levels across the educational system?

So how do we institutionalize “genuine dialogue” at all levels across the educational system? I believe we must start by investing directly in initiatives to encourage collaboration between teachers on the front lines. I would suggest to policymakers that they find a means of increasing out-of-classroom time for teachers. This could be tied into leadership roles and recognition from evaluations. This out-of-classroom time could have any number of practical applications. Teachers could become more involved in policy. Teachers could visit and learn from other classrooms in their own school, and in other schools across different districts, cities, and even states.

At the other end of the spectrum, state, city, and district leaders who have traditionally been merely symbolic heads of school systems must set foot in schools and classrooms. And not simply in photo op schools, where they can be seen reading to children who can function in a typical classroom environment and respect authority. They need to set foot in the schools that are struggling, and they need to understand that struggle first-hand. They need to enter the self-contained classrooms in impoverished communities and understand what it truly means to teach in the inner city. They need to see first-hand schools that lack materials, that don't even have toilet paper in the bathrooms. Otherwise, all they will see in their offices and meeting rooms is disassociated data.

I'm not sure how this latter suggestion can be implemented in policy; I believe lawmakers will need to be involved in providing the formal requirement that political leaders—whether mayor, school board members, or superintendent—must step foot into classrooms on a frequent basis. But I believe that increasing the opportunities for collaboration and understanding across different levels of school governance will provide a foundation for meaningful dialogue.

So my advice to those who wish to make our public education systems better: start by implementing ways of gathering knowledge from the field; systematically foster professional dialogue between classrooms, schools, districts, and states; and triangulate test score data with the information gleaned from direct engagement and dialogue with battle-hardened veterans from the field. Otherwise, teachers, school leaders, and policymakers will continue driving blind, isolated in the confines of their own echo chambers.

While editor Peter Meyer is taking a brief sabbatical from his biweekly blog, Board's Eye View is hosting a series of guest blog posts from a range of experts and stakeholders answering The BIG Question: What's the most important governance issue? Meyer encourages readers to interact with our TBQ contributors or contact him directly at pmeyer@edexcellence.net if they would like to submit their own TBQ essay.

The Advocate has recently published several letters to the editor on public education. I have to say as an educator, I'm disappointed with the prevailing tone and content of those letters opposing change.

Here are some passages that illustrate a common thread:

"We, the public school teachers of East Baton Rouge schools, can't educate children who don't want to be educated. We can't educate children whose parents don't care and are not involved."

"…the state is going to require that very poor students take the ACT… The weaker of these students are not college-bound students who have no intention to attend college, yet he has to be compared and compete."

And one writer simply stated, "Poverty is a significant factor affecting academic scores," leaving it at that—as if that absolves us of any responsibility to educate the child.

I'm so disappointed in these comments for two reasons. First, they betray a mindset that forsakes the American dream. They show a sad belief among some that poverty is destiny in America, defying our core value that any child, no matter race, class, or creed, can be the adult he or she dreams of being. Yes, poverty matters. Yes, it impacts learning. And that fact should only embolden us to do everything we can to break the cycle of poverty so another generation of children does not face the same challenges.

Second, and perhaps more disappointing, is that these letters were written by professional educators. The media would have you think that most educators oppose change. Even The Advocate editorial board used the number of teachers showing up at the Capitol during a weekday as evidence to prove teachers' collective objection to change.

But as an educator, I can tell you that our views are as varied as are the individuals in the profession. There are 50,000 teachers in this state, and it demeans them to say that the loud voices of those who chose to take a day off speak for the majority, who spent that day working with children. It further demeans them when they are represented in these pages as excuse-makers who see poverty as only a barrier to success and not as the reason to do the job in the first place.

Not all teachers support all of the proposals. Some support none. But all deserve better representation in these pages. Our teachers are soldiers in the fight for social justice in America. As with all soldiers, they joined the battle for different reasons and have different stories to tell. But they have not given up on winning. That's the real story. The media should start printing it.

Like many such organizations, NYSSBA can be wordy and bureaucratic, but I was happy to see that this year’s kit included a statement that “the Association currently lacks resolutions addressing some of public education's most pressing issues” and that “examples of issues that lack the support or opposition of a NYSSBA resolution are:

• How the state will address the rising costs of energy and health care and the impact on local taxes.
• Whether or not charter schools should be allowed to join NYSSBA or receive NYSSBA services.

This resolution signals a major move forward on the part of an organization that tends to be resolutely establishment.

The second resolution signals a major move forward on the part of an organization that tends to be resolutely establishment (for all the reasons that reform critics have cited) and gives me some hope that organizations like NYSSBA can become leaders of school improvement. (See Adam’s Choice Words post on National School Boards Association executive director Anne Bryant’s strident critique of virtual learning. This is the kind of heel-dug-in attitude that sends most ed reformers to the choice barricades.)

I know this much: NYSSBA advocacy alerts are just a small part of the services the organization provides school board members in New York—and, as a full-fledged member, I am grateful. I often carry a copy of School Law to board meetings; that’s NYSSBA’s 838-page summary of state laws regulating schools. (Shall I repeat? An 838-page summary of the laws! Help!!!!) While provided as a service, of course, the volume is also a wonderful document from which to start a school improvement campaign—as Chris Cerf is doing in New Jersey, we must begin stripping useless regulations away from our education system. 

The association also has a “mailbag,” answering questions from board members via video podcast, it writes model policies, offers an array of budget and governance services for members, and has a clipping service, sending out daily links to state and national education stories. (Flypaper is often cited as a “Blog of the Day.”) And it publishes its own bi-weekly newspaper, a serious and professional journal that is as well-reported, written, and edited as you can get.

These are smart people with a wealth of information about how schools are run.

These are smart people.  And they have a wealth of information about how schools are run; thus they could be a powerful leverage point for school improvement.

In a recent issue of On Board, for example, NYSSBA’s executive director Timothy Kremer had an insightful essay about what he called “murmur moments,” taking out after state officials for caring about the wrong things.  He cited State Ed Commissioner John King, at NYSSBA’s recent annual convention, calling for school district consolidations on Long Island—the “audience gasped its surprise,” wrote Kremer. Or state budget director Robert Megna urging the school board members to “negotiate harder” to get better budgets. Audience members “launched a barrage of comments about the political realities of governing a school district in danger of `educational insolvency,’” Kremer pointed out.  Some of those realities, said Kremer, included,

• Because of the “Triborough” amendment to the state labor law, which prevents boards from tinkering with expired labor contracts, among other things, “70 to 80 percent of [the local school district] budget is untouchable.”
• There is a new statewide 2 percent local property tax “cap,” which prevents localities from raising taxes above that unless they can get a 60 percent majority vote from their local voters.
•  Local districts “cannot negotiate state-mandated transportation programs, special education assignments and pension contributions.”

As Kremer pointed out, these kinds of mandates leave local school districts with little choice, as he quotes an audience member saying, but to “cut teachers and programs, and deliver a lackluster education to kids.” In New York especially, where the cost per pupil (either first or second in the nation) exceeds by a large margin student performance results, there are plenty of reasons to be focused on how the money is spent rather than how much money is raised, but Kremer and NYSSBA are not wrong about the need to shake the barnacles off the bureaucracy.

John Chubb is CEO of Leeds Global Partners and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution where he is a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. He is co-author with Terry Moe of Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education and author of "Overcoming the Governance Challenge in K-12 Online Learning."

If a public school student wants to take an Advanced Placement course from Apex Learning, a respected provider of online AP instruction, who should determine whether the student may do so? Today, the answer is almost uniformly, the local school board (or charter board) that governs the student’s school. Should it be so?

States have long delegated to local boards the authority to determine how students satisfy state standards such as graduation requirements. If a student wants to meet a state standard by some means other than what his or her school is offering, local board policies determine whether the student may. This makes a certain amount of sense. Students and families may want an option of dubious academic value.

But boards may decide these matters with more on their minds than quality control. Every time a student opts to receive a bit of education outside of a home school, the school or district faces a financial hit: it loses state revenue or gets stuck with a fee. Local boards consequently are not keen for students to try to receive credit elsewhere.

Historically, this has not been a big issue. Other than local college courses, students have not had ready options. But that has now changed—dramatically. Students can take any high school course online, with numerous providers to choose from. Options abound for younger students, too. Granting a student permission to take a course of obvious merit—say, AP from APEX—opens the potential floodgate of requests for other quality courses. Hundreds of students in a school requesting to take just a course or two a year online could present schools with unpleasant budget cuts, including teacher layoffs.

Not surprisingly, local boards are now resisting online offerings.

Not surprisingly, local boards are now resisting online offerings. But resistance may not be what’s best for students. Through self-pacing, multi-media instructional aides, one-on-one teacher support online, and much more, online courses are providing students new ways to succeed with their studies. For students who have struggled in the regular classroom, online may represent a lifeline.

States must now ask a historic governing question: should local boards continue to control student access to instruction on the Internet? Or should the state exert its authority and govern Internet access itself? If states leave access in the hands of local boards, they will slow the development of technology-based instruction, which is clearly not in the best interest of students. If they set policy themselves, guaranteeing student access to any courses meeting state requirements, they will expose local school systems and charter boards to disruptive competitive forces of unknown consequences. The vote here is for state control.

While editor Peter Meyer is taking a brief sabbatical from his biweekly blog, Board's Eye View is hosting a series of guest blog posts from a range of experts and stakeholders answering The BIG Question: What's the most important governance issue? Meyer encourages readers to interact with our TBQ contributors or contact him directly at pmeyer@edexcellence.net if they would like to submit their own TBQ essay.

The Times called it a “coveted endorsement”—and indeed it is, no matter how much fun Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich had at poor Eric Fehrnstrom’s expense. (For the record, that same day Fehrnstrom, a longtime Romney advisor, gave a televised interview in which he said “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign…. Everything changes [when he’s running against Obama]. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”)

Jeb Bush, who has been a tireless education reformer since the mid-nineties, is no Etch A Sketch. Photo by Rex Sorgatz.

Jeb Bush, who has been a tireless education reformer since the mid-nineties, is no Etch A Sketch. And by coincidence I was lucky enough to spend some time with the popular two-term Florida governor (1999—2007) just last week as part Education Next’s “Conversation” series with important education reformers (see my conversations with John White, Whitney Tilson, and Chris Cerf). You can read a summary of what he accomplished in Florida here; examples include instituting an A—F school grading system, ending social promotion, rewarding school success with both more funds and more flexibility, and creating a tax credit scholarship program. And it has worked. The state’s fourth graders—a majority of whom are minorities—went from ten points below the national average NAEP score on reading in 1998 to six points ahead of the national average by 2009. Florida’s Hispanic students are now reading as well or better than the statewide average of all students in thirty-one states and its African-American students are reading as well or better than the statewide average in eight states.

It is easy to see why The Economist ran a lengthy story on Bush just a couple of weeks ago, under the headline,

The Floridian school of thought: Inspired by Jeb Bush, more Republicans want to transform the classroom

Through his four-year-old nonprofit, Foundation for Excellence in Education, Bush remains an outsize presence in education reform circles. (Bush had also launched the Foundation for Florida’s Future after losing the 1994 race for Governor. It went dormant while he was Governor and then started up again in 2007 when he left office. It currently lobbies the Florida Legislature, the governor’s office, and the Florida Department of Education on education reforms to build on and protect the policies that were passed while he was in office.)

I watched Bush entertain a delegation of visiting legislators from North Carolina during an informal luncheon at his Coral Gables headquarters, an incisive and expert hour-long primer on building better school systems. What’s the secret, I asked Bush.  “Hard work,” he says. “And you have to be bold.”

Bush's new foundation is a powerhouse in Florida education reform circles, thanks in large part to a veteran staff directed by Patricia Levesque, Bush’s deputy chief of staff for education while he was governor. And as The Economist suggested, the foundation’s reach is nationwide. (I recommend The Reformer Toolbox.)

As Alyson Klein reported on her Education Week blog,

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the godfather of the reformey-minded Chiefs for Change and an education force in statehouses around the country, has endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for president. That news may be the biggest unsurprise ever to education folks who have been following the campaign.

She notes that former Florida Board of Education Chairman F. Philip Handy is a Romney education advisor and on the board of Bush’s foundation. And Margaret Spellings, President George W. Bush's former secretary of education, is also on Romney's team. I guarantee you that if Mitt only half-listens to George W’s brother, the nation’s education prospects will be greatly improved.

Guest blogger John Kirtley is the founder of two private equity firms in Tampa, FL. He is the chairman of Step Up For Students, a non-profit that administers the tax credit scholarship program and which now empowers the parents of nearly 40,000 low income Florida children who attend a private school of their choice, and of the Florida Federation for Children, a "527" political organization active in Florida legislative races. He is vice chair of the American Federation For Children, a national parental choice advocacy organization, and also a board member of the Florida Charter School Alliance and the Hillsborough County (Tampa) Education Foundation.

The most important governance question is: “Will low income and working class parents truly direct the taxpayer dollars used to educate their children?”

The definition of “public education” is changing rapidly, even if some don’t want it to. It used to mean giving taxpayer dollars solely to districts to operate all schools, where kids are assigned by zip code. The emerging definition, which I prefer, is using taxpayer dollars to educate children in the best way possible for each of them, using a variety of providers and delivery methods.

Parents with enough means already direct dollars—their own—to the best education providers for their kids. Parents with means move to neighborhoods with good public schools, or pay tuition for a private school. Increasingly, these parents combine delivery methods and providers. The president of our non-profit, the former president of one of the largest teacher union locals in Florida, exemplifies this trend. His son’s senior year combined classes at his zoned district school, classes over the internet at the Florida Virtual School, and dual enrollment at a local college. It was the ultimate in customization.

But what about parents who can’t afford to exercise choice by purchasing a home in the right neighborhood or paying tuition at the right school? They must be empowered to direct the dollars that are already spent on their children. They must be able to direct those resources to a district-run school, a charter school, a provider of content over the internet, or even a private school.

Every other governance and reform issue is affected by this one.

If parents can direct the dollars to another provider, it increases the chances that other reforms will be adopted quickly and effectively. Tenure reform, merit pay, more dollars to the classroom—they all will be implemented faster and better if the district knows that parents can move their children.

If parents can direct the dollars to another school, it increases the chances that other reforms will be adopted quickly and effectively.

Parents must be truly empowered, however. They can’t just be empowered to choose charters, as some reformers believe. In most states, there is a surprisingly large inventory of private schools that are already serving low-income children. In some of these places there are few charters—sometimes (but not always) because the district is slow to authorize them. In Duval County, Florida, for instance, the district has only thirteen charters despite its large size (over 150,000 students). And not all of them serve low-income children. By contrast, there are over 100 private schools in the county that serve low-income children under the state’s tax credit scholarship program.

Low-income and working class parents must be empowered to choose these schools, with taxpayer dollars. Why not? With proper accountability, transparency, and oversight, the providers offer a vital solution.

Another advantage of full empowerment: It encourages the creation of powerful coalitions for choice that don’t exist with partial measures. In 2001, the Florida legislature created the tax credit scholarship program with only one Democrat voting in favor. In 2010, when the program was aggressively expanded, half the Democrats in the House and a third in the Senate voted in favor—as did a majority of the combined Black Caucus. That year Democrats clamored to speak at a rally where 5,500 low income parents and children came to the distant capitol of Tallahassee to endorse the bill (see the video here). I have not yet seen a demonstration of support for choice or reform on a similar scale anywhere else in the country.

Full empowerment of low income parents can be the “tip of the spear” for all other reforms. It can also create coalitions where none were before possible. For these reasons, it has my vote as the most important governance issue.

Ed. note: For more on the importance--and complexity--of empowering parents, be sure to read the New York Times' recent Room for Debate forum on parent trigger laws.

While editor Peter Meyer is taking a brief sabbatical from his biweekly blog, Board's Eye View will host a series of guest blog posts from a range of experts and stakeholders answering The BIG Question: What's the most important governance issue? Meyer encourages readers to interact with our TBQ contributors or contact him directly at pmeyer@edexcellence.net if they would like to submit their own TBQ essay.

We have spent most of the last three years watching Congress contemplate reauthorizing No Child Left Behind.

That contemplation has involved endless discussions of all sorts of issues and ideologies, but it has missed what may be the most important question in American public education today: Can we trust school districts to deliver the kind of education we want for our kids?

Does trust matter? Absolutely.

There are two indisputable facts that underscore the importance of trust. On the one hand, there are absolutely terrific districts in this country. They are so good and so effective at teaching every child, including minority children and English language learners, that the only sensible answer is to get out of the way and let them do what they are doing. Typical federal and state policy options, like categorical spending restrictions or directives about how to fix failing schools, dictated from afar are more likely a hindrance than a help for these districts. And just in case anyone is checking, I’d put Long Beach, California; Blue Valley, Kansas; and the Aldine Independent School District north of Houston in that category.

But then there are others—far too many others in fact. These districts do a terrible job educating children. Sometimes it is simply that they are indolent and unwilling to extend themselves to meet the stiff challenge of educating every child. Other times, the motives are more sinister. The well-off folks in town see no reason to plow more money or effort into the schools that educate “other folks’” kids. Likely, those local school board elections generate low voter turnouts, and, in any event, simply are not effective at enforcing any accountability for poor performance. There is nothing trustworthy about such districts. Affording them the same level of freedom as good districts is to abdicate community responsibility to the least fortunate among us to an equal shot at a good life.

The challenge for a legislator who sits in Washington or a state capitol is to figure out which is which and what to do about it. For good districts, you want them to figure out how to evaluate teachers or fix failing schools. They know the situation on the ground and the assets on hand to meet the task before them. For bad districts, you need to assert some control. And it is the legislator’s obligation to both her own constituents and to the students in these under-performing enterprises to act.

What to do?

One part of that answer revolves around what makes a “good” district. Is it simply NCLB-like test scores, or is there more to it? I think so. It goes to the question of what we think of our democracy and our own role as citizens within it. The theory of change animating NCLB was that rules written into federal law would drive how to fix schools. That took precedence over relying on local control even though few dispute that “one size fits all” likely has meant that no size fit anyone. So, if we continue to focus on the seemingly second-best strategy of Washington- or Albany-driven change, is that because we really don’t believe democracy—at least for school districts—is alive and well? Or that it can’t work? If so, then we need to re-think some larger, fundamental questions about us because they will dog whatever plans we have for educating our children.

As tough as that question may be, we cannot avoid it. For better or worse, it is the school district, not the national or state governments, that delivers education to this nation’s students. How we handle those districts, in all their variations, is fundamentally important to getting our education policy right in the 21st century.

Andre Shleifer, a professor of Economics at Harvard, recently wrote an excellent article: “Seven Things I Learned About Transition from Communism.” In case you don’t know Andre, some consider him to be the most cited economist in the world.

The analysis is interesting throughout—it deviates from both “progressive” and “conservative” talking points on key issues. Take five minutes and read the whole thing.

For those of us Relinquishers who see opportunity in moving public schooling from government-operated to government-regulated and non-profit run, lessons abound. For those skeptical of these types of reforms—lessons also abound. See below for the summary of Andrei’s lessons—laced with my takeaways for improving our educational system:

Lesson 1: “First, in all countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, economic activity shrunk at the beginning of transition, in some very sharply.”

Education Takeaway: Underperforming government institutions with decades of accumulated knowledge may outperform cohorts of start-up enterprises in their early years. Could this explain the poor results of the CREDO study?

Lesson 2: “Second, the decline was not permanent. Following these declines, recovery and rapid growth occurred nearly everywhere.”

Education Takeaway: Over time the new school organizations will outperform the government-operated systems. It takes time and requires real accountability, where the best organizations expand and the worst close. Could this explain the New Orleans CREDO results?

Lesson 3: “Third, the declines in output nowhere led to populist revolts—as many economists had feared. … A reformer should fear not populism but capture of politics by the new elites.”

Education Takeaway: The risk of devolving power to educators and families is regulatory capture—i.e., a government monopoly will be replaced by a charter management organization oligarchy. Think ‘Too Big To Fail.” “Reformers” need to be monitored just as much as the previous regime.

Lesson 4: “Fourth, economists and reformers overstated both their ability to sequence reforms, and the importance of particular tactical choices… Lesson learned: Do not over-plan the move to markets, but, more importantly, do not delay in the hope of having a tidier reform later.”

Don’t spend seven years on crafting the perfect legislation. Just do it.

Education Takeaway: The system is too complicated to make accurate predictions about how to best devolve power—make your best guess based on evidence and then move forward. Innovation schools, charter schools, vouchers—who knows what will end up being the best model? Neither neo-liberal technocrats nor free market libertarians nor community organizers. Don’t spend seven years on crafting the perfect legislation. Just do it.

Lesson 5: “Fifth, economists have greatly exaggerated the benefits of incentives by themselves, without changes in people. Economic theory of socialism has put way too much weight on incentives, and way too little on human capital.”

Education Takeaway: The lazy teacher who will close the achievement gap for a $2,000 bonus? Does not exist. Yes, incentives matter. But the quality of people matter more. The power of Relinquishment may well be in the people it attracts and develops.

Lesson 6: “Sixth, it is important not to overestimate the long-run consequences of macroeconomic crises and even debt defaults. This experience bears a profound lesson for reformers, who are always intimidated by the international financial community: do not panic about crises; they blow over fast.”

Education Takeaway: Some state will poorly regulate schools. Some individual schools will fail. The toll of these mistakes will be real. But the toll of not taking risks will be worse.

Lesson 7: “Seventh, it is much easier to forecast economic than political evolution. Lesson learned: middle-income countries eventually slouch toward democracy, but not nearly in as direct or consistent a way as they move toward capitalism.”

The trends in school performance should be more consistent than the trends in good governance.

Education Takeaway: The trends in school performance should be more consistent than the trends in good governance. Once given the power, the best educational organizations will improve as they develop into mature institutions. The political winds will not be so easy to predict.

My personal favorites: lessons four and five—i.e., humility is important but should not be crippling; and people really matter.

We can’t be sure what will work. We must do something. And it should be done with the best people we can find. Seems very reasonable.

Across the world, countries continue to revolutionize their political and economic systems—often based on our own institutions—while we fail to apply these lessons to our country’s most important asset: our educational system.

Perhaps we should pay heed.

Minority students across America face harsher discipline, have less access to rigorous high school curricula, and are more often taught by lower-paid and less experienced teachers, according to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

The report, part of the annual Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) survey, included data from 72,000 schools serving 85 percent of the nation’s students and found, among other things, that black male students “are far more likely to be suspended than their peers.” In fact, it reported, though black students make up 18 percent of the students in the sample, they accounted for 35 percent of the students suspended once and 39 percent of the students expelled.

When I read this, I yawned.  It matches perfectly the statistics in my school district.

When I read this, I yawned.  It matches perfectly the statistics in my school district.  But just as my district pays little attention to the academic environment that these “bad” kids swim in, so too the ensuing national melee over OCR data didn’t mention curricula and teachers.  Everyone wanted to talk about “discipline” practices, school “safety” and “racism.” 

Wrote Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal,

The Obama administration's sympathies are with the knuckleheads who are disrupting class, not with the kids who are trying to get an education. But is racial parity in disciplinary outcomes more important than school safety?

No mention of the knuckleheads inflicting inferior academic standards and teachers on black kids. Or the connection between the three. In my experience, by the time kids start acting out seriously—fourth and fifth grades—they are so frustrated by their ignorance (vis lousy curriculum and inexperienced teachers), that they use their fast-maturing cognitive abilities to ask, “what’s the point of paying attention?” And let’s throw poverty into this brew: if you’re learning little and have parents who aren’t so hot and your chances of getting mugged while walking to the bus stop are one in five—well, Mr. Riley says it best,

This is yet another argument for offering ghetto kids alternatives to traditional public schools, and it's another reason why school choice is so popular among the poor. One of the advantages of public charter schools and private schools is that they typically provide safer learning environments.

Safer—and smarter.

I have been working on a major Fordham report on successful high schools for the poor and minorities in Ohio and have discovered that discipline, academic rigor, and devoted teachers go together. In fact, all of these black-majority schools are safe because, as staff and students testify, “we don’t have time to get in trouble.” Curriculum matters. Good teachers matter. School culture matters.

What this report tells us is that schools matter.

I urge everyone to read the OCR report in the context that it was presented. It is hardly a rigorous study, but it definitely is, as Secretary Duncan put it, “a wake-up call to educators at every level” to “address educational inequities.”

What this report tells us is that schools matter. And they matter in very old-fashioned ways: as institutions of learning. Do that right, as kids of all color know, and we won’t have to try to fool them into thinking that the prison they are attending is a school.

We have to do this in public, a welcome window-opening in a system of baroque halls and closets.

This means that we have to do this in public, a welcome window-opening in a system of baroque halls and closets. The New York Times, one of the media outlets that had sued to gain access to the Teacher Data Reportshan (TDR), made the data available and issued an invitation to teachers to “respond to your data report.”

In fact, surprising many, Michael Winerip, the On Education columnist for the Times and normally no friend to education reform, had it about right:

At first, when I heard that news organizations were going to publish the list, I was angry, but that has passed. Good has come of this. People have been forced to stop and think about how it would feel to be summed up as a 47, and then have the whole world told.

Winerip’s would be a near-perfect conclusion if it weren’t such a reluctant one. If only he could bring himself to provide some context: that this imperfect new system is an attempt to right a terrible wrong, the failure to hold public schools accountable for failing to educate our children. As Winerip predicted, the controversy has produced a wonderful array of rich thinking on the subject—and some not so rich. (I have a short list of “further reading” at the end of this post.) In fact, Winerip was back on track a couple of days later, rounding up the “victims” of the new system:  “Hard-working teachers, sabotaged when student test scores slip.” And the Times ran a moving story by one William Johnson, a special education teacher at a Brooklyn high school. Johnson, who says he was rated “a bad teacher in a good school,” tells a story that will sound familiar to most experienced educators:

As you might imagine, my job can be extremely difficult. Beyond the challenges posed by my students, budget cuts and changes to special-education policy have increased my workload drastically even over just the past 18 months. While my class sizes have grown, support staff members have been laid off. Students with increasingly severe disabilities are being pushed into more mainstream classrooms like mine, where they receive less individual attention and struggle to adapt to a curriculum driven by state-designed high-stakes tests.

And, of course, the punchline:

On top of all that, I’m a bad teacher. That’s not my opinion; it’s how I’m labeled by the city’s Education Department.

Is he a bad teacher? How does one know? According to Johnson,

Dozens and dozens of teenagers scrutinize my language, clothing and posture all day long, all week long. If I’m off my game, the students tell me. They comment on my taste in neckties, my facial hair, the quality of my lessons. All of us teachers are evaluated all day long, already. It’s one of the most exhausting aspects of our job….  The truth is, teachers don’t need elected officials to motivate us. If our students are not learning, they let us know. They put their heads down or they pass notes. They raise their hands and ask for clarification. Sometimes, they just stare at us like zombies. Few things are more excruciating for a teacher than leading a class that’s not learning.

It’s a compelling argument except for one thing. What if the students are not learning? Do our students get an A for effort? Of course, but is it the only grade they get?

Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp weighed in on the TDR release in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. She thinks it’s a bad idea:

So-called value-added rankings—which rank teachers according to the recorded growth in their students' test scores—are an important indicator of teacher effectiveness, but making them public is counterproductive to helping teachers improve. Doing so doesn't help teachers feel safe and respected, which is necessary if they are going to provide our kids with the positive energy and environment we all hope for.

The release of the rankings (which follows a similar release last year in Los Angeles) is based on a misconception that "fixing" teachers is the solution to all that ails our education system.

The system is not perfect; nor are the people running it. How do we make it more perfect?

That too is a compelling argument. But it misses the point and the context as well: we currently have a system that rewards bad teachers. And the release of the data is not based on a belief that “fixing” teachers is all that matters. Indeed, it would be nice if all teachers were as conscientious and hard-working as Mr. Johnson and all administrators adept at making teachers feel safe and respected. Unfortunately, the system is not perfect; nor are the people running it. How do we make it more perfect?

Eric Hanushek, writing at Ed Next, had it about right:

Nobody would ever advocate making personnel decisions through public posting of evaluations in the newspaper. The public release of value-added scores for 18,000 New York City teachers last week should not be taken as a model for how to run the human resource departments of the schools.

But that is not what is going on there. The public release of these ratings—which attempt to isolate a teacher’s contribution to his or her students’ growth in math and English achievement, as measured by state tests—is one important piece of a much bigger attempt to focus school policy on what really matters: classroom learning.

To understand why the release of this data makes sense, you must step back and see the intense, broader battle underway all throughout the nation.

The fight is between those who want to improve the schools and those who like the system as it exists today. Those who want to preserve the status quo have historically had the upper hand. For generations, they have been able to control policy change by focusing attention on the adults in the schools through the contract bargaining process, through labor laws in the legislature and through a supportive media environment.

Finally, my friend Catherine Johnson, who runs a savvy education listserv in Westchester County, just north of New York City, offers this insight:

[A] core problem here, the reason we **have** a value-added movement in the first place, is that parents don’t choose their kids’ teachers. Parents choose their kids’ doctors; parents choose their kids’ piano teachers; parents choose their kids’ tennis instructors. We don’t choose our kids’ teachers. Instead administrators choose our kids’ teachers — and they choose from a pool that has been artificially limited by credentialing laws passed with union support. Parents don’t get to choose teachers at parochial or private schools, either, but at a good private or parochial school you’ll find (some) teachers with Masters degrees and even PhDs in the subject they teach. They’re unhireable by public schools because they don’t have education school degrees. Public schools are a closed shop.

Meanwhile administrators know that some of their teachers are ineffective, and yet they must assign children to classrooms where children will learn less than they would inside another teacher’s classroom. In fact, I think I own a book written for administrators that includes an entire chapter on the ‘ethics’ of deciding which students to assign to weak teachers.

If parents were making the decision, nobody would face that ‘ethical’ dilemma, and we wouldn’t need a value-added movement ---- !

As Johnson and some of her listserv discussants also note, the value-added movement is also a response to labor laws backing lifelong tenure for teachers and last-in-first-out layoff rules—laws that all but negate the good intentions and efforts of the Mr. Johnsons and Ms Kopps. The new teacher evaluation system in New York is far from perfect. But it is necessary. And it is best to have the debate in public—at least until we have a system that proves itself capable of providing good education from behind closed doors. As Justice Kern put it:  "This information is of interest to parents, students, taxpayers and the public generally. Although the teachers have an interest in these possibly flawed statistics remaining private, it was not arbitrary and capricious for the DOE to find that the privacy interest at issue is outweighed by the public's interest in disclosure."

--------------

Further Reading

With thanks to Tyson Eberhardt, this list is highly eclectic and in no particular order. It is meant to give students of the value-added evaluation suggestions food for thought.

• As Education Week put it, the New York City education department released value-added data that “purport to estimate a teacher's impact on his or her students' standardized test scores.” Purport?


• Much of the value-added controversy revolves around the question of certainty and much of it reminds me of John Glenn’s comment about his famous trip around the globe:
  

  I guess the question I'm asked the most often is: "When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel?" Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts—all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

• Starship Enterprise Captain James Kirk: “Risk is our business.”


• Nobody raised hell when Education Week ran a story last month called "'Value Added' Proves Beneficial to Teacher Prep.”  As Stephen Sawchuk reported then,
  

  The use of “value added" information appears poised to expand into the nation's teacher colleges, with more than a dozen states planning to use the technique to analyze how graduates of training programs fare in classrooms.  Supporters say the data could help determine which teacher education pathways produce teachers who are at least as good as—or even better than—other novice teachers, spurring weaker providers to emulate those colleges' practices.

• Bill Gates made a splash, with a “Shame is not the Solution” op-ed in the Times. And RiShawn Biddle objected for much the same reason Bloomberg did:
  

  High-quality data on all aspects of education — especially teacher performance — is critical to helping families become real consumers and lead decisionmakers in education. It is also key in causing the kind of disruptions that have helped begin the first steps in systemically reforming American public education. And this is what Gates (whose own fortunes were made thanks to consumers making informed choices about computers, software, and operating systems) and other reformers should want.

• As I suggested last week in a post about the new “independent validators” scheme for assessing teachers, our search for an “impartial” or objective assessment is an elusive one.  


• Eric Hanushek is interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about why teachers’ value-added scores should be made public.  He has more to say about a larger strategy for boosting teacher quality in “An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom,” which appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Ed Next. See also Hanushek’s “Valuing Teachers: How Much is a Good Teacher Worth?” which appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of Ed Next.


• All you can read (and more) here.


• Emily Richmond of the National Education Writer's Association profiles criticisms of publishing teacher ratings for the Atlantic.


• Matt Di Carlo argues that the way the ratings were published was misleading.


• NYC mayoral hopeful and public advocate Bill De Blasio accused Michael Bloomberg of being on a "jihad against teachers" for releasing performance ratings.


• New York State lawmakers are considering changing state law to shield teachers from having their ratings released to the public.


• Best headline goes to the Shanker Blog for “New York’s Rein of Error.”


• Good reporting from the New York Times:  Fernanda Santos and Sharon Otterman and  Santos and Robert Gebeloff.


• Stephanie Banchero in the Wall Street Journal. She quotes Michelle Rhee:
  

  If we truly want parents to be taking a seminal interest in their kids' education and understand fully what type of education they are getting, then we need to be ready to give them all the information we have…. You can't say we want parents involved and then limit their access to information.

• According to Gotham Schools UFT president Michael Mulgrew found “universal opposition” among his teachers.


• Whitney Tilson and Steve Brill exchanged emails on the subject (my conversation with Tilson for Ed Next is here and a good review of Brill’s book by Nathan Glazer is here.) 


• The Times, which was part of the lawsuit which forced the release of the data, said that it had, “with SchoolBook’s partners at WNYC, … developed a sophisticated tool to display the ratings in their proper context, a hallmark of our journalism.”

“Teachers will be right in feeling assaulted and compromised,” declared Merryl Tisch, chancellor of New York State’s Board of Regents, just after New York City released some 18,000 teacher evaluations to the public last week.

“The arrogance of some people to say that the parents don't have the ability to look at numbers and put them in context and to make decisions is just astounding to me,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg shot back. “This is about our kids' lives. This is not about anything else.”

It is possible that in a different era, a court might very well have concluded that releasing teachers’ names was quite insane.

That pretty much set the tone for the debate: another assault on teachers versus the public’s right to know. And it turns out that the best window on to the question is the January 11 New York State Supreme Court decision itself, a sleek nine pages in which Judge Kern said her only job was to decide whether the city education department’s decision to release the teachers’ names with the Teacher Data Reports was “arbitrary and capricious under the law.” Did it have a “rational basis”?

It is possible that in a different era, a court might very well have concluded that releasing teachers’ names was quite insane. But while this lower court decision (there are, in New York, several higher courts) will not prove to be a major marker in educational jurisprudence, it does show how far we have come in righting a long-listing ship. The issues it addresses are quite fundamental to the governance of our public schools and Judge Kern’s concise ruling is a nice primer on the question of privacy rights in a public school context. So the question, as Kern put it, was the Tisch question: did the release of the teachers’ names in the context of this evaluation program constitute an “unwarranted invasion of privacy”?

According to Kern’s interpretation of New York’s Freedom of Information Law, the only thing excluded from public view was “employment, medical, and credit histories, information that would be used for solicitation or fund-raising purposes, information that would result in economic or personal hardship or simply personal information that is not relevant to the work of the agency.”

The list of exclusions is not comprehensive, said Kern, but the “proper test” of whether release of the personal data was “unwarranted,” quoting a higher court’s earlier decision, is a test in which “the `privacy interests at stake’ are balanced against the `public interest in disclosure of the information.’” The introduction of the “public interest” here is, of course, key. It is the Bloomberg argument: it is “about our kids’ lives.”

But how would one decide the question? Here Kern trots out the tried-and-true “reasonable [person] of ordinary sensibilities” standard. It has always amazed me that so much of our legal heritage hangs on such a slim thread of unscientific, nonobjective reasoning—but it is a fact of American life that our education policymakers would do well to consider. And it is here we recognize the importance of the debate these last twenty years.

According to Kern, “ordinary sensibilities” in the case of Teacher Data Reports would conclude that “release of job-performance related information, even negative information such as that involving misconduct, does not constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy….The public has an interest in the job performance of public employees, particularly in the field of education.” And even though then-Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf, when he was negotiating the evaluation procedures with then-UFT president Randi Weingarten, in 2008, had written a letter promising to work to keep the names secret, Kern again quoted an earlier court ruling that “as a matter of public policy, the Board of Education cannot bargain away the public’s right to access to public records.”

Dozens, if not hundreds, of decisions are made far from the madding crowd in the course of a day at a normal school. And too many educators prefer it that way.

It is quite refreshing to see Kern’s high regard for “the public’s right to access.” Too often—far, far, far too often—education decisions are made behind closed doors or in rooms sealed by professionals and the mystique that professionalism has thrown around them. Dozens, if not hundreds, of decisions are made far from the madding crowd in the course of a day at a normal school. And too many educators prefer it that way. As David Matthews pointed out in his brilliant 2006 book Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming our Democracy, “[A]dministrators, battered by interest groups, become guarded, convinced that `You can’t just pull together a group of people from the community to tell educators what to do.’ The perception that the public has nothing to offer is apparently widespread. One veteran educator of twenty-five years confessed to me, `I was trained to counter influences from outside my classroom, not to work with the public.’”

I recall meeting with a room packed full of teachers to present the results of a district task force on student performance that made 50 recommendations. “Are they research-based?” was the cat-call. I laughed. “Is everything you do during a day in school research-based?” The question caught them off-guard, but the encounter suggested to me the amount of hubris—and arrogance—within the system. In fact, a major cause of the enfeebling of our $600 billion public education system is a faux-perfectionist standard. Education needs what the law has: the reasonable person standard. Reasonable people make mistakes and mistakes are part of the public dialogue. Concluded Kern:

The UFT’s argument that the data reflected in the TDRs should not be released because the TDRs are so flawed and unreliable as to be subjective is without merit. The Court of Appeals has clearly held that there is no requirement that data be reliable for it to be disclosed.

This is a hugely significant point in the battle for the high ground in the education reform war. It supports the democratic ideal: that opinions, whether factual or not, whether buttressed by scientific evidence or not, have validity. It is a welcome reminder that our country values opinions as much as, if not more so, than scientific proof and that science and professional opinion must share the arena with the citizen, including parents of students. It is more important to air the opinions of the many than to sequester them behind closed doors monitored by the few. Next post I will explore what some of those opinions are.

But my heart goes out to the parents, family, and friends of the victims of the Chardon, Ohio, shooting. And to school personnel at Chardon High School—this is when you earn your angel wings.

Everyone is asking themselves, How can we know?

I know that educators all over the country are now huddling with their school security officers and school counselors and social workers. They are reviewing their building entry and lock-down procedures and reviewing the student suspension files, to look again at the records of children who may have been kicked out of school for carrying a weapon or threatening to harm someone or—or what? Everyone is asking themselves, How can we know?

The answer is that we can’t. But what we might consider trying, as the next few sorrowful days unfold, is resolving to get to know our children, whether we are a parent, friend, or teacher. When we are able to look into the hearts of children, we will, of course, find their angels. But we will also find their demons and must help the child to banish them. That can happen only if we spend time with them. Not long before the terrible tragedy in Chardon I was discussing discipline and classroom management with a teacher in Dayton and she told me, “We don’t have discipline problems, we have feedback problems.” She meant that our first duty to children is to pay attention to them.

Just yesterday, at a meeting of our local school board’s curriculum committee, a special education teacher was trying to explain to a social studies teacher that the road to student motivation runs through the ear.  “Listen to them,” she exhorted. “It is so important to make these individual connections to children. Then they will open up and then you can reach them.”

Our sincere condolences to the children of Chardon.

The Common Core promises us a curriculum where none has ever existed.

Sure, we have plenty to worry about when it comes to the role of the federal government in our lives. The current cover story in the Economist is about an “Over-regulated America,” smothered by a wave of “red tape” that may crush the life out of America’s economy. It sure seems to have already crushed much of the life out of America’s public education system.

Coming at the question from a different direction, David Brooks recently suggested that the United States is just as freighted by central government as the Europe is; we just do it differently—and not so well. Our economic briar patch, says Brooks, is in the tax code.

There should be a lesson here for our education policy-wonks and -makers: instead of getting hung up on which government agency is making the rules, let’s dig a little deeper into the question of red tape, at all levels, and find out exactly which ties are binding so firmly to mediocrity and entropy. Chris Cerf in New Jersey has a team going through every Garden State education rule and regulation with an eye of stripping away unnecessary restraints.

The point is, this isn’t a federal problem; at least, not exclusively.

But what worries me about the reasoning of some of the anti-Common Corers (see Jay Greene) is that they seem to confuse a popular national trend with nationalism. The problem was on fine display last week in an exchange between Jay and W. Stephen Wilson, a mathematician who defends the Common Core standards in the current Ed Next forum.  When Jay wrote that Wilson saw the Common Core “as a first step toward developing stronger national standards that would be comparable to those of our overseas competitors and better than all previously existing state standards,” Wilson shot back,

Never said that. Anyway, that’s politics, and I try to stay out of politics. I’m a content sort of guy. Also, although technically I’m the pro-Common Core person, the questions don’t actually ask me to be pro-Common Core. Thus I could answer all the questions without taking a political stance, unless being pro-math is political.

A national curriculum is great; a nationalized one is not. And there’s a difference.

This is a fascinating reply by Wilson and I would recommend reading the full exchange between the two. There is, as I read it, some welcome concession on the part of Jay that the Common Core standards can indeed be evaluated for their content not their commonality—but even that is a far cry from a nationalized curriculum.

In fact, a national curriculum is great; a nationalized one is not. And there’s a difference. Here’s what New York State Commissioner David Steiner told me last year when I asked him for the argument for a common curriculum:    

[T]here’s every argument for it.  First of all, there’s an equity argument.  We have students in this state who are, through no fault of the teachers, but just because of the history in that school, or the training and preparation of those teachers, or the lack of resources or whatever it may be–those teachers are teaching material that is one year, two years below (in content sophistication) what it needs to be.  That’s an equity problem.

Second, there’s a resource problem.  By having multiple different and fragmented curricula, we can’t get the quality we could otherwise get from a really, superb curriculum that has online, that has multimedia, that creates internal assessments for students that enables the teachers to get data about performance.  All of that is much too expensive for an individual district, still less a school to be able to produce.

And third, we’ve never had a common set of standards before that have been back-mapped from college and career readiness, which is what the Common Core standards are.  And so, for the first time we can say we have a ladder to college and career readiness.  It’s time to build that curriculum on that ladder.

There is no doubt that our educational governance system needs overhaul. But let’s not begin by throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Let’s at least hang on to the good that we have (remembering, of course, that good need not be perfect) and start knocking down the barriers to improvement.

Weeks after declaring he would be a “lobbyist for students,” Gov. Cuomo delivered his 2.75 million young clients a major victory Thursday, using the weight of his office to break through the logjam blocking a common-sense mechanism for evaluating teachers based on whether children are learning.

Though there will be much grousing about how common-sensical it is to judge teachers based on how their students do on standardized tests (40 percent of the evaluation)—“it’s a dark day when politicians impose an untested scheme on educators,” wrote Diane Ravitch—the more fascinating part of this story is the New York City subplot.

New York's new 'impartial' observors promise to add yet another layer of bureaucracy to an already bloated system.

The United Federation of Teachers, which represents Gotham’s 75,000 teachers, negotiated an additional deal (also with Cuomo’s help), to include, according to the UFT, “third-party, independent validation of teacher ratings.” Though this applies, ostensibly, only to the appeal of decisions about a teacher’s effectiveness, it introduces an interesting, if largely untried evaluation method (see Nick Kristof on New Haven)—one that promises to add yet another layer of bureaucracy to an already bloated system. As Winnie Hu of the New York Times reports,

[C]ity education officials, with the consent of union leaders, will contract with a company to provide observers, who are to be licensed educators — former teachers, principals or administrators. Each observer will be assigned to between 50 and 80 teachers, and will perform three classroom observations for each one during the year.

Aside from the fact that no one knows what this might cost—Hu says it will be the “largest expense of the new system”—the bigger problem is that it plays into two of the more enduring myths about education: that you can—or even should—take the politics out of it and that you can achieve impartiality. It is a bit ironic that Ravitch is so vexed that the governor, “who has never taught and never evaluated teachers or principals, presumes to know how to evaluate teachers and principals,” presuming that no professional educator backed the evaluation rubric. More ironic, perhaps, is Ravitch’s devastating description (in her 2000 book Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform) of what happened the last time we had a “solid professional consensus” that was “empowered to decide what was best for students.” That was, of course, the infamous Progressive Era and we know where that took us.

As Checker and Mike point out in their recent Rethinking Education Governance paper,

The strongest imprint on today’s school-governance structures, however, may have been left by the Progressive Era—when it was deemed important to “keep politics out of education” so as to avoid the taint of patronage and party. According to the prevailing wisdom, it was better to entrust the supervision of public education to expert professionals and independent, non-partisan boards that would attract disinterested community leaders to tend to this vital civic function. The mayor and aldermen were to be kept at bay, lest public education grow entwined with other government functions and agencies, and thus become contaminated by politics and cronyism.

Alas, special interests moved right in to fill the gap, building a system of corporate and labor union cronyism so impenetrable we have had to create a separate system—choice—to deliver the goods, to restore some sanity when it comes to putting teachers and children together.

Do we really need “third-party validators”? And who will they be? Former teachers, principals, and administrators? How will we know they aren’t the same people who were working in a failed and failing system? They will tell us who’s a good teacher and who isn’t? During a one- or two-hour flyover?

It is not that expert educators can’t or shouldn’t be called on. But not to act as some kind of panel of judges of teacher effectiveness.

Will they bring impartiality? Or mush?

Successful schools I have visited eschew such shibboleths of perfection. Creating a culture of excellence, say teachers and administrators alike, is the key to exercising good teacher evaluations: your peers will let you know. Collaboration counts. Knowing how to use data—and tests—counts. It’s not perfect, but my suspicion is that it’s a lot more perfect—and less costly—than pretending that impartial evaluators will do much more than sew more seeds of dissent.

Past presidents might not be too happy with the current state of education.  Photo by William Andrus.

This is not the time for federal intervention is what they would say. But I would imagine most of our great presidents would be somewhat appalled by the barnacled bureaucracy that now counts as our public education system. I would love to hear what they had to say about these four recent stories: 

• Not to be missed. Scot Simon’s report for National Public Radio on Kansas City’s failed school system is a needed reminder about the delusional thinking of those who defend the current American public education system. K.C. is part of a long-line—think Detroit, Newark, Chicago, New Orleans—of failed city school systems.  One simply cannot take the attacks on school reformers seriously when seen through the prism of reports like Simons’.


• Embracing Common Core.  This is a wonderful symposium by Fordham's Ohio team about the meaning of the Common Core and how to implement it.  See also Education Next’s debate on the math part of the CCCS.  And, of course, always interesting, if somewhat predictable, is Jay Greene’s take: here come the commies. 


• You want to know where we went wrong? You need go no farther than Valerie Strauss’s bizarre “seven myths about how students learn.”  First myth: “Basic Facts Come Before Deep Learning.”  This piece should be read and studied as the seven reasons American schools are in such distress.  Even the normally temperate Joanne Jacobs takes a few good swipes at Strauss. 


• Remaking federalism. Though this essay by Bruce Katz at Brookings is about remaking the American economy, it has some lessons for our education governance folks. “Given global competition, the next president should adopt a vision of collaborative federalism,” writes Katz.  Though not as sensible as Koret’s recent suggestions or Checker and Mike’s “too manycooks, too many kitchens” take, I like Katz’s suggestion that “states and metropolitan areas innovate where they should to design and implement bottom-up economic [education?] strategies that fully align with their distinctive competitive assets and advantages…” 

P.S. And a tantalizing excerpt from Jefferson’s first inaugural address that may provide some orienting purpose in these times: 

[E]very difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

So, with education. Want a convenient scapegoat for our problems? Poverty. It’s there, it’s handy. 

Want a convenient scapegoat for our problems? Poverty. It’s there, it’s handy.

I sat through an hour meeting of our small school district’s budget committee last week, most of it devoted to bemoaning our fate as a “poor district” (over 60 percent of our kids qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, the standard definition of “poor” for schools) in these recessionary times. State aid has been nearly flat and the Governor punched through a two percent local property tax cap. Woe is us. There goes sports. Not mentioned was the fact that we spend over $22,000 per student! 

Diane Ravitch has been hitting the poverty gong for some time, most recently in Cleveland, where, she says, “the level of urban decay is alarming.” I was just in Cleveland and, while I can appreciate the sentiment, I fail to understand how she gets to the next sentence: “Yet its municipal leaders have decided that their chief problem is bad teachers.” 

Huh?

I visited a couple of successful Cleveland public schools during my visit—successful in educating poor children—and while principals in each of those schools said they could use more money, neither said that money—or their students’ lack of it—was their major challenge. Getting good teachers was. In fact, at one of those schools both the principal and the assistant, in separate interviews, said that having to employ less than competent teachers was the biggest drag on the school’s continuing success.

Poverty is a hard thing. I have seen my share of it and written about it, as have others at Fordham. And one thing is certain: poverty’s connection to education is largely in the eye of the beholder and that eye is often shielded by some kind of rose-tinted (or magic mirror) glass.

It was this feeling I had while mulling how to react to Sabrina Tavernise’s front-page New York Times story from last week, “Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor,” a story which generated a great deal of attention. As Tavernise pointed out,

[A] body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.

That the rich do better than the poor in school is a compelling comment. But to turn an effect into a cause—at least, to offer up a delicious non sequitur—is what so often bedevils the discussion. Bad educational practices, such as the poverty of pedagogy or misshapen human resource policies in inner city schools, does not enter into the discussion.

Tavernise does allow a quick dissent by University of Chicago economist James Heckman, who argues, she writes, that “parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before children start school.”

This was the point made by Tavernise colleague David Brooks, in his “Materialist Fallacy” column yesterday. It’s not the lack of money that is causing the deterioration of the social fabric, Brooks argues, it’s “disrupted communities” where citizens “lack the social capital to enact…values.”

As has been pointed out often enough, and as Tavernise’s opening sentence says,

Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults.

We have accepted the "materialistic fallacy."

So why have we given up on the idea that education can be the “great equalizer”? The answer, I believe, is that we have accepted the "materialistic fallacy." We have taken results of our education ineptitudes—more poverty—and made them the cause of them. 

As I suggested the other day, in discussing E.D. Hirsch and reading, insights about cognitive, knowledge, and community deficiencies in early childhood, if recognized, can be compensated for.  

That Tavernise ends her story quoting think tanker Douglas Besharov, saying that "No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare” is indeed bizarre.

Shouted Whitney Tilson:

What?! The cupboard is NOT bare! In fact, over the past decade it's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that very high quality schools, filled with very high quality teachers, in a culture of high expectations, no excuses, etc. (i.e., KIPP and similar schools) can overcome the effects of poverty and that the great majority of even the most disadvantaged kids can achieve at high levels.

Let’s resolve to quit blaming the poor for the poor education they are receiving. 

Let the dollars follow the child was the proposal from the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force, which also makes a compelling case for the federal government’s “central role” in our nation’s education future. Let the feds butt out was the message delivered by Rep. John Kline, Republican chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, as he explained two ESEA rewrite bills at an American Enterprise event. And Unconstitional! was the Pioneer Institute’s conclusion about the federal government’s support of the Common Core:

Actions taken by the Obama Administration signal an important policy shift in the nation’s education policy, with the Department placing the nation on the road to federal direction over elementary and secondary school curriculum and instruction.

One wonders whether “states’ rights” are being invoked to cover up the very inequities that NCLB was determined to remedy.

I hesitate to invoke Civil War analogies here, but there are some troubling signs in the current dust-up that make one wonder whether “states’ rights” are being invoked to cover up the very inequities—the “soft bigotry of low expectations”—that No Child Left Behind was determined to remedy. In a press release from the Education Committee’s Republicans we learn that they “have long recognized the progress state and local officials have had implementing innovative reforms that hold schools accountable for student achievement, support excellent teachers, and provide greater choices for parents.”

Oh really?

Mike also engaged the question in his ‘whither education’ post last Friday:

We bow to the mantra of “local control” yet, in fact, nearly every major decision affecting the education of our children is shaped (and mis-shaped) by at least four separate levels of governance: Washington, the state capitol, the local district, and the individual school building itself.

Too many cooks in the classroom, says Mike.

Rep. Kline’s two bills—the Student Success Act and  Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act—seem designed to kick the feds out of the classroom. In a summary of the Student Success Act, for instance, the House Republicans highlight the fact that the bill

• Eliminates AYP and replaces it with state-determined accountability systems, thereby returning authority for measuring student performance to states and school districts.
• Eliminates federally mandated actions and interventions currently required of poor performing schools, giving states and districts maximum flexibility to develop appropriate school improvement strategies and rewards for their schools.
• Repeals federal “Highly Qualified Teacher” requirements.

But it is unclear how the two bills will actually encourage education excellence or accountability. There will be plenty more on these bills (and I recommend watching the AEI event and looking at a bill summary and fact sheet), but the Koret report seems to strike a more sensible balance here by defining governance roles. As explained by Task Force member Grover Whitehurst in his Education Next summary, the Hoover report would agree with Kline that the federal government’s involvement in K-12 education has grown, with “only modest impact on student achievement.” But rather than concluding, as Kline does, that this means that the feds should abandon oversight, Koret believes that the feds retaining “rigorous accountability is preferable to returning control of public schooling to local public-school monopolies and states, which will fall into old habits all too quickly.”

This is a huge difference of approach, one that recognizes the federal duty to guarantee individual rights, including educational rights. The feds have “a legitimate role,” Whitehurst argues. And this report identifies four federal education functions:

• Creating and disseminating information on school performance in each classroom and program effectiveness, including information on individual student performance;
• Enforcing civil rights laws;
• Providing financial support to high-need students;
• Enhancing competition among providers.

The genius of Koret is its faith in federalism, which, when properly understood, has achieved much. When we understand that part of the federal role is to encourage competition, we can more properly steer our governance systems to align with roles envisioned by the Founders.

Whitehurst argues that “government services are most efficiently delivered if provided closest to the taxpayers or consumers receiving them,” but only if the competition is truly free. For the past 15 years, he explains the feds have “intervene[d] from above” in order to “correct the strong tendency of local school bureaucracies to cater more to adult than student interests.”

Koret, says Whitehurst, suggests that there is a more efficient way of correcting these local oppressions: by letting federal education dollars follow the student. The formula would be “weighted to compensate for the extra costs associated with high-need students” so that parents would have “real choice.” In other words, you not only limit the federal role, you cut out the middle men—the state, local, and school board bureaucrats. It would surely satisfy Mike’s problem of too many cooks in the education kitchen.

“Parents must have the widest possible choice of schools for their children and be armed with good information on the performance of schools,” says Whitehurst.

Does this sound overreaching?  Unconstitutional?  Impractical? If anything, it sounds too good to be true. But so was America when first conceived.

The core problem of literacy in middle school is you’re transitioning from learning to read, to reading to learn.

Wrong. The problem of literacy is that the transition from decoding skills to comprehension should happen long before middle school.

The problem of literacy is that the transition from decoding skills to comprehension should happen long before middle school.

Thomases means well. And he’s trying to clean up the anti-academic middle school mess that has persisted for far too long (see my Ed Next story).  But like far too many educators (including the authors of No Child Left Behind, who wrongly set reading up as a skill divorced from content), he misunderstands the nature of reading.  As Hirsch writes in his second, and arguably more important, book about education, The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them,

While the process of decoding from letters to language is the foundation of reading, it isn’t the essence of reading, which is the comprehension of written language.

Hirsch puts the transition from learning-to-read to reading-to-learn “after second or third grade,” but even then emphasizes that “early oral language masteries” and “speaking and listening competencies” are “primary,” which means that children can have language and vocabulary deficiencies upon entering school, even before gaining the “ability to turn the black marks on paper into words.”  That is significant, but as Hirsch points out,

Small incremental changes in early language learning can produce enormous consequences later on. Young children who arrive at pre-school with a very small vocabulary, and a correspondingly limited knowledge base, can fortunately be brought to an age-adequate vocabulary by intelligent, focused help, and from that base they can continue to perform at grade level.

Emphasis here on “early” and “intelligent” interventions. Too many educators, like Mr. Thomases, think that it’s all about decoding and that you can wait until middle school before providing content. Says Hirsch,

[E]vidence from a variety of sources indicates that when this language and knowledge deficit is not compensated for early, it is nearly impossible to reach grade-level skills in later grades, despite intensive remediation.

Emphasis here on “knowledge deficit.”  The problem is that our schools, focused narrowly on decoding, lose sight of the importance of “an understanding of an ever-growing number of word meanings as used in context…

Word meanings are not formal structures like grammar and syntax. They are symbols that represent ranges of knowledge and experience. They cannot be gained without learning what educators disparagingly call “factoids,” for they include words such as “birthday,” “George Washington,” “tree,” “1492,” “gravity,” and “Kwaanza.”…  [S]ince words stand for concepts and schemas—that is, for knowledge—to read at grade level also means mastery of words that represent knowledge. There is no accurate way to describe reading ability as a purely formal skill, or to remove from it the information-based knowledge disparaged as “factoids.”… The notion that reading is a mechanical skill divorced from domain-specific knowledge is as great a mirage as the idea of formal “thinking” skills.

It is a shame that in 2012 educators continue to ignore the importance of background and domain-specific knowledge as the essence of reading—and of a good education. History. Literature. Art. Music. Geography. Science. Math. These are some of the domains in which our children will find the knowledge essential to becoming truly good readers—and great students. But that knowledge must be transmitted long before a child enters middle school.

Police and fire department as well as Rescue squad are enroute to the new Junior Senior school as someone did not want to be late for class and drove into the building. Police report it as" car vs. building"… 

A few minutes later, another email, from a parent:

As I was driving my son to school this morning 3 police cars were speeding up to the high school doing at least 45 to 50 mph around the curves up the avenue. Thank God nobody was run over. Nothing is more important than the safety of the people along that road. So much for the walking school bus idea.

Ah, yes, the walking school bus. An idea that seems to be sweeping the nation, conquering the obesity problem, saving gas-guzzling millions—not here. We’ve been discussing it for a couple of years. I was pulled aside in the bank a couple of weeks ago. “I heard you’re for the walking school bus,” said the woman, an African American mother of six. It was not a question. “Don’t you know about the perverts?” That too was not a question.

A few days later, I received an email from a local real estate broker. It had a “busing” subject line and began “What a nasty winter afternoon!” I could guess where this was going, but I was wrong:

As an FYI, I support kids walking to school—I walked to St. Mary's and then used the City Trolley in High School (Which, by the way, I paid for out of my own money, since my parents believed that if I didn't want to walk, I had to pay.)

If you haven't already checked it out, I would encourage you to check out the website NeighborHood Watchdog, a site I have used for housing purposes. It was set up by John Walsh, the father whose child was abducted, and who then went on to launch America's Most Wanted.

Sadly, our town is chock full of Sex Offenders of all levels. Type in any address and any route to one of the schools and then be surprised! by how many RSOs a child would have to pass to get to their respective school.

And then of course, because society is much more complicated than when an older kid walked me to school, there are I'm sure, liability issues the walking school bus "operator" for lack of a better word, would be open too.

Teasing out the zeitgeist of a particular time and place isn’t easy—just ask Mitt.

I watch the presidential primaries these days with a new insight about the meaning of the old saw, “You couldn’t be elected dog catcher.” Yes, the saying suggests that the lowliest of jobs requires community support. But it also means that that support comes from somewhere too deep for just anyone to grasp. Teasing out the zeitgeist of a particular time and place isn’t easy—just ask Mitt. I have watched the easiest of questions to a community group turn complicated because of a left-field comment—or seen a crowd’s confusion clarified by a deft turn of phrase, as was done at a school board meeting when a grandparent whose grandson had sprained his ankle in our school’s actual left field implored the audience to get the kids off “this field of screams.”

Will the car stuck in the side of the school building derail the walking school bus idea? Perhaps. But the bigger question, for policymakers, is, Should it? Do cop cars speeding to the scene suggest a problem? What about those Registered Sex Offenders? What should someone in the state capitol–or the nation’s capitol–make of this?

Or the ivory tower?

The other day Jay Greene called attention to a note that a research colleague of his had gotten from his child’s second-grade teacher after the colleague published a study about teacher pay. “How do you sleep at night?” the teacher wrote. As Greene points out,

The teacher was just engaged in bullying, a practice that schools say they are trying to discourage. And part of the bullying is the not so subtle reminder that the teacher has [the researcher’s] children all day. Parents are (at least partially) compelled to send their children to the care of adults who may threaten you if you say things they dislike.

Perhaps the most annoying habit of the educational institution I experience is its arrogance. It is an arrogance of power, the source of which may just as easily come from local bullies as distant ones.

Greene singles out “the teacher unions and their advocates, like Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss, [who] encourage strident views and confrontational tactics that make unprofessional behavior far more likely.” And he is right, as far as he goes. The protective cocoon that shields educators from responsibility for their educational actions—or lack thereof—can just as easily originate in the knot of friends and family who control local elections, by word-of-mouth, as from state and federal policymakers ruled by special interests. We will take this conundrum up in a future post discussing an amazing Koret Task Force proposal described by Grover Whitehurst in the new Education Next (hint: “let the dollars follow the child”). How do you get authentic democracy? Better yet: how do you get it to deliver an excellent education?

For now where I live, the big educational question is, What do we do with that car stuck in the side of the school building?

_____

*Update: Though the car apparently sideswiped another car in the the parking lot, then jumped the curb and careened across a wide sidewalk before crashing into the teachers' lounge, no one was hurt. The vehicle has been towed away, insurance companies summoned, and an emergency meeting of the board facilities committee called for Monday.  In the meantime, another email just arrived: an angry high schooler just kicked in a safety-glass window, but he said it had nothing to do with school.

Meier writes:

What troubles me most about the KIPPs of the world are not issues of pedagogy or the public/private issue, but their "no excuses" ideology implemented by a code that rests on humiliating those less powerful than oneself and reinforcing a moral code that suggests that there's a one-to-one connection between being good and not getting caught. It tries to create certainties in a field where it does not belong.… As we once reminded colleagues, Nazi Germany had a successful school system—so what? I'd be fascinated to interview some KIPP graduates to learn how its work plays out in their lives.

Yikes. That’s quite a leap.

In his Washington Post column Mathews, who wrote a book about KIPP (Work Hard, Be Nice), was describing a new report that suggested that the D.C. public school system either close 38 struggling schools or send their students to charters. Mathews notes that charters are already so popular in the nation’s capital that 41 percent of the city’s students attend them with more on the way. He writes:

This charter fan doesn’t think that’s good. It is not clear that the best charters are capable of such rapid expansion. More important, moving kids from bad regular schools to charters in the way Gray’s Chicago-based consultant, IFF, recommends would accelerate the downward spiral of traditional public schools in the city.  

What is wrong with this picture? Meier and Mathews aren’t arguing with each other—or even about the same thing. What links them is a scaling phobia.  Meier sees too much of it; Mathews, not enough. Meier sees fascism in a popular model of schooling that seems to be doing a fairly good job educating its 32,000 kids—all of whom, as far as I know, attend voluntarily—and Mathews simply doubts that “the best charters are capable of such rapid expansion.”

Choice has a way of solving problems all by itself.

As I suggested in my Scaling up, part 1, essay, part of the problem here is in seeing charters as a pedagogy (or, in Meier’s view, ideology) rather than a market mechanism, one that is largely indifferent to pedagogy or ideology, and, for that matter, capacity. Choice has a way of solving those problems all by itself. The market, as Milton Friedman famously said, is not a cow to be milked.  The idea is not to shoe-horn schooling into governance systems but for governments to get out of the way so good schooling can happen. As RiShawn Biddle says, “The very assumptions—including benefits of scale—at the heart of district bureaucracies hinder much-needed efforts to stem dropouts and help kids enjoy economically and socially prosperous futures.”

By coincidence, over the weekend I came across a dusty copy of a Fordham report from 1999 called “Better By Design.” Written by James Traub of the New York Times, the study profiles ten models of school reform—from Accelerated Schools to Core Knowledge and Success for All—and is still a good read. Traub even includes the Coalition of Essential Schools, founded by the respected educator Theodore Sizer and trumpeted by Deborah Meier, whose Central East school in East Harlem was a part of the Coalition. And Traub notes that “an effective model may bring out the best in all the constituents of a school, but it must succeed with the ordinary human material of administrators, teachers, and children.” The question seems to be, How do you scale up freedom? 

I was struck by Traub’s introductory “truism,” that “it is a lot easier to make a good school than to make a good school system.” Or, “Such are the charms of the exemplary school that one can easily forget the difficulty of reproduction.”

In the context of preparing this essay, however, I wondered, why we should worry so about creating a good system. But as Traub suggests, “Something here must be generalizable and replicable; but what?”

We need less system, not more.

Might I suggest that it is hiding in plain sight. The success of so many different models of schooling over the last couple of decades—including the ones Traub wrote about in 1999—suggest that it is less pedagogy than governance methodology that is the key. And the what may just be government getting out of the way. We need less system, not more. The very notion of scaling up may be leading us in the wrong direction, as RiShawn Biddle suggests, because it only encourages the bureaucracy’s bad habits.

A new flower must “take root in the local soil,” wrote Traub about model school designs. Indeed, Jay Mathews is hesitant to throw over neighborhood schools. But he must be careful to check the soil before planting any seeds. We’ve got a lot of scrub and stone to remove before we start cultivating, much less planting.

An amazing story from Erik Robelen at Education Week begins…

Overriding the governor’s veto, New Hampshire’s Republican-led legislature has enacted a new law that requires school districts to give parents the opportunity to seek alternatives to any course materials they find objectionable. The measure, approved this month, calls on all districts in the state to establish a policy for such exceptions, but sets two key conditions. First, the district must approve of the substitute materials for the particular child, and second, the parents must pay for them. Although at least a few states, including New Hampshire, already have laws giving parents some explicit recourse in particular subjects, such as sex education, this policy appears to be more expansive in its potential reach.

Robelen quotes Fordham’s curriculum guru, Kathleen Porter-Magee, leaning toward parents:

I don’t think it’s crazy to say parents should have a say in what their kids are learning, especially when it affects issues about their faith and belief system,” Ms. Porter-Magee said. “The problem is that the bill is written so broadly.

This is certainly not the first shot fired in what will be a prolonged battle to decentralize education, but it surely brings the fight to the curriculum trenches. 

***

Teachers really really do count. Kudos to Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times for appreciating the stakes of the debate over the Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff study called The Long-term Impact of Teachers.

Kristoff called it, “a landmark new research paper [that] underscores that the difference between a strong teacher and a weak teacher lasts a lifetime.”

For those of us who have seen teachers in action—the good, the bad, and the ugly—the research confirms what we all know. It is now up to our policymakers, as it has always been, to provide us a system of governance that gives us great teachers. 

Here are a few things that I think we need to do:

• Revitalize teacher education, including eliminating regressive certification laws.
• Get meaningful teacher evaluation rubrics, with significant attention to student learning outcomes.
• Abandon Last In First Out rules for teacher retention as well as kissin’ cousins like transfer rights within a district.
• Give principals the duty – and autonomy – to create a school environment that encourages excellence and collaboration—and compensates good teachers accordingly.

It is not enough to sing the praises of great teachers. Our policymakers must do the heavy-lifting that will train them and retain them. 

***

Michelle Rhee is pretty smart. Though this video by a DC group of parents and teachers is unabashedly anti-Michelle Rhee (“the sad legacy under Rhee”) and meant to “contradict her simplisms,” it did lead me to this exchange between Rhee and Ida Lieszkovszky for State Impact Ohio:

Q:  One of our listeners wants to know what impact on a student’s success or failure in school does their home environment and socio-economic status have? Or do you think that a student’s success or failure in school is entirely the teacher’s responsibility?

A:  A kid’s success in school is not entirely contingent upon any one factor; it’s actually both. When you have the home and the family working in concert with the school and the teacher, that’s the best-case scenario, when everyone’s on the same page. And so we should try to do everything we can to try to incent and encourage more parental and familial involvement in schools. Can teachers overcome all of the ills of society? Absolutely not. Can they make a big dent in the potential life outcomes of kids if we’ve got great teachers in the classroom? One hundred percent.

Seems a very un-simplistic statement about a complicated issue.   

***

A curriculum tussle in Tucson. And, finally, another curriculum tussle pitting local interests and state authorities. According to this Associated Press report, “Arizona's schools chief ordered that a portion of a Tucson school district's state money be cut off after he issued a decision Friday that the district's ethnic studies program violated state law.”

Apparently, Tucson’s sin was to create a Mexican-American Studies program, which an administrative law judge, supporting the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal, ruled against because the classes were designed for one ethnic group and, according to the AP, “promot[ed] racial resentment and advocat[ed] ethnic solidarity instead of treating students as individuals.”

The case poses existential governance questions, but they are nothing new. As someone once said about America, “E pluribus unum,” which, roughly translated, means, let the fight continue.

“[Y]ou simply cannot fix America’s schools by `scaling’ charter schools. It won’t work. Charters schools offer proof of the concept that great teaching is a huge difference-maker, but charters can only absorb a tiny fraction of the nation’s 50 million public schoolchildren. Real reform has to go beyond charters – and it has to include the unions. That’s what Brill figured out.”

Nocera makes the mistake of confusing pedagogy and governance.

Wrong. Like many education establishmentarians, Nocera makes the mistake of confusing pedagogy and governance. The former—e.g. great teaching—is a hard nut to crack and Nocera is right to suggest, as does Brill, that there perhaps aren’t enough great teachers in the pipeline (or in charter schools) to educate all 50 million public school students.

But there is certainly no such impediment to `scaling’ charters. Every public school in America could be a charter school tomorrow if policymakers would allow it. Would that “fix” America’s schools? Not necessarily. But it would help.

The other problem with the scaling argument is that it assumes that big is beautiful—that no matter how successful you are, if you can’t replicate your methods of success, then your model won’t be useful to the American public school system. That is true only if you assume a governance structure like the one we now have: a system managed from above. The monolith that we now call public education is dominated by special interests, including unions, that are able to dictate education policy by keeping their hands on a few levers of control (mainly on Capitol Hill and in state capitals). 

It is not so much that “reform has to go beyond charters” as it is that real reform must embrace choice—choice at the individual level. In fact, scaling up is really about scaling down. 

The new MDRC study of New York City’s small schools seems to make the point perfectly.  To quote from the document,

During the past decade, New York City undertook a district-wide high school reform that is perhaps unprecedented in its scope, scale, and pace. Between fall 2002 and fall 2008, the school district closed 23 large failing high schools (with graduation rates below 45 percent), opened 216 new small high schools (with different missions, structures, and student selection criteria), and implemented a centralized high school admissions process that assigns over 90 percent of the roughly 80,000 incoming ninth-graders each year based on their school preferences.

At the heart of this reform are 123 small, academically nonselective, public high schools. Each with approximately 100 students per grade in grades 9 through 12, these schools were created to serve some of the district’s most disadvantaged students and are located mainly in neighborhoods where large failing high schools had been closed. MDRC researchers call them "small schools of choice" (SSCs) because of their small size and the fact that they do not screen students based on their academic backgrounds.

And, according to MDRC, these schools worked. Graduation rates were nearly 10 points higher in the small schools. And the positive effects were spread out to all subgroups, including minorities and the poor.

“Are these small schools perfect?” writes Joe Williams in a New York Post op-ed. “Of course not. In fact, the MDRC report adds to the growing evidence that, while New York City is graduating students at a higher rate than a decade ago, most of these kids are still not ready for college…. Bloomberg and his would-be successors should read the MRDC report from the vantage point of those whose job it is to drive change.”

Williams is right to call out “those whose job it is to drive change.” But that change, as the dramatic restructuring of the system that MDRC studied in New York City shows, must be bold.  And it suggests that the question we must ask is “How do you `scale up’ small?"

In fact, I would wager (although I’m no Mitt Romney) that I could walk into any school in America and within 30 minutes, without looking at any data, tell you whether the students in that school are performing well – or poorly. And I’m a novice.

There is no secret sauce except what hardworking teachers, administrators, and students create.

During the last month I have been visiting high performing high schools in Ohio – high performing poor students—for an upcoming “needles in a haystack” report for Fordham’s Ohio team* (see 2010’s Needles report for a taste of what’s to come) and can confirm Justice Stewart’s aphorism. Success is in the air, the hallways, the offices, the gyms, the cafeterias. It’s on the walls—and probably in the water.  There is no secret sauce except what hardworking teachers, administrators, and students create.

It was thus not surprising to see Roland Fryer’s latest study of charter schools conclude that the key ingredients of success were “increased time, better human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations.” (See Jay Greene’s summary of Fryer’s work and Sam Dillon’s in the New York Times story last September.)

A culture of high expectations – that is what teachers and students and parents in Ohio said was a critical element in their school’s success.

Fryer’s findings should surprise no one, but they beg the question: how do you do it?  As everyone in education seems to know, plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose. (As Charles Payne titled his wonderful book So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools or Rick Hess his, Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform.) Here’s part of the answer, from Fryer’s study:

Finally, to instill a culture of high expectations and college access for all students, we started by setting clear expectations for school leadership. Schools were provided with a rubric for the school and classroom environment and were expected to implement school-parent-student contracts. Specific student performance goals were set for each school and the principal was held accountable for these goals.

The key terms here are clear expectations for school leadership and holding that leadership accountable. 

Visiting failing schools—I am on a school board overseeing several of them – the same Stewart maxim applies: you know them when you see them.  And the major differences between success and failure are in expectations and accountability. But mostly, it’s in the ability to do it. It’s a governance question. And after more than a decade working in my little pocket of education dysfunction, nearly seven of them on the school board, I would say that failure persists because the schools….

• Lack the political will to change
• Are hostage to powerful lobbying interests
• Are tied up in a network of rules and regulations.

Christopher Cerf, the new head New Jersey’s public school system, gets it.  He has instituted a review of the state’s 2,000 rules and regulations governing public schools. These laws, including many that protect labor unions, have taken an enormous toll on our schools; mainly, by preventing the legions of well-intentioned people, including teachers, from doing what works.

In my district, which spends over $20,000 per pupil and has had proficiency rates in English and Math that have hovered for years in the 30 percent range, these three depressive factors form an iron wall of dysfunction. In a rare moment when our school board decided to allow me to attempt to improve things, we formed a Task Force on Student Academic Performance. But at about the third meeting a teacher interrupted a discussion of just those things Fryer and others have said work – longer school days, student performance goals – and announced, “Those are contractual issues.” He never came back and, because he was a union chief, we never had another teacher at our meetings.

It has taken nearly ten years for No Child Left Behind’s accountability teeth to begin to kick in, spurring schools to begin to think about doing things that work, including making teachers and administrators accountable. And the good news is that President Obama and Arne Duncan, with their Race to the Top initiative, also get it.  Here is the president from last night’s State of the Union address:

Give [schools] the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn.

Can we do it?  Only serious governance reforms will help. Suggestions? What are the top five most important governance reforms that policymakers intent in school improvement should begin lobbying for?

____

*Ed. note: While the Fordham Institute is based in DC, it also does education policy and advocacy work on the ground in our home state of Ohio, where our sister organization, the Fordham Foundation, is an authorizer of charter schools.

We shall see tomorrow night, but this is already looking to be the Year of the Education Governor. With NCLB being pummeled from left and right and Race to the Top in suspended inanimation, the feds seem unusually quiet, if not on the run.

In an essay this morning in The Hill, Juan Williams, who is hosting a new video documentary about how Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is “risking his political life by fighting the city’s teachers’ union to improve schools,” says “there is little urgency [about education reform] in the halls of Congress.”

And New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip, also this morning, calls attention to the incredibly difficult work of figuring out how to evaluate the 175,000 teachers in New York State, 79 percent of the state's total teacher population, who will be subject to the new RTTT-driven rules. He points out that the state education department, its budget slashed by 40 percent in the last few years, won’t be able to do much, according to state commissioner John King, except “provide guidance and models.” Concludes Winerip, “the ultimate responsibility for monitoring would be left to principals, superintendents and school boards.”

Kathleen explored the implementation challenges for the Common Core last week, remaining cautiously optimistic that “states are taking CCSS implementation seriously and that they are working to reorient their education systems to the new standards.”

The point seems to be that, ready or not, education reform is coming back to the states.

I’ve covered Andrew Cuomo’s bold moves in New York. And RiShawn Biddle is of the opinion that governors can make a difference: “No matter what happens, Cuomo is showing, as outgoing colleague Mitch Daniels has done in Indiana, that governors without direct oversight of education can actually foster and sustain reform.”

Here is a quick list of links to some of what the nation’s governors are saying about education:

• Louisiana. Bobby Jindal is shaking things up in the Bayou State. See Biddle’s essay referenced above and his State of the State address here. (Also, here.)

• Virginia. Governor Bob McDonnell released his education agenda (press release / Washington Post), including proposals for earlier school start dates and ending tenure. Valerie Strauss blogged her opposition.

• New Jersey. Chris Christie says that he can increase education spending while simultaneously reducing taxes in the Garden State. (Also, see here.)

• Florida. Rick Scott called for $1 billion more in education funds in his State of the State address.

• Kansas. Governor Sam Brownback proposed giving high schools $1,000 credit for every student who earns a technical education certificate.

• Colorado. It looks like the Rockies will take on teacher tenure reform.

• California. In his State of the State address, former “Governor Moonbeam” Jerry Brown, facing a huge budget deficit, called for reducing standardized testing and the federal and state role in local education.

• Wisconsin. Scott Walker proposed ed reforms focused on teacher evaluation and improving literacy skills, but his attentions may be turned to winning a recall vote.

It promises to be an exciting year.

First, on January 4 Governor Andrew Cuomo, in a bold State of the State address, promised to be the state’s lobbyist for students and “wage a campaign to put students first and to remind us that the purpose of public education is to help children grow, not to grow the public education bureaucracy.” 

Then, the next week, Michael Bloomberg delivered an equally hard-hitting State of the City address, his penultimate as mayor of New York City, most of it devoted to education. He proved, as Crain’s Business Review put it, that he was “not resigned to the malaise of a lame-duck term or the limitations of a constrained budget” and “made clear his frustrations with the city's teachers' union, which has long resisted reform.”

Indeed, the Bloomberg speech made it clear that Gotham’s three-term mayor was intent on making the remaking of the city’s public education system his legacy. 

Said Bloomberg:

Nine years ago this month, on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, I gave a speech outlining our plans to transform a badly broken school system. Back then, the graduation rate had been stuck at 50 percent or less for decades. Violent crime, social promotion, hiring based on political connections – they all plagued our schools. Parents had too few choices about where to send their children to school, and they had even less information about how a school was performing. And the worst part was many people had stopped believing that anything in our schools could get better.

Well, I know you didn’t believe that. And we didn’t believe that either. Together, we took on the broken system, and by stressing accountability and innovation and ending social promotion, we’ve made real progress turning it around.”

Bloomberg ticked off a list of his accomplishments over those years, including increasing graduation rates by 40 percent and cutting the dropout rate nearly in half. (See my 2008 Education Next story on Bloomberg’s first six years, with Chancellor Joel Klein beside him, in the reform saddle.) In 2012 he admitted that “we have only climbed halfway up the mountain, and halfway isn’t good enough.” But, he continued, “we cannot allow obstacles to slow us down, and we cannot allow those who prefer the comforts of the base camp to the exhilaration of the summit to hold us back.”

Bloomberg proposed five steps for getting there, including paying an extra $25,000 over five years to those teachers who had graduated in the top tier of their college class and awarding $20,000 raises to those teachers rated highly effective for two consecutive years; closing 25 schools and opening 100 new ones, including 50 charters; requiring “every public school student [to] complete new study lessons and assignments in both Math and Literacy”; and providing financial aid to students wanting to go to college.

But by the far the most controversial – and most surprising – statement was Bloomberg’s challenge to the union on teacher evaluations.

A real evaluation system that is based on measurable improvement in student performance and principal assessment and allows us to make real changes is the only way we can do that. We have a model that works well in deciding tenure – and this should be exactly the same process.

The evaluation stakes had been raised considerably the previous month, as New York’s commissioner of education, John King, had withheld funds to nearly a dozen large school districts across the state (including New York City and 33 of its high-need schools) that had not completed their teacher evaluation agreements with the local teacher unions, a requirement of the state's winning $700 million Race to the Top bid. Many, including Bloomberg, blamed union intransigence for the failure to come to an agreement. Said the mayor,  

[T]he UFT [United Federation of Teachers] insisted on provisions that would make it even harder to remove ineffective teachers. Not easier, but harder. As a result, those 33 schools lost $58 million in School Improvement Grants from the State. And if nothing changes, it could cost students in every borough hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Race to the Top funds.

Vowed Bloomberg,

We’re not going to accept that. We’re not going to wait around while ineffective teachers remain in those schools.

Those who had watched the button-down billionaire mayor over the years could have predicted that Bloomberg had more than rhetorical fluff up his sleeve: he announced that he would invoke a rarely used power granted him by law – and was, he said, “consistent with a provision of the existing union contract” – and would create “school-based committees to evaluate teachers on merit and replace up to 50 percent of the faculty” in the 33 schools. Bottom line: he would, essentially, close the schools and reopen them with a new staff.

It was a nifty end-run around the UFT, which the next day begged to get back to the bargaining table.

As Fernanda Santos wrote in the New York Times, the mayor…

…showed a willingness to confront his most powerful and relentless opponent: the United Federation of Teachers. In a speech defiant in tone and ambitious in content, he announced a plan to sidestep the union, ignore its demands and take matters into his own hands.

There was little doubt that Bloomberg and Cuomo had put the unions on their heels.

The speech, said the Wall Street Journal, was a "volley of attacks at the union."

Meanwhile, back in Albany, Cuomo was preparing a budget address that he had promised would put some meat on the State of the State bones--or was it teeth in the jaw? And he did not disappoint. Yesterday, in his $133 billion executive budget proposal the governor came through with his own dare to the unions: school districts that did not negotiate meaningful evaluations in the next month would lose the governor’s proposed 4 percent state aid increase to school districts. “No evaluation, no money. Period,” said the governor.

Recall that Cuomo sent a forceful letter to the Board of Regents last year, enticing that body to up the ante on the importance of student performance in the evaluations (from 20 percent to 40 percent). The New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) sued. (Jason Brooks, research director of the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability gives good background on the saga.) Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had increased the pressure on the unions two weeks ago with a blunt warning that New York had “hit a roadblock” by failing to adopt a system to evaluate the work of teachers and principals, warning that  “backtracking on reform commitments could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Peter Murphy of the New York Charter School Association noticed the odd irony of Duncan issuing his warning to New York State on the same day that NYSUT’s chief, Richard Ianuzzi, was standing on the steps of the state education building shouting “bully.”

But there was little doubt that Bloomberg and Cuomo had put the unions on their heels.

Said Brooks, Cuomo “demonstrates a commitment to take on the state’s education establishment to bring about the dramatic reform needed to improve New York’s most-expensive school system in the nation….  The teachers unions in New York no longer have an absolute veto power over measures they oppose as they once enjoyed.”

A New York Times editorial praised Cuomo’s evaluation proposal. And Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform, who was called the go-to guy for Cuomo during the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, emailed me, “What is rather amazing is that both Bloomberg and Cuomo have decided this issue is such a no-brainer that they're willing to expend quite a bit of capital to push it forward. For the union to fight it now means it isn't just fighting the mayor and the governor: it is also fighting President Obama.”

This doesn’t mean that the match is over. But this round has surely gone to the governor and the mayor – and to public school students throughout New York State.

-------

*Part 1 was here. Unions, however, are hardly done for.

Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly identified New York's commissioner of education as John White, rather than John King, and stated that Cuomo's executive budget proposal was for $138 billion, rather than $133 billion.

To a large extent, much of the story of American education over these last fifty years is a story of the failure to understand the complexity of our country’s relationship to race and the deep consequences of integration.  As Jefferson said of slavery, "[W]e have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."****

Unfortunately, on the ground, in classrooms all over the country, the interplay between justice and self-preservation has not had happy results for African Americans. 

I once asked another friend of mine, an African American, who grew up in a small northern town, whether, given the choice, he would send his children to an all-black school that scored high on the state tests or to an integrated school with low test scores. And he said, “the integrated school.”  He voted for self-preservation; he knew that the white kids, though less educated, would grow up to run the town and he wanted his children to know them.  

These are some of the Hobbesian choices we have forced on African-Americans since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.  The outcomes for African Americans have been modest at best; catastrophic at worst.  Not just because of Brown, but because the integration that Brown demanded coincided with what has been a prolonged period of educational deterioration.

And this is why I am fond of quoting Martin Luther King’s cautionary words, from 1959, about Brown:

I favor integration on buses and in all areas of public accommodation and travel….  I am for equality. However, I think integration in our public schools is different. In that setting, you are dealing with one of the most important assets of an individual -- the mind. White people view black people as inferior. A large percentage of them have a very low opinion of our race. People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls.

When I first read those words, in a 2004 New York Times book review by Samuel Freedman, it was a Eureka moment – to know that the great civil rights leader appreciated not just the significance of an education but the dangers of partnering with an education system that was still very much a white-run institution.  The facile assumption on the part of far too many integrationists is that all blacks needed to do was rub elbows with whites to get a good education.  To put it succinctly, King was right to be suspicious. 

It was E.D. Hirsch who first articulated the pedagogical dangers of this short-sighted notion in his 1987 classic, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.  Though he is one of the most misunderstood of our modern education theorists (most educators I know claim to have read him; few have), one of his great insights was the importance of the difference between a conservative education and the radical or liberal political outcomes that can flow from it.  As he wrote early in CL:

The claim that universal cultural literacy would have the effect of preserving the political and social status quo is paradoxical because in fact the traditional forms of literate culture are precisely the most effective instruments for political and social change.

This is one of the core findings of Hirsch’s impressive body of research these last twenty-five years.  And in those early pages of CL Hirsch proceeded with a wonderfully counterintuitive reading of The Black Panther, “a radical and revolutionary newspaper if ever this country had one.”  Indeed, after offering long excerpts from the paper, including a section from the Black Panther Party platform that quotes verbatim from the Declaration of Independence, though without attribution, Hirsch writes,

The writers for The Black Panther had clearly received a rigorous traditional education in American history, in the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, the Gettysburg Address, and the Bible, to mention only some of the direct quotations and allusions in these passages. They also received rigorous traditional instruction in reading, writing, and spelling. I have not found a single misspelled word in the many pages of radical sentiment I have examined in that newspaper.

One can find many allusions to classic American and ancient texts in King’s own writing, testament to the “good” education he received.

Many years before I met Hirsch (for a Life magazine story I wrote in 1991), I stumbled upon a collection of essays by Richard Stern, a professor of English at the University of Chicago. (Pity the person who had to be in the same department as Saul Bellow.)  The collection was titled, The Books in Fred Hampton’s Apartment, after a short and brilliant essay on page 70 that recounted Stern’s visit to the Black Panther leader’s apartment just after he was gunned down by Chicago police in a predawn raid in December of 1969.  “Violent death does not make for good housekeeping,” Stern writes, “nor do lawyers, pathologists, tourists, and guides, but it was clear that this apartment had never been an idyllic place to either live or die.”   But Stern spotted the books, “scattered here and there in the apartment, some open, as if reading had been interrupted and were to be resumed the next day,” and noted, “to a bookish man the books changed almost everything.”  Stern writes,

The books in the Monroe Street apartment spoke of self-improvement, of purposive learning, of curiosity. Here are the titles I wrote down: Introduction to Embryology; Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance; James T. Farrell, The Face of Time; Hannah Arendt, Imperialism (a paperback selection from The Origins of Totalitarianism); Black Rage; Ashley Montague, The Direction of Human Development; Linus Pauling, No More War; Vertebrates; Calculus; Struik, The Origins of American Science; American Political Dictionary….

The list – and Hampton’s violent end – puts a sad exclamation mark on Hirsch’s sanguine observation about the Panthers and education.  But it also spoke volumes about King’s prescient observation about the perils of turning young black minds over to a system that was not only racist (overtly and covertly) but already in the throes of a new, anti-academic wave, one that would throw several generations of African-American youth under the school bus. 

About the same period, and not far from where Hampton died, a group of black activists, under the leadership of the Reverend Arthur M. Brazier, was organizing around much the same premise: self-determination.  In his 1969 book, Black Self-Determination: The Story of the Woodlawn Organization Brazier writes,

History has shown that black people cannot rely on the moral integrity of organized white society to give power to black people voluntarily. It must be wrested from that society.

I was lucky enough to meet Brazier in 2010, not long before he died, at a thrilling Harlem Children’s Zone conclave in Manhattan, an event crowded with African-Americans, including members of a presidential administration led by a man who had, finally, wrested power from that white society.  It was enough to see the gleam in Brazier’s eye to know of his pride. And I was also honored that that introduction came from Charles Payne, professor of social work at the University of Chicago and author of So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. Payne’s book is brilliant and should be read by all education policymakers, but today, in honor of Martin Luther King, I want to call attention to the Epilogue (as I have done before), where Payne tells the story of William J. Moore, “grandson of a fugitive slave,” who opened a “first class elementary school” in West Cape May, New Jersey, for the black “yard men, delivery `boys,’ dockhands, truck drivers, casual laborers, and factory workers” who serviced the white tourists of Cape May.   This was the late 19^th century and Moore ran his school for 53 years, a school his father attended. As Payne writes,

When I was a boy, I thought all Black men recited poetry and prose. When my father got together with his boyhood friends, it was not at all unusual for someone to start reciting Shakespeare and for someone else to follow that with some quatrains from the Rubaiyat, which might be followed by bits of Paul Laurence Dunbar or James Weldon Johnson.

As Payne concludes,

Mr. Moore and his school were a kind of counternarrative, daily giving the lie to the narrative of Black intellectual inferiority.  At first glance, the issues of contemporary urban education seem far removed from the world of William Moore and his children. I’m not sure that’s really true, though. The search for prescriptions can be dangerous if we let it, but I don’t know that all our work has given us a better model for educating children from the social margins than William Moore seems to have had in 1895. Give them teaching that is determined, energetic, and engaging. Hold them to high standards. Expose them to as much as you can, most especially the arts. Root the school in the community and take advantage of the culture the children bring with them…. Recognize the reality of race, poverty, and other social barriers, but make children understand that barriers don’t have to limit their lives….  Above all, no matter where in the social structure children are coming from, act as if their possibilities are boundless.

Unfortunately, too much of the story of school integration for blacks has been what King predicted: a feast of junk food served up by educators who have too little respect for the black race, much less “the mind” of their children.  It is one of the least-mentioned tragedies of King’s assassination – that he could not live to join the education reform movement and help stamp out the fires of mediocrity that have burned almost out of control these last 50 years. 

In his Times review Samuel Freedman quotes W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in The Journal of Negro Education in 1935:

[T]he Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education.

As Don Hirsch told me when I asked how his famously content-rich curriculum would deal with students’ self-esteem challenges, he smiled, “The best way to teach children self esteem is by teaching them something.”

The best way to honor Martin Luther King would be to commit ourselves to delivering that rigorous, comprehensive, and, ultimately liberating education.  Indeed, it would be the best way to let freedom ring for future generations.   

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***Said Helms in a 1963 television interview: ''The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that has thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic and commerce and interfere with other men's rights.'' See Kevin Sack, the New York Times.

****For those who have never seen this quote before, it may need some explanation. In short, the founders, as we know, lived in a slaveholding culture and many, like Jefferson, were themselves slaveholders. They live with the Hobbesian choice: to win freedom from England or throw the young country into a potentially catastrophic fight over slavery, one of the key economic bulwarks of the south. The proof of the rightness of Jefferson’s comment came when Lincoln let go of the wolf’s ear and the nation was thrown into the bloody catastrophe of the Civil War.

Peterson, director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard and Executive Editor of Education Next (of which I am a contributing editor), uses the Mac the Knife reference to suggest that loyalties can be bought “for a pittance.” In this case, it’s the National Education Association (NEA), which can, Peterson argues,

…collect multi-millions of dollars through a check-off system that generates revenues directly from teacher paychecks (unless a teacher specifically objects),” and, a la the villain of Mac the Knife, “invest in the work of less-advantaged non-profits that ostensibly have entirely different agendas. Even a little bit of money can produce a valuable ally somewhere down the line.

It’s a short essay, but is packed with evidence (from the Education Intelligence Agency) of NEA’s multi-tentacled reach, from a $250,000 grant to the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice (“which has migrated to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which received another quarter million in direct funding,” says Peterson) to $100,000 for Media Matters, “a group that attacks conservative groups and commentators” and $35,000 for “the anti-accountability group,” FairTest.

“The list goes on and on,” says Peterson, who suggests keeping it handy “if one wants to understand the interstices of the debate over school reform.”

What is also problematic about all this is that the list doesn’t even include the millions given directly to legislators and other policymakers. And therein is an existential problem that, despite the lull in the fighting in Wisconsin and Ohio, lurks in the background of most of the debates about unions: they use public money to influence public officials to write laws that give them even more money. As Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute told the New York Times last year (see my “Unions on the Run” post),

Public unions have had no natural adversary; they give politicians political support and get good contracts back…It’s uniquely dysfunctional.

Thus, as a public union, the NEA (so too the American Federation of Teachers), is, essentially, spreading around tax dollars, money over which the taxpayer has no control, an income redistribution effort that could easily be mistaken for a kickback or, in states where union membership and dues are not voluntary, a not-so-hidden and not-so-representative tax.

And it’s not just lobbying for higher pay that is the problem. As Terry Moe writes in his new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools,

On the surface, it might seem that the teachers unions would play a limited role in public education: fighting for better pay and working conditions for their members, but otherwise having little impact on the structure and performance of the public schools more generally. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. The teachers unions have more influence of the public schools than any other group in American society.

Indeed, the battle about whether teacher quality is important to education outcomes is an important one. And teachers need a voice in the debate. But it should not be a voice amplified with funds from the public purse and used to silence other voices.

Robert keyed in on a recent study in the journal Pediatrics that links “toxic stress” in early childhood to “to a host of bad life outcomes including poor mental and physical health, and cognitive impairment.” Among the bad things caused by such stress are those affecting learning capacities. It is an insight which, Robert argues,

[S]hould have a profound impact on educators and education policymakers.  At the very least, understanding the language and concept of exposure to toxic stress should inform the increasingly acrimonious, dead-end debate about accountability and resources aimed at the lowest-performing schools and students.

What does this look like in the trenches, where teachers teach and principals lead?

No one can quibble with the obvious – that a child’s environment has an impact on his/her learning capacity– and it should be equally obvious that the more research the better to “inform” the education policy debate. But here’s the rub: translating studies like the one in Pediatrics into policy ain’t easy.

It’s not a new rub, of course, and much of the acrimonious debate that bothers Pondiscio is about that translation. What does this look like in the trenches, where teachers teach and principals lead? Or policymakers make policy?

By coincidence, part of the answer came when another friend and colleague, James Baldwin, a superintendent of one of New York’s 37 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) , wrote an essay in a local paper that carries the environmental question foursquare into the policy realm. After saying that “[t]he struggles of poor children carry serious social, economic and political implications,” he gets right to the policy question: 

There is no equity in New York’s system for public education funding. Data recently published by the Statewide School Finance Consortium demonstrates that wealthy districts in the State are often receiving more aid per capita than similarly sized poorer districts. There is no equity when residents living in poorer areas pay higher rates of taxes for a less robust educational program and when the range of annual expenditures per student exceeds $50,000/year in wealthy districts and is a fraction of that in poorer districts.

Case closed?

Hardly.

As Rick Hess writes in the introduction to one of his more must-read collections of expert essays (When Research Matters: How Scholarship Influences Education Policy, Harvard Press, 2008),

One frequent but ultimately unfruitful line of thought begins with the presumption that the primary goal for those concerned about the research-policy nexus is to keep politics from coloring the interpretation or use of research….The reality, of course, is that expertise and research are contested terrains in a democratic nation.

While Pondiscio may be right in hoping that the toxic stress study will have a “profound impact” on policymakers, it remains a long and arduous road – mined with a million ideologies – to get to a consensus on what to do. In fact, one of the more important governance questions is whether there needs to be a consensus.

Same with Baldwin’s suggestion that the funding equity fix “is not necessarily about spending more and more money” but about “deploying the resources we have more equitably and with greater return on our investment in the form of student achievement.” Nothing wrong with that.

Part of translating good research into good policy is, as Chris Cerf of New Jersey has said, making sure that we make the educational interests of children the political interests of politicians. That’s not easy. But it is, as Hess suggests, a necessary part of the democratic process; a process that includes a range of activities, from ivory tower research to grassroots mobilization.

One of the important questions for me – and for this blog – is where the governing action should be located. Capitol Hill? K Street? State legislatures?  Regional alliances? School districts? Boards of education? Schools?

A few weeks ago Checker suggested that “we need to focus laser-like on the barriers that keep us from making major-league gains” in education improvement. He lists eight such barriers, from “archaic governance” structures to “dysfunctional” school finance systems.  His eighth and final barrier:

[O]ur preoccupation with “at risk” populations and with achievement gaps defined as the distance between demographic groups has led to the benign neglect of millions of kids, including but not limited to gifted students and high-achieving learners.”

There is still far too much mischaracterization of the “no excuses” school reformers for my tastes– and no doubt Checker will receive some pushback on this one (see Michael Goldstein). But we have to recognize that politics is the authoritative allocation of scarce resources and thus seek a method of prioritizing and distributing those resources in the most equitable, efficient, and democratic manner possible.

Apparently, the Governor hasn't noticed the work of Citizen Action and the Alliance for Quality Education on behalf of children and the community's schools for well over a decade. Or the District Parent Coordinating Councils, PTAs, etc….  Part of the reason we struggle so hard for school improvement may be that he hasn't "heard" clearly or loudly enough about, or from, us. See you next week, Sir. Oh, and we'll be looking for that 4% and the CFE [Campaign for Education Equity] funding we fought for 12 years, were awarded, and the state reneged on...just saying.

Money seemed to be a theme of many of the protestors, but one of my favorites was the video retort, which you can watch below, from the president of the New York State School Board Association (NYSSBA), Tim Kremer, who was almost as strident as Cuomo:

Well, I have to respectfully disagree, governor.  School board members are lobbyists for students. School board members are elected by their local communities. They spend countless hours working to improve public education for students. They give up nights and weekends, juggle day jobs and family responsibilities. And they are unpaid for all these efforts. Why do they do it?  Because they believe in public education. They want to give back to their communities. And they care about their students….

A predictable response from an education establishment that has been rather defensive, at least since charters and the “consequential accountability” movement put student performance on the nation’s radar. (See Fordham’s recent seminar and Mark Schneider’s “The Accountability Plateau.”) And the protests seemed to help make Cuomo’s point: “the purpose of public education is to help children grow, not to grow the public education bureaucracy.”

In fact, most of the protesteths avoided the rather glaring fact, as Cuomo put it, that New York spends “more money than any other state but [is] 38th in graduation rates.” 

Granted, as NYSSBA’s Kremer pointed out, “mandate relief” would help, and his organization (of which I am a member), like many of those who indeed have their lobbyists, claims to be a public school booster. But NYSSBA, like the others, has plenty of interests other than those which are good for students – it opposes charter schools, for instance, unless they are sanctioned by school boards. As New Jersey education commissioner Chris Cerf put it, during his  brilliant keynote address at Fordham’s Rethinking Education Governance conference last December, “labor has entirely legitimate interests and they often coincide with the interests of children – that’s one reason education is so well-funded today. But the problem is that sometimes they don’t coincide.” (Minute 14:00 on the tape.)

As a school board member, I appreciate Kremer lauding us for the “countless hours” we work; unfortunately, however, most of those hours are devoted to mindnumbingly moving the deck chairs around (to avoid bumping into labor unions scrambling for seats), not what’s best for students. More money for teachers means better education for students is the message of the union’s television ads just before the annual budget vote every year. A message that changes pretty rapidly, when the test scores come out and the unions complain that poverty and bad parents tie their hands. A local radio commentator called Cuomo’s lobbyist comment hypocritical because, as everyone knows, he cut education funding, which hurts students. Of course, this was the same rant the commentator has been delivering for years, most of those years being marked by increasing funds and decreasing student achievement.   

The best recent elucidation of the parameters of this debate came from Chris Cerf. And his address should be seen by policymakers and educators alike, whether of the reform or establishmentarian persuasion.  (The quotes below come, generally, from minutes 5 through 14 of the address and I will give a specific minute in parens where appropriate.) 

Cerf first notes, as many have, that we have thrown billions of dollars and lots energy at the school reform wall, but nothing seems to have stuck. And he describes a “taxonomy of why this is so hard” with three possible answers:  1)The problem is unsolvable, 2) We have to keep doing what we’re doing, but do it better, and 3) the system is organized to produce the results it is producing.

He dismisses the first two, though not without some persuasive arguments – number 1 can’t be true because people are doing it, number 2 won’t work because it hasn’t worked – and suggests that, indeed, we’re getting such lousy results because of “the system organized to produce” them. “So we really shouldn't be surprised by the outcomes.” And this is where Cerf details what the New York governor said was the needed “paradigm shift.”   

You can’t color within the lines – you have to actually redraw the lines. Almost all the reform we engage in takes place within a set of assumptions and boundaries and parentheses and constraints about how the world is meant to operate. And it seems to me that if you’re not willing to attack those boundaries themselves, then the potential for an enormous amount of self-delusion is possible. All hard problems are multiply-determined. (10:00)  Poverty, culture, money. All play a role.  Anyone who says that money doesn’t matter is crazy. 

But the most significant contributor to our long and frustrating inability to move forward is, in fact, the way we are organized…. Look at the way the governance structure of public education has compromised our ability to execute the most basic strategies common to any high performing organization….

Cerf describes a system constructed with “elaborate political bulwarks against any kind of meaningful change” in the essentials of education, especially the people who in the system. Work rules like LIFO [last in, first out], the difficulty of imposing a meaningful evaluation system are two components of the current system that “get in the way of the common sense notion of getting the best and the brightest [teachers] and keeping them working on behalf of children.”(13:20) In fact, “these limitations,” argues Cerf, are the result of the success of “labors’ agenda.” And here’s the answer to the Who’s the lobbyist for students? question:

Labor has entirely legitimate interests and they often coincide with the interests of children – that’s one reason education is so well-funded today. But the problem is that sometimes they don’t coincide.  (14:00)  If you draw up the venn diagram of the interests of children and the interests of employees qua employees, there are areas of non-overlap.  Take LIFO.  The rule in New Jersey, codified and enshrined in statute, is that you must, in the context of a layoff, you must fire a teacher who is demonstrably acclaimed as the best teacher in the universe and retain the job of someone who is universally understood to be inferior even to the point of being poor. You can defend that on the basis of lots of things – avoid arbitrariness, messes up the system  -- but you can’t defend it as being in the best interests of children.  (14:50)

Cuomo gets it. And though there is much room for failure here, the new Empire State governor at least has proven himself a politician who can do what he says: “It’s about the students, and the achievement, and we have to switch that focus.” We wish him well in his new job of lobbyist for students.

His hour-long speech may have been short on specifics, but it was long on principals that promise to make a difference and masterful in its rhetorical and political flourishes. Much of the applause came from a state legislature that the gifted politician – who grew up in politics and was a senior aide to his popular two-term governor father, Mario, before he turned 30 – rescued from laughingstock status – he got the dysfunctional body to close a $10 billion budget gap and deliver it on time, pass a same-sex marriage law, and new ethics laws, and in the process earned a national reputation and whispers about a 2016  presidential bid. In a wonderful flourish, showing his command of the stage, Cuomo had the State Senate and Assembly stand to receive public congratulations. Who wudda thunkit?

So, with last year’s track record firmly in hand and with few doubts about Cuomo’s ability to make things happen, the education part of his talk garnered much attention, even before the speech. And he didn’t disappoint, promising to make public education “the priority mission for this state government.” A Democrat, Cuomo has had a Nirvana moment about education reform, and it seems to have infused his entire approach to government reform:

Today, we are driven by the business of public education more than the achievement in public education. Maybe that's why we spend more money than any other state but are 38th in graduation rates. We have to change the paradigm. We need major reform in two areas:  Teacher accountability and student achievement. We need a meaningful teacher evaluation system. The legislation enacted in 2010 to qualify for Race to the Top didn't work. Management efficiency. We must make our schools accountable for the results they achieve and the dollars they spend.

Cuomo proposed a new state education commission to work on his education reform agenda. (Leaving her new establishmentarian robes at the door, in a blog for the New York Times Diane Ravitch proposes a solid list of questions for the new commission.) But it was his promise to take on a second job – as lobbyist for students – that won Cuomo some of the loudest applause of the day. (Watch the speech below – the education section is at minute 38. See other reports about the speech here, here, and here.)

I learned my most important lesson in my first year as Governor in the area of public education. I learned that everyone in public education has his or her own lobbyist. Superintendents have lobbyists. Principals have lobbyists. Teachers have lobbyists. School boards have lobbyists. Maintenance personnel have lobbyists. Bus drivers have lobbyists. The only group without a lobbyist? The students. Well, I learned my lesson. This year, my friends I will take a second job -- consider me the lobbyist for the students. I will wage a campaign to put students first, and to remind us that the purpose of public education is to help children grow, not to grow the public education bureaucracy.

Perhaps the best compliment Cuomo could have gotten, by reformers’ standards, was this report from a Binghamton newspaper after the speech: “Local school officials said Wednesday they felt vilified by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's comments on public education in his State of the State address.”

It’s a speech worth watching.

Dillon explains how D.C.’s much watched Impact Plus teacher evaluation system (introduced by Michelle Rhee in 2009, but as a collaboration with the Washington Teachers Union) is working. “We want to make great teachers rich,” the district’s chief of human capital, Jason Kamras, tells Dillon. 

And, in fact, Dillon offers some brief profiles of teachers – rated “highly effective” by the new rubric – who are getting double-digit percentage pay increases and five-figure annual bonuses. “Lots of teachers leave the profession,” says one of these teachers, who received a 38 percent pay increase in one year, “but this has kept me invested to stay… I know they value me.”

As Dillon writes,

Many districts have tried over the last decade to experiment with performance pay systems but have frequently been thwarted by powerful teachers’ unions that negotiated the traditional pay structures. Those that have implemented merit pay have generally offered bonuses of a few thousand dollars, often as an incentive to work in hard-to-staff schools or to work extra hours to improve students’ scores. Several respected studies have found that such payments have scant effect on student achievement; since most good teachers already work hard, before and after class, there are limits to how much more can be coaxed out of them with financial incentives.

But Washington is the leader among a handful of large cities that are seeking a more fundamental overhaul of teacher pay. Alongside the aggressive new evaluation system that has made the city famous for firing poor-performing teachers — more than 400 over the past two years — is a bonus-and-raise structure aimed at luring talented people to the profession and persuading the most effective to stick with it.

These are significant changes in creating a teacher corps that will begin to make difference. Congratulations to Washington.

I first ran for school board in the late 1990s. It was a treat, since I had not run for anything since high school.  Some of the old political instincts returned and I won. But I soon learned that it was more like high school than anything I’d seen in the adult world and I resigned after just six months, head spinning. (I recounted my experience for Education Next, (called “A Board’s Eye View”) in 2005.)  

Seven years later, when I noticed that there were no official candidates on the school board election ballot—a new low in our little district’s slide to dysfunction—I decided that I had a chance to make amends for my quitting ways and mounted a stealth email campaign: I won again, with 92 write-in votes, a shock to a board that had not moved the achievement needle at all and with whom I had continued to battle—from the audience at board meetings, in the letters column of the local newspaper, at dinner parties, and in church vestibules. My new board colleagues were not happy about my victory and spent most of the next year deflecting my attempts at being part of the board (they would actually vote NOT to see documents, such as multi-million dollar construction contracts, just to keep them out of my hands).    

Five years into this latest ride on the education governance roller-coaster, I am a convinced if not convicted Churchillian: school boards are a lousy way to do education, but there isn’t anything better.  I wrote as much for an Education Week commentary a couple of years ago:

“For all their problems… I believe school boards are vital institutions. It is the country’s gradual neutering of school boards that has helped cripple our education system. Instead of seeing school boards’ apparent irrelevance as evidence of the need to hurry them out the door, we need to wonder whether such irrelevance is, like the disappearance of the frog, a sign of broader environmental stress. We have to clean the polluted ecosystem, not kill off the frog. But we also have to recognize that, unlike the poor frog, we have multiple adaptive strategies. School boards must see themselves for what they are—the only relevant link between communities and schools—and take responsibility for their role in governing districts.”

Nevertheless, I keep a copy of an email Jay Greene sent me several years ago—printed out and taped to a wall—that reads, in part:

“Even if, by some miracle, a dissenter can slip onto the board, there are tricks that the status quo uses to neutralize that person. And eventually they’ll organize a challenger who will unseat you. It sounds like elected school boards are a dead-end for reformers.”

Tricks, indeed. Challengers, of course. But does that mean that boards are dead-ends for reformers? Or are they our last best hope at saving American democracy?

Indeed, as many observers have pointed out, school boards are a remnant of the 19th century and survived the 20^th, though not without some radical reshaping in the form of consolidation. New York State, for example, had 10,000 school boards in 1900; today, just a few over 700. Perhaps this consolidation is the cause of our current education malaise, an indicator species, as I’ve said, of a deeper political system breakdown.

It may not be the perfect perch from which to view the challenges of organizing a system for educating our children, but  it remains one of the few places where every modern education issue—from curriculum to finance, pedagogy to P.E.—is experienced and discussed on a regular basis, by parents, students, teachers, taxpayers. Most importantly, though, it is a seat from which one sees the incredible diversity that is America and Americans.  And the question for the 21st century is much the same as it was in the 18th: Do we want more government or less? 

What is different, of course, is that we have, over the course of the last century-and-a-half, created a complex governance system that seems to have tied our schools in knots. Today’s educational governance issues are many.  Do we want more federal participation or less? Do we want more choice or less? Do we want states or regional associations to do the heavy lifting? Do we want a more rational and uniform school system or do we want a loosely decentralized confederation of schools? What will online education do to education governance? These were some of the questions raised by participants at the Fordham/CAP conference last December—and the papers from that conference will serve as a blueprint for a discussion about 21st-century governance that the Board’s Eye View will continue.

By its very nature, public schooling suggests a communal duty to educate, and thus a duty to govern. It is here that I hope this blog will attempt to put us in touch with our nation’s history and the founding principles on which much of that history is based. No other nation has built a governance system based on the supremacy of the individual—and a concomitant belief that government would answer to individuals. Can we keep that personal connection between the individual and his or her government and still have an excellent education system?

Join the conversation. Our future depends on your voices.

As it turns out, public schools in India, like many in the U.S., are apparently lousy – “in many states,” write Vikas Bajaj and Jim Yardley about India, “government education is in severe disarray, with teachers often failing to show up.” But unlike the U.S., where charter schools and vouchers have begun to offer alternatives, In India the poor have turned to a network of private schools to educate their children. It is much as James Tooley described it in a 2005 story in Education Next (and his subsequent book, The Beautiful Tree), recounting amazing stories from around the world:

[T]he poor have found remarkably innovative ways of helping themselves, educationally, and in some of the most destitute places on earth have managed to nurture a large and growing industry of private schools for themselves.

Checker wrote about this phenomenon in India in 2008:

I confess: I was impressed--and slightly sheepish, too, considering I've lived and traveled in India and other "third world" countries over many years and worked in the education field forever. Yet, until now I had allowed my gaze to pass over signs of the presence of hundreds of these schools without really noticing them, much less seeking to understand how they work.

This thriving private school market probably has as much to do with the general lassitude of Indian education laws as it does with the human drive to better one's lot, but what is so tragically familiar in the Times’ story is that India's new Right to Education Act, which “enshrined,” says the Times, “for the first time, a constitutional right to schooling, promising that every child from 6 to 14 would be provided with it," has a dark side for those motivated poor private schoolers. As the Times notes,

Few disagree with the law’s broad, egalitarian goals or that government schools need a fundamental overhaul. But the law also enacted new regulations on teacher-student ratios, classroom size and parental involvement in school administration that are being applied to government and private schools. The result is a clash between an ideal and the reality on the ground, with a deadline: Any school that fails to comply by 2013 could be closed.

America, of course, went through its educational my-way-or-the-highway period in the early 1920s when states began passing laws requiring that all children go to public schools – a not-so-veiled attempt to shutter the Catholic education system. It took a Supreme court decision, in 1925, Pierce v. The Society of Sisters, to declare unconstitutional an Oregon law that required public school attendance.

But it's interesting to note that so-called progressive education practices and principles, like class size and parent involvement, could kill off the private schools in India -- and with it an avenue of choice, however decrepit that avenue is, to tens of thousands of dedicated parents.

Let’s hope India will learn something from the United States and create a system that not only educates the poor but does not deny them the chance to educate themselves. But let's also hope that the United States might learn something about the power of pent-up education demand among the poor -- and the risks of too much top-down education rules and regulations. One size doesn't fit all, especially when that size is determined by just a few.

The Condition of Education 2011

This is a fascinating report from the National Center for Education Statistics that, says NCES, summarizes “important developments and trends in education using the latest available data. The report presents 50 indicators on the status and condition of education, in addition to a closer look at postsecondary education by institutional level and control. The indicators represent a consensus of professional judgment on the most significant national measures of the condition and progress of education for which accurate data are available.” Some of the important indicators, which you might call perennials, include:

• Reading—Young Children’s Achievement and Classroom Experiences
• Paying for College: Changes Between 1990 and 2000 for Full-Time Dependent Undergraduates
• Mobility in the Teacher Workforce
• U.S. Student and Adult Performance on International Assessments of Educational Achievement
• High School Course taking
• Community Colleges
• U.S. Performance Across International Assessments of Student Achievement
• High-Poverty Schools
• Enrollment Trends by Age
• Preprimary Education
• Early Education and Child Care Arrangements of Young Children
• Enrollment
• Academic Outcomes
• Reading Performance
• Reading Achievement Gaps
• Mathematics Performance
• Mathematics Achievement Gaps
• Student Effort and Educational Progress
• Student Attitudes and Aspirations
• Time Spent on Homework

Best and Worst from the Left

From the Washington Post, this is The Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg’s take on the year. Among “the worst” trends/events in his estimation were “the misguided obsession with teachers unions” (see Wisconsin and Ohio, Terry Moe and Steven Brill) and the best, not surprisingly, “Ohio residents [who] repealed the wrongheaded attack on teachers.” Also on the best list were North Carolina voters who “backed a return to school integration in Wake County public schools.” In the worst column for Kahlenberg was the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top program “encouraging states to lift charter school caps.” On the positive side, he says, were “some political figures” who began to realize that we "need to stop demonizing teachers and their democratically elected representatives, and focus instead on what really matters: reducing poverty and school segregation.”

The Koret Task Force Best (5) and Worst (5)

The Hoover Institution’s well-regarded education policy movers and shakers (chaired by our own Checker Finn) provide a very straightforward list. The Best:

1. Reinvigoration of school choice via opportunity scholarships and vouchers.
2. The rollback of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey, Idaho, and (temporarily) Ohio.
3. California State Board of Education’s rules that allow the "parent trigger" to operate.
4. Former DC chancellor Michelle Rhee's teacher-evaluation system left in place by new mayor Vincent Gray without substantial change.
5. Indiana’s overall record of education reform.

The Worst:

1. The Atlanta cheating scandal.
2. Bungling of reauthorization of No Child Left Behind by a slowpoke Congress and a Constitution-oblivious president.
3. Postponement and delay by Race to the Top–winning states and weak oversight by the Obama administration
4. Governor Jerry Brown moving California from bad to worse.
5. The unions' victory in Ohio in overturning Governor Kasich's collective bargaining reforms.

Ed Week’s Top Ten

The editors of the industry’s paper of record have “handpicked memorable articles from 2011.”

1. Obama Offers Waivers From Key Provisions of NCLB
2. Wis. Labor Bill Could Vex District-Union Relations
3. Federal Ed. Policy a Whipping Boy for GOP Hopefuls
4. Congress Chops Funding for High-Profile Education Programs
5. Budget-Driven Personnel Shifts Pressure Districts
6. Frustrated Educators Aim to Build Grassroots Movement
7. Jeb Bush's Influence on Education Policy Spreads
8. In War of Words, 'Reform' a Potent Weapon
9. Race to Top Winners Work to Balance Promises, Capacity
10. Mixed Report Card for Education Stimulus After 2 Years

A Quiz on 2011

This neat variation on a top ten list comes from The Answer Sheet’s Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post (you’ll have to check in to see the multiple choice possibilities and the answers):

1) “Corporate education reform” refers to a set of proposals currently driving education policy at the state and federal level. What is not one of those proposals? 2) Teach for America recruits top college graduates, trains them and then places them in high-poverty schools. How much training do the recruits get before they start teaching on their own? 3) Because Congress failed to rewrite No Child Left Behind, what did the Obama administration say it would do to help schools dealing with the law’s onerous requirements? 4) Why did the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District field-test on students 52 different standardized tests? 5) What percentage of American children live in poverty, according to new Census Bureau data? 6) Who said this: “We’ve lost our competitive spirit. We’ve become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we’ve lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things.” 7) What did President Obama do on Friday, March 4? 8) President Obama disagrees with Republicans on: 9) Who said, “I’m beginning to think we are living in a moment of national insanity?” 10) What is the Opt-Out Movement?

BONUS QUESTIONS:

11) True or false: In July actor and social activist Matt Damon addressed a rally in Washington D.C. to oppose the Obama administration education policies. Education Secretary Arne Duncan wanted to meet with Damon before the rally so much that he offered to pick him up at the airport and speak with him en route to the protest.

12) The Obama administration’s key education initiative, Race to the Top, had a competition for states to compete for federal dollars for early learning initiatives. What was not included as a top priority listed in the Education Department’s criteria for applicants?

Rick Hess’s Top Ten for 2012

Finally, the infamous bad boy of education reform weighs in with his predictions for what “we’ll be reading in 2012” (starting with number 10):

10) "GOP presidential nominee abandons primary season attacks on Department of Education; talks up education reform in push for moderates." 9) "Aggressive efforts to tackle bullying starting to raise questions and fuel backlash. After a number of elementary-age boys are disciplined or even suspended for 'harassment' that included routine tussling and name-calling, many parents and school board members are asking whether the anti-bullying effort has gone too far." 8) "Relentless attacks by media, Obama administration, and Senator Harkin on for-profit operators in K-12 and higher ed increasingly lead for-profit entrepreneurs to focus their energies in more receptive climes of Asia, the Middle East, and eastern Europe." 7) "Conservative lawmakers push first two or three states to reverse course and abandon the Common Core, prompting fierce breaks in Republican ranks over the Common Core to spill out into the open. Jeb Bush and leading conservative governors are the face of one side; Rick Perry and the Tea Party are the face of the opposition. Clash makes it tricky for nominee to find firm footing on education standards and accountability." 6) "Hill, administration leaders acknowledge that NCLB will not be reauthorized by year's end. Urgency around reauthorization eases as many states obtain waivers. 'We expect to win reelection, and then we're hopeful we can get it done in 2013,' says Obama administration official.'" 5)"Questions about the slow, haphazard implementation of Race to the Top promises start to fuel questions about whether the effort was oversold." 4) "Obama administration officials 'disappointed' to see that for-profit colleges are pruning enrollment and rejecting students in response to 'gainful employment' regulation. One official explains, 'Sure, we've promised to punish for-profits if they enroll students who don't graduate or earn enough after completion, but we just assumed they'd find ways to ensure that these students get a degree and a good job." 3) Even so, I expect to read: "Obama campaign makes Race to the Top, push on college affordability a centerpiece in effort to woo suburban swing voters." 2) "Despite the improving economic picture, lagging property values and competing obligations mean education dollars are coming back more slowly that district leaders had hoped." 1) And, finally, "Mixed results for the Khan Academy's 'flipped' classroom lead some educators and policymakers to worry that the model doesn't work for kids who don't do the requisite work at home. One expert notes, 'The kids who didn't do their reading or homework before are the same kids who aren't viewing their lessons and lectures now.'"

Finally, without any institutional bias intended, my nomination for the best prediction of 2011 was from our own Mike Petrilli, who wrote on Flypaper that Cathie Black would be gone by April (she was actually gone by February). And because no one else would be so gauche as to propose it, my prediction for the next President and Secretary of Education are… in a sealed envelope on my desk. Happy New Year. --Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

This morning Walt Gardner, who writes the Reality Check blog for Education Week, penned a letter to the Times editor that seems to sum up the anti-profit school of thought pretty well:

Agora Cyber Charter School [the K12 school that was the Times’ whipping post] serves as an instructive case study of what happens when schools are run like businesses. The profit motive always assures that the education of students takes a back seat to the enrichment of investors.

Nevertheless, free market advocates have managed to exploit the frustration and anger felt by taxpayers over the glacial progress of traditional public schools to advance their agenda. In the end, it will become clear that it’s impossible to provide a quality education and show a profit at the same time.

This is a brief but concise compilation of some of the misguided beliefs about business and education, and it reinforces a working theory of mine: that many education establishmentarians lean far to the left on governance issues other than those affecting education. (See my post from last June.) This is unfortunate. E.D. Hirsch, a political liberal, was one of the first to call attention to the ideological split in education between process and pedagogy: in his 1999 book The Schools We Need he noted that the respected 1930s Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci advocated a "conservative" education (facts and content) as the best way to avoid "perpetuat[ing] social differences." I do not want to put words in Hirsch's (or Gramsci's) mouth here, but there are plenty of well-meaning educators who seem not to appreciate that the way of producing great education outcomes in the classroom (content, content, content) is decidedly different than that of delivering great education to lots of kids (choice, choice, choice).

Regarding the latter, I would suggest that the fear of the free market leads to some bizarre statements; e.g. that “[t]he profit motive always assures that the education of students takes a back seat to the enrichment of investors.”

If this were true, Gardner would be attacking the current system, which is filled with for-profit motives: just ask the textbook companies, the bus companies, the testing companies, the consultants, the building contractors, the computer manufacturers. Even the teacher unions, which do their best to ensure that their members are earning a living from the education system, are part of the for-profit school syndrome. So, either Mr. Gardner is proposing a soup-to-nuts government-owned education system or he completely misunderstands the nature of the modern education beast.

Thus, before we can even discuss the impact of the profit motive on education outcomes, we need to understand how that profit motive affects what Gardner says is “the glacial progress of traditional public schools."

Have free market advocates “exploited” taxpayer anger or have they done what good free marketeers do: offer alternatives? And have those alternatives worsened children's educational prospects or saved the education lives of thousands of children?

My friend Robert Pondiscio over at Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation rightly suggests that we should perhaps be debating de-regulation rather than profits:

What if education was essentially deregulated, and its quality was assured not by the Department of Education, but the Federal Trade Commission? Would KIPP or Achievement First emerge as the Clear Channel of education, becoming the dominant provider? Someone else? Those who favor deregulation tend also to favor free markets and local control.

I’m not so sure I want the FTC running education, but Pondiscio is on to something here. What would public education look like if it were de-regulated?

One thing is certain, the nation can ill-afford to continue to put up with the glacial pace (but is it backward or forward?) of our current system. In fact, I would argue that it may be only because of the reform experiments and acceptance of standards of the last ten years -- including accountability for student performance, charter schools, and online education – that we have not fallen further behind. We need more reform, not less. More free market not less..... 'Twas the night before Christmas and not a creature was stirring, not even a de-regulating education reformer....

Merry Christmas.

Terry Ryan said it well, praising The Mind Trust’s Indianapolis school reform plan, Creating Opportunity Schools, as a “bold and dramatic transformation of public education akin to what has taken place in New Orleans and New York City." And it's true that “the most controversial part of the reform plan,” as Terry writes, “calls for neutering the role of the current IPS [Indianapolis Public Schools] school board, while turning governance over to a new five member board appointed jointly by the mayor and the City-County Council.” This is indeed a bold consolidation of power. But the plan also calls for turning Indianapolis into a district of total choice, in which all schools would compete for students — a bold diffusion of power. By combining mayoral authority and parental choice, as Paul Peterson suggests in his masterful 2010 book Saving Schools, The Mind Trust proposal would create “a marriage made in heaven”:

Theoretically, the excellence movement’s two central thrusts — accountability and parental choice — are complementary strategies designed to enhance school quality: information supplied by an accountability system can be made available to parents, who can then make intelligent choices among schools.

But Peterson warns that "when choice and accountability are pursued simultaneously, they operate on a collision course." This tension is part of the reform dynamic, overcome, Peterson suggests, by "reconstruct[ing] it from the bottom up." This is essentially what the 155-page Mind Trust plan proposes. And having done some editing work on David Harris and Bart Peterson’s forthcoming book, Educating a City, I understand the need for wholesale reconstruction. What David Harris, Mind Trust CEO, and Bart Peterson (no relation to Paul that I know of), former mayor, accomplished in Indianapolis while Peterson was Indy mayor (from 2000 to 2008) was something close to miraculous — they helped get the state to pass a charter school law and then created a stable of 16 charters. [pullquote]Education Next called Bart Peterson “the Peyton Manning of charter schools.”[/pullquote] Education Next called Bart Peterson “the Peyton Manning of charter schools.” (This was clearly before the Colts faded and Manning went on the active disabled list.) But Bart Peterson and David Harris’ school reform successes — including The Mind Trust, which was started in 2006 — were all the more remarkable because of the intransigence of the powerful local education establishment. The public school district, while refusing to improve, fought Peterson and Harris every step of the improvement way. The current IPS Superintendent, Eugene White, carries on that tradition. "We are always looking for an easy fix to a complicated problem," White told the Indianapolis Star after the new Mind Trust plan was unveiled over the weekend. "They seem to think the report is very provocative. I don't think it's provocative at all. We're doing most of the things in the report." This is what I call the possum defense; what perennially failing districts like IPS do when attacked: play dead and hope the reform enemy will go away. It has worked well so far — though not for kids. As The Mind Trust report points out,

Only 45% of IPS students meet state standards on the math and English language arts portions of ISTEP+ [Indiana’s statewide tests]. The achievement gap between IPS and the state in English language arts is large in 3rd grade — 20 percentage points — and even larger in 8th — 29 percentage points. Only 58% of students graduate on time. Six of the seven most chronically failing schools in the state are in IPS.

In fact, “Indianapolis Public Schools exemplifies the problems of the nation’s worst public school systems,” RiShawn Biddle of Dropout Nation wrote last year:

This Midwestern district suffers all the faults of urban districts that aren’t involved in any reform effort, from bureaucratic incompetence to political intransigence to high levels of teacher absenteeism.... The district remains home to one of the nation’s most-comprehensive concentrations of dropout factories, with all but one of its high schools (a specialized high school) graduating fewer than 60 percent of its students. The graduation rates for black and white males (based on 2006 data) are tied with Detroit’s abysmal district for the worst.

Indeed, the Mind Trust report is provocative precisely because it knows that the possum is still alive and will not move without some definitive prodding. Mayoral control is no silver bullet, but for what ails Indy, it’s time.

"It makes a difference,” says Seymour Fliegel, “that the same guy who can command the garbage trucks and police cruisers is talking about education."

And this is why some of the initial responses to The Mind Trust proposal from state legislators, who must approve the mayoral control plan, offer some reason for hope. House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, told the Star, "it is perhaps an idea whose time has come." And Rep. Bill Crawford, an Indianapolis Democrat, says, “It's not as bad and as objectionable as some people anticipate…. It creates an obligation on the part of the political leader of the county. (School performance) becomes a record of his success or failure." It is, as Paul Peterson suggests, accountability through choice. And as Fordham inaugurates the new era of education governance rethinking, The Mind Trust initiative — the plan is 155 pages long! — represents the kind of comprehensive systemic change that promises to remake public education; for the better, we hope. Mayoral control is not new, but it has become a popular way for larger school districts to upend the political patronage mills that too many school boards fall prey to — and usher in a pot-pourri of reform initiatives. “In theory,” writes Columbia University Teachers College professor Jeffrey Henig, “mayors are better situated than school boards or superintendents to mobilize a broad constituency for educational investment and improvement and to find and develop positive spillovers between schools and the other work of other municipal agencies that host programs that can help families and youth.” “It makes a difference,” Seymour Fliegel, a 30-year veteran of New York City’s school wars and a former deputy superintendent in East Harlem, told me while I was reporting my Education Next story on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s assumption of control of New York City’s schools, “that the same guy who can command the garbage trucks and police cruisers is talking about education.” “Schools aren’t under my command,” Detroit Mayor Dave Bing told the Wall Street Journal in 2009, “they are run by a school board that is dominated by teachers unions. One of my goals is to have mayoral control of the school system.” (See Henig) There are complexities, of course. And As Rick Hess and Olivia Meeks warned in their recent paper for the Fordham/CAP conference,

Mayoral control and other popular remedies mistakenly focus on the faltering performance of school boards themselves and thereby fail to address the underlying dysfunction of an outdated Progressive approach to schooling.

But The Mind Trust initiative seems to get it, proposing a set of reforms – universal pre-K, shifting budget control to individual schools, giving all parents a choice, recruiting and paying great teachers—that anticipates the Hess and Meeks advice:

Transformative improvement must… begin by rethinking the district monopoly and take advantage of new providers and new technologies in systems organized around function, not geography.”

The Mind Trust’s proposal is indeed a must-read for any education policymaker—or anyone thinking of becoming one.

After I graduated from college, I took the summer off and backpacked through Europe because I figured that it might be the last time I could travel without time constraints (of course, I was right about this).  Not being able to speak the native languages provided some funny and not-so-funny incidents. In any case, I am sure most of you have been in a situation where the discussion is hampered by the two people not speaking the same language. It can be frustrating at times and shows how simple things can become so complicated.

A few weeks ago, I described an education reform program I attended,  Rethinking Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century, which was sponsored by the Fordham Institute.  The presenters were for the most part academics with impressive credentials. For those who have been part of public education for a while, some of these concepts may just turn your world upside down. That is because they are seriously considering “rethinking” education, not just tweaking it.

Most of you know that New Jersey’s commissioner and governor both want to change teacher tenure and teacher evaluations, as well as provide more charter school opportunities for parents. What was fascinating about the program at the Fordham Institute was the thrust of the discussion: that the next reform we need to consider involves changing how school districts are governed. By that they mean changing the role of the school board member and the superintendent. The belief is that the state (or another single entity, such as a city) should have the primary authority over the school system and that building principals are given broad authority and also held accountable for academic achievement.

Why give the state the primary authority?  The belief is that we have a system with too many governing entities, both formal (local boards, state education departments and the federal government) and informal (such as teacher unions) that influence public education and make it hard to reform the system. The lines of responsibility are not clear, so it is hard to hold any one entity accountable.

If state control is not feasible, then mayoral-controlled (notice I used the word controlled not appointed–there is a difference) school districts are another school improvement option that seems to resonate with the Fordham program speakers. Once again, the concept involves concentrating authority in a single entity to avoid school reform roadblocks.

While I believe that tenure reform and reforming the way we evaluate teachers is needed and would help students in all districts, I am not convinced that changing our governance structure will yield any benefits.

There are major hurdles to shifting authority from local districts to the state in New Jersey. For one thing: can you change the governance structure without changing the funding system?  In New Jersey, in 2009-2010, the local property tax levy accounted for 62.1  percent of public school funding and state aid made up 34.7 percent of public school revenue that same year.  (Source: Rankings & Estimates: Rankings of the States 2010, National Education Association 2010)  Why should the state have the authority when the local citizens are the primary funders of education?  Don’t they deserve a say too?  In the community in which I live, the local property tax-payers fund almost 90 percent of the cost of education while the state government pays 7 percent and the federal government 1 percent. No disrespect to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan or Acting Commissioner Cerf, but their influence in the public education in my community far outweighs the financial support they provide.  One of the key presenters suggested that the states pick up most of the tab for public education and I thought to myself “That ain’t going to happen in New Jersey! Let’s discuss policy choices that are at least feasible.”

As for mayoral-controlled boards, one of the presenters mentioned that mayoral-controlled districts don’t always reap great results because the mayors sometimes lose elections and some mayors are better than others.  This seems so obvious to me:  I have known many mayors over my life and I am not sure any really had an education focus.

My other issue with these proposals is that I do favor a system of governance that has checks and balances and I do not particularly like systems that give the authority to one person or entity.

In New Jersey, most of our districts have the same governance structure.  They have a school board and a superintendent who lead the district.  There are districts located a few miles apart  with very different levels of achievement:  one district has outstanding academic results, while the other  is struggling mightily. If their governance is the same, then maybe governance is not the issue, because in the vast majority of districts, the governance system is yielding great results. When we look at these two districts, usually a dramatic difference rests with the economic conditions; while we can never use that as an excuse for low achievement or an obstacle to well-thought-out education reforms, it remains a factor in school performance that must be addressed.  So, maybe governance is not the problem at all.

In any case, what we need to be aware of is that these discussions are influencing state political leaders.  They may be speaking a ‘different language’ than most of us in the education community, but not much is being lost in the translation.

Ladd and Fiske’s essay was one of those broadsides that spreads through the teacher ranks like a brush fire. I received my email copy from one of our district’s veteran teachers, a hard-working, dedicated woman who rarely misses an opportunity to remind me that she and her colleagues would be doing a fine job were it not for unmotivated kids and their irresponsible parents.  And Diane Ravitch weighed in,  calling to mind, in tune with the season, the story of Scrooge and Tiny Tim, offering to “update this tale for today’s school reformers” by calling attention to Ladd and Fiske’s op-ed. (Ravitch says she uses Ladd’s Education and Poverty paper in her post.)

What I don’t understand in all of this is who exactly is claiming that class (or poverty or parents or kids) doesn’t matter?  Ladd and Fiske spend most of their essay stating the obvious: that socio-economic circumstance matters to education outcomes. The evidence that our policymakers and reformers are in denial of this salient fact?

“No Child Left Behind required all schools to bring all students to high levels of achievement but took no note of the challenges that disadvantaged students face.”

Huh?

NCLB actually forced schools to pay attention to their poor and minority students by demanding disaggregated data; that looks to me like quite the note.  And plenty of schools that I have visited got the message.  But it’s not good enough for Ladd and Fiske, who argue that the law should also have helped schools “address the challenges [poor and minority students] carry with them into the classroom.”

Huh?

What happened to Title I?  What happened to free-and-reduced lunch? What about the dozens of adequacy and equity lawsuits that have redistributed billions of tax dollars to low-wealth schools?  And those are just the heavily subsidized income distribution anti-poverty programs directed at schools.  Outside of schools we have Medicaid, Section 8 housing, WIC (Women, Infants and Children food program), food stamps and a plethora of anti-poverty programs that should prove, if nothing else, how misguided the cure-poverty first folks are.

As Porter-Magee wrote last July,

“Of course, the link between student achievement and socioeconomic status is unmistakable….  But saying we need to fix poverty before we can fix schools is like a doctor saying that he’s going to wait until you get better before he treats you.  Education is the path out of poverty, not the consolation prize offered to children whose families have managed to dig their way out on their own.”

The only denial here is Ladd and Fiske’s: thirty years of “war on poverty” (vis Lyndon Johnson, 1964) and stultifyingly little school improvement to show for it. Several years ago I met a low-income housing developer who told me, “I once believed that cleaning up a neighborhood by building decent housing would improve education; it didn’t.”

Ladd and Fiske’s assertions are even more bizarre given the fact that an increasing number of reformers – not to mention generations of Catholic educators, to cite the best known of the private schools that educate the poor – have proven over and over again that poverty is an educational challenge for schools not a death sentence for their students.

But Ladd and Fiske twist these successes into pretzels of logic:   “If some schools can succeed, the argument goes, then it is reasonable to expect all schools to.”  Who makes that argument?  Reasonable?  It would be reasonable to expect such proven methods to work unless, of course, you’re part of a determined status quo which believes that hundred-page teacher contracts, tenure, single-salary wage schedules, and last-in-first-out labor laws are also reasonable.

As with Ravitch’s “miracle” argument (“the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny,” she asserted in the Times last May), Ladd and Fiske build mighty big straw men.  Bam! Slam! “[C]lose scrutiny of charter school performance has shown that many of the success stories have been limited to particular grades or subjects and may be attributable to substantial outside financing or extraordinarily long working hours on the part of teachers. The evidence does not support the view that the few success stories can be scaled up to address the needs of large populations of disadvantaged students.”

And what is the point?  If it isn’t going to work for everyone, it shouldn’t be tried by anyone?  What exactly is preventing poor public schools from receiving “substantial” financing (many of them, as we know, already do) or hiring teachers who will work hard?

Speaking of the devil (that’s just a joke, friends, no demonizing intended), Randi Weingarten is bringing the American Federation of Teachers version of the anti-poverty campaign to the county where it all began — McDowell County, West Virginia, the first place in the nation to receive food stamps – in what the Washington Post‘s Lyndsey Layton says is “an unusual effort to turn around a floundering school system… by simultaneously tackling the social and economic troubles of McDowell County.”  (Custer’s last stand comes to mind.)

Speaking from the same script as Ladd, Fiske, and Ravitch, Weingarten tells Layton, that “I’ve gotten so angry in the last couple of years when people who are new to our field decide that they alone, just by exhorting, will help ensure that geography does not become destiny for some kids….  A lot of the factors that confront kids — poverty, divorce, health care — are real obstacles. People can pretend to ignore them elsewhere, but no one can ignore those factors in McDowell.”

Pretend to ignore?

No matter how often  serious reformers repeat it – and I have heard it often – the status quo ante brigades that Ravitch and Ladd and Fiske and Weingarten represent so well refuse to hear it: poverty matters, class matters, parents matter, kids matter, and, what these new establishmentarians keep denying, schools matter. No serious reformer that I know of, as Ladd and Fiske assert, “den[ies] a correlation [between poverty and educational achievement].”  In fact, it is these reformers’ very embrace of those challenges that distinguishes them from the new establishmentarians and allowed them to, yes, “beat the odds.”

And even Scrooge got the message eventually – but it wasn’t the message Ravitch thinks is key to the Christmas Carol. The biggest sin of Dickens’ famous anti-hero is his monocular view of the world, his belief that caste and class were indeed so deeply imbedded in a person’s character that charity did not matter. Scrooge was the original determinist cum fatalist: since class matters there’s no point in reaching out. Not until he was visited by the ghosts of determinists past did he see the light:  Tiny Tim was redeemable! And in that redemption Scrooge himself would be saved. The lesson here, I’m afraid, is that schools, like Scrooge, can make a difference in children’s lives. And it is my Christmas hope that teachers and policymakers will be freed from their chains and see how much they can do to improve schools and the educational opportunities of our most needy children.

First, on NPR recently, CNN host Fareed Zakaria said that the Founders were so “obsessed with the problem of absolute power” that they created an unworkable government. “The system in Washington is so unwieldy that in order to get everybody to agree, [it] would seem to take a miracle and would perhaps take decades.” Is that good or bad?  (Checker and Mike suggest that, as far as education governance goes, we’ve got to return more powers to the states.) On the same NPR show, former Congressman Mickey Edwards argued that the problem is not the Constitution – and the governance structure it created – but the party system. Sure, you can create an efficient government, like China, said Edwards, “the people just get in the way.” He continued: “Well I think that’s nonsense. We don’t need to change to a system that gives more power to the top…What you want is more power in the people. You have to figure out what’s denying them that power, whether it’s the political primary system [or] whether it’s the redistricting system; figure out what the problems are and solve the problems.”

Second, at yesterday’s Manhattan Institute symposium celebrating Marcus Winters’ new book – Teachers Matter: Rethinking How Public Schools Identify, Reward, and Retain Great Teachers – guests were treated to some provocative governance proposals about the profession – and not just from Marcus, who suggests that “how we structure government to get the best out of our teachers” is one of education’s highest priorities. Chris Cerf, acting Commissioner of Education in New Jersey, and a panelist at the event, repeated some of what he said at the TBFI/CAP conference; i.e. that the hardest thing now is getting the political will to change the policies that prevent successful education. “We’ve got to become radicals,” he told the Harvard Club audience of what seemed to be mostly reform sympathizers. Encouraging “a thought exercise,” Cerf asked the audience what the chances were of state legislators choosing “sound public policy” over “political interests.” “Five percent?” one audience member suggested. “That’s optimistic,” said Cerf to much laughter. He suggested that reformers have to create a climate in which sound public policy is, in fact, in a policymaker’s political interest.

Evan Stone, co-founder of Educators 4 Excellence, made a plea that teachers “have a say in governance questions.” (Teacher unions were variously characterized as “the elephant in every room,” “necessary evil,” and “not meaningful partners” by speakers. Stone suggested that the unions aren’t really representing the voices of active teachers, but rather retirees and non-active teachers, which comprise some 70 percent of union membership.) Seth Andrew, superintendent of Democracy Prep charter schools, echoed the sentiments of the other panelists when he said that there were too many “barriers to entry” for folks who might make good teachers. He also pointed out that the parent voice is all too often left out. “We’re called Democracy Prep, not Generic Prep,” he pointed out. Finally, Joel Klein, the keynoter, said that he now believes that the key leverage point for education reform is choice. “Kids with the greatest need,” he said, “have no choice.” Klein made several references to his favorite baseball team. “Can you imagine the Yankees with LIFO?” he asked, referring to the Last In First Out system of dismissing teachers. “They would have had an even worse season.”

Finally, I’ll highlight the recent AARP Bulletin just for the cover headline: “How air conditioning, cable news and Thomas Jefferson created the mess in Washington.” It’s worth getting old just to see this one.

Kids ought to be allowed to work parttime in school, particularly in the poorest neighborhoods, both because they could use the money — if you take one half of the New York janitors, who are unionized and are paid more than the teachers. An entry-level janitor is paid twice as much as an entry-level teacher. You take half the janitors, you could give lots of poor kids work experience in the cafeteria, the school library, in the front office and a lot of different things. I’ll stay by the idea that young people ought to learn how to work. Middle class kids do it routinely. We should give poor kids the same chance to pursue happiness.

Yes, there was applause.

In fact, Gingrich continues to be the only Republican candidate talking seriously about education. (See home pages for Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and John Huntsman, and follow their “issues” pages.) Ron Paul mentions the subject, but as an adjunct to “homeschooling” –

Congressman Paul wants parents to have the freedom to choose the best educational options for their children, and his commitment to ensuring homeschooling remains a practical alternative for American families is unmatched by any other Presidential candidate. As President, he will veto any legislation that encroaches on homeschooling parents’ rights. Returning control of education to parents and teachers on the local level is the centerpiece of Ron Paul’s education agenda.

Not bad. And if he continues to expand his work ethic ideas (e.g. including middle- and upper-middle class kids), he’ll be mainstream education reform (see Paul Tough’s grit story) and sound as thrifty as Mitt Romney.

In the final segment, Checker moderated a discussion of big-picture governance reforms that featured Paul Hill, Kenneth Meier, Jon Schnur, and Paul Pastorek.

For more, download drafts of participants’ papers and stream all the video from the conference, including Chris Cerf’s lunchtime keynote address, on the Education Gadfly’s YouTube channel.

Here’s one from Michael Powell in the New York Times, rebutting Michael Bloomberg’s suggestion that we cut the number of teachers in half and pay the remaining ones twice the salary:

In fact, studies show class size makes a substantial difference in lower grades. Studies are more ambiguous about higher grades. Prof. Aaron M. Pallas of Teachers College at Columbia University says no academic study has explored the effects of doubling the size of a public school classroom.

Is that a string of non-sequitors or what?  Powell goes on to tell stories about his sons and a friend who teaches in Brooklyn Technical High School. But the subject of “studies” that do and don’t show something  — anything! — is dropped.

Here’s one from Tom Ash, legislative director for the Buckeye [Ohio] Association of School Administrators, speaking about international test results and what makes some countries more successful:

It’s not just the number of facts you can regurgitate, it’s whether you have developed the ability to learn.”

Why does vomiting facts suggest an inability to learn?  What if we merely wrote the facts?  Slowly spoke them?  What is it about facts that so bothers educators?

Finally, from Bridging Differences blogger Diane Ravitch, apropos, what else, poverty:

One of the central claims of the corporate-reform movement is that poverty is not destiny and that a school staffed with great teachers can eliminate poverty.

Perhaps there’s a typo somewhere in that sentence. Great teachers eliminate poverty?  I think even the coarsest of coarse leaders of the “corporate-reform movement” (does she really mean corporate-reform movement, which would seem to suggest an alliance with the Occupy Wall Street campers?) would not claim that teachers of any stripe can eliminate poverty.

But the bigger question is, Have we reached such a low-point in the use of language that such incomprehensible statements – if you stop to ponder them for more than a Tweet second — have become part of the daily dialogue in education reform? Newt Gingrich looks pretty tame in comparison.  But the problem is that issues like class size, the importance of content (facts), and poverty deserve more than lame and lazy rhetoric to support their causes.  They need the facts, pure and uncontaminated by ideology and partisanship.

To learn more, download drafts of participants’ full papers and watch the first panel on Flypaper.

Want more? The first and second panels can be viewed online and we’ll be releasing the rest of the footage tomorrow on Flypaper.

To learn more, download drafts of participants’ full papers and keep an eye on Flypaper for more footage from the conference.

For the last couple of weeks Gingrich has been tossing read meat to the liberal wolves in ways that only the Grinch who stole Christmas can.  He has also suggested that poor kids do janitorial work in school – and earn money doing it.  According to politico.com, the former West Georgia State College history professor told a Kennedy School of Government audience that. It’s worth an extended quote, because Gingrich needs context to make up for the  lightning-bolt phrases he drops in throughout:

This is something that no liberal wants to deal with… Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods, crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy. It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid. You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple model…. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising….  You go out and talk to people, as I do, you go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job between nine and 14 years of age. They all were either selling newspapers, going door to door, they were doing something, they were washing cars….  They all learned how to make money at a very early age… What do we say to poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Don’t do it. Remember all that stuff about don’t get a hamburger flipping job? The worst possible advice you could give to poor children. Get any job that teaches you to show up on Monday. Get any job that teaches you to stay all day even if you are in a fight with your girlfriend. The whole process of making work worthwhile is central.

Not surprisingly, Gingrich’s ideas were attacked as Dickensian. Blow called them “cruel.” Randi Weingarten called them “absurd.”

“Who in their right mind would lay off janitors and replace them with disadvantaged children — who should be in school, and not cleaning schools,” Ms. Weingarten said. “And who would start backtracking on laws designed to halt the exploitation of children?”

Newt’s never been known for soft-and-cuddly and he does make an easy target for bleeding heart liberals – a term that Gingrich’s new front-runner status may bring back to life – as he joins his Darwinian socio-economic observations with a delivery crisp enough to shatter good china.  The problem is, though, that he’s mostly right.

His “21^st Century Learning System” is worth considering. A sampling, from Newt.org:

• Empower parents to pick the right school for their child.  Parents had the right to choose the school that is best for their child, and should never be trapped in a failing school against their will.
• Institute a Pell Grant-style system for Kindergarten through 12th Grade. Per-pupil school district funding should go into each child’s backpack, and follow them to the school their parents wish to attend. Parents who home school their children should receive a tax credit or be allowed to keep the Pell Grant.
• Require transparency and accountability about achievement. Each state must set a rigorous standard that allows every student everywhere to master the skills they will need to be competitive, and develop a process for grading the effectiveness of every school.
• Implement a “no limits” charter system.

• All of the money allocated for student education goes directly to the school.
• The school manages its own staff, whereby it is exempt from laws regarding tenure, and need not unionize.
• The school defines its own curriculum, in line with the state standards and assessments.  Students in charters are not exempt from state assessments.  The schools are not exempt from reporting requirements, nor should they be.
• State law allows the school to “franchise” its model without limitation.  That means they need not apply for a new school every time they can build a new one.  If they have the demand, they must be able to serve it.
• The state has NO CAPS on the number of charter schools that can be approved, and the process for approving charter schools is smooth and efficient.

Oh, yes, he doesn’t suggest killing the federal Department of Education – just “shrink” it and “return power to states and communities. The Department’s only role will be to collect research and data, and help find new and innovative approaches to then be adopted voluntarily at the local level.”

Is it time for education reformers to pay Gingrich some more attention?

Okay, I’m a dying breed. I carried the print version of the Winter 2012 issue around most of the last several days – scribbling in the margins, spilling coffee on the pictures, throwing pages on the passenger seat, breaking the binding back and perching the salt shaker on it at breakfast – I guarantee you this is a  Thanksgiving feast.  Even online! (Full disclosure, I am a contributing editor at the magazine, have a story in the issue (see below), and am biased.)

But I guarantee you, you won’t leave this issue hungry:

Play Ball! This June Kronholz cover story takes us curriculum afficianados to a new playing field. “There’s not a straight line between the crochet club and the Ivy League,” writes Kronholz, “[b]ut a growing body of research says there is a link between afterschool activities and graduating from high school, going to college and becoming a responsible citizen.”

This story sets us on a trajectory of common sense that is much needed in our polarized and partisan education policy world. I hesitate to use the word, but organic comes to mind. The whole child; more reason to move NCLB – and the reform movement – off its parochial ELA and math dime. A must read.

Do We Play Ball with the Unions? Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and here presents a compelling case for changing our approach to education labor and management relations: let’s collaborate, the way the Canadians and the Finns do it.  It’s enticing.

Thus three “social partners” – government, labor, and management – would frame social policy together, as equals.

Unfortunately, with all due respect to our social democratic neighbors to the north and east, that’s not how the world works in a free, heterogenius society, where government must celebrate, accommodate, and channel individuals.  This is one of the more persuasive arguments for collaboration – and the denial of nature! — and should be read.

Unions schmunions. What about the kids? This forum feature is a feast for our education gladiators: Spartacus Jay Greene v. Vercingetorix Richard Kahlenberg.  It is not a contest for the faint of heart.  But it’s worth pointing out that Kahlenberg does a lot of dancing around the central question – do teacher unions really help kids? – while Jay has to admit that “it is very hard to produce rigorous research on the effect of teachers unions on education.”  Bring on the lions.

Studying “teacher moves” This is perhaps the best story in the issue – and that’s because author Michael Goldstein, founder of MATCH Charter School and MATCH Teacher Residency, is such a voice of reason.

Teachers don’t trust research, and understandably so.  There’s a lot of shoddy research that supports fads. Experienced teachers remember that `this year’s method’ directly contradicts the approach from three years ago.

Goldstein is here arguing that the Gates-sponsored project to study “teacher moves” – what a teacher does in a classroom – will provide “a massive uptick in our knowledge of teacher moves” and that such research  might actually be useful to teachers. “Until that [research] exists,” he says, “I’ll see you at the 5^th-grade dance.” Go granny, go granny, go.

Our Best are Mediocre.  This little feature report, from Jay Greene and Josh McGee, should scare the pants off our country’s remaining education system boosters:

Even the most elite suburban school districts often produce results that are mediocre when compaired with those of our international peers.

So much for blaming poor, inner-city blacks for our dismal international test results. (And read the comments on this one.) Even American kids born on third base, conclude Greene and McGee, can’t hit home runs.  Take Beverly Hills, with a median family income of $102,611 and 85.1 percent white: math achievement of its average student puts the district at the 53^rd percentile relative to our industrialized nation students. Take that, you smug middle class parents.  But here’s a chance to see where your district stands compared to the World (at www.globalreportcard.org) .

This problem is reiterated by Sa Bui, Steven Craig, and Scott Imberman in a closely argued research report in the same issue, titled Poor Results for High Achievers. The research suggests that “students who are placed in higher-achieveing groups” don’t do all that well and, in fact, “can suffer psychological harm.”

What the best dressed countries can teach us.  This story by Carlos Astra-Anadon and Paul Peterson recaps the highlights of a unique conference sponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance: “Learning from the Inernational Experience.”  By sampling views of educators from different education success countries – such as Jari Lavonen of Finland and Gwan-Jo Kim of Korea – and different fields – e.g. Susan Patrick of the International Association for K—12 Online Learning and Shantanu Prakash of Educomp Solutions – we get great insight into what works and what doesn’t from those who know.

Chris Cerf of New Jersey and Gerard Robinson of Florida were also there, talking about what is working in America.  It’s a roundtable of some intelligence and might convince you, conclude Lastra-Anadon and Peterson, that American “popular culture shows little appreciation for the educated citizen,” that “a decentralized government arrangement with multiple veto points precludes rapid innovation,” and that “education policitics [in the United States] is marked by antipathy between teachers unions and school reformers.” But there’s more.

Parent Power. This story is called “Not Your Mother’s PTA” – and that is a perfectly apt way of describing the difference between the old-fashioned bake-sale parents and the radicalized mamas and papas of our reform era.  Go Parents!

Desert: Le Whitney Tilson.  I was honored to meet this crusader for education excellence. And I hope this story conveys some of the nuance – and passion — that makes him one of the most insightful and incisive education reform provocateurs of our day.  Why does he care?

I believe very deeply in the promise of this country, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But there is nothing more fundamental about what America stands for than equality of opportunity. That it doesn’t matter who your parents are or what color your skin is or what neighborhood you were born in—every kid in this country should get a fair shot at the American dream. And there’s nothing more important to that than getting a decent education.… The outrage comes from the fact that we have a public education system in this country that systematically delivers a massively inferior education to low-income and minority kids. The kids that most need a good education, to escape the disadvantages of the life they were born into, are systematically given a lousy education. That violates every sense of fairness, every belief I have about this country and thus the outrage.

Bon appétit. And be thankful.

Clarence Lee from Tennessee
Loved the commercials he saw on TV.
He watched with wide believing eyes
And bought everything they advertised

I used to read this to the kids whom I tutored in reading and also brought it with me to classrooms, to share with whole groups of students.  The poem introduced these youngsters to narrative rhyme — and  the ubiquity and charms of advertising:

Powder for his doggie’s fleas,
Toothpaste for his cavities,
Stylish jeans that fit much tighter.
Bleach to make his white things whiter
Spray to make his hair look wetter
Cream to make his skin feel better

It was a set-up, of course, to the punchline: parents were just like toothpaste: trade ‘em in for better ones. And, of course, it was funny because the kids Silverstein addressed actually loved their parents, despite the fact that they made them do things they didn’t want to do, such as go to school, read, do homework, take the garbage out.

But I eventually stopped reading the poem in my school, as I realized that its punch line — that the kids could trade their parents in for “’A brand-new Maw, a better Paw!” —  didn’t work for kids who really did have bad parents and insufferable homelifes.  For these kids It wasn’t funny.

New, improved in every way –
Hurry, order yours today!

If only.

It was not funny for kids whose parents weren’t there, who beat them up, smoked dope, disappeared for days – these kids really did need new parents. But it’s a complicated relationship.  Once while reporting a story for Life magazine many years ago (“Children of Poverty”), I recall walking down a residential street in an Ohio town, just behind a man and a young child. It was a Norman Rockwell moment until, out of the blue, the man suddenly slapped the child down.  I was stunned. And I watched in utter horror – and confusion – as the little boy got back up and rushed the man and clung to his leg, crying. “Daddy! Daddy!”

Anyone who has lived for more than 30 seconds understands the importance of parents – and the complicated relationship between them and their children.   It’s not surprising that the PISA study that Friedman cites (from our friends at the Organziation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) who develop the international test of 15-year-olds) concludes that the kids “whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.”

But it’s also not surprising that schools can’t remake parents — a fact that Friedman doesn’t mention.

What does a teacher – or a school – do in the face of the reality that parents make a difference?  The answer: teach the kids.  Schools can’t fix parents. They can — and should — educate (fix) kids.

The problem, as I pointed out last week, is that “the parent improvement movement is destined to become another responsibility for a system already freighted with the weight of the world – and the World Wide Web!” Parent improvement initiatives are not – and should not be – respsonsibilities of the schools.  Schools need to focus on teaching children what they do not know.  Schools need to do what schools can do – before saddling themselves with responsibilities that they can’t do; e.g. fixing parents.

Having said this, I encourage all parents – and teachers – to read Friedman and the PISA report. Be a good parent; read to your child. Be a good teacher, teach your student.

This, of course, is vintage Weingarten, described by Nocera as ?whip-smart? and ?politically savvy.?? But the larger question is what happened to Brill, founder of American Lawyer and Court TV and a formidable presence in the New York media scene, on the way to the education repair shop?

Himself whip-smart and politically savvy, Brill made instant news when he took on the city's teachers union in a 2009 New Yorker story about the city's notorious ?rubber rooms,? where bad teachers went to soak up full salaries while doing nothing.? In that story Brill described Weingarten as such a ferocious defender of teachers that she ?would protect a dead body in the classroom.? ?That was meant to suggest that teacher unions weren't so good for our kids.

And indeed, in the ensuing book's first 420 pages, as Nocera colleague Michael Winerip wrote of Class Warfare last August, Brill ?bashes the union and its president, Randi Weingarten, is dismissive of veteran teachers and extols charters.?

So why does Brill ?suddenly veer? in a different direction? at the end, as Nocera asks.? Brill gives a decidedly Diane Ravitch-like reply: ?It's called reporting,? he tells Nocera.? Of course, Ravitch changed her mind about reform over the course of several years -- and after writing many books that helped define the historical record of shame that has helped give the reform movement its shape and energy. Brill managed the 180-degree turn in one book.**

What's going on here?

On the silly side, one could argue that teacher unions have done more (teachers, please note the conditional: one could argue) to grease the wheels of American education decline than any other single organization and so it wouldn't make much sense to make one of its most effective leaders a school chancellor, even under a? ?keep your enemies closer? rubric.? In his book Brill quotes Mayor Michael Bloomberg saying, ?It's a really stupid idea? Never in a million years.? (The way things have been going for Bloomberg lately, the end may be nearer than he thinks.)

On the nuanced side, Brill attributes his change of heart to several people:

• Jessica Reid, a charter school assistant principal who ?burned out before Mr. Brill's eyes,? says Winerip, and quit her job;
• Dave Levin, co-founder of KIPP, who told Brill that there aren't enough good teachers, with or without unions, to do what the good charters do;
• Randi Weingarten, who ?really cares about this stuff? (Brill to Winerip).

All of this means that, as Nocera sees it,

[Y]ou simply cannot fix America's schools by `scaling' charter schools. It won't work. Charters schools offer proof of concept that great teaching is a huge difference-maker, but charters can only absorb a tiny fraction of the nation's 50 million public school children. Real reform has to go beyond beyond charters ? and it has to include the unions. That's what Brill figured out.?

In fact, most good reformers have figured that out too.? But one need not accuse reformers of demonizing Weingarten and her union, as Nocera says they do, in order to understand the situation.***

There is no doubt of Weingarten's savvy nor is there any question that the unions' don't have a tight grip on our education system. ?But there are some key educational practices that need to be addressed and that require a great deal of change? on the part of the education establishment, which includes Weingarten and her unions.? (For a fuller picture of Weingarten and a good account of the difference between political savvy and fixing our schools for kids, I suggest RiShawn Biddle's profile in the American Spectator.)

The anti-reform movement has picked up some steam of late because it has successfully worked these false dichotomies ?? e.g. because unions control public schools, our school children need them ? into a rallying cry.? As a political slogan, it may work.*? Unfortunately, as a governance model, it still leaves a great deal to be desired. And we do have plenty of ?proof of concept? on that one.

As to the question of scale, that too is a trick of rhetoric in this particular debate, relying on the age-old cum hoc ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this) fallacy to win rhetorical points: because we haven't scaled up, we can't scale up. So we shouldn't even try to scale up?? Sure, we can't fire all the teachers who are members of unions and sure we can't run a school system that burns people out.? But just because we can't turn the Titanic around on a dime, doesn't mean we should embrace icebergs.? It surely doesn't mean that union power which hobbles a school's ability to educate children ? with regressive tenure and seniority rules, for example ? doesn't need to be checked. And it surely doesn't mean that teachers can't be held accountable for student performance.

To paraphrase E.D. Hirsch, the problem with our education system is not bad people but bad ideas. ?I probably wouldn't go that far (regarding the bad people!), but as a general proposition it should remind us that ?car[ing] about this stuff? is a necessary but not sufficient qualification for New York City schools chancellor.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

*Please see Mike's just posted post on "disingenuous teachers unions."

**In her resolutely change-of-heart book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Ravitch writes, ?I have a right to change my mind.?? But her explanation of the change presages Brill's,that ?my views changed as I saw how these ideas [she lists ?testing, accountability, choice, and markets?] were working out in reality.?? And she quotes John Maynard Keynes: ?When the facts change, I change my mind.?

***Can we stop with the ?demonizing??? Some very smart and dedicated reformers have taken a great deal of unearned demonization from the warm-and-fuzzy teacher union folks ? and columnists who love the precision of the word.

It's too early to know whether Tisch's visit to Automotive High School in Brooklyn, where, says the News report, ?just 1 % of students graduated ready for college last year,? will lead to anything.

But the Times gave the story a slightly different twist: ?Regents Chief Says No to a Run for Mayor.?? Interesting.

Times reporter Fernanda Santos says that ?the buzz? about the outspoken (and rich) chancellor running for NYC mayor had been around for weeks.? The last time Tisch was asked about rumors of? an education shakeup in the Empire State, last summer, on an Albany radio show, she dropped the bomb that David Steiner was resigning as commissioner of education. (See my Ed Next story from this summer.) ?Not this time.? Tisch ?categorically denied? the rumors, says the Times.

More interesting, perhaps, is the story of Tisch's visit to Automotive High, during which she was accompanied by the state's new commissioner of education, John King. The visit actually took place a couple of weeks ago. ?And Tisch remarked:

Where do you think these kids are going? They have no education and they aren't getting one?? I'm not saying they're going to be college- and career-ready; I'm not a fool. So put a G.E.D. program in there; teach them skills.

The new ? and diplomatic -- commissioner, Mr. King, added, ?We're on the same page about the urgent need for change but we're always going to try to offer constructive feedback when we have concerns.?

Though Bloomberg shot back that Tisch was ?totally wrong on the facts,? the billionaire mayor, once discussed as a potential ?education President? ?(me among those talkers, in my 2008 story in Ed Next)? has not been having an easy time of it since his partner in reform, Joel Klein turned in his NYC chancellor hat last fall.? I'm sure that Regent chief Tisch has not heard the last of the questions about the mayoralty.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

According to last February's Bloomberg news report on List's idea, it's ?one of the largest field experiments ever conducted in economics.?? List ?? with the help of fellow economists Roland Fryer of Harvard and Steven Levitt, also of the UC -- is following more than 600 students in several Chicago schools to ?find out whether investing in teachers or, alternatively, in parents, leads to more gains in kids' educational performance.? (See also here.) The experiment includes a ?parenting academy? and scholarships worth up to $7,000 a year.? (A control group of 300 kids receive nothing.) ?Local families with kids 3 to 5 years old were encouraged to enter a lottery and were randomly sorted into three groups.

Whether the List research will help in Newark, I'm not sure, but according to the Bloomberg report, ?List says that his experiments will give policy makers, executives and investors much greater certainty about why students, donors and shoppers make the decisions they do? and ?may show that the U.S. doesn't spend enough on helping parents.?

?We have too many eggs in the kid basket,? List, himself a father of five, tells Bloomberg. ?We need to spend much more time and many more resources on helping parents.?

There is, of course, a lot of running room in the ?helping parents? field ? a field littered with yellow flag penalty markers stretching back to the Great Society and the War on Poverty. (See just about anything Rick Hess has written or read his guest bloggers Melissa Junge and Sheara Krvaric last week: ?Implementation matters.? Or see Chris Tessone's post on a Fryer study of merit pay. Or Fryer's study on Geoffrey Canada's Harlem experiment: schools matter more than social services.)

As an education governance question, most of the debate has centered around ?parent involvement,? a tired phrase that has been all too frequently abused by schools not wanting to shoulder responsibility for educating children: if we just had better parents. ?In fact, as David Matthews of the Kettering Foundation has chronicled (Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming our Demcracy), educators don't much like parents (or are afraid of them) and there has been little real effort to engage them in the educational improvement effort. ?Journalist Katherine Boo (in a 1992 Washington Monthly piece) described the education reform movement of the 70s and 80s as something that ?didn't normally involve parents, let alone community members.? She said it was made up of people ?paying lip service to the notion of citizen participation? while working ?doggedly to keep the masses from messing with their plans.? (See Checker's National Affairs essay "Beyond the School District" for a broader perspective on the dangers of professionalization.)

We are seeing hopeful signs from the new parent empowerment efforts of people like Ben Austin of ?parent trigger? fame. And the List study should go a long way toward adding some research data to the parent question within a new and more hopeful system of choice. ?In fact, educators, including their policymaking second-cousins, are living in quite ?interesting times in large part because the walls of the school house doors are coming down. ?And this is one reason Fordham is sponsoring a day-long event on School Governance in the 21^st Century on December 1.? Sign up today.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

---------------------------------

***Believe it or not, I wrote this post, including the headline, before I saw Mike's We have a parenting problem, not a poverty problem.

I can't recall all the suggestions for our 20k Parent University grant money, but I do remember raising my own Milton Friedman hand and suggesting that we give the bucks to parents, in $100 and $500 scholarship grants.? They could use the money, I suggested, to buy books or computers or even hiring tutors and babysitters.? I did some quick math and figured that the $20,000, handed out this way, could help dozens of parents.

?Can't do that,? said the super.? ?The grant won't allow us to just hand out money.?

What the grant did allow ? and this is where the money finally went ? was to pay for a community ?play day? on the football field. Games, brochures, games, and brochures ? and hot dogs. A couple hundred people came, played, ate hot dogs, and ? Well, I have no idea what happened after that.? But I know that local tent-installers, food vendors, clowns, and the folks who do those blow-up bounce-around gyms were all happy.? ?And the money was gone.? Yes! Parent University!

Ah, philanthropy!

I recall another time, when a friend from the nearby community college called to say he had a million dollar ?mentoring grant? and wanted me to help gather up parent mentors for the program.? ?Neat,? I said, ?Finally, the poor parents can get paid for their work.?

?No, no,? he countered.? ?The parents have to be volunteers.?

I didn't have to ask where the million bucks was going.

So, Mr. Gregory Taylor, with your $382,000 salary, what will you do with $200 million?? (The city of Newark is supposed to match Zuckerberg's $100 million dollar for dollar and so far has gathered $48 million, according to the Times.) Pay a few people lots of money?? We know that the foundation has already given out $7 million (what could I do with that money!) ?to 20 grantees to help start some schools, expand Teach for America, and establish a parent call center. And we know that you are going to present to your board suggestions for spending more money on, according to the Times, five ?broad priorities: early childhood education, teaching quality/principal leadership, school options, community engagement and out-of-school youth.?

Okay. But my hand is still raised: Why can't we just give it to the parents?? Pass it out, Robin Hood-style.? The district has 40,000 students ? even if we give $100 million to the smart administrators, the other $100 million can be given to 40,000 students and is?.. well, $2,500 per student.? Can you imagine what a parent could do with that money to help his or her child get better educated?? Buy a complete set of The History of US. Or What Every First- (Second, Third, etc.) Grader Should Know? The Illiad? The Odyssey? A math tutor ? two math tutors!? A new computer!? Two new computers! And if only the poor kids ? about 25,000 in Newark are free and reduced lunch ? got these Zuckerberg scholarships, that would be almost $5,000 per student.? That's a year in a good Catholic school. Not bad.

I like Mr. Taylor's motto: ?the urgency we have matches the urgency people have for their kids.?? But if that's the case, get the parents the money. Pronto.? If we respect the urgency of their educational aspirations, let's respect the wisdom of their educational choices. Let's give them choices ? the kinds of choices that their well-heeled suburban brethren have: the choices that money will buy. ?(There are twelve charter schools in Newark, and the Archdiocese of Newark has 84 elementary schools and 32 high schools. A school voucher law for New Jersey is still in the works; it would provide even more choice.)

As I suggested in my Follow the Money post in August, ?our philanthropist reformers? may just be ?responding to what has been the outsized influence over the system exercised by private teacher unions, textbook and testing companies, and a web of high-powered lobbyists representing all manner of industry associations.? But the real reformers will do everything they can to effect a paradigm shift: from the oligopoly of top-down decision-making to the boot-strap choices made by thousands of concerned individual parents.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The previously undisclosed database containing the allegations, a 62-page printout of which was obtained by The New York Times in October, provides a window onto the ways that high-stakes testing is roiling school communities, with principals accusing teachers, teachers accusing principals, and teachers accusing other teachers.

The story has been simmering since last summer (see here), when it was reported that cheating allegations in New York City had increased dramatically since Michael Bloomberg had taken over the schools in 2002: ?there had been 1250 test-tampering and grade-changing accusations, with the numbers rising as test scores took on more meaning.

The new statewide cache, reports Otterman, includes 670 tampering allegations, half of them ?verified.? ?Twenty-four of the 146 allegations against Gotham schools were verified. Also this morning Yoav Gonen of the New York Post reported that, ?The investigative arm of the city's Department of Education has confirmed 106 cases of cheating since high-stakes testing expanded to nearly all public- school grades in 2006?. That's in response to 909 allegations of cheating that were reported to city officials in the past six years -- a confirmation rate of about 11 percent.?

Do we have a cheating scandal here or not?

We may never know.? While State education Commissioner John King took quick action, convening a task force last summer that would go on to make some long-overdue recommendations, such as not allowing teachers to grade their own students' state-administered high-stakes tests and renewing erasure analysis to detect cheating, the state and City still seem reluctant to actually investigate for the purposes of prosecuting wrong-doing, as Georgia's governor did in Atlanta.? In fact, as Otterman reports, New York's ?independent investigator? is ?charged with overhauling some of the state's anti-cheating policies? ? a far cry from the full-fledged forensic investigation that the cheating numbers would seem to warrant.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In this morning's report, on a New Hampshire school, tellingly headlined ?In a Standardized Era, a Creative School Is Forced to Be More So,? Winerip is at his reportorial worst as he strains to make the point that No Child Left Behind is forcing another great (?creative?) school to ?teach to the test.?? Given that NCLB has become everyone's favorite punching bag of late, Winerip's whines have become something of a yawn.? However, it is instructive to read this piece because it perfectly illustrates the reasons the public is so misinformed about the best education reform efforts: bad reporting.

To start, we need to be aware of what Winerip leaves out, beginning with the facts. How many students go to Oyster River Middle School, the subject of his story? How many are minority, Free and Reduced lunch?? We don't know. Has the school's proficiency rate ? which Winerip says is ?about 85 percent? ? gone up or down?? Which grades does it apply to? Which subjects? We also need to pay attention to all the people Winerip doesn't interview for the story; in fact, he only quotes two people.? The star of the show is a 67-year-old English teacher, awarded a teacher of the year title by the National Council of Teachers of English in 2000, who Winerip says was ?just about killed? by all the test prep forced on her by NCLB. The only other person from Oyster River that Winerip quotes is the principal of the school, who says, ?I believe we can do better.?? No other teachers or administrators are interviewed; no parents, no community members. And yet, Winerip is able to conclude that NCLB ?has taken over everything.? This is the kind of hyperbole that makes so many Winerip stories so laughable.

We are told that Durham, NH, is a ?prosperous? town, home of the University of New Hampshire and that the kids in Oyster River Middle School are plenty smart because the kids in the high school score 111 points above the state average and 170 above the national average on their SATs.? How dare the feds tell these bright kids and their bright teachers what to do?

In fact, they really don't.? The offense which got Oyster Middle school its failing NCLB grade is that ?about a dozen of its 110 special education children did not score high enough.?? High enough? On what? Winerip doesn't say -- another example of lousy reporting; in fact, it's worse than that since we know that Winerip is capable of bringing home the factual bacon when he wants to.

The point which seems to elude Winerip here? is that this is exactly what NCLB is supposed to do: highlight districts that hide their subgroups behind a curtain of well-tailored middle-class gauze.

Remember Princeton, NJ?? Great SAT scores. Among the the best performing school districts in the country, right?? Right, unless you were poor and black. (If someone could point me toward the report on Princeton schools, published before NCLB, I would appreciate it.)? In fact, the state of New Jersey has the same problem today ? it ranks in the top ten in the country on NAEP scores, but has the 47^th and 48^th worst achievement gap.? (See here.)

Aside from the problem that Winerip trots out standardized test scores (SATs) to prove that kids don't need standardized tests, the stranger oddity here is the failure to explain why the entire Oyster River middle school was focused on ?test prep? when, in fact, as Winerip himself reports, only a few special ed kids caused the problem?

He paints a pained picture of a school that had ?little need for test prep? before NCLB ? just look at the SAT scores! ? but was now all but killing its teachers with ?the new focus on test prep.?

Again, Winerip is long on rhetoric and short on reporting. And all of it is rather thin gruel with which to nurture an NCLB condemnation. In fact, if anything, the story proves the value of the law: some special ed kids are now getting the attention they deserve and a principal is seeing that there can be improvement.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

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*Eduwonk and I did not consult in advance on our Winerip posts; it's just another example of great minds not conspiring.

Advises the Times:? ?go? back to the drawing board.?

The editorial does the requisite bowing and scraping before the flaws in No Child Left Behind, but it does not forget the law's remarkably radical attempt to fix a ?broken American education system: ?forcing schools to be accountable for educating all children.? Yes, folks, teeth can be discomfiting.

The Times supports the Obama Administration waiver plan because it ?would allow states to be rated on student growth? and rightly also requires that waiver applicants ?set goals for all schools and plan for closing achievement gaps.?

The Harkin-Enzi bill ?lowers the bar,? says the Times, and ?backs away from requiring states to have clear student achievement targets for all schools.?

It is past time to fix NCLB; but it is not the time for retreat on the need to raise standards and hold educators accountable for student performance.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In the meantime, catching up on my reading, I call your attention to a few recent stories worth pondering.

Rupert gets it right, sorta.? In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, called ?The Steve Jobs Model for Education Reform,?** Rupert Murdoch leaps into the deep end of the argument over schools by proposing ?that we're not making adequate use of technology. ?This is sensible. But one wishes that the media-mogul-turned-educator would dive a little deeper (or call Joel). ?Murdoch says,

Just as the iPod compelled the music industry to accommodate its customers, we can use technology to force the education system to meet the needs of the individual student.

What exactly are ?the needs? of a student? And who determines them?? Those questions should be answered before assuming that the ?[t]he top-down, one-size-fits-all approach? is bad, as Murdoch suggests.? What exactly do we mean by ?one-size-fits-all??

Shouldn't adults decide what kids should know? ?Shouldn't all our children know how to read and write, know how to find France on a map, know the difference between the Pythagorean theorem and the Periodic table? ?Who decides?

We can agree that there has been a ?colossal failure? to educate our children and that ?the education industry bears a good part of the blame.?? But is it because we have already succumbed to the anarchy of the "child-centered" classroom?? We need to do a lot more reflecting about what exactly the ?tired wares? of the status quo really are.? Is a textbook really ?outdated the moment it is printed??

As Ed Kaitz, Ph.D., of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, wrote in his letter to the editor about Mr. Murdoch's comment:

It might be news to Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, Adam Smith and others on my syllabus that their writings have been outdated the moment they were printed.

***

Occupy the Classroom That was the headline above Nick Kristof's brilliant column about the importance of early childhood education.? Indeed, while expressing sympathy for the wishes of the Occupy Whatever movement, Kristof says that ?the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It's an expansion of early childhood education.?

I like Kristof, and not just because he grew up on an Oregon sheep and cherry farm not far from where I was growing up on a sheep and filbert farm.? He has reported extensively from depressed corners of the globe and has good truth-seeking antenna (farmers have to be astute readers of reality).? When he says that there is a ?bigger source of structural inequity? in our economic system than billionaire tax breaks, we need to listen. And the bigger problem, Kristof says, is that ?many young people never get the skills to compete. They're just left behind.?

For this essay Kristof touches bases with Kathleen McCarney, dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education; David Deming, also at Harvard; and James Heckman at the University of Chicago.? ?One common thread,? says Kristof, ?whether I'm reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty.? Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don't get a chance to board that escalator.?

I continue to believe, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, that poverty, though a real challenge, has been used as a convenient excuse by too many educators; an excuse not to improve, not to seek changes in school organization and instructional techniques, not to raise expectations.? I have spent a lot of time in schools with poor kids ? schools that are succeeding ? and know that success is not some miracle, nor is it something derived from a Herculean effort. Hard work, yes. Commitment, yes. Focus, yes and yes.

Gap closers, unite: Occupy the classroom.

***

Equal opportunity in choosing a school A recent Wall Street Journal editorial had it right in criticizing civil rights groups like the NAACP for not jumping on the educational choice bandwagon since, as the Journal says, ?reform's main beneficiaries are poor and minority students in places like Harlem and New Orleans.?

The editorial cites a new study by the California Charter Schools Association which studied the state's Academic Performance Index (API), which runs on a scale from 200 to 1000, and found that, according to the Journal,

[T]he average black charter student outscored the average black traditional school student by an average of 18 points over the last four years of publicly available data. In reform hubs like Los Angeles, the charter advantage was 22 points, in Sacramento 48 points, in Oakland 51 and in San Francisco 150. In San Diego, the other major urban center, traditional schools outscored charters by an average of eight points.

The irony here is that the education status quo that some of these civil rights groups support has not been good to African American adults either.? According to Arne Duncan, more than 35 percent of our public school students are black or Hispanic, less than 15 percent of teachers are black or Hispanic. ?It is not good for any of our country's children that only one in 50 teachers is a black man.? (See here.)

Concludes the Journal:

The education achievement gap remains enormous?even in charter schools, black kids in California are almost 150 API points behind their white peers. But the gap won't get any narrower as long as civil-rights leaders oppose the reforms that are doing the most to bridge it.

***

A Tocquevillian education.? Finally, it was a happy moment to see Bill Evers recall the insights of that famous 19^th century French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville in warning of federal intrusion in educational affairs.? Writes Evers:

One of Tocqueville's major insights was that Americans have benefited from popular participation in the large number of churches, charities, clubs, and voluntary associations in our country, as well as in state and local governments, which stand between the individual and the national government in Washington, D.C.

It is important to remember that the power of Tocqueville comes from the acuity of his observations.? He was first and foremost a reporter ? and a good one. ?And the genius of that reporting is proved by the accuracy of the conclusions he forms ? one reason that his Democracy in America has withstood the test of time: not as historical artifact but as a valuable roadmap for today's governance travelers. He got to the heart of the thing.

Evers has written a fine essay.? And its most important insight is in suggesting how far we have strayed from the days of the ?school committee? which built and ran local schools to today's Titanic bureaucracies.

Some people still have a romantic, out-dated image of school districts and local boards. Today, they are not the school committees that Tocqueville saw, but rather, to a large degree, creatures of the Progressive Era. If we want to change that and re-invigorate school boards, we will have to restore avenues for popular participation of the sort Tocqueville sought. For example, Indiana recently put school elections in November, when more people vote. Another new promising avenue for popular participation is Parent Trigger, whereby parents can petition to turn a regular public school into a charter school.?

It really is worth considering a trip back to the future.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

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**The Jobs model, according to Murdoch, is derived from the famous 1984 Super Bowl ad for the Mac in which a woman throws a hammer through the television screen shouting, ?We shall prevail.? ?If you ask me,? says Murdoch, that's ?what we need to do in education.?

Central Park East?? The school started by Deborah Meier, current scourge of standardized tests, charters, accountability, and just about everything associated with Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein, who initiatiated the school report cards program? ?(See the Bridging Differences blog Meier shares with Diane Ravitch and this wonderful 1994 profile of Meier and her hugely successful Central Park East experiment written by veteran NYC educator Sy Fliegal.)? Children's Workshop offers ballet and yoga, for heaven's sake!

Instead of a progressive principal complaining about Gotham's new accountability system squishing her student's creative impulses, however, we hear an 18-year veteran school leader who was shocked by the C grade the school received in 2010 and determined to do something about it:

I shared it with absolutely no one because it was so devastating to me. I took it home. I sat with my husband and I said, ?My God, do you know what this is going to do to morale?? And he looked at me and he said, ?O.K., you have the weekend: have a pity party and then move on.?

Velez-Clark actually went to the Transit Museum and bought ?C? buttons (for the C train), brought them to school, sat down with her staff and said, ?O.K., now what do we have to do here in order to get off the C train and get on the B train??

She then took her staff on a weekend retreat, where they reviewed every child's test scores.? And what is most interesting about the school's response is that Velez-Clark seems unafraid to admit that she has learned something that may be good for her students.

When she and her teachers began to dig into the test scores, for instance, they discovered

....a correlation between attendance and a child's score. So we worked on attendance. I didn't always send a note home before, but now sometimes if a child is absent too much, I have to send a letter home saying ?this could lead to A.C.S. [Administration for Children's Services] coming to visit your house? or ?your child is at risk of being held over because of attendance.?

The school didn't stop being progressive, it simply integrated cultural history into its ballet lessons and nutrition and science into its yoga classes.

This is how it's supposed to work. ?Congratulations to the staff and children of Children's Workshop for their B grade this year ? and showing that it's okay to do well in tests.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Today we are treated to a long, front-page story in the New York Times featuring cracks in another idol of modern education: technology; in this case, the ?software? that hides in said magic box.

What the Times says is already a $2.2 billion industry may just be producing more educational snake oil. The paper cites the federal Education Department's What Works Clearinghouse, which conducts rigorous studies of the research that many of the software developers allude to in their promotional materials, and concludes,

Some firms misrepresent research by cherry-picking results and promote surveys or limited case studies that lack the scientific rigor required by the clearnhouse and other authorities.

An interesting irony here is that the Times has a story in the same edition of the paper about a growing chorus of Republicans calling for the abolition of the federal Education Department. ?It would seem that some members of the GOP have gone back to a rather narrow states-rights parochialism, forgetting their party's individual rights roots and the core values that its most famous president (hint: author of the Emancipation Proclamation) espoused in defying those states when they asserted the authority to subvert individual rights. As Checker told the Times:

People want government money, they want greater accountability?. None of those things in most places comes from local control.

There are plenty of things that the federal education department should probably not be doing.? But I suspect that helping ensure equal access to educational opportunities is not one of them.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Tomlinson herself says that DI is just ?a tool for planning instruction? and ?like all tools, it can be applied elegantly or poorly.?? But it is her admission that content counts that stands out:

The critical variable in this debate? ?is not really differentiation vs. special classrooms for advanced learners. It's the quality of content a nation is willing to support for all its students.

Exactly.? The problem, however, is that as a nation we remain fearful of curriculum ? the Common Core movement is a step forward, but it is just a first step ? and thus tools like DI, because so few schools have rigorous and content-rich curricula, will be misused far more often than they will be appropriately, much less elegantly, applied. In fact, just as we make people take a test before issuing them a driver's license, we might consider a law forbidding a school from putting any teacher behind the DI wheel unless the school has a certificate of coherent and comprehensive curriculum.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The author of the report, Daniel Losen of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, is more diplomatic than that, but he does suggest that many current discipline policies may be ?unlawful? because of their ?disparate impact? on African Americans and the disabled.? And I would have to agree.

In our post-Columbine, zero-tolerance, character-first education world, Losen proposes a radical thesis (that the race of the student counts more than his or her behavior) and mounts a remarkably persuasive argument for doubting that current mainstream beliefs ? and the policy and practices that they have spawned ? about disciplining our students are sustainable. ?In fact, Losen bluntly states, student suspensions ?are significantly influenced by factors other than student misbehavior.?

If that sounds radical, even counterintuitive, read the study.? Among the findings reported here are these:

• ?School suspensions nationwide have risen steadily since the early 1970s, and racial disparities have grown considerably as well.?
• ?In 2006, at least one district in each of 46 states imposed long-term suspensions or expulsions on students with disabilities significantly more often than on nondisabled students." [pullquote]Children who are suspended are often from a population that is the least likely to have supervision at home.[/pullquote]

Racial and physical biases aside, the suspension crackdown (my word), according to Losen, doesn't seem to have improved our educational outcomes:

• [I]f suspending large numbers of disruptive students helped improve instruction and the learning environment, better academic results should be expected. But this does not seem to happen."
• ?There is little reason to believe that removing a child from a school to spend more time in?a dysfunctional [home] setting will improve behavior.?
• Quoting from a study by the Academy of American Pediatrics' Committee on School Health, ?Children who are suspended are often from a population that is the least likely to have supervision at home?. Children with single parents are between 2 and 4 times as likely to be suspended or expelled from school?.?
• Quoting from one of his earlier reports, for the Poverty Law Center (see my report last September), ?Longitudinal studies have shown that students suspended in sixth grade are more likely to receive office referrals or suspensions by eighth grade, prompting some researchers to conclude that suspension may act more as a reinforcer than a punisher for inappropriate behavior?.?
• [R]esearch on the frequent use of school suspension has indicated that, after race and poverty are controlled for, higher rates of out-of-school suspension correlate with lower achievement scores.[pullquote]Often, student misbehavior is attributed exclusively to students themselves, but researchers know the same student can behave very differently in different classrooms. Disruptions tend to increase or decrease with the skill of the teacher in providing engaging instruction and in managing the classroom[/pullquote]

While many of these findings may seem obvious, the key insight here is this:

?Often, student misbehavior is attributed exclusively to students themselves, but researchers know the same student can behave very differently in different classrooms. Disruptions tend to increase or decrease with the skill of the teacher in providing engaging instruction and in managing the classroom?areas many teachers say they would like help improving.?

Teachers matter, not just in academic outcomes but in disciplinary ones as well (and Losen offers alternatives to the current ?exclusion? practices, which kick kids out of school).? But the question that I have always asked about a ?bad? student is the one that Losen suggests ? is he or she bad in every class? More often than not, the answer is No -- which suggests, as the question is meant to, that the problem is not the kid but the teacher. Indeed, teachers make a difference. And they make a terrible difference when the rules ? Codes of Conduct that are dozens of pages long and prohibit every conceivable indiscretion, from wearing flip-flops to talking back to an adult ? are both intensely specific and airily vague. You can drive a hundred expulsion trucks through these discipline tunnels ? or none at all, depending on?. What?? The color of your skin?

I have seen the terrible consequences of overt, covert, and implicit racism in my small district over many years.? It is not simply the numbers, though they certainly represent something of a signal of trouble: ?30% of the kids are African American and 99% of the teachers and administrators are white. ?And it has never seemed coincidental ? as Losen's report points out ? that the academic performance numbers correspond so well with the suspension numbers: blacks were about twice as likely as whites to fail as they were to get kicked out of school. As the American Pediatrics' report quoted by Losen said,

[C]hildren most likely to be suspended or expelled are those most in need of adult supervision and professional help.

We kick out the kids least likely to benefit from the punishment. (I once proposed to our school board that we make bad kids stay in school longer (and do some blackboard writing!) and was laughed at.)

A number of us did form a group, called Parents in Partnership, to represent students when they were suspended, and it was remarkable how often we were defending kids whose main infraction was haplessness rather than badness.? And when pressed to produce the necessary paperwork ?(per the Code of Conduct) to justify the punishment meted out, more often than not the case presented by administrators against the poor kid ? mostly poor and mostly black ? fell apart.? (They followed few of the procedures called for by the Code of Conduct.) I recall one particularly egregious example of the problem, when the school principal intervened in a cafeteria food fight and, on his way out, spotted a young black boy, a known troublemaker,? standing by the exit, his hands raised in innocence. ??See, Mr. G., I didn't do anything,? he said proudly.? ?Come with me,? said Mr. G. (this, by Mr. G's own account).? ?But I didn't do anything,? the boy protested.? Long story short, the kid was suspended for insubordination.

If I hadn't seen such racist behavior on the part of adults ? and there is no other explanation for it ? I would not have believed it.? And I would not have believed that the disproportionate number of disciplinary actions ? from ?referrals? to suspensions ? against blacks was caused by the kids' color.? But it was.? Of course, it is more complicated than that, but that is what makes the problem so insidious and why the ?disparate impact? standard explained by Losen is appropriate in weighing a school's culpability for inequitable enforcement of discipline standards.? Writes Losen, quoting from a 2010 book he co-authored,

Under the `disparate impact' theory, a method of discipline that is racially neutral on its face but has a discriminatory effect may be found unlawful absent sufficient justification such as educational necessity. Even if a school's action is found to be justified, it still may be unlawful if equally effective, less discriminatory alternatives are available.

There may be some justifiable controversy here about the significance of ?uneven educational outcomes? as a perfect measure of unfair disciplinary practices, but there should be no doubt that adults have to take charge of their schools ? which means taking responsibility for the behavioral atmosphere within them.? The best evidence here, supporting Losen and his findings, comes from Martin Luther King himself, who was asked in 1959 what he thought of the historic 1954 Brown versus Board of Education ruling that integrated schools:

I favor integration on buses and in all areas of public accommodation and travel. I am for equality. However, I think integration in our public schools is different. In that setting, you are dealing with one of the most important assets of an individual -- the mind. White people view black people as inferior. A large percentage of them have a very low opinion of our race. People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls.

As long as white people are writing the rules, interpreting them, and enforcing them, African Americans have something to worry about ? and it's not segregation.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In fact, the headline over the online version of this story is, appropriately, ?Making Change Happen, on a Deadline.? It is not some kind of generic affection for the status quo that causes entropy.? Not getting things done seems to be an affliction in the very bones of the thing. The drinking fountain that has been broken for two years.? The doors that stay locked despite pleas to open them.? The pothole at the school driveway entry that has been unfilled for more than a year?. The curriculum that remains unwritten?. The test scores that defy change?.? It is true: if you can't fix the little things, your chances of resolving the big problems are slim.

This is not a new subject in education.? See Charles Payne's So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools or Rick Hess's The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas.

But Tina Rosenberg's Times story is instructive because it is not about schools or education; it is about construction projects in underdeveloped Africa.? Could have fooled me. This line from the story sure sounded like American education:

People drag their feet. Budget approval takes forever. The bricks are stolen. The project is abandoned by new leadership. Every villager fumes: nothing gets done around here.

Rosenberg calls attention to one Nadim Matta, a management consultant and president of the Rapid Results Institute in Stamford, CT, who she says,

...likes to say that what's missing to turn poor places into rich places isn't more information, money or technology; it's motivation and confidence.

By coincidence, two days before reading this I was sitting with New Jersey's Commissioner of Education, Chris Cerf, who was discussing his plans for transforming Garden State education.? ?Exhortation is not enough,? said Cerf.? ?You have to make demands.?

And demands come with deadlines.? In the case of Rapid Results, according to Rosenberg,

A trained facilitator sits down with people in a business, organization or village to decide on what to do.? They vote.? Now, if we had some money from the government or the World Bank ? say, $5,000 or perhaps $30,000 ? how could we spend it to accomplish that goal in just 100 days?? The village chooses its goal and how to get it done. The facilitator only talks about what other villages have accomplished in 100 days.

By further coincidence, I had dropped a minor bomb on our curriculum director's desk a couple of weeks ago by suggesting that we get a K-6 curriculum done for the four core subjects by the end of the year. ?I might as well have said 100 days.

?The 100 days may seem ridiculous at first,? writes Rosenberg.? ?Groups that turn to Rapid Results have usually had the repeated experience of nothing happening in three years.? ?(In my case, I had been pushing for a curriculum in the core subjects for ten years!)? The secret here is moving the project out of the realm of ?business as usual.?? In Chris Cerf's terms (watch for my Interview with Cerf in Education Next), it is about ?dismantling? the old system and creating a new one.

?The deadline,? writes Rosenberg, ?makes people do whatever it takes to meet it.?

Which reminds me of another tale from the trenches of education reform.? Several years ago, I noticed children playing on a wood pile behind one of our schools. It was construction debris and, of course, was sprinkled with rusty nails.? I marched into the principal's office ? I was on the school board! ? and told him the pile had to go.? The principal, on his way to retirement, was then feuding with the superintendent and so said, ?It's not my problem. Talk to the Super.?? My email to said super went something like this?. ?If the pile isn't gone tomorrow, it will be in your driveway the day after tomorrow.?

Presto! The pile disappeared.? I doubt that method is in the Rapid Results playbook, but the moral is the same.? Exhortation is not always enough; deadlines help.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Mike wonders whether we're doing the wrong thing expecting that kids should go to college.? I would suggest that it depends on what you mean by college.

I would further suggest that we seem to be awash in existential educational questions like those, brought on by such new controversies (at least, newly packaged) as whether it's good to try to close the achievement gap, whether it's counterproductive to demand ?proficiency? as opposed to ?improvement,? whether ?differentiated instruction? is another form of tracking, whether common standards are anti-American, etc. All these tough issues seem to point, roughly, to the Big One: ?What's the point of an education? What exactly does ?college ready? mean?? What's the difference between that and being ?career ready??

Mike asks these questions:

?with so many kids dropping out of college?and especially so many poor kids?should we reconsider our assumption that higher education is the ticket to the middle class? Isn't it possible that lots of these kids would be better off pursuing the trades or (dare I say) the military?

In a sense, Dillon's story this morning helps answer those questions by subverting the premise:? that we can or should decipher a difference between higher education preparation and a pursuit of ?the trades? or ?the military? before we decide what a K--12 education should -- or can -- do. Yes, Dillon's report is superficially about paying kids and teachers to succeed -- and I'm sure it will invite another round of debate about the merits of merit pay ? but it is really about shattering the myth (again) that poor kids can't learn -- or can't be taught ? the stuff of higher education.? (Here, I recommend the new book by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.) The amazing turnaround in the lives of the children participating in the National Math and Science Initiative, as described by Dillon, stands as yet more evidence that schools and teachers can indeed make a difference in poor kids' educational lives.

I would like at least to think we are finally approaching a tipping point in terms of educating ?the poor? ? rather, a tipping point in educating our educators: ?the success stories are now more than exceptions that prove the rule. ?In fact, at least in my view of things, we are simply reclaiming the optimistic? belief that schools are a ticket out of poverty. ?Now, all we have to do is convince our educators that whether a kid wants to be a plumber or a lawyer, a soldier or a physicist, he or she should finish high school armed with enough knowledge to pursue any of those careers.

Pipe dream?? Only if you've given up on the American dream.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Does this mean I believe in an unfettered web in our schools, the subject of an interesting report by Winnie Hu in today's New York Times?

Well, I think I would agree with William Fitzhugh, the respected editor of The Concord Review, who told Hu,? ?I think students should have unfettered access to the library."

In other words, we have a much huger problem than the kind of Internet censorship that Banned Websites Awareness Day seems to be worried about.? A glance at school curricula, summer reading lists, or what pass as textbooks these days, indicate that our educators are already doing a pretty good job of censorship, keeping children from THE BEST of what our civilization has produced over the last couple thousand years.? I often quote from Pat Conroy's My Losing Season, wherein an English teacher answered the budding writer's question about what he should read: ?The great books, Mr. Conroy, and nothing but the great books. There isn't time for anything else.?

What's a great book? you ask?? Well, like the pornography that proliferates on our unfettered Worldwide Web, you know it when you see it. ? And as much as the computer has put information -- including great books -- at our fingertips, it has yet to give us a longer day.? There still isn't time for anything else.

So, not only would I keep a tight lid on the Web in our schools, I would consider supporting a Ban Bad Books Day.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In short, the new essay, ?Beyond the School District,? is an ambitious rethinking of school governance, top to bottom, that weds the best of our past (true local control) with the best of our present (charters, vouchers, mayoral control, technology) to create a workable school system for the 21^st century.

And I hate say it, but from where I sit, on a local school board, it makes sense.

As Checker says, with an understatement that should require no argument, our current system isn't working. ?And his attribution of cause surely matches my experience: we have a ?confused and tangled web? of local, state, and federal rules and regulation, not to mention a web of ?adult interests? like teacher unions, textbook publishers, tutoring firms, bus companies, and the like, that has thwarted the best of reform intentions. Despite spending billions of dollars to fix things, the results continue to be lousy: ?millions of children still can not read satisfactorily, do math at an acceptable level, or perform the other skills need for jobs in the modern economy.?

I surely see this dysfunction at the local level, where I sit on a school board that seems to have as much influence over our schools as the deck chair manager had over the direction of the Titanic. (I would temper that statement with one that I make to my local parents and stakeholders all the time: there is no law that says we can't have a good school.? Unfortunately, the tangled web has a way of complicating that message.)? Checker helps explain the problem by taking us on a grand tour of American education governance history, from the hopeful sprouting of tens of thousands of locally-controlled (and funded) school districts through the ?professionalism? wave of the Progressive Era of the last century, and the ensuing consolidation craze, which reduced the number of schools districts from 130,000 in 1930 to fewer than 14,000 by 2008.

Checker skips most of the recent federalism era, which, in this account, might be redundant. But the federal role is surely an issue that will need to be addressed in Finn's future, since it has contributed mightily to the "tangled web."? By the same token, as someone who has experienced first-hand the wonder of NCLB, which shined a light in to the dark corners of our schools, where the poor, the ethnic minorities and the disabled had been hidden from view, we will need to make sure that such abuse is not the result of unfettered local autonomy (rather than too much outside influence) and identify a federal responsibility to protect the constitutional rights of our children to equal educational opportunities; indeed, despite some wonderful people in my community, and though I know that Checker's suggestions will go a long way to restoring ?the good? of local control,? not a day goes by that I don't thank God ? and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson ? for our federal Bill of Rights. ?We will also need to recognize the debilitating influence of federal micro-managing and decide what to do about it; indeed we are in need of a robust discussion about the good, the bad, and the ugly of federal intervention and in future posts I intend to argue, among other things, that keeping the feds out of the curriculum-writing business has only lured them into creating huge highways of waste and inefficiency in much less essential educational territory.

But there is certainly no disputing ? or should be no disputing -- the need to ?restore a true sense of local education,? as Checker argues, because ?families and communities?more knowledgeable about their own desires and their children's needs?[have to] make crucial decisions about how to educate children, rather than leaving those choices to distant, scattered, self-concerned bureaucrats and adult interest groups.?

And as I read Checker, the answer is to untether the promising reform strategies now bubbling up all over the country from the multi-layered governance system that thwarts them. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!? We have plenty of talented people working within the system, Checker says, but ?they seldom have the capacity to innovate, to make judgments about matters beyond their customary duties, or to stage successful interventions in failing districts and schools? (per the ?tangle? described above). ?Indeed, as Checker says, ?new forms of local control have started to take root.??? Mayoral control is one of those new governance structures -- and we need that direct connection not just in big cities.? My small school district, for instance is an amalgam of five local towns, none of whose mayors or legislative councils have anything to say about education. It is a disconnect between a huge part of their constituencies ? parents and children ? and a significant part of their economic health and well-being -- education -- which the local school district has little stake in.

Also, ?less visible, but far more widespread,? says Checker, are the many alternatives to the traditional Local Education Agency (LEA) model: choice and charter schools, vouchers, magnet schools, virtual schools, homeschools, etc. ?Says Finn: ?it can accurately be said that slightly more than half of all American students today attend schools that they or their parents selected.?? Finally, there is technology, the invention that allows ?local control?to be brought right into parents' homes.?? As a member of a dysfunctional LEA (for all the reasons Checker suggests), I would welcome the opportunity to return our schools to a system of true local control, including spinning individual schools off to their own governing bodies.

So, these many reform vehicles add up to the ?direction that the future of American education should point,? as Checker says. But how do you do it? What does it look like? ? Here's what he suggests:

• ?Self-governing, charter-style schools should become the norm, not the exception.?
• States (the governor and legislature not some ?independent? body) would ?both increase and shrink their roles.? They would ?authorize? every school and hold it accountable ?for academic results, for complying with essential rules, for properly handling public dollars, and so forth?.? ?They would also ensure that there are ?enough approved schools to accommodate all children.? But they would ?back off from their customary micromanagement and regulation of the K-12 space?.?
• Local funding of schools ?as we know it would vanish.?? States would pay for schools ? and this is one of Checker's key proposals -- through a ?weighted student funding? formula in which ?the amount of money devoted to a child's education varies with his needs and educational circumstances and accompanies that child to the school of his choice.?

Again, I do worry about placing undo faith in states, whose leaders and legislatures have shown themselves to be plenty receptive to special interests, and I encourage more discussion of the federal role in thwarting monopolies, whether of private or public making.

We won't find the answers to all our questions here, but ?Beyond the School District? is a much-needed start to remaking school governance for modern times. It imagines a refreshing Tocquevilian system of free associations that would, concludes Checker, ?endeavor to make education local again.?? And that, for America, is to make education whole again.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

There is plenty of good science here about the question at hand, but I was especially struck by this line:

?children benefit from being close to the limits of their ability.

Aside from what it says about sending your kids to school too late or too early, the statement opens up a Pandora's box of issues for educators and education policymakers. At least, it should cause them to ask some pretty existential questions, especially whenever they hear phrases such as ??child-centered classrooms,? ?customized learning,? and ?individual education plans.?? Exactly who determines an individual child's ability, let alone what ?the limits? of that ability are? And does determining a child's ability in fact predetermine it?? The authors do not even touch the question of the standard by which we measure ability -- can we customize and standardize at the same time?? And, perhaps most importantly, what does it mean, as the authors say about the little ones, that ?school makes children smarter??? What!?? Don't Wan and Aamodt know that school is supposed to make kids ?life-long learners,? not smart? And haven't they heard of poverty?

In fact, they have:

Disadvantaged children have the most to lose from delayed access to school.? For low-income children, every month of additional schooling closes one-tenth of the gap between them and more advantaged students.

Shall we say that somewhat differently?? As in, school counts. And if school counts when you are 4 or 5, doesn't it make sense that, as the brain is still developing (last time I checked with a neuro-scientist our wires are not completely hardened until the end of our teens), school might also count beyond kindergarten?

Yes, we delay high expectations for our students at their and our peril.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Sounds pretty drastic.? And, indeed, Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, head of the House Education and Workforce Committee, says it

sets a dangerous precedent. Make no mistake ? this is a political move that could have a damaging impact on Congressional efforts to enact lasting reforms to current elementary and secondary education law.

But before leaping for joy about the death of the wicked NCLB witch of the east (or west), or condemning the waiver option, we need remember who NCLB was meant to help; that is, kids.? Of course, the law's reach was farther than its grasp. Of course, its standards were onerous. Of course, teacher unions hated it.? Of? course, state and district education bureaucrats saw it as a nettlesome intrusion.? But there are today tens of thousands of students who have had an opportunity to get educated that they would not have had without NCLB; there are thousands of special ed kids who have been given the opportunity to learn what their more abled compatriots learn; and many more thousands of poor and minority children have been brought to the front of the bus of putative integrated schools thanks to NCLB.

No, those who believe that the rollback of NCLB is a victory for students are mistaken.

As Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education who shepherded NCLB to its hugely bipartisan passage? in 2001 and oversaw its rollout, told the Wall Street Journal,

If these waivers allow the state to promise the sun and the moon and then not follow through?which some of them are famous for doing?then we will see a retrenchment of accountability....

To their credit, Obama and Duncan, are promising a portfolio of quid pro quos that are supposed to ensure the continued focus on accountability.? The proof will be in that pudding; let's hope it's quickly served.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In the specific year when students move to a middle school (or to a junior high), their academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, falls substantially in both math and English relative to that of their counterparts who continue to attend a K?8 elementary school. What's more, their achievement continues to decline throughout middle school. This negative effect persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores.

I found other research that supports the Rockoff and Lockwood findings -- that grade configuration matters --? in my report for Education Next earlier this year.? I traced the history of the modern middle school movement, known as ?middle schoolism,? which was born with a Cornell University speech by educator William Alexander in 1963.? It is a movement that came of age in an era in which the psychological society teamed up with the sociological one and together marched into into our schools, making a beeline for what was considered the most troublesome though forgotten age group, 11 to 14. The best way of treating those children (instead of teaching them?), many educators of the time believed, was separating them into emotional and behavioral holding pens while their horomones adjusted to maturity. (It didn't help that academics was taking a nose-dive in all our schools.)

?I don't know if it was deliberate or not,? Trish Williams, executive director of EdSource, a California nonprofit, told me last winter, ?but I know that when my kids were in middle school, one of the best in California, one of the teachers told me that her job was to just hold them and keep them safe until they get through puberty. So there has been a philosophy in middle school which deemphasized academic outcomes?.?

As Cheri Pearson Yecke documented with her 2005 study for the Thomas Fordham Institute, Mayhem in the Middle, middle school was ?where academic achievement goes to die.?

While there is more emphasis on academics at all grade levels today and evidence that the middle school burden can be overcome (Williams and colleagues showed in a major 2010 study, called ?Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better,? that an intense focus on academics can work), it is odd that Walcott would favor reforming middle schools instead of doing what the research suggests is better and easier -- creating smaller, "elemiddle" (K--8) schools? ? and what the trends are showing is happening all over the country ?? as David Hough, managing editor of the Middle Grades Research Journal, ?told me, ?the trend is definitely away from stand-alone middle schools.?

Walcott promised to borrow instructional methods from successful middle school charters with this initiative, but even charter organizations like KIPP, which began by serving middle school kids, are having second thoughts about the challenges such isolation from other children create, and has been building ?clusters? of schools that include early grades and high schoolers.? Indeed, it is one thing for the new chancellor of the nation's largest school system to dial back the heated rhetoric that marked much of the Joel Klein reform era, but let's hope Walcott doesn't set the pedagogical time machine arrow to the 60s and 70s.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

It's a worthy subject,? but I was turned from the ?unrelenting criticism? hokum by an email from New York City teacher Mark Anderson, with his announcement that ?A new school year begins! Here is the third post in my series on curriculum, in which I advocate for a unified core curriculum.?? His post is here and I read it with great joy, but I will get to that in a moment.

[pullquote]

In times of great uncertainty for U.S. teachers, who speaks for them?

[/pullquote]

First, I must make mention of another welcome event; a trend, really, one reported on by Stephen Sawchuk in the current Education Week: ?New Groups Giving Teachers Alternative Voice.? Sawchuk leads with the obvious question, ?In times of great uncertainty for U.S. teachers, who speaks for them??? (The uncertainty is taking its toll:? according to a blog post by Sawchuck, as many as 10 percent of teachers are now ?quitting after just one year.)

The answer to the question of who's speaking for teachers is: they are.? At least, they are starting to speak. Sawchuk describes a number of new teacher groups that are stepping outside the unions' tight circle of money-and-work-rules agendas and working for better outcomes for students.? He names four such groups:? NewTLA (in Los Angeles), Teach Plus Policy Fellows (in Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, LA, and Memphis), Center for Teaching Quality (Denver, Hillsborough County, FL; Illinois; San Francisco Bay Area; Seattle), and Educators 4 Excellence (New York City).? The head of the Center for Teaching Quality, Barnett Berry, tells Sawchuk:

There are so many teachers out there who want change and have great ideas, but they've had so few venues and vehicles to be heard, understood, and embraced?. They're itching for the research knowledge to help them articulate the connections between policy and practice.

Mark Anderson is one of those teachers. And curriculum is one of his subjects. (Though a commenter pointed out, ?it's a lonely world.?)? I met Mark, a second-year Teaching Fellow working in a fifth-grade self-contained special education classroom in the Bronx, last winter at a conference on teacher quality sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Education Writers Association (see my The ?Great Teacher? Trap). ?He was one of the few teachers or journalists there who seemed interested in curriculum as something more than a teacher autonomy or political ideology (a la Pedagogy of the Oppressed) issue. And I was pleased to see him tackle the subject in a post on Gotham Schools the following June. ?What arrived in my mailbox a couple weeks ago was his third post on curriculum and he needs to be applauded for attempting to understand the question from outside the box of labor union politics ? and poverty.? While everyone is ?busy focusing on external factors such as poverty, human capital mechanisms (hiring & firing), and accountability,? writes Mark, ?we have been largely ignoring one of the most easily and cheaply modifiable components of education: the curriculum. And this is the component that has arguably the most immediate and direct impact on a student.?

[pullquote]

To those who understand the gist shall be given new word meanings, but to those who do not there shall ensue boredom and frustration.

[/pullquote]

While still struggling with some grad school language ? ?academic knowledge,? ?core foundations,? ?impelled the process? ? Mark at least seems to have read E.D. Hirsch*:

When I introduced the Core Knowledge Sequence [first developed by Hirsch's foundation more than a decade ago] this year to the teachers at my school at a faculty staff meeting as a potential reference to guide their curriculum mapping, I expected either a lukewarm or even resistant reception. On the contrary, however, teachers were overwhelmingly excited by the sequence and gratified to have a copy of it to refer to. Aides and preparatory teachers were snapping the copies up like candy, such that we ran out of copies for core content area teachers! I feel like teachers ? just like students ? are desperate for guidance, given the superhuman demands made upon their time and energy. Why would we deny such explicit and systematic guidance to them??

Anderson gets it.? As do the teachers in the trenches.? The common core doubters need to dispense with the ideology and focus on what teachers ? and students ? need: a rigorous, comprehensive, and aligned (vertically and horizontally) curriculum.? And, as a plus, the New York Times this morning reinforces Anderson's colleagues' instincts: with an op-ed essay by Hirsch himself. There is a longer version of the essay here, but it is another persuasive argument for teaching kids (rich and poor) content, ?early and often. Paraphrasing the famous New Testament chronicler, St. Matthew (?For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.?), Hirsch writes,

The Matthew Effect in language can be restated this way: ?To those who understand the gist shall be given new word meanings, but to those who do not there shall ensue boredom and frustration.?

Amen, Amen, I say to you:? Content counts.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

--------------------------

*I once asked six different school superintendent candidates what they thought of Cultural Literacy and each launched into a high-minded speech about racial and ethnic diversity. It was clear that none knew anything about Hirsch, much less had read the book.

• school board members (four major roles: representative, leader, steward, advocate),
• school boards (?four macro responsibilities: ?set the district's direction?, ensure alignment of strategies, resources, policies, programs, and processes with district goals, assess and account for progress?, continuously improve the district,?),
• board president (?leader of leaders,? ?presider,? ?communicator?)
• superintendent (advisor, executive, leader, manager, advocate, communicator)

.... but in the nitty gritty world where we lived, as the governance discussion proceeded, the big issues were ?chain of command,? "being part of the team," "being negative," and one of the major themes of that first hour and a half was, as our facilitator reminded us, the board's role as ?overseer, not micromanager.? The board "should not second-guess? the administration's recommendations ?except in extreme circumstances,? we were told. It should ?trust the professionals.?

That was my opening. ?That's exactly what we've been doing for ten years,? I blurted, "trusting the professionals. We were 83^rd out of 86 districts in the region ten years ago and we are 83 out of 86 today ? by letting the professionals do their work.?

There was a slight silence, but not a heavy one. In fact, our facilitator rather quickly replied, ?That's the board's fault.?

It was a revelatory, if head-spinning, moment.? And very briefly a light shone on the heart of one of the major challenges of school governance: getting a school board to do its job, which, as the hand-out rightly said, was to improve the district.? Easier said than done. To do its job it has to be able to sift through acres of dust stirred up by federal and state mandates and piles of policies, politics, herds of wildebeest unions, experts, professionals, rivers of ?model? policies from our school board associations, and a chain-link fence of interlocking economic interests defined by major corporations, rich lobbyists, and willing legislators.? Anyone who has ever tried skiing -- even walking -- in a whiteout can appreciate what it's like walking into a school board meeting.? Take charge? ? Continuously improve the district?? You gotta be kidding.? Improving requires changing, which disrupts.? The system is set up to encourage the opposite: to not rock the boat, to continue on whatever road you're on -- or, the safe path, to do nothing.? Every once in a while we glimpse the truth: After suffering through endless lectures about leaving it to the professionals, we are told it's all our fault. ?Ouch.? But it is.

I have argued before (here) that school boards' irrelevance ? defined as their failure to improve education outcomes, whether they try or not -- is a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself.? Our nation's 14,000 semi-impotent school boards are an indicator species, their malignancies caused by environmental toxicities not of their making.? New York State alone had 10,000 school districts in 1900 ? we need ask ourselves if the disappearance of 9,250 districts over the ensuing 50 years (there are about 750 school districts in the Empire State today) has been good or bad for education.

The problem is that we -- local school boards -- can't wait around for the folks who have caused our cancers to cure them.

Last year in Education Week I argued that ?School boards still have enormous power?, especially on the local level?; and that ?my own battle is to get my board to acknowledge that power, and to re-engage itself in the task of educating children, to revive a sense of the relevancy of democracy itself. It's a win-win. Not only do we get a better education for our children, but we also get a community that begins to feel that it can deliver that education.?

This rosy view, of course, must be tempered by the fact that school systems (per the blizzard described above) don't do right by the kids, as far education opportunity goes.? And on this question it is fortuitous that Mark Osgood has a new post at Education Next calling out those who believe that the education gap is ?the civil rights issue of our time? to demand that the courts step up to the plate on these education issues as they did in the last civil rights era. I would go a step further and send in the National Guard ? which is why I remain a steadfast defender of NCLB (minus the warts), the educational equivalent thereof.) ?As long as we have a public school system, school boards, in my experience, remain the last ? if? increasingly tenuous ? link to the democratic ideal: the peoples' schools. But it remains a federal responsibility to ensure that local majorities don't block the school house door to racial, demographic or socio-economic minorities.

At the heart of my school board's recent governance retreat ? Webster's definition number 1 is appropriate here:? ?an act or process of withdrawing esp. from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable? -- was this mixed message: you're responsible, but don't get too involved. ?In school districts that have all the gears running smoothly, that is the kind of creative tension that can work to keep the train on the tracks moving forward; in districts where the train has been off the tracks for years, it is a recipe for continued disaster. ?I have seen the enemy and it is us.? Bring in the AYP!

Is that the answer?? What's the question?? I recall walking with Tom Carroll, ?founder of the successful charter school network in Albany (see my Education Next profile), after a couple of weeks of reporting on his Brighter Choice schools, which were knocking the socks off the traditional school competitors on test scores, and asking, ?So, why are you able to do it and they aren't??

?Will,? said Carroll without hesitation. ?Political will.?

If only, I thought. If only?.? Whispering in my ear was the voice of the school board overlord, ?Yeah, but?.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Another superintendent emphasized frank, open, oral dialogue because relying on written communication often leads to misunderstandings.

Yes, those written words are so slippery.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

It's a tough town.

According to the Times poll only 34 percent of New Yorkers approve of Bloomberg's performance as the education mayor. ?And Blacks and Hispanics, whose children make up 70 percent of the enrollment in the city's public schools, says the Times, ?expressed the most dissatisfaction, with 64 percent of blacks and 57 percent of Hispanics saying they are generally not satisfied, compared with 50 percent of whites.?

Though reporters Sharon Otterman and Allison Kopicki concede that ?dissatisfaction with public schools in New York is longstanding? and that in the 1990s through the first few years of Bloomberg control ?few residents were satisfied,? one thing is clear: the bloom is off.? The third term has been especially hard on the billionaire mayor, notably due to the loss of Joel Klein, who had worked closely with Bloomberg? in remaking the nation's largest school district during his eight-year tenure as chancellor, and the bad stumble with naming publishing exec Cathleen Black as Klein's replacement.

The crux of the issue may be that of fickle fates versus substantive reform. ?Bloomberg did dismantle the old system, which no one seemed to like.? He? abolished the 32 patronage-laden community school boards and relocated the education department's headquarters to City Hall's back yard.? He broke up big schools, gave principals more autonomy, introduced a tough school grading system, doubled the budget, won the Broad Prize, and ushered in a golden era for charter schools. ?There will continue to be skirmishes about the data ? ?graduation rates are at an all-time high and we are outpacing the rest of the state on test scores,? a spokeswoman tells the Times ? and wrangling over issues like class size, cheating, and union constraints, but I doubt very much anyone would want to return to the old system.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Troubled Schools Mimicking Charters This is an intriguing piece by Sam Dillon, about school reform in Houston, but I stopped short when I got to this line:

In the first experiment of its kind in the country, the Houston public schools are testing whether techniques proven successful in high-performing urban charters can also help raise achievement in regular public schools.

First of its kind?? I ran this by my friend Hal Kwalwasser, who has just finished a book (for which I provided some editing advice), describing improvement strategies in many traditional school districts.?? Writes Hal in an email:

There are lots of districts around the country that are doing the things that Houston is now about to do. Nothing new here?.? The big question is not that Houston is trying them out now, but why hundreds if not thousands of districts have not done the same thing - and not done it many years ago.

Time to Revive Home Ec This is a gem of an essay, written by Michigan State historian Helen Zoe Veit.

Reviving [Home Economics] and its original premises ? that producing good, nutritious food is profoundly important, that it takes study and practice, and that it can and should be taught through the public school system ? could help us in the fight against obesity and chronic disease today.

?Nuf said.? Let's do it.

What School Reforms Work Best When I first read Walt Gardner's letter to the editor last week, I was going to use this line for a jumping off point for a post about why teachers are so defensive:

Teachers don't choose a career in the classroom for money, power or fame. What they want more than anything else is to make a difference in the lives of their students. They don't always succeed, but they deserve more than the unrelenting criticism they've endured since the accountability movement began.

I still might get to that "unrelenting criticism" business, but it's interesting to read the "Sunday Dialogue" replies to Gardner's three ?controversial education reforms? -- Common Core Standards, value-added evaluations, no more seniority -- from a group of educated respondents.?? ?The hubris of the elite class of education policy makers boggles the mind,? writes an education professor at Arizona State about teachers and principals "being forced to cope with a tangle of contradictory, expensive, politically motivated school reform policies." A former teacher from Colorado Springs says that ?much of the criticism of teachers is very much deserved? and wishes that teachers wanting ?more than anything else to make a difference in the lives of their students? were true.? ?We get what we pay for,? he says, ?teachers included.?? And this from Deborah Meier:

The most interesting and successful teachers and schools I know build their curriculum carefully to create a coherent intellectual experience for their students ? rather than follow someone else's bland prescription.

I must confess, I'm baffled by that statement.? We've been letting teachers and schools do their own thing for several generations, with some pretty bland results in a wide swath of America, including populating prisons with adults who stopped learning in third grade.? What a country.? Let the dialogue continue.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The Arizona school district that reporter Matt Richtel uses to illustrate the lengthy discussion (a front-page story in the Times' Sunday print edition) is the 18,000 student, K-8 Kyrene School District, which has invested $33 million in its digital system since 2005. ??Hope and enthusiasm are soaring,? writes Richtel, ?but not test scores.?

Despite the headlong rush to digitize our schools, there is, as Larry Cuban tells Richtel, ?insufficient evidence to spend that kind of money. Period, period, period.? ?Cuban also pooh-pooh's the ?student engagement? argument for computers. ?There is very little valid and reliable research that shows the engagement causes or leads to higher academic achievement,? he says.

Even Kyrene Superintendent David Schauer has his doubts, telling Richtel, ?We've jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we're doing. This might just be the new bandwagon.?

The story covers most of the essential bases, but, tellingly, makes only glancing references to curriculum. ?The familiar buzz phrases are there ? ?digital devices let students learn at their own pace, teach skills needed in a modern economy and hold the attention of a generation weaned on gadgets,? writes Richtel ? but it would seem, according to this report, that, as happened to the charter school movement, which spent lots of time and energy debating the chartering process and defending it in the face of frequent lackluster performance numbers, the technological classroom is late to an appreciation of the essential elements of education; mainly, the importance of knowledge.? What should our kids know? ?David Cohen of the University of Michigan told a gathering of education journalists last May (see my Digital Divide post) that all the technology in the world won't help if you don't get the curriculum right.? (And speaking of charters, I once asked KIPP co-founder David Levin how important curriculum was to KIPP's success. ?Very,? he said.)

It can be done.? When Ron Packard was starting his pioneering internet school, K12 Inc., in the late 1990s*, one of the first things he did was to convince Bill Bennett, the education ?czar? under Ronald Reagan and co-author (with Checker Finn) of The Educated Child, to join him.? This was 1999 and a major coup, in no small part because Bennett and Finn had written that there was "no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve learning." (They didn't say, ?period, period, period,? but it is remarkable how far we haven't traveled in the last decade.) Equally important ? though less publicized ? was Packard's next move: hiring John Holdren, who had overseen E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge K-8 Curriculum Sequence, to design K12's curriculum. ?What Packard appreciated, and too many education technologists still don't get, is that content counts.

There is no doubt that digital learning bears little resemblance to the vast wasteland bust of the TV-in-every-classroom era; computers are here to stay. ?But Richtel's piece should be a cautionary tale for our education policymakers: you ignore curriculum at your own ? more importantly, at our students' ? peril.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

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*Full disclosure: I worked on a writing project for Packard several years ago.

The United States became the wealthiest nation on earth primarily because Americans were the best educated. ?That advantage has entirely eroded over the past 30 years.

Though the ?advantage? he is referring to here is most likely the economic one, there is no doubt that Brooks sees the strong connection between the nation's economic and educational health ? and it should not be too much of a stretch (or putting words in his mouth) to say that the thirty-year erosion applies to our education system as well.? Brooks might also have added that they (our early 20^th-century American educator ancestors) created the world's most educated people by educating lots of poor kids.? In Henry Luce's phrase the ?last century was ?the American century? and as Brooks might have said, it's because our educators were predominantly no-nonsense on at least this point: that we get wealthy by educating the poor, we don't get educated by making the poor wealthy.

Brooks's larger point here is positive -- and slightly different than the one Mike makes in his When public education's two Ps disagree (which is to stop thinking parents ?are dummies for liking their schools the way they are?). But they share the same common sense suggestion:? that we can't and shouldn't govern from the fringes.? Says Brooks,

It will take an active government to reverse this stagnation ? from prenatal and early childhood education straight up through adult technical training and investments in scientific and other research. If government is ?inconsequential? in this sphere, then continued American decline is inevitable.

We can -- and will -- argue for a long time about the exact role of government in fixing our public school system ? whether it's the feds, the states, the cities, or even local school boards ? but just as we will need an ?instigator state? to to help ?ward off national decline,? as Brooks says, we will need all hands, including those who work for government agencies, on deck to help restore the vigorous virtues to our public school system.

So, on this Labor Day weekend, let us give some nod of appreciation to those who have worked -- and worked hard -- to give us a great education system. And let's also encourage those now toiling to keep the faith -- and keep on working!

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

• Has 18 pages of ?required components? for the antibullying policy that each school must adopt;
• Requires each school in the state to have an antibullying specialist and an antibullying coordinator;
• Sets up a system to grade each school on its antibullying efforts and ?educators who failed to comply could lose their licenses.?

There's more, of course.? ?I think this has gone well overboard,? Richard Bozza, head of the New Jersey Association of School Administrators, tells Hu. ?Now we have to police the community 24 hours a day.?

If schools have felt burdened by being turned into social service agencies, their new anti-bullying duties should seal the deal:? they have to do everything.? (I would be curious to know what Geoffrey Canada thinks of this.)

In my February post, Stop the Anti-bullying Bus, I Want to Get Off, I wrote,

In the hell of good intentions, the anti-bullying campaign has got to be on one of the lower rings.

In that post I detailed the anti-bullying policy in my own district, in New York, which was nine, single-spaced pages long (one-third the length of the district's entire Code of Conduct) and was voted into law by the school board (on which I sit) just a couple weeks ago. Policy #0155 included such lovely sections as,

Social, psychological or relational bullying includes, but is not limited to, excluding someone from a group, isolating, shunning, spreading rumors or gossiping, arranging public humiliation, undermining relationships, teasing about clothing, looks, giving dirty looks, aggressive stares, etc.

As I asked at a board meeting, Does this apply to board members? (My question did have some impact; this section was changed to read, "Social, psychological or relational bullying includes, but is not limited to isolating, shunning, spreading rumors or gossiping, teasing about appearance, etc.")

Etcetera is still a pretty broad category.

Though I haven't read the New Jersey law, which Hu says is ?the toughest legislation against bullying in the nation,? her report is scary enough. Writes Hu,

This summer thousands of school employees attended training session on the new law; more than 200 districts have snapped a $1,295 package put together by a consulting firm that includes a 100-page manual and a DVD.

If Mike hadn't already used it, I'd say Stop the Madness! Yes, bullying is a bad thing. And yes, educators need to provide a safe environment for learning. But the policies that are springing up all over the country, aside from being bureaucratic nightmares,? end up using the rather blunt instrument of unintelligible verbiage as their main enforcement mechanism, a situation which creates? a gulag of fear and intimidation rather than the hoped-for peaceable kingdom.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The intricate system of checks-and-balances that is a hallmark of our aging republic often seems more checks than balances. And the subject of Mike's madness essay yesterday,? a court battle between State Ed and the state's teacher union (round 1 to the union), sure seems worthy of an insanity verdict.? And today, as I read comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's decision, I would tend to agree with State Ed spokesman Johnathan Burman, who told the Times' Sharon Otterman,

The comptroller has allowed political pressure to get in the way of vital technology that would help our students.

In this case, however, perhaps political pressure was a good thing.

Indeed, the $27-million Wireless Generation contract to monitor student performance is the result of a rather tangled web ? WG was purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in November, just after it announced it was giving Joel Klein, who had pushed the WG contract forward as the city's education chancellor, a job.? Given WG's sterling reputation (it was already running a successful data system for the city's schools) and the exigencies of Race to the Top deadlines to get the performance tracking system going, the contract might have overcome the appearance of conflict in the Murdoch/Klein shotgun wedding (News Corp says Klein had nothing to do with the purchase of WG), but it couldn't survive the smell of the hacking scandal.

The anti-Klein legions will no doubt pounce on the comptroller's decision as vindication of their criticisms of the Klein reforms ? just as the state's new commissioner of education, John King, must be tearing his hair out over another Gotham misstep (did someone say cheating?) while he's trying to keep the state's fragile reform engine running.? In fact, the moral here may just be the obvious one: the system, ungainly as it is, works.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

This article describes teachers' collective work aimed at learning to teach mathematics for social justice. A situated, sociocultural perspective of learning guides this examination of teachers' negotiation of mathematical goals and social justice goals as they developed, implemented, and revised lessons for social justice.

Sol Stern, where are you? (See here and here and here.)

In fact, as Stern has written, teaching social justice through math is a well-practiced craft among certain mathematics teachers.?? Eric Gutstein, a Marxist education professor at the University of Illinois and also a full-time Chicago public-school math teacher, wrote Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice a while ago (Routledge, 2006)? The work combines, says Stern, "critical pedagogy theory (which depicts the United States as an evil nation rife with injustice) and real-life math lessons that Gutstein piloted with his predominantly minority seventh-grade students."

The question is, do kids learn any math?? Here's what Ms. Bartell writes,

Education is intricately linked to economic, political, and social power structures in society that serve to perpetuate inequity in both schools and society (Apple, 1992; Kozol, 2005)

I love the term ?intricately linked.? At first blush, the reader might read that as ?intimately linked? or even ?inherently linked.?? But ?intricately??? What isn't intricately linked to everything else? And what does that have to do with teaching math? Writes Bartell,

Considering these structures in relation to education and the call for equity in mathematics entails a shift from thinking about preparing students to live within the world, as it currently exists, to thinking about preparing students to restructure ?those social systems . . . in order to remove barriers that women, minorities, and others experience? (Secada, 1989)

Or this,

Thus, mathematics education faces a two-fold imperative: to provide students with mathematics instruction that includes the mathematics deemed necessary for success in the current system while simultaneously providing students an opportunity to use mathematics to expose and confront obstacles to their success (Guti?rrez, 2002; Gutstein, 2003; Martin, 2003; Tate, 1994, 1995).

Is it any wonder that American students can't do math?? ?On average US students place 32nd in the world in math, following Portugal,? reports Education Next. ?The best state, Massachusetts, is only 9th in the world; the most populous state (California) comes in 37th.? (Read the full story, by Paul E. Peterson, Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anad?n, Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann? here.)

Is it social justice for legions of American kids to not be taught basic math? ?Why is it that we still have to argue about this?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The greatest challenge facing America's schools today isn't the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or ?teacher quality.? It's the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom.

Thanks to a wonderful report by Patti Neighmond in today's Morning Edition (National Public Radio), we may get back on the path of common sense in our approach to the "enormous variation" challenge.? Reports Neighmond, a new meta-study (a study of studies), by University of South Florida psychologist Doug Rohrer, suggests that that there's no scientific evidence to show that? the learning style movement has done anything for student learning.? Rohrer tells Neighmond,

We have not found evidence from a randomized control trial supporting any of these [learning style practices]?? and until such evidence exists we don't recommend that they be used.

Wow.

No doubt, we'll hear from other researchers about the validity of Rohrer's findings.? But for the moment, the advice of? Dan Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive scientist who writes frequently about how students learn (see here), should guide us.? As Neighmond sums up Willingham's opinions,

[T]eachers should not tailor instruction to different kinds of learners. He says we're on more equal footing than we may think when it comes to how our brains learn. And it's a mistake to assume students will respond and remember information better depending on how it's presented.

Is there a middle ground here? It may be that, as Willingham suggests, we need to adjust our thinking ? and teaching styles ? to understand how we are similar before we start trying to design systems that emphasize our differences.? (Not to be too metaphysical here, but what exactly is a system?) It may just be possible that technology will eventually free us from the need to live (and learn) together.? But just in case we're not there yet, and with all due respect to Monsieur Rousseau and his descendents, we might best err on the side of his and their social contract collegues and try to understand what is common before throwing all our babies into one-person dinghies -- even if they are all connected to Google.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

[pullquote]It was pretty radical, by New York standards, ordering school districts to evaluate teachers using student performance data as one of the key measures of teacher competence.[/pullquote]

The ruling was the result of a suit filed in June by New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), the Empire State's famously powerful (it claims 600,000 members) ?teacher union. Though the decision received wide coverage (per above) and throws New York school districts a curve (they are supposed to have an evaluation policy in place by September 1), it's not clear that the decision will have any major implications for other states that are considering linking teacher evaluations to test scores (except as inducement to make sure their regulations correspond to their laws). It is, however, a great window on to education politics in a large state, once-ruled by teacher unions, who hate student performance evaluations, in the reform era. This is power politics at its best.

[pullquote]Districts still have to deal with the local teacher unions to get a decent teacher evaluation system. Good luck on that one.[/pullquote]

To recap, thanks largely to Race to the Top incentives (a cool $700 million), a group of New York State reformers, including the state's Commissioner of Education and its Chancellor (the head of the Board of Regents) had pushed for teacher evaluation reforms that included linking those evaluations to student performance. Thanks also to some shrewd lobbying on the part of Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform and Sunday bagel breakfasts hosted by NYSED Commissioner David Steiner, NYSUT agreed to go along (see my story in Education Next) with the changes. The result was state law 3012-c, passed in late May of 2010, just days before the RTTT deadline. It was pretty radical, by New York standards, ordering school districts to evaluate teachers using student performance data as one of the key measures of teacher competence.

After fighting every attempt at linking student test scores to teacher evaluations, NYSUT had given in at the eleventh hour and its president, Richard Iannuzzi, made a famously symbolic walk with NYSED Commissioner David Steiner and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, from the state ed office building to the State Capitol building across the street, to signal their joint support of several RTTT-induced state laws, including one that breached the ?fire wall? between evaluations and student performance. ?Indeed, the reformers had won a historic victory.

But in the ensuing months, as NYSED worked to write the regulations that spelled out how the law would be implemented, it pushed the student performance piece of the law in directions that NYSUT didn't like.

The law says that

(i) twenty percent of the evaluation shall be based upon student growth data on state assessments?. and (ii) twenty percent shall be based on other locally selected measures of student achievement.

Did the Regents get greedy?? In their May meeting to pass the implementing regulations, with encouragement from Governor Andrew Cuomo, they voted to merge the ?locally selected? with the state assessment, effectively making 40 percent of the teacher evaluation dependent on state assessments of students. NYSUT didn't like it, and sued.

[pullquote](i) twenty percent of the evaluation shall be based upon student growth data on state assessments?. and (ii) twenty percent shall be based on other locally selected measures of student achievement.[/pullquote]

The Wednesday decision, by Judge Michael Lynch*, was limited to the issue of whether the NYSBOR and NYSED had exceeded their authority in issuing regulations implementing the new teacher evaluation law.

Lynch concludes that

There is no dispute that the first 20% component is based on `student growth data' as measured by state assessments or comparable measures.

But he doesn't think that ?locally selected measures? can include those same state assessments. ?The reasoning is excruciatingly detailed (e.g. ?the key here is the use of the qualifier `other,'? he writes), but Lynch would seem to be right in concluding that the legislature meant ?other locally selected measures? to mean something different than the state tests.? And it makes sense, as Lynch concludes, that the Regents regulations are ?invalid only to the extent that the same `student growth measures' utilized to measure the first 20% category?may not be utilized to measure the second category?. In short, to allow a single state assessment measuring student growth to determine 40% of the student achievement category? would contravene this multiple measures mandate.?

The larger point here, however, and the bigger problem for those trying to weaken the union grip on the process, is that both the ?locally selected? 20% and the remaining 60% (classroom observation and professional growth), as Lynch concludes, ?must necessarily be determined through negotiations? with the union. ?Districts still have to deal with the local teacher unions to get a decent teacher evaluation system. Good luck on that one.

Indeed, the Regents, who voted 13 to 3 in May to impose the more rigorous evaluation procedures (see here), have had their wings clipped by the Lynch ruling.? And though the judge upheld other parts of the Regents regulations opposed by NYSUT, ?he also struck down a piece of the regulations that determined how teachers would be rated ? ineffective, developing, effective, highly effective ? based on the multiple measurement scale.? Since a teacher had to score at least 64 points to avoid the ?ineffective? rating, according to the Regents' plan, it was conceivable, as the judge noted, that ?the regulation allows for an `ineffective' rating based solely on poor student achievement results (the first 40% category) without regard to the 60% evaluation category.?

Nice try, Regents. But NYSUT caught it and argued, according to Lynch, that such a scoring rubric was ?contrary to the statute's mandate that the composite score incorporate multiple measures of effectiveness?.?

Where everyone goes from here is anyone's guess.? So far the popular new Governor, who had promoted the stricter evaluation measure, has been silent.? Let's hope he speaks up. And let's hope that he pushes to amend the law to make it clear that student performance measures remain central to the evaluation criteria for teachers.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

*Lynch is a state Supreme Court judge, which, in New York, is a low-level judicial position. The highest court in New York State is the Court of Appeals, which would be the bench that would next rule on this issue, should NYBOR and NYSED appeal, as they promised they would.

If the response to that news by the city's new chancellor, Dennis Walcott, is any indication of the city's attitude about cheating, we should be worried.? As Walcott told Sharon Otterman of the Times,

People are reporting things, that's fine; we want people to report things?. [P]eople could be reporting for real and necessarily real reasons.

Uh? That means, I suppose, that this is not Atlanta; not to worry, Gotham just has a reporting spike.

The ed department's chief academic officer, Shael Polokow-Suransky, tried to explain Walcott's odd comment by telling Otterman that, ?When there is conflict that exists in a school ? sometimes between teachers, sometimes between teachers and administration ? it is not unusual that there are reports and allegations made as a result of that.?

Protesteth too much?? Plenty of personnel ? and personal -- battles are fought by filing pre-emptive (and bogus) charges. God knows, there are enough rules and regulations to give even Attila the Hun some cover while he complains.? But that debate is a distraction: Was there cheating or not?

According to the city's special commissioner of investigation, Richard Condon, whose report is the cause of the current uproar, cheating complaints in NYC have increased from 68 in 2003 to 225 last year.? Quite an increase. But those stunning numbers come on the heels of an August 8 comment by Mayor Michael Bloomberg that "to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence or even allegations of widespread cheating," (New York Post), which raises the question of whether we've got a cheating scandal on our hands -- or a cover-up of such.

Consider this, from Walcott, in the Times: ?I have not seen one iota of fact about systemwide cheating on the part of New York City. This is not Atlanta at all.?

Are we sure about that? An almost fourfold increase in cheating reports and not "one iota" of evidence that we have a problem?

If nothing else, the city's response to the new cheating allegation inquiries has been bumbling, leaving one to wonder what has happened to the once powerful PR machine at the district's Tweed headquarters.? In fact, Gotham's cheating and testing security problems have been a slow-moving train wreck, which should have alerted the department to trouble brewing.? (See my August 2 post for some history.) One of the more blatant examples of the city's problems was a study conducted for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year which concluded that nearly 5% of the city's high schoolers who passed the state's Regents test last year ?should have failed? ? because of test tampering.

Walcott's problem now is to regain some credibility high ground.

But unlike the state's new Commissioner of Education, John King, who quickly formed a task force, last month, to investigate the cheating and its causes and cures, the City's educators are on the defensive ? and showing it.? Condon's office, which is ostensibly independent of the city education department and handles all matter of possible misconduct, from conflict of interest to sexual misconduct, substantiated 13 of the 62 cheating cases that his office investigated. Emphasis here: that his office investigated. The big question is why, as Otterman reports, ?a vast majority of the 1,252 accusations of test-tampering and grade-changing by educators [Condon] has received have been referred back to the [education] department's in-house investigators? and why ?city officials last week would not provide information about the disposition of those cases.?

These are serious cover-up charges, but Walcott only digs the hole deeper? with his op-ed in today's New York Daily News.? He leads by taking out after ?opponents of student testing? who he says used the Atlanta cheating scandal

as an opportunity to question achievement results here in New York City and the education reform community's push for strong accountability systems. Many of the same voices are seizing on fresh reports of an increase in allegations of cheating as a sign that actual tampering with scores is widespread.

Well, some of us just want to know whether there is cheating; not because we are against testing, but because we are for it: testing can not be a credible measure of success unless it is a credible measuring tool. Cheating seriously weakens that tool. (If you don't believe me, see the new New York ruling about ?the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.) ?And we haven't even touched the troublesome question of ?erasure analysis,? a standard ?testing integrity measurement that was abandoned by New York City either just before or just after ? according to Otterman, this is another matter of dispute ? Bloomberg assumed control of the schools in 2002.? (Oddly, Walcott writes in the Daily News that erasure analysis ?is useful in certain cases where we suspect cheating may have occurred, and we use it for that purpose,? which only confuses the matter since he also says ?it is foolish to think?[such erasure analysis] will eliminate any and all cheating.?)

No, we don't want to debate the ?widespread? nature of this beast until we get the facts. But so far the chancellor sounds more defensive about those facts than forthcoming. ?He spends a great deal of time in his Daily News op-ed discussing ?the precautions we have in New York City public school around grades 3-to-8 testing.?? But he avoids talking about the thirteen cases of cheating that the special investigator found or the 1,252 accusations of test-tampering and grade-changing that his department supposedly investigated. How did that happen with all the ?precautions?? Walcott cites an 18-month audit done by the city's controller in 2009 as proof that ?safeguards have clearly worked,? but that hardly covers the period of Condon's report and Walcott doesn't mention the fact that the audit also concluded that the city's education department had ?engaged in sloppy and unprofessional practices that encourage cheating and data manipulation.? (See my August 2 post cited above).

If transparency is to be a hallmark of the reform movement, Mayor Bloomberg and his new schools chancellor have a lot of catching up to do.? To regain the credibility high ground, first and foremost, they have to get the facts out.? Walcott may have rode into Tweed as an ?education diplomat,? but now he needs to shed ? and shed quickly -- the appeaser mantle and take up the sword of Damocles. Slay the cheater! But, please, don't shoot the messenger.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Michelle Rhee was of course aware of the risk of increased cheating and took strong steps to make sure it didn't happen, including hiring an outside firm, Caveon.? In addition, she's strongly supported that independent investigation of issues raised by the USA Today story.? Finally, it's nonsense that she's ducked this issue.

Tilson directs his readers to a number of post-scandal interviews Rhee gave, including one with Ben Smith at Politico, Jay Matthews at the Washington Post, Tavis Smiley at PBS, and Kojo Nnamdi at NPR.

Though this deflates much of the Michael Winerip complaint, it still doesn't explain why Rhee wouldn't talk to the USA Today team that broke the story or speak out more forcefully now about a subject that is of growing importance to the accountability arm of the school reform movement.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Is DC different than Atlanta, which Winerip has written about (see here)?? You bet.? The reporting on the latter case (by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) was ongoing, for several years, before it hit nationwide scandal status.? And Atlanta's superintendent, Beverly Hall, was in charge of the district, before, during, and after the scandal broke ? she retired just before the hugely damning governor's investigation was released in July.? Rhee, in charge of DC schools for barely three years, can hardly be said to have presided over a cheating scandal, but not talking to USA Today, a reputable national news outlet, surely doesn't do her protests of innocence (on the ?Tavis Smiley? show, according to Winerip) any good.

Face it; one of the more egregious faults of our public school system is its lack of responsiveness ? to students, parents, the public, the press, reality, you name it.? So, reformers must be purer than Ceasar's wife when it comes to transparency, especially with the importance of test score data on the rise.? There needs to be an investigation in Washington at least as good as the one done in Atlanta. And Michelle Rhee should be discussing it, if not leading the charge to secure the facts.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

To make ends meet, principals have trimmed after-school programs, shrunk their support staffs and tightened their schools' use of things like printing paper, markers and Post-it notes. They have dismissed coaches who used to help teachers prepare for their lessons, and teachers whose salaries they could no longer pay.

The best part of the story is the sense of ownership of the challenge on display. Everyone is upbeat! Principals and their assistants are rolling up their sleeves and getting back into the classroom and the hallways.? "I don't need anyone walking the halls," says one principal. "I can do that myself." If they can keep the kids learning, we may be on the right track. And New York continues to show us how to transform a school system into a system of schools.? Hopefully, these principals all have copies of Stretching the School Dollar.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

People in the department were burning out?. This was a great way to enhance our capacity.

Sounds reasonable. These are tough times and deep-pocketed individuals are stepping up to the plate to help out. Is that a good idea?? Aside from Jay Greene's recent advice (which is old advice), that ?Philanthropists with billions of dollars to devote to education reform should build new institutions and stop trying to fix old ones,? the question posed, by innuendo, by Winerip, is whether this sort of private? salting of the bureaucracy is kosher.? The Board of Regents had no say in the selection of the research fellows, who went on to make a number of recommendations, the most contentious of which was to increase the importance of student test scores to teacher and principal evaluations ? from 20 percent to 40 percent of the total score. The ensuing fight, as Winerip describes it, was one that is all too familiar to governance watchers -- ?the losers cried foul ? and so dilutes the case that Winerip seems to be trying to build. (In fact, unstated here is that Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo also weighed in on behalf of the 40 percent bar and the Regents voted overwhelmingly, 14 to 3, to adopt it.)

John Bierwirth, a Long Island school superintendent and part of a task force of 63 educators that had met many times and recommended a 20 percent evaluation ceiling, said he ?felt used,? ?irrelevant.?

Welcome to New York!

Winerip does a decent job of airing complaints from the dissenters, whom he calls ?The Bottoms? (those who call the Obama administration's singular education law a Race to the Bottom), but also gives space to ?The Tops? (proponents of Race to the Top). But he doesn't say much about what the researchers actually did, nor does he get to the fundamental question of how exactly private money can and should be used by public officials. (Perhaps because The Bottoms have their own deep pockets; see below.) ?There doesn't appear to be any suggestion of laws being broken. Commissioner John King, according to Winerip, ?said that picking the fellows was the commissioner's decision and that there was no legal requirement to consult the Regents.?

Still, shouldn't there be limits on ?gifts? to public education? More strings, perhaps?? More hoops to jump through rather than fewer?? The question seems to have become more pointed now that more wealthy individuals care about reform and more reformers are showing up in leadership roles.? (I'm waiting for one of them to show up in my district; there's no more pleasant phrase to a school board's ears than, ?at no cost to the district.? Is snake oil good for you?? Is it ?free??)

Winerip implies that Bill Gates contributed $892,000 to the research fellows effort (though it's unclear if that was a personal donation and whether it went to the fellows program).? But the reporter also mentions the National Association of Charter School Administrators, the Robbins Foundation and the Tortora Sillcox Family Foundation as private organizations that fund education causes they believe in.? Is that bad?

Gates and Mayor Michael Bloomberg ?are expert at using philanthropy in a way that pressures government to follow their public policy agendas,? writes Winerip. But he doesn't define ?pressure? and doesn't say that the efforts are bad for education.

There is, indeed a long list of philanthropic flops, and such mainstays of the charitable giving world as Ford and Rockefeller and Carnegie ?and Annenberg have been trying to influence public education for many years. Lately, the money has come from names like Gates and Walton and Broad, not to mention Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who gave a cool $100 million to Newark last year (coincidentally, at about the same time as an unflattering movie about him was released). Yes, the money seems increasingly aimed at leveraging change (?impact investing? is in Wikipedia), despite Jay Greene's longstanding contention that it's all ?Buckets into the Sea,? the title of his chapter in Rick Hess's 2005 book With the Best of Intentions.

But there is no doubt that the education reform movement has been jolted to life by the interest of major money. (See my story in Ed Next about the creation of Albany charter powerhouse Brighter Choice, thanks in large part to Wall Street mogul George Gilder and his wife Virginia.) ? And no matter what your politics, you must appreciate the huge impact of the billionaire education Mayor himself, Michael Bloomberg, who made no secret of his desire to break some education furniture in New York City and who recently kicked in $250,000 to help save New York State's Regents tests -- and then gave $30 million for a publicly run program to help the city's black and latino men.

Good or bad?

In a recent interview with Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal, Gates admits to some missteps in his ?record-breaking philanthropic push for school reform,? as Riley writes.? And so Gates ? his foundation ? is now turning to ?higher leverage? charity, notably, doing what state and the federal governments aren't doing: research and development.? None of the 50 states do R&D, Gates says. Why can't he help? His foundation is now spending $335 million to figure out what makes an effective teacher, an initiative that includes videotaping 3,000 elementary teachers in classrooms across the country. ?Indeed, teachers and teaching are a hot topic on the philanthropic circuit. The Walton Foundation just announced that it was donating $49 million to Teach for America and the Carnegie Corporation last year launched its ?Elusive Teacher Strategy? initiative.

I could go on.? (See Richard Lee Colvin's The New Philanthropists in the 2005 Education Next. Colvin concludes that, ?Despite the sometimes gloomy assessments of philanthropy's impact, there is reason for hope.?)

My question is not Jay Greene's question about whether the best bang for the buck is in the tributaries of the education system.? My question is whether a mogul's million is any different than the million gathered from thousands of taxpayers ? and do we need more regulation and policing over it?? It's sure easier to raise a million from a few people -- especially if you're a billionaire chancellor or mayor --? than raise the taxes of a million people.? But can't the former be construed as unfair influence over the public's purse, broadly defined.? What happened to one person, one vote?

The Daily News, for instance, was not comfortable with ?six deep-pocketed individuals? buying New York students their Regents exams:

New York doles out more than $19 billion in education aid annually, pushing school spending above $18,000 per pupil versus the national average of $10,500. Yet Gov. Cuomo, the Legislature and the department could not find the $1.5 million for the January Regents, or $6.5 million more for further testing. Even at a time of severe budgetary stress, these numbers do not add up?. ?Albany's priorities are out of whack. At a time when desperately needed school reforms demand more and better exams, cutting funding for testing is a bad policy choice. And that's something no rich benefactor can fix.

This starts to get to the point that Diane Ravitch consistently makes in her warnings about ?the ?privatization? of public schools and her criticisms of ?Astroturf? philanthropists: their excessive influence over public institutions that, by right and law, are owned by voters, each of whom has, in theory, an equivalent share of stock in the ?company.?

?Reform groups such as Stand for Children, and Teach for America, Ravitch said,? according to a recent story on Ravitch by Politico's Abby Phillip,

take money and policy directions from corporate foundations like Gates, Walton and the Broad Foundation whose interests don't line up with what is best for schools and teachers. The real goal of these groups is to erode teachers' collective bargaining rights, improve education for a select minority of students rather than all children, and tie teachers' evaluations to flawed standardized tests.

Or so the theory goes.

The blind spot ? it's actually a big black hole -- in this analysis is that it leaves out the billions of private dollars already coursing through the system's veins.? As Rishawn Biddle pointed out about the recent recall effort in Wisconsin,

more money [was] spent on the recall elections than on the entire state legislative campaign last year, most of it coming from public-sector unions? ?And when the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers weigh in ? including spending $400,000 on radio ads supporting Democratic opponents alone ? the elections are also a referendum on the influence of teachers unions in education policy.

In the end, it may very well be that our philanthropist reformers ? including hedge-funders ? are simply responding to what has been the outsized influence over the system exercised by private teacher unions, textbook and testing companies, and a web of high-powered lobbyists representing all manner of industry associations. Shouldn't that be part of the Astroturf critique? Isn't all that dough more private sector money? ?(The term ?public sector union? is often misunderstood; teacher unions are no more public than the Gates Foundation.)

It was thus a shock last year to New York State United Teachers when a couple of veteran politicos mounted a multi-million-dollar lobbying campaign ? yes, financed by Wall Street -- to get key reform bills through the state legislature, a legislature once owned by the powerhouse teacher union.

When I talked to NYSUT chief Richard Ianuzzi about it (see my Ed Next piece on New York's winning Race to the Top strategy), he was blunt:? the union lost key battles because of ?hedge fund operators?who could write out a check for a million dollars a shot.?? He should know.

All's fair?

Well, no, but the new governance muscle being exercised by men and women of means ? and their foundations ? is a welcome corrective to the room-clearing elbows thrust by the unions and their allies.? The bottom line is that the process needs to be transparent, and the debate kept public.? But it is time, at least, to recognize the fact that the richest people in the education room are not Gates or Bloomberg or Tisch, but AFT, NEA, and NYSUT. That's the privatization that has done the damage to our nation's school system.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

?We won't raise our annual [NCLB-mandated] objectives this year,? Juneau later told a group of school chiefs from ten rural states, Dillon reports. And ?we're not asking for permission.?

Dillon says that ?half a dozen other states have joined the chorus in recent weeks, using less defiant language but still asking for relief from the testing mandates.?? But he quotes Larry Shumway, superintendent of schools in Utah, another breakaway state, sounding pretty inflammatory:

Pretty soon all the schools will be failing in America, and at that point the law becomes meaningless?.? States are going to sit and watch federal accountability implode. We're seeing the end of an era.

That may be how it looks to some failing states.? But the picture is far more nuanced than that; in fact, if you throw waivers and cheaters and union-busters into the debate, one might say that we're experiencing a bit of an accountability brain freeze at the moment.? And the Republican-controlled House of Representatives seems content to do nothing about it.

But before wading into the politics of it, let's recall the good news reported by William Howell, Martin West, and Paul Peterson in their recent public opinion survey. We don't appear to be at the end of the accountability era:

Nine years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, the public's appetite for standardized tests appears undiminished. More than two in three Americans believe that the federal government should ?continue to require that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3?8 and once in high school,? whereas less than 10 percent actually oppose this requirement. Roughly three in four affluent respondents support the regular administration of tests, as do similar shares of African Americans and Hispanics. Only among teachers does there appear a nontrivial segment of the population that opposes existing testing practices. Even so, majorities of teachers support annual testing of lower-school students and a single test for high school students.

This suggests that the current revolt may not be as populist as it may seem, and that the new pushback against accountability may, in fact, be a lot like the original one: teacher unions and their deeply imbedded institutional allies doing what they do best. But as is usual in education debates, strange bedfellows abound. And the current swirl around accountability has a new twist with the states-rights revolt, as Dillon suggests, fanned by Tea Party sentiment -- a threat to reform that didn't exist in the early days of NCLB.

Last May, Rep. John Kline, who heads up the House Education Committee, told Education Week that "I think many of us would say maybe you don't need to be accountable to the Secretary of Education?.? Maybe you oughta be accountable to the local community, to parents" school boards, and states. Perhaps the Republicans in the House are waiting for the implosion Mr. Shumway predicted ? if so, they are playing into the hands of the powerful unions. For better or worse, unions are at their most powerful at the state and local levels, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana notwithstanding.

The immediate? danger is that the new coalition might wound two of our more fearless reformers: Duncan and his boss.?? Mike Petrilli urged the Secretary of Education not to be tone-deaf to the politics of ESEA reauthorization and Rick Hess says Duncan's waiver gambit achieved ?new heights of hubris.?

My only hope is that we don't let education policy get hijacked (with due deference here to vice-president Biden) by the same partisan bickering that flavored the debt-ceiling standoff a couple weeks ago.? Our education system lost its AAA rating several generations ago.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In fact, the most telling line in Fernando Santos' and Anna Phillips' front page New York Times story this morning is buried inside the paper, a third of the way through:

It is also unusual because the city does not often tell schools what to teach.

What is it about sex?? For some reason schools chancellor Dennis Walcott feels ?a responsibility? to impose sex education, as he tells the Times. So, why doesn't he feel the same responsibility about literature, mathematics, geography, art, music, science?

From the Times we learn that ?high schools in New York have been distributing condoms for more than 20 years.?? But wait, the next sentence reads, ?In the new sex-education classes, teachers will describe how to use them.?

You can't make this stuff up.

Unfortunately, teen pregnancy is an important subject that is rarely treated properly; i.e. as a symptom, not a disease.? Symptom of what?? Most of the subtext of the Times story assumes that teen pregnancy is caused by a deficit of knowledge about sex -- you don't know how to use a condom, how hard it is raise children, etc. -- when, in fact, it is a knowledge deficit of a completely different kind; i.e. reading, writing, and arithmetic.? (I covered some of this territory last October.)

I was first introduced to the subject in the early 80s, when I wrote a long report about teen pregnancy for the Carnegie Corporation. It was the era of condom key chains and young kids ?taking care? of chicken eggs and sacks of sugar to teach them how difficult it is take care of a baby. ??(See my Education Next essay, ?Baby, Think it Over,? for the modern version of that particular pedagogical petard.)? I visited Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable High School in Chicago, subject of the infamous Chicago Sun-Times story (September 15, 1985) with the headline whose shock value can not be appreciated today:? ?Pill Goes to School.? ?(Here's Charles Krauthammer on that subject in 1986.)

I also sat in on dozens of sex education classes that were like history or math classes ? most of the kids weren't paying attention ? except that the kids already knew plenty about sex.? Something didn't make sense. Then I discovered? Leon Dash. The intrepid Washington Post reporter spent nearly a year hanging out with poor kids in southeast D.C., which had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, and concluded, in a 1984 series for the Post -- later turned into a book, When Children Want Children -- that kids had babies not because they were ignorant about sex but because ?it was the best option for fulfillment they had. Confounding conventional wisdom, Dash showed that teen pregnancy had less to do with sex than with hope -- or lack of it.

Hope for a better future. ?This is what schools need to offer. And they offer it by providing an education in core subjects, which in turn provide kids the option of going to college, which then gives them a chance to be productive members of society.

Let's stop the patronizing and start the real teaching. The last thing poor children need is sex education.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Finally, I thought. Schwarz had written (paragraph three) that ?nearly 200 teachers and principals admitted to tampering with standardized tests to raise students' scores? and I had immediately wondered, What happened to them?? Fired?? Does Atlanta have a rubber room large enough to hold all the suspects? Did they find replacements?? Major administrative headache, I would think. So, I was relieved to see a parent ask similar questions and expected that would lead to the answers to my questions. Unfortunately, not.

Since inquiring minds might want to know, I checked the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and, according to a July 28 report, found out that all the implicated educators, including 38 principals, are being put on administrative leave -- though it is? unclear when exactly that would go into effect.? In the same story the district says that 41 of the 179 implicated have already quit or retired. Sounds like an administrative nightmare to me. Says the AJC:

Superintendent Erroll Davis, who has been adamant that none of the employees will work in front of the district's children again, plans to start termination proceedings as quickly as he can.

So, where are they today, first day of school?? And who's taking their places?

Oddly enough, in AJC's big back-to-school story this morning (?As school year starts, here's what to expect,?), the lead what-to-expect? issue is unpaid furlough days, followed by new teacher evaluations systems, NCLB mandates, new graduation requirements ? hardly a mention of cheating.? I'm sure Atlantans are happy about that.

But as they say, stay tuned.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

I am not one to blame the press for problems, but I do take seriously the founders' belief that the democratic experiment won't work without an informed public.? It is not about taking a stand for or against; it's about reporting the facts -- all of them, including those from dissenters, reformers, and researchers.? As the Fox News anthem has it, ?We inform, you decide.? The problem is that even if the public is not informed, it still decides.? Scary.

Luckily, the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard and the editors at Education Next have been thinking about this question and last week they released their 5th annual survey of the American public's views about education reform, which included several questions meant to tease out the value of information to a respondent's opinion.? It is well worth immersing yourself in the story, co-authored by PEPG director Paul Peterson and professors William Howell and Martin West, as it provides a fascinating window on to not just the American public's ideas about education reform, but also the state of the hearts and minds battle for that public's attentions, a battle which the authors say is ?far from over.?? (See also Peterson's two essays about the results, one in the ?Wall Street Journal and the other at the Education Next website, as well as Mike's post about the survey, ?The schools?and the deficits?we deserve,? which discusses Americans' great ambivalence about education spending.)

You can take the survey yourself and see how your views on questions like tax credits, charters, vouchers, teacher compensation and tenure, and testing compare with those of the general public and survey subgroups like ?affluent,? teachers, parents, African Americans, and Hispanics.

But here's the real scary thing for me: only thirteen percent of Americans says it pays ?a great deal? of attention to education issues and 22 percent says it pays ?very little? to ?none.?? This education abdication only magnifies the influence of the special interests.? (See Mike's Podcast interview with Terry Moe, whose new book is called Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools.) And its significance is clearly visible in two of 28 questions on the survey.

When asked, for instance,? if ?government funding for public schools in your district should increase, decrease, or stay about the same,? 59 percent of respondents wanted more funding. But when the question was posed with information about how much the local district was actually spending per child, only 46 percent favored more funding ? a thirteen point information gap that could potentially have enormous impact on a legislature's funding decisions.

The subject of teacher salaries worked similarly. When asked if salaries should increase, decrease, or stay about the same, 55 percent of the American public said give them more money.? But when told that the average annual salary for teachers is $54,819, only 43 percent of Americans wanted to give teachers more money.? Again, this is a huge difference, with serious policy consequences.

Indeed, the significance of information ? the facts, m'am, and nothing but the facts -- to the education debate can not be overestimated. And it is why the transparency and reporting provisions of the much-maligned No Child Left Behind law are so important.?? It would be too simplistic to say that the difference between good schools and bad is in the quality of the information the public gets about its schools. But the swing in public opinion the size of that reported by the PEPG/Ed Next survey should be a wake-up call: get the information out. ??If the founders were smart enough to see the value of a free press and embed it in the Constitution, let's be smart enough to take full advantage of our freedoms and make sure that the public knows what is happening in its schools.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In New York, for instance, as Philissa Cramer of Gotham Schools reports, ?mounting anxiety? over recent events has prompted new State Education Commissioner John King to convene a task force to review the state's testing procedures.? (See also Sharon Otterman in the Times.)

Cramer describes it as ?a fast-moving process to tighten test security before it risks following Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey into cheating scandals.?? It better be fast. The Empire State has been just a hare's breath in front a testing scandal for years, up to now, able to bury the problem in the weeds of bureaucratic inefficiencies.? (See my post of yesterday.)

In 2007 the New York Post reported that,

In 2000, for example, numerous teachers told The Post that educators had dumbed down that year's Regents history and geography exams to a laughable extent. Other reports have exposed grading scams - dubious practices, like "scrubbing," in which teachers find ways to get extra points to kids just below a pass/fail threshold. Other times, so many kids failed that results were simply scrapped, as with the math Regents a few years ago.

In January of this year, a Post headline put it bluntly:? ?Teachers Cheat: Inflating Regents Scores to Pass Kids.?

The Wall Street Journal did its own analysis of NYC's Regents tests and in February found what Journal reporter Barbara Martinez said was,

a disproportionate percentage of New York City students [who] barely got the passing score they needed to receive a diploma in the past two years, while very few received scores just below passing?.

The state does not conduct erasure analysis on any of its tests (the procedure which exposed the cheating in Atlanta and Pennsylvania) and New York City had ended erasure evaluations in 2001, but the passing rate anomaly at the cut score line, from a statistician's point of view, is just as telling.? "There's no question that there's something fishy going on," Jonah Rockoff, a professor at Columbia University's business school, told the Journal. Rockoff estimated that ?3% to 4% of the students who passed the Regents test last year should have failed,? wrote Martinez.? (The Journal hired three economists -- Thomas S. Dee of the University of Virginia, Brian A. Jacob of the University of Michigan and Justin McCrary of the University of California at Berkeley? to do an independent analysis of the data and they corroborated the significance of the anomalies.)

Under David Steiner the State attempted an end-around the dumbing down problem by raising the proficiency bar for its 4^th- and 8^th-grade math and ELA tests, but the reports of scrubbing -- and worse -- persist and King's team may be running just ahead of a train wreck.

This could be the first major test for King, who took over the state ed reins on July 15, and New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who assumed his duties in April, has already stumbled on the testing issue, saying that the City has for years ?gone above and beyond? state requirements when it comes to ensuring test integrity, citing a 2009 audit by the City's Comptroller as proof.? As Philissa Cramer points out,

while that audit found no new instances of cheating, it concluded that the city Department of Education had ?engaged in sloppy and unprofessional practices that encourage cheating and data manipulation.?

Is "encourage cheating" the same as cheating?? These are tough times to have to start shoring up our testing dikes.? But if educators wish to continue to pursue accountability practices through testing, they have no choice.? The tsunami is coming.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Having grown up in rural America (Oregon), lived and worked in urban America (Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.) for several decades, and having now settled down in upstate ?high needs rural? New York (this, according to the official New York State Education Department's designation), I have a strong opinion on the subject of rural and urban educational needs.? And that opinion is, Right on RiShawn!

[T]he idea that the nation's education crisis is only limited to the nation's big cities is false, as are arguments that schools serving suburban students are somehow immune from the same problems of abysmal curricula, laggard instruction and cultures of mediocrity in which only some kids are considered capable of learning. The fact that one out of every four fourth-graders in a suburban school ? and that young male fourth-graders (including half of all those on free- or-reduced lunch plans and one-fifth of those who are not) ? are performing at levels of functional illiteracy all but proves lie to that assumption. So is the fact that a fifth of all persistently failing high schools are located in suburbia.

This is the kind of straight talk that many of our differentiated instruction reformers need to hear: ?Rich and poor need the same knowledge.? As a country, we once excelled in this when we believed that ?one size fits all? ? every child should read Shakespeare, know the periodic table, and? be able to name the capitols of the 50 states.

Biddle does not make the point in the same way, but he's close:

While big-city districts are home to half of the nation's dropout factories ? high schools with graduation rates of 60 percent or lower as defined by Johns Hopkins researcher Robert Balfanz ?? one out of every five persistently failing high schools are located in the nation's rural communities. The graduation rates for poor and minority students are also the same: Just 54 percent of black ninth-graders attending rural high schools graduated during the 2005-2006 school year, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, just 8 points higher than the graduation rates for their counterparts in big-city schools.

It doesn't matter whether you sleep in a tent under the stars or a in a tenement under a blanket of smog -- knowledge counts.? And, Yes, most of that knowledge, from Homer to Balzac, Augustine to Mailer, has little to do with whether you live on a farm? or in a housing project.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

And Winerip suggests that PDE's initial response to the latest news ?is not encouraging:

State officials have directed school districts and charter schools with suspicious results to investigate themselves.

This, of course, is another startling reminder of the inability of the system to police itself.? As Winerip points out, it took years of dogged reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution before the state took the charges seriously.

But these cheating scandals appear to be the tip of a rather large iceberg, one which suggests (if I may change metaphors) that the line between bureaucratic indolence and criminality is indeed blurry.? Last fall, for instance, Winerip's colleague Sharon Otterman reported that

[E]vidence had been mounting for some time that the [New York] state's tests, which have formed the basis of almost every school reform effort of the past decade, had serious flaws.

And in February Otterman again wrote,

State and city education officials have known for years that graduating from a public high school does not indicate that a student is ready for college, and have been slowly moving to raise standards. But the political will to acknowledge openly the chasm between graduation requirements and college or job needs is new?.

There is a difference, of course, between changing test scores and sitting on information that the tests had ?serious flaws.?? But not much of one. I for one am not so sure that the latter doesn't carry some serious malpractice implications, especially as the testing stakes increase.? As Winerip correctly observes,

Never before have so many had so much reason to cheat. Students' scores are now used to determine whether teachers and principals are good or bad, whether teachers should get a bonus or be fired, whether a school is a success or failure.

The greater the stakes, the greater the responsibility of educators, at all levels, to ensure the integrity of the system.? Georgia finally got it right when the governor assigned ?sixty of Georgia's finest criminal investigators? to the case, as Winerip reported. ?It is a shame that Pennsylvania's Department of Education apparently did nothing with its July 2009 report on school cheating.? And they only dig the hole deeper, in the face of evidence of systemic malfeasance, by asking that schools investigate themselves.? Pennsylvania must follow Georgia's lead if it is to restore credibility to its public education system.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Smink, the vice president for policy for the National Summer Learning Association, is right to worry that many children, especially low income ones, ?lose? reading and math skills over the summer, and I'm sure us berry- and bean-pickers lost ground to somebody somewhere as we brought in the harvest. But I wouldn't trade places with today's crop of Tiger Mom kids for all the tea in China!? I don't want to sound like David Brooks here, but it is too bad we have so narrowed our views of education that it can't include something other than reading or math "skills."? Sleepovers?? Berry-picking?? Why not?

And tagging the ?American ideal of lazy summers filled with fun? as the culprit for this learning loss is misguided.? In fact, the last time I checked, most American workers had fewer paid vacation days than workers in other nations.? We work hard in America.? Most of us. What we don't do is educate our kids when we have them in the classroom.? Worrying about lazy summer dreams -- or even the end of the agricultural roots for long summer school holidays -- doesn't help get to the source of the summer learning loss problem, which is much the same as the loss incurred by tens of thousands of children during the regular school year. ?Winter, summer, spring, and fall: we keep blaming the victims instead of fixing our curriculum and instructional practices.

I am not against summer ?enrichment? programs ? ?good summer programs with individualized instruction, parental involvement and small classes,? as Smink describes the need.? But doesn't my berry-picking have it all?? And if we don't teach reading, writing, and 'rithmetic during the regular school year, how can we expect to do it in July and August?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Close isn't what we do. It's retaking these schools, and over a number of years changing the management, the teachers, the programs, in schools that aren't working. One of these schools, I think they had a three percent proficiency rating in English and nine percent in math. And the suit wanted to keep that school open. This is just so ridiculous.

When radio host John Gambling described the judge's decision as one ?against the UFT and the NAACP,? Bloomberg interrupted. ?No, no, I would rephrase that. A judge ruling for the kids.?

Indeed, though Bloomberg has stumbled of late (with his appointment of Cathie Black as chancellor) and is suffering from some social contract fatigue with New York's notoriously picky citizens, it is nice to see that he has not given up on his title of the Education Mayor.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Many people would say student teaching is the most important piece of teacher preparation?.? But the field is really barren in the area of standards. The basic accrediting body doesn't even have a standard for how long a student teacher needs to be in the classroom. And most of the institutions we reviewed do not do enough to screen the quality of the cooperating teacher the student will work with.

Stephen Sawchuk at Education Week also notes that the NCTQ ?contends that colleges are preparing too many elementary-level teachers?perhaps more than double the number needed nationally?thereby taxing both the higher education institution and its partner school districts' ability to provide high-quality field experiences.?

Some of the report highlights:

• 43% of the rated schools had no criterion for the selection of mentor teachers other than some teaching experience;
• 52% of them played no role in the selection of mentor teachers, relying on any placement offered by the school district;
• Only one state explicitly requires that mentor teachers be selected on the basis of their ability to improve student learning;
• Only 1 of 25 teachers at a typical school is likely to be both qualified and willing to take on the role of mentor teacher;
• Only 14% require that mentor teachers are fully qualified: 1) have three years of experience, 2) are themselves highly effective and 3) can work well with adults.

The 134 schools studied were selected, says the report, ?using a stratified random sampling that was designed to include approximately three teacher preparation programs in

every state and the District of Columbia.?? And the schools were not given a choice about participating. No doubt, the 74% found to be poor or weak ? which included, for example, New York University and Chicago State ? will not be thrilled by the results, especially when U.S. News and World Report publishes its rankings of ed schools later in the year.

As Kate Walsh tells the Times, ?This is shaping up to be quite a battle royale.?

Where the accountability buck stops is never an easy question to answer.? But thanks to the NCTQ a few of those bucks are at least landing on some university desks.? And there will be increasing pressure on schools of education to do their part in improving student performance.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Charter Fights Move to the Suburbs Winnie Hu had a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times documenting a small trend in the charter movement to open more of the independent public schools in suburbs: about one in five of the nation's 5,000 charters are now in the ?burbs.? Not surprisingly, the story raises some existential questions about public education. ?Mike calls attention to the article in his Myth of the ?good? school post this morning, pointing out that ?One person's `good school' is another person's `bad fit.'? ?But there is also a ?financial question here, which is whether we can afford a good school, or even a good fit, for everyone. Is the computer the answer? Just as we citizens and taxpayers pool our resources to build common roads and ?provide for the common defense,? our ?public school system? has traditionally supposed that we get better education by having common schools. Traditionally, that has meant a central location. But if we don't need bricks and mortar to educate, do we still need a there there?

Rocketship Takes Off One of the newest charter success stories, Palo-Alto-based Rocketship Education may provide some answers.? According to Vauhini Vara of the Wall Street Journal, the the four-year old organization, which operates four schools in Santa Clara County and whose donors include Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, ?is known for a ?hybrid approach. While students spend most of an eight-hour school day in traditional classrooms, they also bone up daily on their shakiest skills by playing educational computer games and getting tutored in small groups. Rocketship has a waiting list of about 500 students for its schools.?? With impressive academic achievement data for its mostly low-income students, Rocketship is looking to add ?20 more charters in the Santa Clara school district.

Performance Pay ? NOT in NYC.? Though Gotham's merit pay program was suspended in January, today, according to Sharon Otterman of the Times, we understand that more than a bad economy killed the $56-million program: a RAND Corporation study concludes that the it didn't improve student performance.? One of the interesting hypotheses by the researchers about why it didn't work, writes Otterman, was that ?all city schools are already under heavy pressure to raise student test scores, or else face sanctions, including closing.?? Carrot or stick?? Apparently, you don't need both.

The Times op-ed on Atlanta It is good see that the Times editorial page still supports education excellence and accountability.? The paper of record opined on Sunday:

Test haters will inevitably blame the standardized testing mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind act for inducing this kind of misconduct. The tests remain a crucial gauge of student performance and an indicator of how much academic progress schools are making. It's the cheats who need to go, not the tests. To restore integrity to the Atlanta system, which serves mainly impoverished children, state and city officials need to improve test security and make sure that those involved in cheating lose their teaching certifications and never work in classrooms again.

And Even Michael Winerip Gets it Right.? I must say, before reading Winerip's story on the Atlanta scandal, I asked myself, ?How far into it before we get comments from the `experts' who blame NCLB and the tests for the cheating?? ?Mercifully, Winerip uses his reportorial talents to good effect this time, and simply tells a great story about how the Georgia governor's team of investigators ?cracked the egg? and got people to talk.? Winerip without ideology is a wonderful thing.

Schools Matter ? Even for Geoffrey Canada This could be a real shocker, especially for Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone: two economists studying the HCZ's unique approach to teaching poor children, which combines full-service social services and good charter schools, are finding that good schools are enough.? According to Matthew Yglesias, a Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer,? in a new paper in the American Economic Journal, conclude:

Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an HCZ middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics. The effects in elementary school are large enough to close the racial achievement gap in both mathematics and ELA. We conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. Community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient.

Don't Shoot the Parents In a major victory for proponents of the ?parent trigger? law, California's Board of Education last week, ?after months of controversy,? according to the Los Angeles Times, ?set out a clear road map...to allow parents unparalleled rights to force major changes at low-performing schools.?? The radical law ? ?the first in the nation to give parents the right to petition for new staff, management and programs at their children's schools,? says the LAT ? allows a school to be turned into a charter school if more than 50 percent of parents sign a petition requesting the change. But see also RiShawn Biddle, who cautions that ?the NEA's California affiliate, which has worked hard ?to curb the expansion of charter schools and tie the hands of cash-strapped school districts,? will now try to ?force trigger parents ?to go through approval by half of [the union's] rank-and-file members, which would effectively keep the schools under failed district management (and under NEA and AFT influence).?

Saving 4,100 NYC Teaching Jobs Finally, another dramatic tale, this one told by Javier Hernandez in the NY Times. It features tough contract negotiations between New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his administrators and teacher union bosses -- ?described as some of the most chaotic of Mr. Bloomberg's tenure, agreements imploded abruptly, meetings erupted into shouting matches??? It had a happy ending, if you consider the job-saving felicitous, but it's worth reading and wondering, Does any of this really improve the education opportunities of our children?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

According to Stern,

On a battery of reading tests, the kindergartners in the Core Knowledge program had achieved gains five times greater than those of students in the control group. The second-year study showed that the Core Knowledge kids made reading gains twice as great as those of students in the control group.

This is no surprise to fans of E.D. Hirsch, whose research over the last 25 years (from Cultural Literacy (1987) to The Making of Americans (2010)), has shown that teaching children a wide-ranging but comprehensive content heavy curriculum actually improves reading more than teaching reading skills does.? As Robert Pondiscio of the Core Knowledge Foundation explains it,

Two large (and largely overlooked) problems remain at the root of the reading crisis:? a lack of a coherent elementary school curriculum, and a stubborn insistence on teaching and testing reading comprehension as a how-to ?skill.?? Comprehension is highly correlated with general knowledge?the more you know, the greater your ability to read, write, speak and listen with fluency and comprehension.? Thus an essential component of reading comprehension instruction must be a focused commitment to build broad background knowledge in a coherent manner from the earliest days of schools?precisely what CKLA seeks to do.

Stern emphasizes,

Among Hirsch's insights is that disadvantaged kids quickly fall behind in reading because of inadequate background knowledge; therefore, imparting such knowledge in the early grades is even more important than conveying basic reading skills.

Coincidentally, Stern's Daily News op-ed was published at the same time as a front-page story in Education Week reported a new push to improve P-2 reading. Unfortunately, though, according to Catherine Gewertz's account, the increased efforts in these lower grades seem to emphasize the same skill-oriented approaches that have proven so unsuccessful in the higher grades. Indeed, despite Herculean efforts and many millions of dollars spent to improve reading skills (drill-and-kill phonics, etc.), the National Assessment of Educational Progress 4^th- and 8^th-grade reading scores have been flat for 30 years ? flat at very low levels. As Gewertz points out, the latest NAEP (2009) showed that ?only one-third of 4^th graders scored at or above `proficient.'?

It is discouraging that our education system seems so blind to good ideas.? As Stern writes about the Gotham experiment, ?Keeping this potential breakthrough alive would cost a mere $300,000 per year - which seems a far smarter investment than the $70 million paid in bonuses to teachers and principals who produced zero reading gains.?

Let's hope that New York City will see the light.? More importantly, let's hope that educators all over the country start to realize that planting healthy content seeds will a produce a bumper crop of good readers.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

...after spending more than $1.5 million of investors' money on consultants and lawyers,? [he] has walked away from the project, and the schools will not open as planned this fall, leaving others involved stunned and frustrated.

It is hard to tell what this means for Vander Ark, who was plucked from the obscurity of running a small school district in Washington state in 1999 to be the Gates Foundation's billion-dollar point man on education. ?According to a 2006 Education Next profile by Paul Hill, it was Vander Ark who devised the small high schools strategy that Gates pursued, handing out tens of millions of dollars to school districts all over the country ? including Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, New York ? to break up large high schools.? Vander Ark would eventually move the foundation to fund entrepreneurial endeavors, including charter and choice initiatives.

Vander Ark left Gates at the end of 2006,? a nationally-known figure in education, and started City Prep Academies in 2008. It was a for-profit CMO that, according to Phillips, ?was financed by $1.5 million from Revolution Learning, a venture fund where he is a managing partner.?

This was the group that got the three charters, hired principals, found buildings, and was beginning to interview prospective teachers when Vander Ark pulled the plug.? There is some disagreement, according to the Times report, about how well-informed Vander Ark kept his board and whether it was a weak economy or weak leadership that caused the failure.? For the moment, it's a lot of bad blood and recrimination.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Indeed, young Matthew Sprowl, ?disruptive and easily distracted,? seems to be the poster child for what charter critics have long said is the unfair advantage that charters have over their traditional school counterparts: charters don't have to take all kids, regular schools do. In his third week of kindergarten at Moskowitz's Harlem Success Academy 3, Matthew was suspended for three days, writes Winerip, for ?bothering other children.? The problems escalated and, with help from Harlem Success, Matthew soon found a regular public school, where he was later diagnosed as having ?attention disorder? and, over the last three years, ?has thrived.?

It's an interesting story and Winerip tells it well ? too well to make his argument against charters stick. He gives Moskowitz schools their due, pointing out that her ?students earn top honors.? ?Typically, that's the setup for the skimming trap. ?It didn't work -- Success 3 just has too many Special Ed and English Language Learners to make the charge stick.? Winerip makes another mistake (for his argument's point of view) in allowing Moskowitz assistant Jenny Sedlis to explain what happened to Matthew. Even in the short space Winerip gives her, Sedlis makes the chase for charters, convincingly;? at least for these eyes and ears. In what Winerip says were ?two voluminous e-mails totaling 5,701 words,? Sedlis writes:

We helped place him in a school that would better suit his needs?? His success today confirms the correctness of his placement. I believe that 100 percent of the time we were acting in Matthew's best interest and that the end result benefited him and benefited P.S. 75, which now has a child excelling.

Though Winerip tries mightily to cloud the issue with statistics (cherry-picked?), this is exactly how choice is supposed to work.? Many children do not thrive in traditional public schools and now have a choice to ?move? to one that might be a better fit.? If sometimes movement is in the other direction, will we accuse traditional schools of cherry-picking?? We should be applauding Matthew, his mother, and the educators that have given him this? opportunity to succeed.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

A Little Shakespeare in Welding Class, Please! The deep recession has exposed a few education ribs in the nation's torso the last couple of years. And Motoko Rich has an excellent report about the impact budget cutbacks are having on the technical and trade schools.

The administration has proposed a 20 percent reduction in its fiscal 2012 budgdet for career and technical education, to a little more than $1 billion, even as it seeks to increase overall education funding by 11 percent.

The silver lining ? and best part of the story -- is toward the end, when Rich addresses the problem, as she writes, that ?the skills that employers most frequently say are in shortest supply are critical thinking, the ability to work in teams and communication, not specialized training.? ??She cites a Pioneer Institute study pointing out that manuals for many of these trade jobs, like plumbing and auto mechanics, require Grade 14 reading level and that more technical schools are realizing that even kids destined for blue-collar and busted-knuckle jobs should know how to read and write.

On the Avenue Seeing Benno Schmidt with hard-hat in hand does not mean that the former president of Yale is opening a trade school ? especially when he's standing next to education entrepreneur Chris Whittle and media executive Alan Greenberg.? What the three are doing, says the Times, is building The Best School $75 Million Can Buy on Manhattan's West side.? I could do that.? But this, say these educational entrepreneurs,? is just the first of what will be a stable of ?world school? campuses built for the rich all over the globe. (Best see Mike's Understanding Upper-Middle-Class Parents.)

It is a wonderful tale of wretched excess in a city famous for it ? it's not the $40,000 tuition as much as the education ambition: ?a school where Singapore math and British geography collide with Julliard-level violin instruction, in 20 shining schools around the world.?

The big question will be whether Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children's Zone students, just a few miles north, will make these rich kids eat academic crow on the state tests.

Don't Let the Smoke Get in Your Eyes Which is the segue to saying that? it's tough to see Paul Tough, who wrote an excellent book on Geoffrey Canada (Whatever It Takes), jump on the nit-picky, anti-reform bandwagon with his new essay in the Times Magazine, ?No, Seriously: No Excuses.? ?Following the lead of Diane Ravitch, who took out after several charter schools (including Urban Prep in Chicago and ?Bruce Randolph in Denver) that had the unfortunate accident of being praised by Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, Tough piles on by poking fun at them for trying to defend themselves.

To point out the obvious: These are excuses. In fact, they are the very same excuses for failure that the education-reform movement was founded to oppose.

Do we really care?? Most of the criticism by Ravitch and her disciples is more sophistry than substance and, in light of the Dresden-like conditions that continue to pervade our inner city schools (not to mention the systemic cheating scandals in status quo districts like Atlanta), it seems a bit like so much fiddling while Rome burns.

As Bill Tucker says at Ed Next, schools like Urban Prep and Bruce Randolph may not be perfect, but they are more likely ?part of the solution, not the problem.?

I think Bill, Benno, Paul and Motoko should get together and figure this out.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

After several years of state and local budget cuts, thousands of school districts across the nation are gutting summer-school programs, cramming classes into four-day weeks or lopping days off the school year, even though virtually everyone involved in education agrees that American students need more instruction time.

This could be the perfect storm for the Save Our Schools marchers, who might want to add this chant to their July 30 Washington protest repertoire: Dumber Down and Dumber Dee!? Dumber Down and Dumber Dee!

In all seriousness, I hope the folks rallying in oppressively muggy D.C.? later this month? ?for justice in education? include in their request of our education policymakers something tangible for the tens of thousands of American children not being educated by our current system. If we need to solve poverty first, then I would hope they please desist with the calls for more money for schools.? If they want more money for schools, then I would advise that they quit with the solve-poverty-first mantra.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

At the extremes, I think, it's easier to see "good" and "bad" schools -- or "rich" and "poor" ones -- and make decisions about how best to educate your children.?It's tougher in the middle, where most of us live ? or think we live -- but the sociology of the thing, no matter where you are, is a huge factor; all parents have an eye on "future happiness" or "future success" for their kids and run that through their own metrics, which usually include schooling. Lavish spending masks lots of academic problems just as the lack of spending can exacerbate them.? But even in the dark cave of ?adequacy and equity,? the good school / different school shadows are dancing. ?Even the rich want ?good? schools.

In this context I believe that E.D. Hirsch's insight about "background knowledge" provides the best guide for educators and policymakers.? Despite the new noise that the "college isn't for everyone? crowd is making, I think most of us have a pretty good idea of what we should know in order to be successful and our system of colleges does a pretty fair job of managing the marketplace of knowledge so that college grads will get jobs and be happy and successful, etc.? Sure, it's popular to rail against ?one size fits all,? but most people still believe (even if secretly) that true north is true north, even in literature, and that we best know it if we are to get where we want to go.

Poor kids do need different schools, not because they're poor, but because they tend not to get the background knowledge at home that the more affluent kids tend to get with homelives that are book- and language-rich. ?A ?commentor on Mike's post, who identified himself as a former school board member from an affluent district, seems to make this point ( but in reverse), describing a rich district with poor academics and high school grads who don't do well in college. ?Yes, Virginia, even rich kids can be dumb.

My concern with the "different" schools movement is that it is so susceptible to dumbing down. ?If you don't have a firm grasp on -- or belief in -- the kind of knowledge that folks like Hirsch believe is essential, you run the risk of giving different kids inferior schools instead of better ones. And yes, there is a difference.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Let's hope so. No doubt, the case will fan the flames of the high-stakes testing fires. Are we putting too much pressure on teachers to ?perform?? And their administrators? Apparently, even one-time National Superintendent of the Year Beverly Hall is implicated. (As Severson reports, she just retired and? ?left Tuesday for a Hawaiian vacation.?) How do you explain systemic cheating?

As I opined last February, ?the range and depth of the problem, especially given the improbability of a conspiracy, is troubling.? Lacking a conspiracy, we are left with an explanation of?moral and ethical breakdown of epidemic proportions. And the question: how is the virus spread??

I'm not sure if the? "conspiracy of silence" proves me wrong, but there are things that can be done?including putting people in jail?and I would hope that Governor Deal is serious about consequences.

By the same token, our policymakers need to take a close look at the policies and practices that not only encourage cheating, but make it easy. When I wrote about Atlanta last February, there was another story about cheating, in New York schools. The word there was ?manipulating? data. As Sharon Otterman of the Times reported,

The Regents exams [the statewide tests that seniors must pass to graduate] are graded by teachers within schools and teachers are not barred from grading their own students.

If the difference between a pass and a fail is a question or two and your job depends on it, the incentive to cheat is high.

The New York city Regent exam score results suggest the problem, as Otterman reported:

At one Queens high school, the number of students scoring 65 to 69 [65 is the passing grade] last year in the five most popular Regents exams?integrated algebra, global history, biology, English and United States history?was more than five times the number who scored 60 to 64.

We need to know that our teachers are teaching and that children are learning. We need tests. And we need accountability. The next move in Atlanta is crucial to restoring credibility to a discredited school system. But what will that move be?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

--------

*The Internet age has diminished the meaning of ?yesterday,? ?today,? and, probably, ?tomorrow.? But I hand it to the Times for paying attention to these kinds of details. At the bottom of the online version of the story, they write, ?A version of this article appeared in print on July 6, 2011, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Systematic Cheating Is Found In Atlanta's School System.?

**The Times should have quoted the Governor's press release here.

Those guys were brilliant?and brave.

The crisis now before us is that we are creating citizens who won't remember the revolutionaries and what they did, much less appreciate the reasons for the revolution. We know that only 17 percent of our eighth graders scored at or above proficient on the 2010 NAEP history test. (It is somewhat reassuring, perhaps, that 62 percent of them were able to identify the Declaration as the source of "we hold these truths to be self-evident.") But Fordham took us into the heart of darkness earlier this year with its report, The State of State U.S. History Standards 2011, documenting the sorry state of our schools' approach to the teaching of history. Wrote Checker Finn and Kathleen Porter-Magee in the study's foreword:

The results of this rigorous analysis paint a bleak picture: A majority of states' standards are mediocre to awful. In fact, the average grade across all states is barely a D. In twenty-eight jurisdictions?a majority of U.S. states?the history standards earn Ds or below. Eighteen earn Fs.

As I considered ways of memorializing Independence Day (I vetoed my wife's suggestion of joining 3 million people on Manhattan's West Side to watch the fireworks there), I decided to spend some time in front of the computer (would Thomas Jefferson have a Facebook page?) and find out what our state standards say about the Declaration of Independence; rather, what are they saying our kids should know about it.

I followed a number of the online accessible links to the state standards that are listed in each state's review in the State of State report. Once there, I did a search for "Declaration of Independence." ? Below, I've listed the results from two of the grade-A states (South Carolina and California) and three of the Fs (Alaska, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania); I have recorded every mention of the document. This little exercise is not, of course, meant to be in the least comprehensive (that is what State of State is?and it should be studied by every educator), but it suggests what's possible (the A states) and, unfortunately, what is the reality.

One of the remarkable things about so many of the standards documents that I looked at?even the good ones?is the amount of throat-clearing they do. California, for instance, first mentions "Declaration of Independence" on page six of a twenty-six-page introduction to its quite comprehensible and comprehensive 234-page history and social studies standards (see below).? The mention is part of "framework" number eight (there are seventeen total):

This framework incorporates a multicultural perspective throughout the history?social science curriculum.... The framework embodies the understanding that the national identity, the national heritage, and the national creed are pluralistic and that our national history is the complex story of many peoples and one nation, of e pluribus unum, and of an unfinished struggle to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

All fine and good, I suppose, but it is an example of an unwelcome tendency on the part of too many of our educators (as the Fordham report all too well describes) to drape their standards with excessive?and often unsophisticated?historiography; and that's being kind. At least, as we'll see, California gets to the nitty-gritty (and does it well, in my estimation); most states never get beyond the throat-clearing.

Without further ado... I present the "Declaration of Independence" as seen by five of our states (these are actual excerpts):

South Carolina (Fordham grade: A)

--Grade 3:? Analyze the causes of the American Revolution?including Britain's passage of the Tea Act, the Intolerable Acts, the rebellion of the colonists, and the Declaration of Independence?and South Carolina's role in these events.

--Grade 4:? Hypothesize about why parts of the original Declaration of Independence, especially the antislavery section, were eliminated by the full Continental Congress.

--Grade 4:?? Illustrate how the ideals of equality as described in the Declaration of Independence were slow to take hold as evident in the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Acts.

--Grade 8:? Explain the interests and roles of South Carolinians in the events leading to the American Revolution, including the state's reactions to the Stamp Act and the Tea Act; the role of Christopher Gadsden and the Sons of Liberty; and the role of the four South Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence?Edward Rutledge, Arthur Middleton, Thomas Lynch Jr., and Thomas Heyward Jr.

--High School ?Core Area?:

: Explain the impact of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution on the American colonies and on the world at large.

: Write an essay on how the decision to declare American independence from Great Britain was reached. Who was involved, what events led up to the decision, how did they decide what to include in the Declaration of Independence, and how did the colonists inform Great Britain of this declaration?

: Summarize the basic principles of American democracy including popular sovereignty, the rule of law, the balance of power, the separation of powers, limited government, federalism, and representative government as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

****

California (Fordham grade:? A-)

--Grade 1:? Identify American symbols, landmarks, and essential documents, such as the flag, bald eagle, Statue of Liberty, U.S. Constitution, and Declaration of Independence, and know the people and events associated with them.

--Grade 5: This experiment was inspired by the innovative dream of building a new society, a new order for the ages, in which the promises of the Declaration of Independence would be realized.

: As the war began, young Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence with its idealistic statements that all men are created equal and that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed. Students should understand the courage required of those who signed this document because they risked their lives and property.

: To understand the continuing attraction of immigrants to the United States, students should become familiar with the tenets of the American creed by discussing the meaning of key phrases in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

: Understand the people and events associated with the drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence and the document's significance, including the key political concepts it embodies, the origins of those concepts, and its role in severing ties with Great Britain.

: Understand how the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence changed the way people viewed slavery.

--Grade 7: They also will see how the principles implicit in the Magna Carta were embodied in the English Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the American Declaration of Independence.

:? Discuss how the principles in the Magna Carta were embodied in such documents as the English Bill of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence.

--Grade 8:? Readings from the Declaration of Independence should be used to discuss these questions: What are ?natural rights? and ?natural law?? What did Jefferson mean when he wrote that ?all men are created equal? and ?endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights?? What were the ?Laws of Nature? and ?Nature's God? to which Jefferson appealed?

: They should read and discuss the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiment and compare it with the Declaration of Independence.

: Students analyze the early and steady attempts to abolish slavery and to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

: Analyze the philosophy of government expressed in the Declaration of Independence, with an emphasis on government as a means of securing individual rights (e.g., key phrases such as ?all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights?).

: Analyze the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution and the success of each in implementing the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

: Students analyze the early and steady attempts to abolish slavery and to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

: Discuss Abraham Lincoln's presidency and his significant writings and speeches and their relationship to the Declaration of Independence, such as his ?House Divided? speech (1858), Gettysburg Address (1863), Emancipation Proclamation (1863), and inaugural addresses (1861 and 1865).

--Grade 10:? The philosophy of natural rights and natural law on which the democratic revolutions were based should be fully discussed and analyzed, with particular attention to the language of the American Declaration of Independence.

: List the principles of the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights (1689), the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791).

--Grade 11:? Students analyze the significant events in the founding of the nation and its attempts to realize the philosophy of government described in the Declaration of Independence.

--Grade 12:? In addition, students should study the Declaration of Independence, Washington's Farewell Address, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation for deeper understanding of the fundamental principles and moral values of American democracy.

: Explain how the U.S. Constitution reflects a balance between the classical republican concern with promotion of the public good and the classical liberal concern with protecting individual rights; and discuss how the basic premises of liberal constitutionalism and democracy are joined in the Declaration of Independence as ?self-evident truths.? [This is a no-no. The actual words in the Declaration are: ?we hold these truths to be self-evident.?]

: When appropriate to the comprehension of pupils, instructional materials shall include a copy of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (Education Code Section 60043).

****

Connecticut (Fordham grade:? F)? In all of twenty-eight pages of dense type K-12 social studies standards, not a single mention of the Declaration.

****

Alaska (here and here) (Fordham grade: F)? Poor Alaska. It has managed to create a nearly indecipherable gumbo?all subjects, all grades?in these two documents?one, 144 pages and the other, a collection of dozens of files, unknowable?and mention the Declaration only once. ?Best to defer to Fordham's assessors, who wrote,? "The content standards, however, do not actually specify content. Instead, they each describe four to seven broad and abstract goals. In history, for example, one of the four stated goals calls for students to 'understand historical themes through factual knowledge of time, places, ideas, institutions, cultures, people, and events.' Then, within each such goal, the standards describe (again, broadly) the skills that students must master to meet the stated goal."

****

Pennsylvania (Fordham grade: F) This should be an embarrassment: The Keystone state's ?academic standards for history? are all of 18 pages long and nothing to write home about?much less send home. But at least this state, whose City of Brotherly Love gave birth to it, managed at least two mentions of the Declaration:

--Grade 3:? Identify and describe primary documents, material artifacts and historic sites important in United States history.

: ?Documents (e.g., Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights)

Don't cry for me, Argentina.? But I do hope that a few American policymakers and educators spend some time today considering how to teach our youth the significance of the 1,322 words those fifty-six guys mailed off to Britain this day in 1776.? And lest we think these folks were prudes, I will end with this, from Modern Drunkard Magazine, a little-known "fact" that probably won't make it into any of the state standards:

What we are not told [about the founders], and I think we can guess why, is that booze played a large part in the lives of our most popular Revolutionary heroes. Like it or not, the American Revolution happened hand-in-hand with bouts of awe-inspiring drunkenness and the United States is a nation built upon intoxication.

That explains it.

?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

I wish Brooks had spent more time exploring the difficulty these change-averse educators have in trying to argue that they should be paid more for doing something they claim is impossible to do (i.e., improve schools), but I'll settle for Brooks' wonderful exposition of why testing is such a bogus issue.

The only schools that are ?distorted by testing,? Brooks argues, are bad schools,? "the schools the reformers haven't touched.?

Brooks manages to work in references to a host of change agents and academics ? Whitney Tilson, KIPP, E.D. Hirsch, Caroline Hoxby ? to make his case.? And he concludes with this simple truth: ?If your school teaches to the test, it's not the test's fault. It's the leaders of your school.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Rick Karlin of the Albany Times Union, says it's the first time in four decades that NYSUT has sued the Regents, which isn't surprising since NYSUT is used to getting its way (see this 2008 NYSUT victory pronouncement).? According to Karlin, ?NYSUT initially agreed to a plan in which improvement in state-issued tests would count for 20 percent of a teacher's evaluation. But that was later increased to 40 percent, which NYSUT contends came out of the blue.?

The union's precipitous fall from grace was made painfully apparent when even the Democratic Governor, traditionally a NYSUT ally, weighed in on the matter. In fact, Andrew Cuomo helped move the student score needle up, writing in a letter to the Regents just before their May vote, ?This change would ensure that greater balance is struck between using objective teacher evaluation measures?and subjective teacher evaluation measures.?

Ouch.

In a press release from the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, Jason Brooks calls the suit ?an act of desperation?:

The state legislative session has ended and NYSUT doesn't have anything it can boast of to its members.? It lost on preventing school funding cuts, it lost on increasing state taxes, it lost when its member teachers showed a compassionate willingness to make contract concessions to save the jobs of their peers and programs for their students, and it lost on its attempts to defeat the long-awaited and desperately needed property tax cap? ?Evidently, NYSUT believes that the last place it can look for friends is behind the judge's bench.

This being New York, with union dues still rolling in, you can't count NYSUT out.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

And coming on the heels of Dana Goldstein's new profile of Meier's Bridging Differences partner Diane Ravitch, the essay also reveals something about how the differences between the two educators got bridged so quickly. ??In fact, it's welcome news (to me) that Ravitch has roots in the socialist movement (she worked at The New Leader and was part of the ?New York anti-Communist left,? says Goldstein, ?for decades?) because it makes her recent ?apostasy,? as Goldstein calls Ravitch's break with the reform movement, more understandable.

Meier seems to have no apostate leanings and even gently chides Ravitch for her ?overly enthusiastic endorsement of the schools of yesterday? (referring to Ravitch's small manifesto about next month's Save Our Schools march on Washington).? This may speak to Ravitch's current manic (see Goldstein re: ?late-night twittering habits and Liam's "major omission" take) school establishment advocacy, but Meier continues with the surprises, admitting that ?there are times?when it's best to close a school and rebuild.? ?(She wants to take that issue up with Diane ?next year.? I can't wait.)

Though the point of Meier's essay is, as previously noted (see part 1), ostensibly about ?everyone going to college? ?-- in fact, most reformers I know are? more concerned with whether we get kids college-ready -- ?Meier has bigger fish to fry:

The corporations have already launched a new round of attacks on postsecondary education. Hardly their first attempt to muscle in to the money to be made in this field, as well as the opportunity to impose their ideals on the nation. Yes, its not just the dollars they see. I grant the fact that, like me, they have a vision. It's just not mine.

?The corporations??? What do they have to do with this? As with Ravitch's constant plaint of late about ?privatization? of public education, Meier muddles her pedagogy with her politics; she doesn't much like the free market and it would seem to be that distrust that drives both her and Ravitch's current education advocacy efforts. At another point, Meier says,

Once again, by failing to insist on thinking about purposes, we let others use our schools for other purposes than "ours;" or as they would say, relying on "the market" to solve it for us.

Putting aside the odd us and them problems with her statement ? ?we let others use our schools?? -- it is hard to align Meier's fear of ?the market? with her decidedly strong belief in individual autonomy, a free market if you will, within schools. This begins to get to contradiction at the heart of the progressive movement's ?thought world? that E.D. Hirsch has so brilliantly exposed in his many writings, including his recent review of Ravitch's latest book (and was so ably documented by Ravitch herself in her pre-apostate 2000 tome Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms).? That will be the hardest difference to bridge here.

Indeed, what does Meier believe the purpose of an education system to be?? More importantly, how does she propose to know whether the purpose is achieved? ?For Meier, and now Ravitch, there will be no easy answer without coming to terms with the failure of the current system and the successes of the reformers.? It could be a hopeful sign that Meier at least is trying to get in touch with her own reform roots.

As she says, ?I'm a revolutionary in spirit?this cannot continue! But I'm a `reformist' in practice since it is, in fact, the fastest way to get to where I want to go.?? Terrific. But why wait until next year to discuss needed reforms?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

A dishwasher with a college degree earns 83% more than a dishwasher with no college

A cashier with a college degree, 56% more

A plumber, 39%

Etcetera.

Writes Leonhardt:

The most unfortunate part of the case against college is that it encourages children, parents and schools to aim low.

Why should we even be arguing about this?

Leonhardt quotes David Autor, an M.I.T. economist, saying rather bluntly, ?Sending more young Americans to college is not a panacea?. Not sending them to college would be a disaster.?

Unfortunately, that disaster, aided and abetted by smart people like Deborah Meier, is already upon us.? (Full disclosure:? Ms. Meier is a somewhat neighbor of mine and we share some Hyde Park (Chicago) memories, if from different times.? We once lunched together, quite agreeably, in part most likely because we didn't talk a lot about education.) How prevalent is the notion that college ain't such a big deal?

A couple of years ago I surveyed a group of parents and teachers in a school district not far from the one that Meier's grandkids attend, and one of the questions I posed? was, ??Should the goal of our K-12 school district be to make kids smart enough to go to college??? There was a unanimous and resounding NO.? To say I was stunned is an understatement -- these were? folks who cared enough to join a group that was going to improve our district! As we discussed the question further, it turns out that the word ?smart? bothered everyone.? ?There was much palaver about ?preparing kids for life? and making them ?critical thinkers" -- my? own critical thinking suggested an answer to the question of why the district ranked near the bottom of academic rankings--and finally, in frustration, I blurted, ?Wouldn't it be nice if your plumber could quote Shakespeare??? ?No!? said the retired math teacher ? and he wasn't joking.? (See "plumber," above.)

America's anti-intellectualism is nothing new, of course.? But I'm not so sure it has ever been so deeply imbedded in the school system.? The fact that respected educators like Deborah Meier are singing Luddite songs -- in chorus with teachers and parents -- nearly two decades after A Nation at Risk is scary.

I'll let Leonhardt have the last words:

I don't doubt that the [college for all] skeptics are well meaning. But, in the end, their case against college is an elitist one?for me and not for thee. And that's rarely good advice.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

An egregious fiscal abuse on its own terms, the bill (S.4067-A) would allow school districts across the state (except for New York City) to issue 15-year bonds to cover a portion of their rising teacher pension costs over the next several years ? at least $1 billion in all, by one estimate.? The measure was introduced two months ago at the behest of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) as a way of reducing pressure on teachers to make contract concessions.

The drama in Albany continues.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

[P]ublic workers have a unique relationship with elected officials, because government employees are effectively negotiating with bosses whom they can campaign to vote out of office if they don't get what they want. Private unions, in contrast, don't usually have the power to fire their members' employers.

Therein lies a problem.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

But the issue that caught my eye was that of whether KIPP has anything to crow about.? In an early question to Barth, Rick says, ?some critics have asked? whether KIPP's long-term college graduation rates are ?really four times the comparable cohort, given that KIPP students have chosen to attend.? ?The key phrase here, of course, is ?chosen to attend.? And Hess is asking the question that has dogged charters from the beginning.? Do they succeed because they do a better job educating kids or because they select better, more motivated kids? (Does Harvard make the man or does the man make Harvard?)

One of the more succinct statements about the ?problem? was a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal last month.? One Daniel Cooper was responding to a Joel Klein op-ed piece (Scenes from the New York Education Wars). Cooper, a parent, wasn't persuaded by Klein's random lottery argument to counter the skimming charge because ?it is a random lottery among the self-selected.?? Charter students have, as Rick says, ?chosen? to attend.? And, continues Cooper:

Once chosen by the random lottery, there are further conditions for families to satisfy. When my child was chosen to be offered a seat in a Harlem charter school, the admissions packet we received included a commitment card to be returned by a specified due date, a set of 20 forms to be completed, and an announcement indicating that a parent and the child must attend a mandatory 5-hour enrollment meeting on a specified Saturday in May as a condition for accepting the seat. These requirements are not onerous enough to deter a family that is committed to a child's education, but almost certainly they would screen out a family that is not so committed?. [C]harter schools benefit from filtering mechanisms unavailable to nearby district schools?.

True? ?Barth's reply to the ?chosen to attend? question is interesting:

Again, we welcome these tough questions. What the Mathematica research is showing is, in the case of academic readiness, our fifth graders are coming in really, really behind. They are coming in farther behind the students in districts in which these schools are located. Over time, our research is showing that our schools can make a big difference. And we're incredibly proud of our outcomes.

Good answer, except that he doesn't really address the ?chosen to attend? problem. ?He's defensive.? My answer would be this:? Part of what KIPP ? and every other charter ? does is unleash pent-up demand. It doesn't steal motivated parents; it creates them.? How?? Charters market ?themselves as better schools, for one thing.? Hype?? You bet.? Carnival barkers?? This way to the Education!? Previously unmotivated parents suddenly get motivated; no one has ever vied for their attentions, surely not the neighborhood schools that think that most of them are unmotivated. ?Traditional schools would do well to emulate charters, work to earn parents respect and ?chosen to attend? status by creating good schools.? This way they might find out they have better parents and kids than they thought.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Start with the test. As the headline asks, ?Are You as Smart as a 12^th Grader??? Well, my guess is that the average adult American is probably as smart as the average 12^th-grader, considering that only 12 percent of the NAEP sample of seniors were proficient in the history test.? But the questions are not easy ? everyone remember what the Ordinance of Nullification was? ? and the test, however golden a standard,? is probably a better measure of the nation's curriculum anarchy than of student knowledge.? (See my post on the national obsession with putting the assessment cart before the curriculum horse.)

Mr. Wooten's essay illustrates a different set of challenges for our schools; most specifically, how do you teach writing?? The young man's op-ed essay is wonderfully constructed and shows a mastery of the topic and of the writing craft that is far more mature than the standard 12^th-grade fare I've read.

I didn't think much about [about being the product of an unknown sperm donor] until 2006, when I was in eighth grade and my teacher assigned my class a genealogy project. We were supposed to research our family history and create a family tree to share with the class. In the past, whenever questioned about my father's absence by friends or teachers, I wove intricate alibis: he was a doctor on call; he was away on business in Russia; he had died, prematurely, of a heart attack. In my head, I'd always dismissed him as my `biological father,' with that distant, medical phrase.

Assuming it hasn't been too seriously edited, Wooten's prose begs the question, for me, how did he come by such talent?? Can it be taught?

I will let people more adept than I am take a swing at that. But I suggest two things other than what we seem preoccupied with doing in too many of our schools, which is ?making kids write as soon as they can hold a pencil (or tap at a keyboard).? The two better methods of teaching children how to write are:? a) have them read and b) teach them how to diagram a sentence.? As someone who came to the writing craft by way of the latter, via Father Ignatius's drill-and-kill sentence diagramming program, and who has, more or less, made a living trying to string words together ? or help others do it ? I can tell you that learning the basics helps (and will compensate for some reading gaps). By the same token, an avid reader (of good stuff), will learn the basics of grammar and sentence structure by osmosis and so may not need to know the parts of speech backwards and forwards. In any case, one of my favorite pieces of advice on this score comes from Pat Conroy, a superbly gifted writer, in his memoir, My Losing Season. As I recall the scene from the book, sometime in high school (at the Citadel), young Conroy, probably about Wooten's age, decides he might want to be a writer and so asked his English teacher what he should do. And the answer went something like this, ?Read the great books, Mr. Conroy, and only the great books. There isn't time for anything else.?

So, keep reading, Mr. Wooten ? and writing. ?And if any of Mr. Wooten's teachers would like to share their secrets, please write as well. ?And please tell us something about teaching history while you're at it.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

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*I peeked, at Google: Leesville Road appears to be a public school in Raleigh, NC.

Perhaps you could convince me that we are taking two steps forward and only one step backward in our focus on educating ?black boys.?? (I hate the term more than the N-word.)? But most of the time it feels as if we're doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

So Education Week is reporting that ?Experts Call for Early Focus on Black Boys' Nonacademic Skills.?? When will the academic silliness stop? ?When will our scholars and policymakers admit that African Americans need an education just as much as Caucasians, Asians, et al. And that the duty of a school is to provide it, regardless of race or ethnicity?

The interesting thing, in my experience, is that many of our schools are equal opportunity failure factories; they can be just as insensitive to white social and emotional needs as to black social and emotional needs.? (Did the recent NAEP history scores bring on a wave of calls for ?white boy? symposia?) We keep shoving the responsibility for school failure on to the kids ? poor kids, black kids, disabled kids, tall kids, fat kids ? instead of focusing our efforts on making schools (I mean, the adults in them) responsive.? Schools that work tend to be just as good about providing a good curriculum as fixing water fountains -- and just as bad at both. (And as Kathleen suggests, the age of the "individualized learning plan" may be making things worse.)

Just as you don't stop teaching math to fix a water fountain, so you don't stop teaching literature, history, and science because a child has an emotional problem. But that is what happens.? I heard a wonderful speech the other day by one of New York? State's newest Regents, James O. Jackson,? an African-American, who complained that our schools have been "turned into social service agencies." And he's right.? Every social problem gets a curriculum. ?Drugs ? we have anti-drug classes. Character?? Hours of character-building exercises.? Jobs?? We'll visit employers (forget whether the kid can't read or write).? Teen pregnancy?? Let's hand out dolls and condoms and spend hours talking about body plumbing.? Did someone say Dickens?? Names of the fifty states?? Abraham Lincoln?? Who's got time?

I'm sorry, dear scholars, but African American children, like most children, would do much better later in life if school taught them how to read and write ? and, hopefully, a little history and science, art and math along the way ? instead of being served up what has become a steady and distracting and unhealthy diet of paternalism and fries.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

I would like to add another view from the trenches: and would suggest that Washington policymakers take a deep breath and understand that, in the provinces, most people still don't know what a charter school is.? Sure, as Rotherham suggests, ?the term `charter school' is increasingly meaningless? ? inside the beltway, that is. Outside the beltway, the term ?charter school? has never been meaningful. The powerful teachers unions, in small districts and large, have so demonized charters for so long, have so hamstrung local reporters and their Chamber of Commerce publishers, that most people ? and most education journalists ?? still think of the appearance of charter schools on the scene as the education version of the invasion of the body-snatchers.

For those interested, here's how, thanks to John Merrow, the modern charter school movement was invented (see history of charters).

But I have found that once people understand the reason for charters, and their advantages over their traditional school brothers, there's no turning back. I lead a committee in my district to study the schools' academic performance and recall that, at the beginning, ?charters? were a big no-no.? Six months later, after 16 meetings, previously anti-charter folks were? convinced that charters were a viable alternative to traditional schools.? One formerly anti-charter parent blurted out at the end of the study sessions, ?We ought to turn all our schools into charters.?

The moral?? Before we end the times ? let's at least let people know what they entailed.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries.

And:

The evidence we have reviewed suggests that high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented in the United States, decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement.

No doubt there will be much parsing and gnashing of policy teeth over the meaning of the report. Education Week's Sarah Sparks does a good job gathering some early opinions. They range from that of Jon Baron of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy -- ?It's an antidote to what has been the accepted wisdom in this country, the belief that performance-based accountability and incentive systems are the answer to improving education,? ? to a ?stunned? Eric Hanushek -- ?What we've done to date hasn't been perfect; there are lots of obvious flaws in either results or program structure to date. As we go into the future, we should learn from our results? -- to Jim Bradshaw at the Education Department, who said the report proved that ?the accountability system in No Child Left Behind is broken.?

The heart of the problem could be, as Michael Hout, a sociologist at Berkley and chair of the high-powered, blue-ribbon panel, told Sparks, that we need to understand that tests used for incentives and tests used to monitor progress are different animals. ?What we're trying to say here is that you need an independent assessment of progress.?

I have not read the report yet, but in scanning it (e.g. a search for ?curriculum?), I was impressed that it found that incentive models have different effects on different people and that some teachers react with a "greater focus on the full curriculum" and others with "extra time in test preparation.?? The report also finds "strong evidence of random year-to-year fluctuations in student performance," and speculates that it could be caused by a "test [that] happens to ask more questions that were covered in the school's curriculum or because of common environmental factors, such as whether there was an important school basketball game the night before the exam.?? That is the shocking reality of our current assessment-based system: that a basketball game has the same weight as a curriculum.

I was disappointed that the recommendations seem a bit weak.? But at least they know it: ??Our call for more research may seem like a hackneyed response, but we believe it is essential with regard to incentives.? I only hope that, in the meantime, the findings will spur more policymakers and educators to put assessments where they belong: after the curriculum. There is nothing wrong with incentives, but as the study seems to suggest, an incentive without the basic tools for achieving what the incentive is built for doesn't work.? Anyone who has coached a little league team knows that no amount of pizza and hot dog promises for ?winning? do you any good if you haven't taught the kids how to hit and catch the ball. For years we have been incentivizing (more hotdogs and pizza) without teaching the basics; it's a cruel game, making teachers and students guess what's on the test -- or matching them against teams that have been practicing for months -- without telling them what they are supposed to know.? I surely wouldn't oppose more research on incentives and assessments, but I would prefer that this new report incentivize us to finally put the curriculum horse before the assessment cart.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Though there don't appear to be any smoking guns here, the story should be read in conjunction with Jay Greene's limits and dangers of philanthropy essay, as it raises important issues about charter accountability ? in this case, it's less about academics than finances ? transparency, and our tolerance for? cultural diversity within our public schools.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

As Winerip rightly points out, the PAR program is a wide-ranging professional development system (invented, says Harvard Ed, in the early 1980s by teacher union leader Dal Lawrence in Toledo) ?that includes lots of mentoring by senior teachers and a ?panel? of teachers and administrators that actually votes to fire teachers. According to Weast, who has run the Maryland district since 1999, it took several years ?to build the trust? in teachers that ?we weren't playing gotcha.?? But in the 11 years since Montgomery County introduced PAR, reports Winerip, its panels have fired 200 teachers and persuaded another 300 to leave voluntarily ? this compared to just five teachers fired the previous ten years.

Sounds promising.? And Weast has been justly praised by many people for his successes -- which he is rightly proud of.? And when he said thanks but no thanks to the RTTT funds dangled by the feds, it was because he had the proof that he had a better program. The lost money, $12 million,? as he wrote in the Baltimore Sun last year represents just five-tenths of one percent of the district's budget and is ?hardly worth unraveling years of successful reforms? for.? That nuance, however, was lost on Winerip, who doesn't mention the five-tenths business or Weast's shrug, but who does spend the last half of his story trying to make Weast into the newest poster child for the campaign against RTTTs incentives to tie teacher evaluations to student performance. Once again (see here) Winerip is making a mountain out of the wrong molehill ? using a premier school district, that does many good things well, to make a case against modest reform efforts to fix bad school districts.

Just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating about Winerip's story, I checked in with my friend Harold Kwalwasser, chief counsel to the Los Angeles Unified School District under Roy Romer. Hal has just finished a terrific book about successful school improvement programs all over the United States (full disclosure: I helped edit it), including Mr. Weast's Montgomery County.? In an early morning email from California Hal writes,

Winerip has overreached.... Montgomery County is in fact a high functioning district. ?It has in place a system that evaluates teachers effectively. ?Although it does not necessarily use "student achievement data," its method of following kids' mastery of subjects gives them a good idea of how well a teacher is doing - and to that is added the observations and collaborations that are fully built into its system.

Most districts do not come close to that system. ?They don't have data, they don't have PAR, they don't have close collaboration of teachers in planning interventions or professional development. ?They don't have all the things that allow Montgomery County to make careful evaluations of teachers. ?For these other districts, student achievement data is one of the few points of information they might have around which to base an evaluation. ?Over time, it might turn out that other districts can evolve into Montgomery County-like operations. ?If they do, and if they don't want to use data in the way prescribed by Race to the Top, one would hope that the SEA would have the sense to let them do what works for them, too.

Hal's book should be out early next year -- and I hope Winerip reads it. In the meantime, I urge him to check in with Fordham's Reform Realism archive.? We need to get our kids educated ? any way we can.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

All professionals restrict their own speech, after all, reflecting the special purposes and responsibilities of their occupations. A psychologist should not discuss his patients' darkest secrets on a crowded train, which would violate the trust and confidence they have placed in him. A lawyer should not disparage her clients publicly, because her job is to represent them to the best of her ability.

And he even admits that teachers ?have a responsibility to transmit the topics and principles of the prescribed curriculum.?

Zimmerman then gets a little squishy when he talks about the need for teachers to teach? ?democratic capacities,? including ?reason, debate and tolerance ? so that our children learn to think on their own? ? which sounds like a reasonable part of the curriculum --? but quickly falls into the weeds by concluding that teachers should have a right to ?model those skills? ?by, I assume, saying all kinds of dumb things. It's an interesting argument: we should keep loudmouth teachers in order to teach kids that they too have a right to be loudmouths ? to be, perhaps, rude and lazy whiners. Something tells me that we're already doing quite a fine job of that.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

According to Ravitch, writing in a recent New York Times op-ed essay, titled, of course, Waiting for a School Miracle, all these high-powered education reformers, from President Obama to Arne Duncan to Jeb Bush to Michael Bloomberg, are claiming ?miracles? for their reform efforts; and Ravitch is there, a one-woman Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the Devil's Advocate, to throw some almighty holy water on the hype fires.

Unfortunately, while accusing these folks of? ?statistical legerdemain,? Ravitch commits the sin of rhetorical tromperie: none of her targets claim anything miraculous. ?I will leave to others the task of sorting out Ravitch's claims about the? accuracy of the reformer's claims, but from the research I've seen so far, nobody's cooking books ? the dispute seems to be one of whether the glass is half full or half empty. And Ravitch proves herself? as good at cherry- and nit-picking as the next guy or gal.

The problem is that slippery rhetoric is as unhelpful as saucy statistics.? In her Times essay Ravitch very clearly cites four speeches (including a press conference) and four schools, ?to illustrate her point that ?the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny?:? Obama in his 2011 State of the Union praises the Bruce Randolph School in Denver; ?then, it's Duncan addressing the 20^th Anniversary Teach for America celebration last February commending Urban Prep Academy in Chicago; then Bush (and Obama and Duncan) at a Miami High School event in March, before a crowd of adoring high schoolers being extolled for their progress; finally, Bloomberg gushing over PS-33 in New York at a 2005 news conference. (Sorry, I don't have a cite to the press conference; I will assume, perhaps too boldly, that Bloomberg praised the school's improvement and that it's probably true, as Ravitch says, the school fell back to earth.)

?[T]he only miracle at these schools was a triumph of public relations,? says Ravitch.? But the only person calling these improvements miraculous is Diane Ravitch. ?None of the reformers use the word; I suspect because they know what it means. I suspect that Ravitch also knows what it means, which is why she employs it -- in order to continue her seemingly relentless attack on the reform movement. But these kinds of rhetorical gimmicks are unfortunate, especially if the intent is to improve education opportunities for America's children. (I had a similar bone to pick recently with the Cato folks over their insistence on calling a ?common? curriculum a ?nationalized? curriculum. See my War of Words ) Indeed, we always need scrutiny of claims. But if we are accusing folks of claiming miracles, then the standards of scrutiny demand that those folks should at least have used the word. ?You've either been to Medjugorje or you haven't.

Ravitch has the same problem with poverty.? ?To prove that poverty doesn't matter,? she writes in the Times essay, ?political leaders point to schools that have achieved stunning results in only a few years despite the poverty around them.? Who is claiming that ?poverty doesn't matter?? Again, there is not a single quote from any of the high-powered people Ravitch attempts to skewer that claims ?poverty doesn't matter.? Why? Because those are Ravitch's words, not theirs.

Skepticism ?about claims of success is always a good thing, as Liam suggested earlier, but Ravitch undermines her credibility by inventing these weak-kneed and flammable straw men to set fire to. And her cherrypicking of schools that don't match the hype is not helpful or productive to school improvement efforts either.? Facts still matter ? but so do words. ?And if no one is claiming a miracle cure for bad schools or saying that poverty doesn't count, then let's not put those words in their mouths.

Praise the Lord!

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Get out of the school buses, folks.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

They were all referring to our board of education's vote last night (a board I am a member of) to impose a school budget that raises the local property tax levy by 9.8 percent (triple the New York state average) and, by the way, a budget that was soundly rejected ? by a 3 to 1 margin of 18% of registered voters ? at the polls on May 17. As I wrote then, the board overruled the popular will just minutes after the results were in because ? well, because it could (see the ?contingency? law below), 4 to 3. Aside from getting the Tin Ear award for politically dumb moves (the gang of four might have waited a respectable few days, at least, before rubbing their power in the voters' noses), the rush to tyranny revealed a great deal about the board's isolation from its community, not to mention a deafness to some harsh economic realities (it is a poor community with average family income of just over $30,000, and an unemployment rate of about 9 percent). Needless to say, the community roared back, packing the high school cafeteria a few days later, forcing one of the four to change his mind and the board to rescind its previous vote and promise to go back to the drawing board. As I wrote last week, Round 2 had gone to ?the people.? Well, the fight ended abruptly last night with a TKO: despite a flurry of budget workshops and hundreds of suggestions for cutting expenses and increasing revenue, to improve the rejected budget, the board, 4 to 3 (someone else changed her mind), reimposed that same rejected budget.? Not a penny changed.

Breathtaking.

There are several lessons here -- the need to abolish school boards is not one of them.

1. People change their minds. The U.S. Congress has nothing over local political skirmishes when it comes to sharp-elbowed tactics. And need it be said?? The lower the stakes, the bloodier the conflict.? The silver lining: board meeting attendance spiked.

2. Anyone thinking about centralized control ? federal or state ? should walk a mile in my shoes.? Or any of our students' or teachers' or voters' shoes for that matter. The variety of possible interactions in this tiny place should give any distant policymaker pause.? (See Mike's brilliant Less Fed in Your Ed essay here.)

3. Get the unions out of the schools. With 80 percent of our teachers living outside the district, they had no stake in the property tax levy question (in fact, in the districts where they actually lived and voted, the tax levy increases were mostly in the 1-3 percent hike range), which was bad enough. The bigger problem is the statutory protections they enjoy in the aptly named Empire State.? Between the contingency law and the so-called ?Triborough Amendment? (see below) teachers are all but guaranteed salary increases in perpetuity.

Yes, as I looked out at the audience of mostly teachers last night, they very much looked like an army of occupation.? And it's worth a second to review? the enabling legislation.

1.? The contingency law is pretty straightforward, despite the jargon, which I leave in for flavor (emphasis added):

If the qualified voters shall neglect or refuse to? vote? the sum? estimated? necessary for teachers' salaries, after applying thereto ?the public school moneys, and other moneys received or? to? be? received? for? that? purpose,? or? if they shall neglect or refuse to vote the sum? estimated necessary for? ordinary? contingent? expenses,? including? the? purchase ?of? library books and other instructional materials associated? with a library and expenses incurred for? interschool? athletics,? field? trips?? and? other? extracurricular? activities? and? the? expenses? for cafeteria or restaurant services, the sole trustee, board? of? trustees, ??or? board? of? education shall adopt a contingency budget including such expenses and shall levy a tax for the same, ?.

Tea party, anyone?

2. The Triborough Amendment has similar entitlement provisions for teachers. This, from an anti-tax group, is a pretty fair description:

The 1982 Triborough Amendment to the Taylor Law prohibits a public employer from altering any provision of an expired labor agreement until a new agreement is reached. This amendment, which was originally approved with the strong support of unions, has the effect of requiring automatic pay increases where a salary step schedule or longevity schedule exists, even though the labor agreement has expired. Consequently, a public employer's salary costs continue to rise even when labor negotiations have reached an impasse.

How we got from a state constitution requiring that the legislature ?provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children? of this state may be educated? to laws taking away the right of citizens to determine what they spends for that "free" education is a long and hard legal and policy road.? I know this, here in the trenches, the events of the past couple of weeks have been enough to take your democratic breath away.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,

but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here

to the unfinished work which they who fought here

have thus far so nobly advanced.

--Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, 1863

My father, an Army logistics officer in World War II, only told a few war stories when we were growing up in the 50s and 60s. The one about crossing Italy in the winter in a Jeep ? ?Half the time it pulled me and the other half I pulled it,? my father laughed ? made me a lifelong lover of Jeeps*.? I thought he made up the one about losing his hearing as a result of ?an enemy bullet piercing his helmet and spinning violently around on the inside, bursting ear drums and his dreams of being a lawyer ? until I found the helmet in the back of a closet one day.? I once caught my father in the bathroom, his foot hoisted into the sink, a washcloth carefully tending a set of shockingly gnarled and yellowed toes ? frostbite, he admitted, from the war. He didn't say it, but my guess was that it came from the pulling part of that winter Jeep trek across Italy. The body remembers.

My father never went into much detail about these things until years later, while in his 80s and suffering the setbacks of multiple strokes and unable to recall whether he had breakfast, much less what he had eaten. He began to tell stories from the war that I had never heard while growing up ? the bloody bad ones -- and they seemed to spill out, I supposed, because that was all that was left of his memory. And he cried as he told them, something else he had never done before. If we are lucky, as he was until debilitated by the whip of age, good memories crowd out the bad. I interviewed some of the Americans held hostage for 444 days by the Iranians, from 1979 to 1981, and many cited childhood memories ? the good grandmother, the summer vacation, the wonderful teacher -- as helping them cope.

But I have also interviewed those whose memories are so crowded with violence that they know only violence. They were the ones who suffered the stress of absent or rotten parents or, later, became the victims of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome as a result of the stress of living with death on a distant battlefield. ?Their traumatic memories crowded out the good; they wrecked their lives ? or the lives of others.? For better or worse, we can not ? do not! -- live without memory. So there is the question: What shall our memories be?

A few years after my father died I happened to be visiting Franklin Roosevelt's Hudson River estate in Hyde Park, NY, for a story I was writing on presidential libraries and I asked my guide how extensive a picture collection the library had. I was immediately ushered into a large room with row after row of stacked gray metal drawers. ?Pretty extensive,? he ?smiled, with a wide wave of the hand. ?Would you happen to have a shot of FDR riding in a Jeep at the Casablanca Conference?? I asked.? Within minutes I was looking at a dozen different black-and-white pictures of the crippled president in fedora, riding in the vehicle that was part of my childhood -- through the wonderful story my father often told of being woken up in the middle of the Moroccan night in January of 1943 and ordered to take a crew to the base garage and a retrofit a Jeep ?for a handicapped person.?? Fifty years later I was staring at pictures of FDR speeding across the Casablanca airport tarmac in a little convertible Willy's Jeep holding on to the metal bar that my father and his welding crew had just installed hours before. My dad the hero.

The moral of these stories is perhaps too simple: that we are not only lost without memory, we are also driven by it. And, of course, this Memorial Day, some of that message is repeated over and over. It is memorial day, after all, national memory day. This is not as ?simple, however, as learning history, the failure of which is pretty much a plague on our nation (see here and, from Fordham, here and here);? it is about forming habits of remembering and then making sure that living and learning are part of it. How important is history to the future?

Intuitively, we all know the function of memory; my father's war ?wounds? were physical, mental, emotional; he did not transmit the bad memories until the end. ?Many kids are not so lucky. Bad memories ? a fall, a hit, an accident -- leave scars. They hurt.? There are kids who live nightmares every night, victimized by the bad memories of their parents ? and those memories are brought to school.

As educators, we need to remember that good memories are paths to good living ? and our schools must do whatever they can to teach the habit of remembering. Memories are stamps on the psychic DNA. ?Handed down from my father? is the clich?. ?How many presidential speeches give credit to mothers and fathers, a teacher?? A couple of days ago, Scott Simon was interviewing cellist Alisa Weilerstein on NPR and to the question, why cello? Weilerstein told the story of her grandmother making musical instruments out of cereal boxes one day when Weilerstein was not quite three years old. The infant took to the Rice Krispies box, which was the cello, and never looked back. (There is a story on the NPR site this morning called To Make a Memorable Meal Start with a Memory.)? This morning's Times has a lengthy profile of the newest member of Congress, Kathleen Hochul, whose interest in politics, reporter Raymond Hernandez writes, was acquired ?after a teacher took her class to Buffalo City Hall for a tour.?? The rest is history, as they say.

Our lives are not anything other than living what we have learned ? and what we have learned is in our memory.? This is why I cringe every time I see ?rote memorization? ridiculed. What would be so wrong in memorizing The Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, The Raven?? In fact, it is precisely rote memorization ? that which is inexplicably and inexorably lodged in our memories -- which provides the basis for all our current habits, including that of breaking free from them; including too the bad habit of having no memory ? which leaves us bereft of any direction.? The other day I ran across a kid in our Intermediate school whose sixth-grade class I entertained a couple months ago (for Dr. Seuss's birthday) by reading Solomon Grundy and then having the class memorize it ? outloud, altogether now! ?Solomon Grundy, Born of a Monday, Christened on Tuesday, Married on Wednesday?.) and I asked the young man, two months later, ?Remember what I read?? and without skipping a beat, and while skipping down the stairs, he reeled off Solomon Grundy, proud of his rote memorization. My God, I thought, what else was he capable of remembering?? Memory is essential to our future ? we need to practice it.

As I wrote in my Habits of Mindlessness post a few months ago, quoting Proverbs, ?Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.? What is training other than remembering? And what is school other than an amazing opportunity for smart people to teach children how to remember. ?In that Habits post? I quoted from a Ted Sizer statement (from Horace's School) that is often overlooked in citing the great educator's wisdom:

Good schools are places where one gets the stuff of knowledge?that is, crudely, "the facts" ?where one learns to use that stuff, and where one gets into the habit of such use.

Habit? Practice?? As I wrote then,

Most of the modern purveyors of habits of mind forget the mind part; the habit of learning ?the facts? and using them.? And when Sizer says ?the facts,? he means it. He's not talking vague standards. ?A student learns the Bill of Rights,? he notes in the very next sentence, ?what those constitutional amendments say, precisely, and what they meant at the time of their framing.? He learns then to use the Bill of Rights to understand past, present, and even possible situations.?? Note his precisely.

It may be too farfetched to declare every day a national rote memorization day, but we need to do something to train our children to remember what it is they need to know.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

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*This is not a paid plug; it's the power of memory and probably says something about the reasons advertisers spend so much more time and money trying to hook kids on a potato chip brand than educators spend hooking them on the Great Books.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

?I support a rigorous system of evaluation,? writes Tilles, who has great credentials, including service on two state Boards of Education, teaching at education schools of three universities, and being on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. ?It is imperative that we develop a system that is effective and fair and that will lead to better student learning. Unfortunately, the regulations ? which link 20-40 percent of a teacher's evaluation on the results of student standardized test scores ? don't have some of the elements necessary to make them either fair or effective.?

Tilles raises legitimate concerns about the use of these tests ? the quality of the tests, their snapshot nature, the unintended consequences of their being high stakes -- but seems to forget that 20% of the teacher score comes from ?locally-selected measures of student achievement? and that 60% of evaluation is based on ?other measures.?? (See Regents summary of the new regulations here; or the 70 pages of the regulations themselves here.)? Tilles colleagues Kathleen Cashin, a retired New York City school administrator, and Betty Rosa, who also has an extensive list of education credentials, also voted against the new evaluation regulations, for many of the same reasons Tilles enumerated.

So, though an evaluation system is ?imperative,? says Tilles, ?student learning is complex.? So complex, he implies, that we really can't have a system that is ?effective and fair and that will lead to better student learning.? ?And, throwing up his arms, he quotes a task force of the National Board for Professional Teaching:? ?Much of what is tested does count, but much of what counts cannot be tested.?

Which means what? No tests? No evaluation that includes student achievement? ? The curious logic of the anti-testers, hiding behind a curtain of perfection, prevent us from fixing our schools.? Tilles calls the ?high-stakes nature of student achievement tests? ?crushing? and ?corrupting,? with the horrible consequence of ?teachers losing their jobs.?

And what about the consequences of students not learning? The high stakes of doing nothing?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

According to our state school board association (NYSSBA), that's pretty good:

Reflecting the difficult economic times, the average school district spending increase [in the state] would fall for the seventh year in a row?. The average proposed spending increase of 1.3 percent for 2011-12 is lower than the 1.4 percent average this year, the 2.3 percent average in 2009-10, 5.3 percent in 2008-09, 6.1 percent in 2007-08, 6.3 percent in 2006-07, 6.6 percent in 2005-06, and 6.9 percent in 2004-05. The five-year average is 3.9 percent.

Much of the restraint, obviously, is due to the busted economy; in New York, state aid to districts was cut by $1.2 billion.? In our district, if the voters approve the budget, we will be axing 22 teachers, 11 percent of the teaching staff. (New York City thinks it has it bad: Bloomberg's proposed teaching cuts ? 6,100 --? represent only 8 percent of Gotham's teaching force.)

What's not so good ? and if there is a ?burning issue? in my district, this is it ? is the proposed 9.8% local tax levy increase, more than double the increase on the ballot in surrounding districts and nearly three times what our state school board association says is the average proposed increase by the state's 658 districts.

How we got to 9.8% is a sausage-making story for another day, but if there is ever a lose-lose, this is it: we're cutting 10% of the staff and increasing the local tax levy 10%. ?At the end of this post, I will make a prediction about today's election outcome in my district.? Here are some of my considerations*:

1. It's Not Our Fault With over 50% of our district's revenue coming from the state, the state aid cutback did hurt ? to the tune of over a million fewer dollars of revenue for us. (All of these numbers are very rounded, to protect the decimally-challenged.)? We also lost our federal ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment) money (another million plus gone).? If you add the ?roll-up? expenses (the so-called fixed costs associated with items like contracts and pensions), you suddenly, have a budget ?gap? of over $3 million. Not good; something has to give.? Being a victim is always good to get the wallets open.

2. The ?Contingency? Confusion This is a doozy, but never much of a bother except in lean times.? We're here.? New York State law says that a local district may impose a ?contingency? budget ? allowing an increase commensurate with the previous year's Consumer Price Index (CPI) ? without voter approval; rather, if the board of ed proposes a contingency budget (which we have) and the voters reject it, the board has the power to simply impose it.? Since last year's CPI, according to our state officials, was 1.6 percent, our $41.2 million budget proposal was well within contingency limits.? What is rarely mentioned to voters, however, is that the board also has the option of going back to the drawing board and redoing the rejected budget -- which it would present to the voters in a June election.? How many of our voters know this?

3. Closing the Gap: With a Sledgehammer With the contingency number in view, our administration did what school districts are programmed to do: they balance staff cuts and tax increases.? Using a ?reserve fund? (already depleted by half the previous year), we closed the gap by $500,000; we then found another $300,000 in a capital reserve fund.? The gap was down to about $2.5 million.? So?? Split the difference: cut a million-plus from staff and have local taxpayers cough up another million-plus. Voila: a 9.8% tax levy increase. The alternative could have been cutting more staff.? I don't think creative budgeting is considered an issue.

4. Where Are the Teachers? A couple of Sundays ago, leaving church, a district official pulled me aside and whispered, ?You didn't ask how many teachers live in the district.? No, I said. Fifty percent I guessed.? She smiled. ?Try 13 percent.?? This meant, of course, that the teachers, who, through their union, had adamantly rejected any salary freeze ? which would have saved an estimated $500,000 (see #5) -- had no stake in this vote ? not as taxpayers.? They lived in districts that were increasing tax levies by one and two percent (where teachers were taking wage freezes!) and were being paid by a district that was punishing its taxpayers.

5. Were There Other Options? You bet. The salary freeze, for instance. And busing? We could save nearly $500,000 by not busing students who lived within one mile of school.? Sports?? Untouched. In fact, my suggestion that each school (we only have four) and administrative department come up with its own recommendations for cuts was soundly rejected.? (See #3 above.) It's hard to break old habits, even in these tough times. (Instead of Stretching the School Dollar, Fordham might consider a report on Dislodging the Budget Sledgehammer.)

6.? Turnout, Turnout, Turnout As previously reported, we know that off-cycle elections (which is today) all but guarantee a low turnout, which favors special interest groups, like teachers unions. (According to an interesting chart compiled by the National School Boards Association, many states hold off-cycle elections. And Rick Hess once estimated that more than half of all American school district elections are held separately from state and national elections (see here)).

Add all that up and you get ?? an election tossup and many issues to ponder for the future.? Since so few teachers live in the district, their influence is somewhat muted. (New York also has an ?improver advocacy? rule which forbids any school employee ? or even the board of ed -- from lobbying, or even advocating, for a budget proposition on school grounds or using school funds to do so. The law was routinely flouted until a taxpayer sued a few years ago. He lost, but the Commissioner of Education rebuked the district and so there are no more students and teachers standing in front polling places with VOTE YES placards.)

Even so, the pro-school lobby ? parents, teachers, staff ? is an active one and (per the turnout rule above) wields a great deal of influence in these off-cycle, low turnout affairs.? The question today, however, is whether the 9.8% tax levy hike has created its own interest group and whether it can mobilize its base.? It has been awfully quiet the last couple of weeks.

Cut to the chase. My prediction: total turnout 15 percent (1500 voters), 740 of whom will vote Yeah, and 760 Nay.? How's that for close? ? (There are three open board seats, but only three candidates, so there are no issues there.)

Polls close at 9pm.? I should be able to post results (called in from five polling stations and written, in chalk, on a big blackboard) by 11pm.**

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

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*I have promised my board colleagues to say, "I do not speak for my board here."

**Results:? I'm not making this up.? The budget was soundly defeated, 1249 (NO) to 424 (YES), but the board of education, per its authority in #2 above, voted (4 to 3) to adopt the budget anyway.? I must admit: I was flabbergasted. The voters got it; the board decided not to take them up on the recommendation to go back to the drawing board.? My predictions were close on turnout (18% instead of 15%) and, though wrong on the actual vote, I guessed correctly that a rival special interest (angry taxpayers) would assert itself. Boy, did it.? But -- and here we have the best argument possible for increased local autonomy instead of less -- because of state law, hammered out in back rooms by powerful union interests, local voters were denied their electoral rights.? It is an argument for more local control, not less.? And I can't explain the board's silly decision tonight, to immediately invoke the contingency law, in the face of a 3 to 1 voter rejection of their proposal, except to quote Jay Greene, who's advice to me, months ago, I printed out and taped to my computer screen:? "Even if, by some miracle, a dissenter can slip onto the board, there are tricks that the status quo uses to neutralize that person."? I been neutralized!? The status quo is stupid.? And I am more convinced than ever that we need an informed -- and educated! -- citizenry if we are to save the Republic.

According to the letter, Cuomo wants the Regents, who answer, officially, to the State Legislature not the Governor, to make ?comprehensive changes? to the evaluation plan, including:

? Increase the percentage of statewide objective data, like measuring student growth on statewide test scores, used to evaluate teacher performance;

? Impose rigorous classroom observation and other subjective measures standards on school districts when evaluating teacher performance;

? Require a positive teacher evaluation rating be given only when the teacher receives a combined positive rating on both subjective and objective measures, such as student growth on statewide tests; and,

? Accelerate the implementation of the evaluation system.

Though the devil is in the details, which Cuomo provides in his letter, there seems little doubt, as the Albany Times Union put it, ?that the letter puts him ?on course for clash with teachers,? whose powerful union was able to water down implementation metrics on the much heralded evaluation settlement negotiated to help win a $700 million Race to the Top prize last year.

If interested, you can watch the Regents discussion this afternoon, beginning at 4:45, at??http://usny.nysed.gov/webcasts.html*

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

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*At 6:30pm the Regents voted to pass the proposal as submitted by the Commissioner and his team -- counting student achievement scores as 20% of a teacher's evaluation -- rejecting both Cuomo's proposal** for making tests count more and Linda Darling Hammond and nine colleagues' request to give them less weight.? But see also Gotham School's more complete report, here; Cuomo had more of an impact than I first thought.

**As the Times reports (May 17), the Regents passed the evaluation proposal 14 to 3 and did, in fact, increase the weight of student test results, from 20% to up to 40%, in the evaluation procedure.

King is smart and hardworking and tough on the details.? He'll need all those gifts and more as he takes on the challenges of running a once moribund school system, with the third highest enrollment numbers in the country (2.7 million K?12 students, after California, with 6 million, and Texas, with 4.6 million) and a powerful teachers union.

Good luck, Mr. King.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Unfortunately, according to the district's most recent state report card, the money (some $17,000 per student) doesn't seem to be resulting in much education for the largely poor students: 70% qualify for free and reduced lunch,? 25% get suspended every year, less than 60% graduates, 73% of its eighth-graders are ?below proficient? in English and 74% of them below proficient in math.? Is it any wonder that 18% of its teachers leave every year?

State Deputy Commissioner of Education John King*, who had been managing director of Uncommon Schools before being tapped for New York's number 2 education job (perhaps soon to be #1 ? see here), had visited the district a couple weeks earlier and told its leaders to lock themselves in a room and not come out until they had some solutions.

Well, the leaders came to a public meeting on May 3, but not only didn't they lock any doors, they didn't stay very long. And when they left, the citizens that were still there, jaws dropped, decided they'd had enough and voted to boycott.? Ironically, the group is modeling its protest on a strike by Buffalo teachers in 1947, when schools were shut for three days, until teachers got their raises. Said parent leader Samuel L. Radford III about tomorrow's boycott,

We see something that worked. It worked for the teachers?? We're not anti-teacher. We're pro-teacher. We love good teachers. But they're not more powerful than us. So we have to come to terms with the fact that we are equally powerful, but right now, nobody believes that. On May 16 we are going to show all the stakeholders we are unified.

It will no doubt be tough for a largely poor group of parents to match the power that the city's current teachers and educators must have, but they'll give it a try.? As parent leader Radford says, they're tired of waiting: "We need to hold [public officials'] feet to the fire. The boycott keeps the fire burning."

And last Friday they got support from another group, Buffalo ReformEd, which called a press conference to encourage parents to keep their kids home on Monday. Said ReformEd director Hannya Boulos:

Parents are the only stakeholders that will always put the needs of students first; and a students-first mentality is a necessary part of the change that needs to happen. We support this boycott because it represents the parents and students who are consistently overlooked in this district.

Adding that it is...

...shockingly clear as to why the parents are so disappointed in the education their children receive: lack of creativity, innovation and enthusiasm in teaching and learning; teachers who don't engage students in the teaching and learning process; unchallenging work; inconsistent expectations and grading; untrained leadership; no real professional development plans; ineffective data assessment; "taught" curriculum not aligned with "written" curriculum. The list of deficiencies continues, and yet these schools have been failing Buffalo's students for years, and will continue to fail them unless parents are given the chance to participate in the reform process.

Good luck, Buffalo.**

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

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*Appointed Commissioner on May 16. (See here.)

**The Buffalo News reports that official attendance today was 53%.

Nice try, guys.

On the other side of the aisle, of course, is the privatization crowd.? Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier have been sharing their worries about billionaire ed reformers conspiring to kill off public schools for a long time and just about anything associated with ?business? draws hizzahs of privatizing public education.? Just the other day, Gail Collins weighed in on the Times op-ed page with a column called Reading, ?Riting and Revenues.? ?Today,? she opines, ?let's take a look at the privatization craze and the conviction that there is nothing about molding young minds that can't be improved by the profit motive.?

Though I would never be one to pooh-pooh a rhetorical flourish or two, there really are times when the language should be used to clarify not confuse.? The word "demogoguery" often comes to mind.? Words do have meaning.? We certainly can have a national curriculum without nationalizing the curriculum process. ???We certainly can have for-profit organizations operating public schools ? just as private companies service our schools' copy machines, drive our buses, write our textbooks -- without privatizing schools.

Words matter. Distinctions matter. ?So do the facts.

Collins rightly calls out Ohio for its proposed new law letting for-profit businesses run public charter schools without public oversight.? (See Terry Ryan's comprehensive analysis of this big blooper.)? But in Texas, the issue is not so clear.? There, Collins takes out after the state's alternate certification programs, ?some of which have requirements slightly less rigorous than those for the trainers at neighborhood gyms.?? Collins does a wonderful job making you believe that these new for-profit, alt cert programs are whacky ? she simply leaves out the part about the country's current underwhelming teacher education and certification systems.

In the heated atmosphere of school reform there is a great tendency for the kettle to call the pot black.

In the same edition of the Times that Collins was bemoaning the ?privatization craze,? we read a story about coal companies paying Scholastic publishers to write a fourth-grade curriculum called ?The United States of Energy.? ?Is that a sign of how the private sector can misshape young minds? ?You bet.? Do they misshape young minds any better than the public sector?

Well, read Sharon Otterman in today's Times. She reports on nine failing public schools in Gotham that are being turned over to private (though nonprofit) school operators to run.? Aside from the ?host of questions about how much authority these organizations? will have to lead the schools,? as Otterman says, does anyone wonder anymore whether the schools' failure has something to do with the rickshaw construction template of the public school system?? (See Bryan Hassel's Ed Next post on a couple new turnaround studies.? See also David Stuit's recent Fordham report, Are Bad Schools Immortal; Stuit finds that charter organizations don't do much better turning schools around than traditional districts do.)

And vouchers?? This little idea, which has been around for many decades, is the quintessential marriage of the free market and the public purse: handing over public money to individuals to spend in the private school of their choice. First proposed by Milton Friedman, it once ?received qualified support from radical ex-priest Ivan Illich, who himself once proposed a Constitutional amendment barring states from making any law about education. (In fact, David Skinner wrote a wonderful strange bedfellows story in Ed Next (in 2005) called Libertarian Liberals: When the Left was (sometimes) Right, pointing out that Illich, author of DeSchooling Society, represented ?the beginning of the end of the Left's interest in a laissez-faire approach to education.? The most notable ? and successful -- recent head-spinner for ideologues was Democrats for Education Reform, which stands for just about everything that teacher unions stand against.)? In any case, vouchers are back. According to NPR, Indiana just ?approved one of the country's most extensive school voucher programs,? and in Ohio Governor John Kasich is talking about expanding that state's voucher program from 14,000 to 56,000 students.

The point is this: the biggest challenge to education reform is avoiding the rhetoric which clouds the school improvement waters instead of clarifying them. No doubt some reformers believe that public schools don't work simply because they are owned by the public; just as some traditionalists believe that money-grubbing hedge-funders lurk behind every call for market efficiencies. As Neal McCluskey of Cato argues, wanting a national curriculum is just a ?sneaky push for nationalized curricula.? ?Or, from Deborah Meier, ?They, the `billionaire boys club,' have a different agenda??

Folks, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

As I suggested the other day, borrowing from David Brooks, even our famously nonfederalist founders saw some value in a confederation. I'm sure they did not intend the Constitution to be a suicide pact.? And if Madison et al were smart enough to put a commerce clause in the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3), allowing us to build interstate highways to bring goods to market without hindrance, we would honor them by being smart enough to build an interstate highway to bring the stuff of knowledge to our schools.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

It's a lot easier? for an interest group to dominate the outcome and elect a friendly school board in the sparsely attended primary elections. And so now they will have more of the public at least eligible or at least on hand to take part in those elections, we'll see if it makes a difference.

According to Anzia's research, it should make a big difference. In a country with more than 500,000 elected officials, most of whom are not elected on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November (the so-called regular cycle elections), she finds that school districts ?with off-cycle elections pay experienced teachers over 3 percent more than districts that hold on-cycle elections.?? Not surprisingly, the pay differential increased for the most senior teachers:? those with more than ten years of experience received 4.2 percent more money in districts with off-cycle elections.? This is a fairly big deal since, as Anzia reports, citing Rick Hess, more than half of our school district elections are off-cycle.

And the reason for this significant correlation between election cycle and pay for teachers? Daniels told his AEI audience that in these poor turnout, off-cycle elections, interest group power is more concentrated.? Says Anzia,

Members of organized interest groups that have a large stake in a particular election turn out to vote in high numbers regardless of whether other elections are on the ballot at the same time. Therefore, they make up a greater proportion of the total vote when that election is held off-cycle.

Not surprisingly, the most organized interest groups in education ?are teachers and their unions. Not only that, says Anzia, "a primary goal of teacher unions across the country is to secure higher salaries for public school teachers.?

It works. ?In Indiana, Daniels noted, the election change bill was so threatening to school boards that, ?as that bill moved near passage, ? school boards in some cases were rushing to finalize [teacher union] contracts before the law was effected.?

The well-intentioned folks who believed that separating school district elections from the hurly-burly of the hoi-polloi would result in something more dignified and professional -- well, apparently, they were wrong. It's the same old mercenary spirit at work.? Join the crowd, educators.

As Anzia concludes, ?As it happens, something as seemingly simple as the date of an election can have substantial consequences for the composition of the electorate and the content of public policy.?

Or, as Thomas Jefferson might have said, had he lived longer, democracy is no cake-walk.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Though Brooks's premise lacks nuance ? he attributes our loss of industriousness to the fact that only about 80 percent of American men between ages 25 and 54 are now working, compared to 96 percent in 1954 ? the point is similar to the one that has roiled education for a few decades: our schools have become ?less vital and industrious.? As we all know, our NAEP scores are flat, our SAT scores are flat, our graduation rates, flat ? and worse.

Why that is has, of course, been the source of endless argument among educators and policymakers. (There remains a healthy contingent of educators who deny that those indicators even have validity.)? Brooks attributes the nation's loss of vitality to, in part, the fact that ?more American men lack the emotional and professional skills they would need to contribute.? This would seem to apply to schools, where increasing numbers of children don't have the wherewithal ?to contribute.? ?Could that be because we are not asking them to contribute? ?(Remember the complaint of many educators: children are not coming to school ?ready to learn??) ?Are we so busy tailoring our instructional efforts to the ?needs? or ?learning styles? of the individual child that no objective standard applies?? It used to be that school was every child's first job ? you learned the skills of getting up in the morning and working hard (sit still, listen, do your homework), the attributes of self discipline needed to contribute to the larger world.? ?No shortcuts,? L.A. teacher Rafe Esquith so famously said.? ?Work hard, be nice,? is the KIPP mantra (borrowed from Esquith) that is helping pull thousands of kids out of the slumber of solipsism (another Brooks essay, see here) that our child-centered classrooms have encouraged.

Another part of the national malaise, says Brooks, ?has to do with structural changes in the economy.?? And this, of course, is also a hot topic in education: how do we teach ?21^st century skills? and prepare our children for the new ?knowledge economy?? ?Brooks says that there are ?more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression? and that such idleness (vis dropout, attendance, and graduation rates) and that many of them ?will pick up habits that have a corrosive cultural influence on those around them?. This is a big problem.?

Indeed.? Most of Brooks's solutions are not that applicable to educators ? except this one:? ?shift money from programs that provide comfort and toward programs that spark reinvigoration.? ?That reinvigoration requires a return to a work ethic that asks more of our children, not less. And that requires a reassessment of education's current fetish for ?individualized instruction,? which threatens to re-blur the standards bar and give children little to reach for beyond their own needs.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

?but a place where the structure is so stultifying, and the curriculum so narrowly conceived, that any sort of deeper learning like the kind you'll find at, say, Sidwell Friends, gets strangled at the root.

Another commenter on Mike's story wondered, rhetorically, whether,

? the purpose is the same across race and class ? to engage students in deep thinking and the construction of meaning or to prepare them for tests and their place in the economy?

What happened to 21^st century skills? ?Remember critical thinking? I often tell the story of showing the Core Knowledge Foundation's K?8 Sequence (upgraded and available here) to our school district's Curriculum Director, who dismissed it with a huff, ?We're interested in teaching critical thinking.?? ?But what,? I asked, ?will they think critically about??

As my rhetorical question suggests, it's not so much that these concepts are faulty ? who would oppose deep thought or critical thinking, after all? It's what's behind them that educators need concern themselves. (See my March 26 Habits of Mindlessness.) Based on last week's Times report on the 100 NYC schools testing out the new Common Core standards, there are kinks to be worked out.? For one thing, as Joanne Jacobs points out, ?It's one of those stories in which the new, improved ideas seem very familiar.?

They are.? And that is because, as Santos notes, ?There are guidelines for what students are expected to do in each grade, but it is still up to districts, schools and teachers to fill in the finer points of the curriculum, like what books to read?? There is no national body responsible for seeing that the standards are carried out, because of fears of giving too much control of education to the federal government. So far, only a few other large cities, including Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia, have begun to apply the standards in the classroom. And depending on how No Child Left Behind is refashioned, it may still be left to each state to measure its own success.?

As Checker points out, in that story, ?the standards create a historic opportunity in that we now have a destination worth aiming for.?? And the Times story provides, unwittingly perhaps, a road map of the detours along the way.? Here are four of them.

1. Standards are distracting.? Yes, the United States is notoriously ? proudly? ? lococentric.? Autonomy (see #3 below) is built into our national DNA. But stupidity isn't.? And to continuously study, and discuss, and write standards without writing a curriculum is simply ? not smart. As I wrote in my March Madness post, ?we keep talking about playing the game, how to score it, what size the ball should be, the dimensions of the court, the height of the basket, the uniform colors of the referees -- but we don't play the game.? ?Teachers don't teach standards; they teach ?the stuff of knowledge,? in Ted Sizer's words (see Habits above). Standards come from that stuff, not the other way around. We get our history standards from ? where else?--history; more specifically, from the events and facts of history. We need to teach them. We get ELA standards from great literature ? the analysis of the master texts give us some rules about writing.? We need to read it. This point was made recently by two reviews of the new book by Professor X, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, by a college English teacher ?whose job filled him with despair,? as reviewer Caleb Crain notes in the NY Times Book Review. As Crain notes, ?Competent writing, X insists, requires a solid grounding in grammar and a long history of reading.? ?As Liam remarked in his review, ?Professor X writes that it is precisely lack of `declarative sentences and bedrock grammar' that make his workshop sessions so `strained.'?? Professor X writes about writing, says Liam, ??in a way that lends the craft more mysticism than it deserves, but that isn't the pupils' trouble?their trouble is that they're enrolled in a college class and cannot spell.?? Unfortunately, though the Common Core has a wonderful reading list in an Appendix (sadly, they are only ?illustrative texts?meant only to show individual titles that are representative of a wide range of topics and genres?) try to find ?parts of speech? in the dense 66-page ELA Standards document (officially known as ?Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects). ?The math standards have their critics as well. ?The sooner we can get to good curriculum (or curricula), the better (see #4 below).

2. Content is misunderstood.? In his latest book, The Making of Americans, E.D. Hirsch notes early on that ?the widespread notion that the early grades are places where students should learn merely basic skill of reading, writing, and arithmetic rather than specific content is, we now know, a scientifically misguided concept that contradicts reality.?? We now know? Unfortunately, based on dozens of conversations with teachers and other educators ? and reading many blogs by others ? I would say the ?we? remains an unfortunately smallish part of the education world. And part of the reason that the standards movement is gaining momentum but remains a weak coalition is the failure to understand, much less appreciate, how fundamental ?specific content? is to the education enterprise. As Hirsch writes, ?We have paid a high price for a persistent adherence to this fallacious, how-to conception of early schooling in which `critical thinking' is supposed to transcend `mere facts.'? (An Appendix in Hirsch's book, ?Content is Skill, Skill Content,? is well worth the reading. In it Hirsch also directs readers to Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognititive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, his brilliant 2009 book that should scare educators straight on the subject of ?mere facts.?)

3. Autonomy is overrated.? With all due respect for fellows like Senator Jim DeMint (from South Carolina), Neal McCluskey (Cato), and our 100 reform colleagues who just issued their anti-curricular manifesto (Rick Hess calls them the anti-Common Core-ites), local autonomy is just one strand of the American DNA; another part is union. After all, this isn't France ? or Spain or Indonesia. What is America?? Do we not want to school our children to be American?? The anti-Common Core-ites forget the meaning of the melting pot, that the word which comes after e pluribus is unum and that we fought a bloody civil war to keep it so.? They forget that our founders were not only highly educated themselves, but knew ?that an ?informed? public was necessary to sustain the American experiment. Jefferson, often cited for his apt comment that, ?I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves,? also said, ?and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.? The agreement to create a national government was an agreement to create a nation ? not a suicide pact. ?David Brooks addressed this problem nicely in his Politics of Solipsism column a few days ago. As Brooks says, ?America's founders were republicans,? meaning that they had ?large but limited faith in the character and judgment of the people? and believed in the need to ?erect institutions and barriers to improve that character and guide that judgment.?

4. The fear of a curriculum. ?One of my favorite education book titles (and there are many good ones) is Cheri Pierson Yecke's 2005 volume, The War against Excellence. Part of what Yecke argued was that schools had given up on their academic duties. And in many ways the reform movement of the last 30 years ? since Nation at Risk ? has been a battle to regain the high ground of academic excellence. ?The push for higher standards and choice, the effort by our NCLB authors to shine a light on the horrors of the miseducation of ?subgroups,? and the incentives to excellence of Race to the Top are all part of the effort to right the ship.? And it should have come as good news, as Sam Dillon reported a couple weeks ago, that the common core standards movement had prompted some foundations, including Gates and Pearson, to start writing curricula ? the real thing.? And even if they may not be the best choices for the job, their efforts were surely not ?The Outrage of the Week,? as Diane Ravitch called them. In fact, what Ravitch ? and her new anti-Common Core-ite allies on the right -- misses is that the country has no curriculum -- and our children, especially, our poor children, suffer for it. The only outrage here is that we haven't done this earlier.

In fact, as mentioned, the Core Knowledge Foundation, on whose board I believe Ravitch still sits, produced one of the best full-bodied curricula for K?8 education over ten years ago. As CK's Robert Pondiscio says, in an email, ?It was our hope that textbook companies and others ? Gates and Pearson, I'm looking at you ? would avail themselves of the Sequence, and use it as the ?source code? to produce instructional materials that are coherent and sequential.? If they merely (and dumbly) throw in an arbitrary amount of nonfiction in their existing basals and skills programs and slap a `CCSS Ready!' sticker on them the entire common standards effort will die in its crib.?? (See #2 above.)

It's unfortunate we're still in the curriculum crib. But if we're serious about winning the future or teaching children critical thinking skills or how to think deeply, we better get them a comprehensive, rigorous, and content specific curriculum as fast as we can, even if we have to skip the training wheel stage.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Even if one sympathized with ?these folks' sentiments about the financial ?inequality crisis? or believed for a second or two that it was the big banks that ?crashed our economy,? the question is where the big unions ? and their contrail of sympathizers -- have been during the inequality crisis in education the last thirty years. Their silence in the face of crushing inner city educational failures has been deafening.? Not a single protest, that I know of, during this long inequality crisis.? Unfortunately, the only thing the May 12 march will prove is that in education, as in finance, you have to follow the money.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

She has her work cut out for her.

For an idea of how long Newark has been struggling, see David Skinner's 2006 story in Ed Next. The district was taken over by the State of New Jersey in 1995. (I do hope Anderson considers a new motto for the district: I'm not sure how old it is, but ?Changing hearts and minds to value education? does not quite convey a sense of optimism about the future.)

The Newark job should be somewhat lighter thanks to some serious money from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who, with great fanfare, promised $100 million to the district last fall. ?But the money seems to come ? and it's unclear whether any has come ? with some strings and some questions, including how to leverage it if and when it arrives.? (One major problem for Anderson will be a $75 million gap in the district's current $970 million budget. According to the Star-Ledger, the district is considering laying off nearly 400 employees, including 150 teachers ? and that could be Anderson's war.) Also, according to the Journal, the 26-year-old? billionaire said his money would come conditioned on Newark raising an equal amount.? Though Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who is responsible for hooking Zuckerberg, has no legal authority over Newark's schools, he acts like an education mayor and has raised $43 million of the required matching dollars. ?And according to some folks at ZDnet, Zuckerberg established a foundation, Startup: Education, (which seems to reside, naturally, only on Facebook, one of the more ungainly venues for dispatching coherent information), which ?has been stocked with Facebook shares. It will sell those as needed to raise cash, which will then be used for educational initiatives. Booker's staff will distribute the funds with guidance `from the community.'?

But Booker is already facing some problems on the community front ? and the appointment of Cami Anderson, once an adviser to Booker, might not help.

In March Booker devoted half of his hour-long State of the City address (his fifth) to education, saying "More than anything, we must do better for our children's education?? We know that there will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public school system for our city." But there was already grumbling in the community over all the private money and where it was going.? There were picketers outside the Performing Arts Center where he delivered his speech and a local NAACP president and former teacher told the Star-Ledger that,

The stakeholders in education need to give approval of reforms?. The governor and the mayor do not have a right to make plans for the people.

Needless to say, there are some obvious similarities here to Washington, DC, where Michelle Rhee, another TFA alumnus who is also white and an outsider and an ally of a once-popular African-American mayor, and who got thrown out by the community.? More than 50 percent of Newark's population is African-American. (Ironically, Anderson will replace Clifford Janey, an African American, whose Newark schools contract was not renewed and who had been fired by D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty ? before he hired Rhee.)

The Times quotes Derrell Bradford, executive director of E3 (Excellent Education for Everyone), an advocacy group that supports school choice, saying,

Newark, like Baltimore and Detroit, is highly insular and extraordinarily distrustful of outsiders?. There is a very tight cultural and political narrative that exists in these cities, and if you did not spend your life reading and writing that narrative, you have to prove that you understand its significance.

Anderson has some serious creds, having managed Joel Klein's initiative aimed at creating schools for New York City's most challenging students. And she gets kudos from Randi Weingarten, who worked with her while Weingarten headed up the City's teachers union. "Initially it was a bumpy start, but then we actually worked together fairly decently," Weingarten tells the Journal.

Still, I would advise Anderson not to pose for the cover of Time holding a broom.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Mike praises Bryant for taking on the unions and arguing, during the debate, that...

unions buying the school board's seat is just plain wrong. There should be the distinction between management and labor and governance, and management and labor?.? I have to admit that having the kind of situation that Gene [Maeroff, member of the panel, board member of Edison, NJ, and author of a new book on school boards] described to me about the candidates being put up by the union doesn't always get you the best school board members.

Mike's conclusion about these remarks ? that ?similar words could well have been spoken by Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Jeb Bush, or any other dyed-in-the-wool reformer? ? are understandable, in the narrow sense that they indicate Bryant's willingness to take on union power.? But his extrapolation that those words mean that ?school boards continue to be influenced if not actually captured by the unions? and that ?there just might be a fatal flaw with elected local boards? is pushing it.

The fatal flaw here is not ?elected local boards,? but the failure of our policymakers and legislators to ensure the integrity and freedom of the elections that fill them. You don't protect democracy by taking it away.? But this signals a deeper problem here. Bryant, Maeroff, and too many other well-intentioned policy makers focus on the poor schlubs on school boards who try to "run" our school districts rather than the behemoths (unions, associations, state and federal legislators) who constantly thwart the little guys' authority.? As I argued in a post-debate post, ?one of the troubling trends in school board governance is the attempt to professionalize the institution.?? Though understandable, it is an anti-democratic impulse. Several of the Fordham panelists, as I wrote, ?expressed the need for board member `training,' [but] ?such training only adds barnacles to the bureaucracy.?

Educators need to focus on creating great schools and our governance wonks and practioners need to focus on keeping democratic governance structures just that: democratic. ?The reason that union-brokered elections don't get you the best school board members is because they have undermined the freedom of choice that is essential to our governance system. (Such choice also happens to be a wonderful ambition for our public ?schools.)

No, we need to go back to first principles here. Government ? our kind of government ? was established to protect the freedom of? individuals.? Thus the feds -- like my heroes Teddy "Trust Buster" Roosevelt and John "National Guard to Alabama" Kennedy -- should do more to make America safe for individuals to exercise their democratic right by shutting down the? monopoly interests that run our schools rather than by trying to make them in to some image of "perfect" created by the professional class.? I'm with William F. Buckley (with all due respect to my acadmic colleagues) on this one: I'd rather my school board be chosen from the Boston phone book than the Harvard staff list!

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

What is refreshing about Eggers and Calegari's approach is that it picks up on some of the more important findings of the recent McKinsey report (released last fall), which was also devoted to the question of attracting and retaining more ? and more better! ? teachers. ?Their summary of McKinsey's findings comparing the treatment of teachers in three high-performing countries ? Finland, Singapore, and South Korea ? ?and is, more or less, apt:

First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don't.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don't.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do. And most of all, they trust their teachers. They are rightly seen as the solution, not the problem, and when improvement is needed, the school receives support and development, not punishment. Accordingly, turnover in these countries is startlingly low: In South Korea, it's 1 percent per year. In Finland, it's 2 percent. In Singapore, 3 percent.

All fine and good. But the elephants in the room are many, and Eggers and Calegari get into trouble when they say that accountability, tenure, and test scores are? ?worthy of debate? but ?secondary to recruiting and training teachers and treating them fairly.? ?They omit ?pay? in that sentence, but leave no doubt that it is of primary concern by devoting two paragraphs to it:

At the moment, the average teacher's pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers' salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary ? after 25 years in the profession ? is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible.

So how do teachers cope? Sixty-two percent work outside the classroom to make ends meet. For Erik Benner, an award-winning history teacher in Keller, Tex., money has been a constant struggle. He has two children, and for 15 years has been unable to support them on his salary....

Booh-Hooh.? As I used to say to a local radio personality who would harp ceaselessly about the poor pay that teachers get, ?Alan, I'll agree to pay good teachers what they are worth if you agree to pay bad teachers what they are worth.?? No reply.

I have written on this topic before because it is an important one -- and because many of the same errors of analysis get repeated.? (See my Pay Teachers More! post from March 13, which devoted attention to a wonderful column by Nicholas Kristoff on the subject, and my The ?Great Teacher? Trap post, which highlights an Education Writers Association meeting hosted by the Carnegie Corporation, which has its own The Elusive Talent Strategy initiative. And those of you in Washington on May 9, may want to attend the Center for American Progress' panel on Growing Great Teachers.)

I wish Eggers and Galegari well on their tutoring initiative, but I urge them to avoid the briar patch of ?low pay? unless they understand the enormous costs already absorbed by such system inefficiencies as single salary pay schedules, last-in-first-out (LIFO) hiring rigidities, and, of course, tenure.? As a nation which already spends more per pupil on education than any industrialized country, we simply can't continue to throw good money after bad.? No, we should not hold the good reform initiatives like those proposed by Eggers and Calegari hostage to these issues, but we can no longer afford to treat accountability, LIFO, tenure, and pay for performance issues as secondary.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Flypaper's Kathleen Porter-Magee jumped all over Kohn for his ?pedagogical strawman? -- ?in fact, she says, ?the pedagogy that is used and encouraged at the most successful urban charter schools around the country? are actually designed to create the conditions where student thinking and learning can actually happen?? -- and Core Knowledge's Robert Pondiscio did an excellent counterpunch by pointing out that ?a lot more damage [is] being done to low-income urban kids in the name of `authentic learning' and a refusal to acknowledge the cognitive benefits of a knowledge-rich core curriculum.?

Indeed, Kohn sticks the ?pedagogy of poverty? labels on the wrong foreheads.? He confuses cause and effect and, in a typical ruse of rhetoric, blames those trying to fix the problem of poor kids not learning with having caused it.? For instance, Kohn quotes Martin Haberman writing that ?`the overly directive, mind-numbing,? anti-intellectual acts' that pass for teaching in most urban schools `not only remain the coin of the realm but have become the gold standard.'?

As Pondiscio says, ?That sounds truly horrible.? Where is this happening?? Perhaps I don't visit as many schools as Kohn, but I haven't witnessed a whole lot of rote memorization and militaristic behavior control.?

I would go further, and argue that several generation of progressive educators, confronted with the need to actually teach children some facts, have reacted to the challenge with mind-numbing, anti-intellectual acts ? like ?teaching to the test? -- that have sabotaged the best efforts of the reformers. Kohn attributes to them ?a system of almost militaristic behavior control,? one littered with ?public humiliation for noncompliance and an array of rewards for obedience that calls to mind the token-economy programs developed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals.?? He quotes one-time reformer and current defender of the status quo Jonathon Kozol as saying that inner-city kids ?are trained for nonreflective acquiescence.?

In fact, it is primarily the fear of facts and the reluctance to teach them that has propelled the establishment to undermine the reformers and continue the damage ? a major reason many reformers prefer to start fresh.

Indeed, such self-proclaimed champions of the moral order as Kohn and Kozol wish to deny poor parents their right to chose to go to better schools ?? and the waiting lists are long ? because, apparently, Kohn and Kozol know better.

As Pondiscio says, ?here's my earnest challenge to the estimable Mr. Kohn.? Show me.? Take me to these schools you decry so that I may see what you see.?? I want to visit the schools that you have visited where all the children sit in rows, memorize by rote, and spend their days filling out worksheets.?

I too want to go on that tour.

He also admitted to having ?struggled a lot? with the issue of the combative and abrasive language he often uses in talking about education. Apparently, not for long. According to reporter Richard Perez-Pena, Christie ?said he would not change his tone until the teachers' union, the New Jersey Education Association, agreed that schools are in crisis and showed more willingness to make major changes.? Said Christie:

I have to convince the public that the house is on fire.

And he got an ovation from the crowd, according to the report, when he said, ?The reason I'm engaging in this battle with the teachers' union is because it's the only fight worth having.?? That should make the transportation department, parks and recreation, corrections, banking and industry, and the other? state agencies very happy.

?is typical of the ambitious former physics teacher who emigrated from Haiti as a boy, used the U.S. education system to drag himself up by the bootstraps from housing project poverty, then applied the same zeal to reforming the system that helped him, say friends and enemies alike in this upstate New York city of 210,000.

This jumped out at me in part because of the recent Joe Nocera Limits of Reform op-ed column in the NYT ? please see my Education Unbound* and the accompanying Comments (other interesting Comments on the Education Next version) and my Culture of Poverty?or the Poverty of Culture? post in Flypaper last October.

My argument about poverty is simple: there are too many millions of people like Brizard who ?used the U.S. education system? to drag themselves out of poverty to count them as exceptions that prove some demography is destiny rule.? (I'm sure Randi Weingarten would agree.) There are also too many charters and charter networks and private systems (e.g. the Catholics) that are getting the job done to dismiss them as anomalies.

No, these successful ? and, yes, increasingly replicable and scalable ? school (not social service!) systems are educating poor kids not by denying the harsh realities of poverty but by embracing those realities ? and overcoming them.? We should not be talking about the ?limits? of reform but about the opportunities they are offering our children. It can be done.

He has hopped around the country to campaign for candidates, hold meetings and lobby for Florida-style changes. They include private-school vouchers, online courses and requiring third-graders to pass reading tests before they move up to fourth grade, rather than being pushed along with their peers ? or ?social promotion.?

We learn that Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education ?received $2.9 million in 2009 from the Gates and Broad foundations, ?among others,? and that he has been ?closely involved? in education reform initiatives in a half dozen states, including Minnesota, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Utah. Go, Jeb, Go.

Is he running for president?? Of course not.

Thanks, Joe. I didn't know that.

In fact, Nocera, who wrote the Talking Business column for the Times before landing the plum assignment on the paper's prestigious op-ed page, will one day see this essay as beginner's jitters.? He does hit all the high notes ? the ravages of poverty, the lessons of James Coleman, the further lessons of Richard Rothstein, even bringing in Joel Klein as the heartless reformer who thinks a student's home life is ?irrelevant? ? but ends up being completely off-key,? forgetting that we now have dozens, if not hundreds, of schools that are succeeding in educating poor children. He also conveniently forgets that the Catholics have been doing it rather successfully for many decades, if not centuries. And, in fact, Nocera ignores most of the last 150 years of American history, during which time our public school system did rather well educating poor people.

No, no.? The modern school reform movement does not need ?a dose of humility about what it can accomplish,? as Nocera suggests. It needs smart people like Nocera to give up on na?ve, ahistoric, and ultimately fatalistic beliefs about the limits of such reform and the potential of schools to make a difference in childrens' lives.

__________

*With thanks to Rick Hess, for his Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling

I would like to make four quick observations prompted by the discussion:

1.? Size matters.? It seems clear that we need to think along two tracks in redesigning school governance structures for the future: forms of direct democracy and those of representative democracy. Clearly, consolidation of authority (either through state-wide governance systems or mayoral control) will take us in the latter direction. The question for Americans, steeped in a culture that prizes autonomy and diversity, is whether we know how to do the consolidation thing very well.

2. Responsiveness matters. Whether it is responding to the parent with a concern about a teacher, digesting a research study on best practices, or meeting the challenges of a crumbling economy, the school system that can adjust to such varying kinds of inputs is no doubt better off than one that can't. The need to be responsive on these various levels is what should guide us in working out governance issues for the future.

3. Finances.? This is the toughest nut to crack and I got no special insights from our panelists on the subject today (though I admit to taking a couple of breaks and may have missed something). The best direction to move, as Terry Moe suggests in the current Ed Week,? is toward a system in which the money follows the student. ?This is one of the more threatening ideas to school boards ? and perhaps the major reason they seem so anti-charter.

4. Lay control.? One of the troubling trends in school board governance is the attempt to professionalize the institution.? Though several of the panelists today expressed the need for board member ?training,? I would argue that such training only adds barnacles to the bureaucracy.? As one of the audience questioners suggested, we have a tradition in the United States of lay people running the show. Our military is the primary example.? It is a healthy tradition and we need to encourage people with a diversity of non-education backgrounds to be on school boards to keep our educators honest.

Are school boards vital?? Only if we make them so.

The discussion features Anne Bryant, head of the National School Boards Association; Chris Barclay, president of the the Montgomery County (MD) Board of Education; Checker Lost at Sea Finn; and Gene I. Maeroff, Founding Director, Hechinger Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University and author of School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy.

Here's the quick argument for ?more so than ever?: ?If we are able to create differentiated instruction for children using digital technology, we should be able to use computers to put the demos back into education governance.? Like it or not, school boards as an expression of our democratic values and practices are vital.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Other than the size of the challenge (New York's is the largest school district in the nation; Chicago, the third largest), one of the things the two appointments have in common is that they are creatures of mayoral authority.? Michael Bloomberg, who stumbled into his third term as major domo of the Big Apple (no one calls it that any more), tripped badly when he tried to force another non-educator on the system.? He recovered quickly and moved one of his loyal deputies,? Walcott, into the job.

Chicago, on the other hand, is about to get a new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who, while no slouch in the politics department (serving six years in Congress and several as a senior advisor to two presidents, including two as Barack Obama's chief of staff), has never run a city, much less an education system.? He might do well to talk to Adrian Fenty, the one-term mayor of Washington, DC., as well as Bloomberg, since, at first glance, Emanuel seems to have tripped coming out of the gate (he's not sworn in until next month) with the appointment of Brizard, who comes with a great deal of education management experience (he's a former principal with a masters' degrees in school administration and science education, graduate of the Broad Foundation's Superintendents Academy) and baggage, not the least of which are some angry citizens in Rochester, where he spent just enough time (two-and-a-half years) to give education reformers hope and the teacher's union agita. ?Says the Tribune:

A Tribune analysis of state and district records shows that even the accomplishments Brizard has heralded in his short time in Rochester are not what they seem.

For example, the district's passing rates on state achievement tests have increased in both math and English language arts across elementary grades, but scores plummeted in 2010 when the state raised the bar because of concerns that the test was too easy to pass.

And Emanuel surely struck the wrong note last week, introducing? Brizard, a Haitian native who served in New York City's schools, saying ?I chose somebody to shake up the status quo.? ?Isn't that what Richard Daley, who appointed three non-educators ? Paul Vallas, Arne Duncan, Ron Huberman ? tried to do the last couple decades?

Bloomberg and Joel Klein surely shook the status quo in New York during Klein's eight-year tenure at the helm?an extraordinarily lengthy one by urban superintendency standards.? And if the Times profile of Walcott is right, Gotham is getting a peacemaker, which seems to be what the city needs. It is anything but clear, however, that Chicago's new mayor, with his own reputation as a hothead, will need a troublemaker to run its schools.

A larger question, perhaps, is whether anything works.? Has any major American city seriously improved education opportunities for children?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Appointed on Thursday

Choir Singing, Ballroom dancing and Skydiving on Friday

Quizzed on Saturday

Preached on ?Sunday

Well-Prepared on Monday

Visits Albany on Tuesday

Praised some more on Wednesday

Waivered on Thursday

Made waffles on Friday

This is the story of Solomon ?Walcott? Grundy ? so far.

If there could be such a thing as a collective sigh of relief in a city of 7 million, New York had a week-long version of it with the elevation of Dennis Walcott to Chancellor of the City's schools on April 7. In fact, if there is any single event that sums up Michael Bloomberg's genius, it was dumping publishing celeb Cathie Black after just 96 days on the job (January 1?April 6, 2011) and replacing her with former kindergarten teacher Walcott.? Let the honeymoon begin.

But perhaps here's the point; at least, one of them.? Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein were successful at remaking, in Bloomberg's words, ?the rinky-dink candy store.? It has not been easy. Klein was gutsy and smart ? and from New York. He had street creds with his magna cum laude ? and he could take a hit.? And what the Cathie Black appointment proved was that the remade system now needed an able manager, not another rehabber, especially a brittle one from Chicago. We don't know that Walcott is the man, but he's an insider, knows the territory, knows how to keep a low profile and smile properly. He has carriage--and can make waffles for a classroom of kids.

In a speech at Teachers College last Saturday (his first after taking office, one that Black was supposed to give), he ?poured on the charm,? as Davin McHenry of the Hechinger Report wrote.? Said Walcott:

People on both sides of this debate have been guilty of contributing to the current polarized atmosphere?.? The poisonous debate is hurting our children, plain and simple. And they don't have time to wait for us to grow up? The problems facing our schools are extremely complicated. They can't be summed up in 10-word sound-bites. And above all they can't be solved until we start listening and working together.

True enough.? And we shall see, of course. In the meantime, if he hasn't already done so, before dipping into Alexander Russo's new book on Green Dot and Steve Barr (see Jay Matthew's review of Stray Dogs?), I recommend that Walcott read Russo's extensive profile of Tom Payzant, in Education Next, from a few years ago.? One of the more successful urban superintendents of our time, Payzant, wrote Russo, was an ?education diplomat? who ?refutes the notion that radical changes are needed to improve urban education. He was never the type of reformer to talk about `blowing up' the system or `turning things on their head' to achieve laudable ends.?

It may be what Gotham now needs. And maybe the kid from Queens is the right guy for the job.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

EN (Education Next): How do we get teachers to see the need for a rigorous, aligned, and common core curriculum?

DS (David Steiner): Oh, I think that by and large they do.

EN: And who should write such a curriculum?

DS: Well, first of all, when I discuss the idea of a state wide curriculum with the leaders of both the NYSUT and the UFT [teacher unions], they were and are enthusiastic.? They are our partners in this work and I think that the key is the design.

You don't want a kind of French straightjacket, where you say that at 11:15 on Monday morning every 11-year-old is opening the same page of the same text.? That doesn't seem consistent with our traditions, our history, and our culture.? On the other hand, it's true that right now we have a total fragmentation and even within the same large high school, within the same grade, you might have teachers teaching at a very different content level and [different] content itself.

So how do you build a really attractive, flexible curriculum that has modules that could be used, not only for students who are on grade level, but for those who may be a year behind, for the ELL students, for special needs students?? How do you give examples of best practice, on video and in other ways?? I think we need to bring in our teachers, our university professors, business community and our best technology designers.? We have 22 million dollars or so in Race to the Top for that work.? There is interest from other states as well.? This will be exciting work.

EN: So who's writing it?

DS: I don't want to bind my successor, but I'm sure that we will bring together the best expertise that we can find.? This is not an American tradition, and there lies a challenge.? It has, as you know, historically been very much left to not only the local districts, but often the local school and I think while we have standards of course, those standards have translated uncomfortably into what we would call a curriculum.

EN: Can you give teachers the argument for the aligned common core curriculum?

DS: Oh, absolutely.? I mean, there's every argument for it.? First of all, there's an equity argument.? We have students in this state who are, through no fault of the teachers, but just because of the history in that school, or the training and preparation of those teachers, or the lack of resources or whatever it may be?those teachers are teaching material that is one year, two years below (in content sophistication) what it needs to be.? That's an equity problem.

Second, there's a resource problem.? By having multiple different and fragmented curricula, we can't get the quality we could otherwise get from a really, superb curriculum that has online, that has multimedia, that creates internal assessments for students that enables the teachers to get data about performance.? All of that is much too expensive for an individual district, still less a school to be able to produce.

And third, we've never had a common set of standards before that have been back-mapped from college and career readiness, which is what the Common Core standards are.? And so, for the first time we can say we have a ladder to college and career readiness.? It's time to build that curriculum on that ladder.

Is this the model for creating a national core curriculum?? It's surely a good start.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In fact, I think Jay continues to miss the point of a common curriculum, which is to impart important knowledge (the "stuff of education" as Ted Sizer says), to be used to communicate with others. A national curriculum ? and what's in it -- is? "the coin of the realm" -- or should be.? The correct analogy here is not travel agency (or drinking game), but currency exchange. Today we treat American public school students like they live in different countries, each teacher handing out different coins (based on what? the kids' poverty and racial status?) -- coins not accepted by the next teacher, or the next school, or the neighboring state's test writers--right on up to Dropoutville, where you don't need no coins.

Sure, you could argue that having a national currency infringes on local control; but no one does anymore.? That's because the goal of a common? currency, as with the goal of a common curriculum, is to expedite the free trade of goods, services?and ideas. ?It's a tide that will lift all boats. And I'll drink to that.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The announcement rattled me, since I was just finishing up a feature story for Ed Next on Steiner's brilliant leadership in taking the moribund Empire State to the RTTT winner's circle in nine short months ? the equivalent of turning on a dime in the education reform world.? Much of the credit, of course, goes to RTTT itself, which set broad but rigorous reform goals, then dangled a nice prize in front of cash-strapped states ($700 million in New York's case) that proved they were serious about attaining them.? States rushed to join in the competition. But no one gave New York much of a chance ? and in fact it finished far out of the money in Round 1.? Steiner arrived in October of 2009 and by the end of May the following year, at three in the morning, stood with Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and his deputy John King, in the State Assembly and watched the vote that raised the state's charter cap by 260 and dismantled the ?firewall? between teacher evaluations and student performance. Said Joe Williams of Democrats of Education Reform, ?What had been considered impossible months before was now a done deal.? My story takes you through the story of how Steiner and his team were able to accomplish this minor miracle.

You can also read excerpts from my April 11 interview with Steiner, just four days after his resignation announcement, and hear him describe what he tried to accomplish and what comes next. In some ways, however, my interview with Steiner last December (excerpted here) is more revealing, as he speaks candidly about the ?huge challenge? of implementing the ambitious program that he had helped design. By April 8, the day after the resignation announcement, in a brief phone conversation, he told me that he had decided that the ?grinding implementation? was not his cup of tea. ?Still diplomatically tight-lipped about the exact reasons for leaving ? ?an academic thrown into a knife fight,? one insider explained ? Steiner will be missed in New York.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The research says it's better to start your school day later?? But those researchers don't live in my neighborhood.

As Mahler writes, Gonzalez's neighborhood is in the poorest Congressional district in the nation and most of his students live in one of five sprawling nearby housing projects.? Violence is a big part of his students' lives and the reason for starting school earlier is a nod to the realities of the street: he wanted to create more time for tutoring after school so he could get the kids home before dark.?

The?story is deftly reported and admirably written, and the Times should be applauded for allowing Mahler the space to show the nuances of the small victories and major challenges that illustrate some of the?secrets of ?Gonzalez's success; there is no secret sauce,?it seems, other than that of grinding dedication, intense focus on details,?and hard work.? The title of the story is apt: The Fragile Success of School Reform in the Bronx. After seven years under Gonzalez, who opened M.S. 223 in 2003, as?one of Joel Klein's first new schools, ?student proficiency levels in math have jumped 360 percent and in English by 200 percent; not bad, except that that still leaves 40 percent of the kids below the proficiency bar in math and 70 percent behind in English. ?Not something to brag about in most schools districts,? notes Mahler, "but those numbers make 222 one of the top middle schools in the South Bronx.?

Former schools' chancellor? Klein makes an important cameo appearance, so Mahler can give him credit for ?the notion that New York should not aspire to a have a great school system but a system of great schools run by talented and empowered educators.?? And the?here here?is about that empowered educator, Gonzalez.?

It's a great read, with a bittersweet ending (will Gonzalez be punished for his success?) that I will not give away.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In fact, the two education leaders couldn't have been more different. Black was a non-educator; Steiner was the real deal and his appointment?was hailed by educators as a major step forward for New York.? In a few short months, he turned New York State from an also-ran?in the Race to the Top competition to a winner.? As I write in a forthcoming story for Education Next about Steiner, ?Perhaps not since William T. Harris, the 19th century's last U.S. commissioner of education and founder of the first philosophical periodical in America, have we had such a deep and agile mind in such a key position of public school responsibility.? ?

What happened???While the Black exit was predictable ? and predicted, by Mike Petrilli ? Steiner's departure came as a shock to many when New York State Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch announced it today.? The press release reads:

We recruited David because he is one of America's leading education reform visionaries, and as Commissioner he has delivered - leading New York's successful Race to the Top application and guiding this department through an amazing array of reforms.? As he approaches the end of his second legislative session and second school year as Commissioner, he has informed me of his desire to return to a role outside of state government where he can continue to champion reform.? I know he is weighing a number of exciting options.? In the weeks to come the Board will begin an orderly transition and continue to move forward with our reform agenda.

This does sound like a very different kind of leave-taking than the one Cathleen Black got, but the question may be whether he sealed his fate when he granted Black her waiver?earlier this year.?

Stay tuned.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Between vague standards ? and standard vagueness in this country ranges from the opacity of White Out to a hole you can drive a truck through (though Fordham's recent report paints a slightly rosier picture) ?? and the tests that everyone wants to write for them is this yawning cavern?where curriculum should be. It is a cup and a lip that has spilled hundreds of thousands of kids onto our streets, including those who are very computer savvy, uneducated. And I'll add my scepticisim to that of Checker about the Finlandization of America that Rick sees in a common curriculum.? He prefers the Balkanization that we've lived with for the last half century?

As I pointed out the other day (Habits of Mindlessness), even Ted Sizer got it. As he wrote in Horace's School:

Good schools are places where one gets the stuff of knowledge?that is, crudely, ?the facts? ?where one learns to use that stuff, and where one gets into the habit of such use.

I'm sorry Sizer is not around to help guide us through the Internet revolution (he died in 2009), but unless we get ?the stuff of knowledge? into our Schools of One and educate good reformers like Tom Vander Ark, who, says Hess, is ?a champion of tech-enabled curricular customization,? about the necessity of common knowledge, we are likely to be doing The Same Thing Over and Over -- only faster.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The question of quality is, indeed, the issue that educators and policymakers should be focused on here. And Gabriel is off to a promising start with an anecdote about an online student who went to Wikipedia to answer a question about social Darwinism for an English class. ?He copied the language, spell-checked it and e-mailed it to his teacher,? reports Gabriel.

That kind of quality control challenge is only the tip of the iceberg. ?Gabriel leads his story describing this same student's study of Jack London, ?in a high school classroom packed with computers.? The kid scans a ?brief biography? of London and that's it:

But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of Call of the Wild or To Build a Fire.

Unfortunately, this is where Mr. Gabriel falls into the weeds ? and he never gets out. Rather, he falls in just after these promising anecdotes: curriculum is not mentioned again in the story.? In fact, I would bet Mr. Gabriel good money that generations of English students in thousands of schools never even saw a copy of Call of the Wild, let alone tattered it. But how would we know? Few states have a common curriculum in English, much less a mandated, or even suggested, reading list. And this little problem predated online learning.??

Indeed, the battle over online learning, which Gabriel describes well, has very little to do with the knowledge deficit that is the?real national nightmare (and I hope Rick Hess is wrong about the common core movement ?running off the tracks?).

I wish Gabriel had attended the recent conference about online learning at Columbia University, Teachers College, sponsored by the Hechinger Institute and the MacArthur Foundation ? or read my report on it, The Digital Divide and the Knowledge Deficit.? Or, please see my report on another great conference, sponsored by the Education Writers Association and the Carnegie Corporation, The ?Great? Teacher Trap, or my Habits of Mindlessness, or, from yesterday, my essay at Huffington Post, March Madness and the Common Curriculum. The thread of a theme in all those reports is this: curriculum is ?the backbone? of education, as Judy Zimny of ASCD put it, whether you're in a digital classroom or on a desert island.***

One of my favorite comments from the Hechinger powwow was that of Meg Campbell, founder of Codman Academy Charter Public School in Boston, who was asked about her school's relationship to computers. ?Sure we use them,? she said, ?but when I asked an IT friend of mine whether we should have a separate computer room, he replied, `Did schools ever have pencil rooms?'??

The point, so to speak, should be clear, but as Gabriel's story unfortunately shows, by omission, it is?not.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

_________

***Also, there's a wonderful new essay on the subject from Paul Peterson at Education Next:? A Pedagogical Divide in the World of Digital Learning Concludes Peterson, ?Digital learning is coming, but the battle over its form and content is just beginning.?

In fact, from what one can surmise from the news stories, yesterday's Task Force report is not a lot different?from one issued in January ? just a lot longer -- and they all point toward a briar patch of monumental complexity. Writes Scott Waldman in the TU:

Twenty percent of an educator's evaluation will be based on student academic progress on state standardized assessments, 20 percent on locally selected measures of student achievement and 60 percent on other measures of teacher and principal effectiveness. Those measures must be collectively?bargained.

To be continued.? ?

?--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

***Ah, the power of Flypaper.? The press release is up and the Task Force report available--here.

And, in the process, he reminds us that it should also be conventional wisdom ?that teachers are the most important ingredient in an ineffective school.? Indeed, often lost in the national demonizing teacher debate is the simple fact that ?there are large differences in teacher quality, and these differences are felt in very tangible ways by students and by U.S. society.?

Hanushek analyzed the financial impact of differences in student achievement and then matched that up with the students' teachers. He says it's ?fairly straightforward set of calculations.? ?And, he concludes,

[T]he numbers are astounding.? A teacher at the 85th percentile can, in comparison to an average teacher, raise the present value of each student's lifetime earnings by over $20,000?implying that such a teacher with a class of 20 students generates over $400,000 in economic benefits, compared to an average teacher, for each year that she gets such achievement gains.? Gains go up and down with how good the teacher is and with how many students she has.? And the gains are symmetrical in comparison to the average teacher ? a teacher at the 15th percentile subtracts $400,000 in value from her class of 20 students.

Ouch.?

?--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

But I started to get really teary?thinking of the next day's board meeting ?budget workshop,? the last of a series of painful meetings in which we public servant powerbrokers stare into the?sights of the budget howitzer and start firing, so to speak.??There, a few feet in front of me,?playing the French Horn in the orchestra was a young Intermediate school music teacher.? With a proposal on our plate to cut 12 percent of our teaching staff, his chances of surviving the knife were slim.

But it's not just him or even LIFO. It's where music and art seem to be?in the ?educational pecking order.? For many reasons our little school community, with dismal proficiency scores in STEM subjects, prized art and music.??And?these?intimate and personal?expressions of community values,?and priorities, on a?stage on a Sunday afternoon, are part of what?make me fear anything, including curriculum, with the word ?national? attached. I'm a firm believer in NCLB for its emphasis on academics, but hate its one dimensional focus on math and ELA.? Same with a national curriculum, if it is simply STEM fear writ large.

Music and art are essential to our school systems -- as they are to our kids, and to our country.? As essential as math and science.? And that is one of the reasons?my friend Todd Brewster, with his co-author Peter Jennings, in their masterful In Search of America (full disclosure, I helped on it) featured ?the stage? as a key part of the American character. And the authors built their chapter on the stage around the role of the high school musical:

Today, the teenage theatrical production has become a kind of rite of passage of American high schools, the first time many adolescents get to grapple with big, adult issues using only their voices, their feet, and their ability to imagine themselves into a character by immersing themselves in the nuances of a script?. No matter how crowded the chorus scene, one is essentially alone on a stage, vulnerable, at the mercy of one's wits, which, no doubt, is one of the reasons educators see theater as good preparation for life.

So true.

I won't be able to dance at my next school board meeting, as I promised our own song-and-dance man Mike Petrilli, but we need to watch Fordham's April 1 spoof on Glee again to remind ourselves that music and dance are no jokes -- and that the education of our children can and must be joyful.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

These are certainly tough times, but E.J. McMahon at the Empire Center takes off the gloves with a post this morning that offers a different perspective on the ?It's about the kids? argument made by many of the protesters who crowded into the Capitol. ??Not,? says McMahon in his short post. ?And he takes out after one teacher from a nearby school district who was at the rally and was quoted ?quoted in the Albany Times?as?saying "It's about the kids." ?

Actually, it's about teacher pay increases. It seems that nearly half those threatened jobs in Rotterdam-Mohonasen could be saved if the district's unions would accept a wage freeze recently requested by district officials.

McMahon then uses the considerable database his organization (a subsidiary of the Manhattan Institute) has amassed on public service employee salaries and their union contracts to reveal that the teacher was paid $92,522 in 2010, ?a nice increase from her $85,042 salary the previous year.? The raise apparently included a retroactive pay hike under the latest Rotterdam-Mohonasen teachers' contract. The five-year deal reportedly granted teachers a 15 percent salary boost, on the heels of the worst recession in decades.?

These questions -- is $92,000 a lot of money? is a million bucks too much?is a 15% raise unseemly??-- are almost metaphysical in their resistance to easy answers.? They call such epistemological challenges politics,?a contact sport, especially this year. ?

?--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

There were several dozen teachers (wearing their black union t-shirts), several dozen students, several dozen parents, and assorted knots of district employees and ordinary citizens. Our security guard, who does not normally come to meetings, smiled at me from the back of the room.? I knew just about everyone and I knew they were not there for the Board of Cooperative Education Services report or for the Walking School Bus program PowerPoint.

In fact, because it's a small town, I knew that most of the people were there for an item that was not even on the Agenda: ?the board's decision the previous week not to allow the varsity baseball team to play its home games at a nifty new stadium, owned by the town, just down the road. ?For some reason, a majority of board members had gotten it in their heads that the team was being disrespectful by wanting to play in a modern facility, with lights, bathrooms, parking, bleachers, dugout, and ?no cost to the district? ? instead of the district's field, which was, pretty much just that, a field ? no lights, no bleachers, no dugout. Bathrooms were available if you walked around the outfield and across a soccer field and into the school. ?The board had voted 6 to 1 (I lost another one) to force the kids to play on our field. ?

It would take several posts to explain the majority's rationale here ? and why are we talking about this anyway? ? but anyone who has ever been to a little league game anywhere in America should know? that the last constituency in America that you want to alienate is that of sports parents.? A petition was generated, the phone- and email-trees activated. Sports parents are among the most connected in any town. And they were mad.? And they got other people mad. And lots of them?were now at a board meeting. They glared and stared (a potential violation of the new anti-bullying policy) and, at the Public Forum part of the meeting, they spoke. They spoke passionately, angrily, some articulately, some not.? There was clapping and cheers after each speech.? The stack of petitions ? 200 signatures ? was handed over. Exhilarated, I made a motion to rescind the decision from last week. I got a second; a good sign. But the board was unmoved, save the one member who seconded the motion and another who, inexplicably, abstained: ?4-2-1 to stick by its insanely unpopular decision.?

Without going into all the excruciating detail, all hell broke loose. ?Parents shouted taunts and insults from the back of the room, threw papers, and shouted some more, before storming out, issuing threats as they went.

Is all of this a reason for school boards or for no school boards??How will the problem be handled in the school of one? How about in the?consolidated, statewide district? ??If you'd asked me Monday night, after the three-hour meeting and the post-meeting phone calls, I would have said no way, Jose. ?Kill the boards.??As Mike said, quoting Obama, in a democracy we have to ?disagree without being disagreeable.?? Has the President ever been to a school board meeting?

Is it a system we should rely on to educate our kids??

After the baseball parents left, there were still about a 120 people in the room, most of whom were there to watch the board revote on another hot issue: moving high school graduation from Sunday afternoon to Friday evening.? I was saying my Hail Mary's on this one.? It was on the Agenda, a good sign. We had already had one meeting with a booing crowd as the board switched from pro-Friday back to Sunday because, as the Superintendent announced, ?the local synagogue had objected. Not surprisingly, that brought one teacher (tenured!)?to her feet to tell us "you dropped the ball on this one."? She proclaimed her longstanding tolerance for graduation on Sunday, ?even though that's my Sabbath.? (Mind you, small does not mean uninteresting; we once had a race riot and teacher strike in the same year. Diversity is not all it's cracked up to be.)? But this time, there was a better outcome.? I had convinced the parties to meet and, as luck would have it, there were no Jews in this year's graduating class.? Friday was okay ? this year! ?Another 80 people left the meeting ? but they were happy.?

We then slugged our way through field trip approvals, Special Ed placements, a professional development conference day report, and the budget ? the big news out of Albany that day was a tentative legislative agreement (slashing $1.2 billion in state aid to education), which will have an enormous effect (see here and here) on our state-aid dependent district.? (The Times had a brilliant editorial on Sunday, called ?Rich District, Poor District, We are a poor district.) ?One senior citizen rose to say he was on a fixed income and couldn't make the meetings because he had to work to pay the taxes.? A teacher rose to criticize me for my comment at the last meeting saying I would not vote for any budget that raised taxes more than zero.? Boo!?Meyer! It was late and I was tired and I returned fire ? a big violation of board etiquette -- delivering a rant about our failure to do proactive budgeting and making taxpayers pay for our wasteful ways. ???

Everyone did a lot soul-searching after the meeting.?The next day?there were more phone calls, from teachers and parents, wanting to review the drama from the previous night.??More meetings.? And by the end of Tuesday, we got word from the Superitendent that the baseball field question was going to be on?next Monday's Agenda.? Lordy, Lordy!

I am not convinced that yelling is the best way to get a good school.? But I must say: it does have some accountability value.? And?my faith in democracy grows stronger with each public debate about things that people care about.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The Irvington Parents Forum, which was started in 2006 by Catherine Johnson, co-author, with Temple Grandin, of Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior,?for parents in this upscale Westchester town who wanted to discuss?issues in their schools.? Irvington?is about the same size as my district, but with a considerably different demographic.

It is refreshing to know that the professional class is as ornery as the working class; that a district that has lots of local money (i.e.?Irvington gets little state aid) has governance challenges similar to our district, which?has very little local money. This doesn't mean there aren't major differences in educational outcomes -- and?folks in Irvington are surely more comfortable at the keyboard than in my district (where I have an education listserve that is almost inactive): the Irvington forum now has 312 members and they've generated an impressive 5,691 (as of this writing) messages over the last five-and-a-half years. The writing is?often witty and wise, sometimes angry, and relatively uncensored (though anonymous posts are frowned on and Johnson is a dedicated moderator).? She is now beginning to see the forum as a ??training ground' for parents and non-parents who want to influence their own schools.?? And it's public, so anyone, including board members and administrators can ? and do! ? read it.?

So, as I was writing about baseball field battles, this?is some of what was coming in from Irvington (it is a sampling, not a thread, I have corrected some of the typos,? and I had not posted anything about my town; the coincidences are real):

From Charles:?

So sack the BOE

Again, from Charles:

Who the hell cares about tenure? What kind of divine right is tenure anyway? Tenure is an absurd institution/program. It doesn't strengthen unions to defend bad teachers. Senority is a disease not a wellness program to protect the elerly. Only in America!

Dave weighs in:

If the program isn't improved, fire the associated teachers and administrators. Don't ditch the program.

Then this, from ?toomuchfreetimetoomuchmoney? (who identifies him/herself as ?a 20 year old graduate of your high school? and who violates the rule against anonymous posts):

How many hours a day do you spend on this forum? How many hours a day could you be spending making positive changes for this world? How many times a day do you ask yourself where all of the things you are fortunate enough to have come from? How often are you thankful for them?

Could your child tell you anything knowing that you would still love them? Not judge them? Can you trust your own child?

Do you personally know the administrators you spend hours bashing?

Have you ever had an internet thread days long spread around about you? How would you feel about your child doing the same? ? These threads do not even touch some of the issues inside of these schools. When you ask any of these children where the true dilemmas in their lives stem from, it's their parents. "They don't listen" "Too much pressure" "She is mauling me to death". This is a waste of time and energy?..

And Jeff:

I am not a regular participant on this forum, but I do read the posts that discuss the serious business of running our schools and educating our children.? I am not a fan of teacher or administrator bashing, but I do think?that one thing we lack is a real involvement in the public schools that we "own."? More people need to read and participate in forums just like this one.? Public schools are not run by the government (thank goodness!)? They are run by the people.? Note the local school boards that are filled with citizen volunteers -- not educators or politicians.? More community members whether they have children in school or not need to engage, think, and participate...? And that includes 20 yr old former students....? So welcome.? I hope that you can add something valuable to the serious discussions that go on here everyday.

And I'll give Catherine, the brilliant and evenhanded moderator, the last word, responding to toomuchfreetimetoomuchmoney:

'She is mauling me to death'?

That is not a nice way to talk about your mother, too much.

Mind your manners.

A lesson for all of us, even in the messy business of a democracy.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The power of a habit should be indisputable, but the nature of the habit, especially?a habit?of the mind,?is subject to some misdirection.? (Dare I remind our readers that drug addictions, etc. are also habits.)

Meier suggests a 2007 blog essay by Bruce Schauble (who says he is Director of Instruction at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii) as a good summary of the field; and I trust her judgment on this. Schauble reviews?Ted Sizer's habits of mind ? perspective, analysis, imagination, etc., -- and Meier's habits ? evidence, connections, viewpoints/cause and effect, etc. ? and those of Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick, at the Institute for Habits of Mind ?? thinking and communicating with clarity and precision, managing impulsivity, gathering data through all senses, etc. ? but he leaves out Sizer's important introduction to the whole?subject:

Good schools are places where one gets the stuff of knowledge?that is, crudely, ?the facts? ?where one learns to use that stuff, and where one gets into the habit of such use.

Most of the modern purveyors of habits of mind forget the mind part; the habit of learning ?the facts? and using them.? And when Sizer says ?the facts,? he means it. He's not talking vague standards. ?A student learns the Bill of Rights,? he?notes in the very next sentence, ?what those constitutional amendments say, precisely, and what they meant at the time of their framing.? He learns then to use the Bill of Rights to understand past, present, and even possible situations.? ?Note his precisely.**

Even Sizer casts the other stuff ? perspective, imagination, etc. ? as ?skills.? And there is certainly nothing wrong with teaching them. But Sizer cautions (this is 1992), ?having the skills today is but a small part of the whole. Being committed to using them consistently tomorrow is the crux of it.?? Using them, he believed, to learn "the stuff of knowledge."

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?? The same way you get to college:? practice. ?And the best habit of mind that we can teach our children is that of learning and using ?the facts.??

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

--------?

*Who wrote, now famously, on January 17, ?Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls.?

**from Chapter 6, "Habits," in?Horace's School: Redesigning the American High School, by Theodore R. Sizer. Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1992. Pp. 68-9.

Going to scale may not be for everyone.? But let's hope we can always find places for visionaries.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

I have, over the years, done a great deal of reporting on childhood violence (see my book Death of Innocence), meeting my share of horror along the way.? It is not a continuum; it is a swamp.? (The book I wanted to write on the subject is called The Triple A of Childhood Violence: Armed, Angry and Amoral.) There is nothing worse than seeing a child arrive at school in the morning?bearing the scars of such terror -- these kids are victims.? (I have met kids who, academically, are reading two grade levels ahead of their peers, but who are unable to eat lunch using a fork and spoon.) But I can't help but looking at these kids and thinking, `They are learning the ways of violence.' ?And though there is plenty of research linking environmental and domestic victimization of children -- sexual abuse is a terribly underreported story here -- to future behavioral problems (that's the anger part), I'm sure anyone who has ever worked in a school in a violent neighborhood knows the scene.?

Here's what Igbazenda Moses, assistant principal at the Catalyst Howland school, in Chicago's devastated North Lawndale neighborhood (where approximately 10,000 adult males from the neighborhood were in prison (2000 census) and which has the highest incidence of HIV in the state and the highest rate of asthma for kids in the state, and the highest percentage of grandparents raising grandchildren in the nation) told me about?his school's challenges:

These children live in a world where you can't appear weak?it can be deadly?. All of this makes the kids very uptight and creates a huge barrier to learning? Three weeks ago we had a child whose dad was shot and killed? We have two kids like that here now. There is so much violence in their daily lives. They hit you?and they're used to getting hit back. Self-control is a big issue for these kids.

As I note in my story, ?Howland's was a student population suffering from enormous environmental, economic, and social trauma?a kind of permanent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.??

Says John Horan, who opened the North Lawndale College Prep public charter in the neighborhood in 1998,

Job one in a school like this is to establish a culture of peace and high academic expectations and do rigorous social supports?. Stable leadership makes all the difference in the world. You can't end-run this one. The principal makes it all happen.

The interesting thing about Horan's approach, as stood up against that of the programs NPR has chosen to highlight, is its appreciation?of the need for?"high academic expectations" within this war zone.? Indeed,?though violence is contagious, you don't solve the problem with classes about it?? you?provide a?zone of safety, a "culture of peace," within which you then do the hard work of education.?

Yes,?these are schools where education is, literally, a matter of life-and-death. But the educator's goal remains the same: to educate.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The research should give pause to anyone addicted to incoming texts and tweets. The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness?something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.

Decision science, as the new field is called, would seem to raise many questions for educators, since the emphasis on "critical thinking" and "self-expression" has a great deal to do with the interchange between information and decision-making.? "[D]ecision science," writes Begley, "has shown that people faced with a plethora of choices are apt to make no decision at all."??And the alert for ciritical-thinking and self-expression adherents is this:? "One of the greatest surprises in decision science is the discovery that some of our best decisions are made through unconscious processes."?

Though Begley's story unfortunately doesn't address the question of information (knowledge) quality per se, she surely makes the point that we need some regulation over the rate of?the information?flow.? And that insight, applied to our schools, should?inspire our adults to pay more attention to how -- and at what speeds --?? knowledge is delivered to our children.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Antonucci makes a compelling argument to buttress his case that the NEA has reason to go to war in the face of the recent existential skirmishes.? After several decades of membership increases (making it the largest union in America) and ?a virtually non-stop expansion of the scope of public sector collective bargaining,? he reports,?NEA numbers are down in 43 states. And, he says, ?the union faces a $14 million budget shortfall?? ??

Here's the battle cry, according to Antonucci:

`We are at war,' incoming NEA executive director John Stocks told the union's board of directors last month, outlining a plan to keep NEA from joining the private sector industrial unions in a slow, steady decline into irrelevancy to anyone outside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. And like any good war plan for an army under siege, it allows for a defense-in-depth while preparing for a decisive counterattack.

Antonucci is by no means draping any coffins here. The NEA ??is still a political powerhouse, and will not be content with lying against the ropes, being pummeled by Republicans,? he reports. ?And ?despite its budget shortfall and freeze on executive pay, the national union is flush with cash, and aims to double the size of its political war chest. The bulk of this money will go to the state affiliates, though the national union will have a larger hand in how it is disbursed.?

Read EIA's full report here.??

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Last night, for instance,?with the administration suggesting that we lay off 10% of our teaching staff (but only 3% of the aides and no one from Central Administration), we heard impassioned speeches from two nurses, who knew their positions are not ?mandated? and thus vulnerable.? Individual teachers have lobbied me to save their jobs or their program, but no teachers spoke last night because we are in the middle of contract negotiations -- and I can't talk about that.? (I once suggested these public union contracts?be negotiated in public, an idea that was greeted with as much enthusiasm as if I'd suggested a class field trip to Mars.) Why aren't vocational teaching jobs on the line? a parent asked. Or Special Ed teachers?? What about our AP courses? ?Why do we have so many buses with just a few kids on them?? Why isn't sports on the chopping block??????

There were lots of ?hums and hahs and?promises that "we're doing the best we can," but the question is this: why are we having these conversations in March, just a month before we have to present the budget to the voters? As much as I admire the civic engagement of these lobbying efforts, they are disputes about the deck chairs, not which way to steer the ship. (In fact, most of the 40 people who came to the meeting last night wanted to talk about changing the graduation date and the condition of the baseball field!) My theory?? Years of being on the dole ? our district receives over 50% of its revenues from the state ? has made us good victims and better beggars.? The only proactive measure suggested last night was to organize students and parents to contact our legislators and ask for more money.

What is interesting to ponder here is what this bubble battle means to the very different governance directions the country's public schools are headed in: ?more centralization (ostensibly, for efficiencies of scale) and more school-level control (the charter school movement has lead the way here).? Stay tuned.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In less than 24 hours ? sleeping was off-campus ? a small group of education journalists sat mostly well-behaved in room 177 of Grace Dodge Hall at Teachers College, Columbia University, and listened to a couple dozen experts ? plus or minus, depending on plane and train schedules ? challenge them?to keep up with fast-paced rounds of panels (I counted eight, but who was counting) about ?Digital Media, Children's Learning and Schools.? I wondered at one point whether lunch would be delivered virtually. ?My head is still spinning.? (Dave Murray, veteran education writer for the Grand Rapids Press, kept his cool and had three stories about the conference posted before he even left it. See here. Laura Fleming, another participant, reported on the conference here.)?

It was a wonderfully eclectic gathering of new media watchers and educators, befitting the infinitely anarchic nature of the digital revolution. There was Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist of technology use from the University of California, Irvine, talking about breaking down ?authoritarian forms of knowledge.? ?Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, director of the National Writing Project, was trying to save the twenty-year-old national literacy program from the earmarks chopping block. ?Anthony Orsini, a middle school principal from Ridgewood, NJ, talked about the media frenzy surrounding his memo to parents advising them to keep their kids away from social-networking sites.? Joe Kahne from Mills College,?has found evidence?that social media are contributing to more civic engagement on the part of students. And we ate dinner listening to James Paul Gee, author of An Introduction to Discourse Analysis as well as What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. The linguist turned gamer (who bears a passing resemblance to Sci Fi author Isaac Asimov) believes that the full integration of gaming technology into our educational program will end the need for tests ? replaced by levels of proficiency as measured while playing the physics or history ?game.? As Kahne?was explaining to me, even the SAT test, now given on computers, instantaneously adjusts the level of difficulty of a question based on whether the previous question was answered correctly or incorrectly.??

Despite the obvious new age mood of the sessions,?some of the discussion had a d?j? vu quality to it, brought home by education historian David Cohen, the University of Michigan professor with long gray hair and backpack, who bemoaned the lack of a national curriculum and praised the efforts of the common core crowd. ??This is the longest running debate in American education,??said Cohen, who worried the Tea Partiers would sidetrack the common core movement. ?Without a common curriculum, he said, "our teachers are learning how to teach nothing in particular to no one in particular.? That seemed to take?some of the air out of the room, but the point was reinforced the next day by Meg Campbell, founder of Codman Academy Charter Public School in Boston, who was firmly in the computers-as-tools camp. ??Sure we use them in our school,? she explained, ?but when I asked an IT friend of mine whether we should have a separate computer room, he replied, `Did schools ever have pencil rooms?'???

Indeed.? While there seemed to be a consensus?that the Internet, the computer, iPad, Kindle, Smartphone, cell phone had definitely arrived and would, like it or not,?change schools and learning, there was also?a great deal of sentiment by the presenters?that we?were only at the beginning of the road. As Susan Neuman from the University of Michigan, reported, "We thought that once the digital divide was closed, we would be home free.??But almost 100% of our schools are wired and?now we have a widening knowledge gap.??

While impressed with caliber of the minds on display at the conference, I couldn't help wonder whether?we aren't periously close to letting our digital obsessions distract us from?obligations to?teach knowledge.??While many educators remain digitally clueless, many?are in the grip of the "relevance" and "engagement" and ?self-expression??candies that our?electronic gadgets proffer. ?And unless we get a hold of the thing, as David Cohen and Meg Campbell suggested, we may be setting up another generation of poor kids, especially blacks and hispanics, for another huge fall.???

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In fact, at the local level, in New York state and many other places, thanks to the tireless efforts of a generation of reformers ? I am lucky enough to have gotten to rub intellectual elbows with some of the best, at Fordham and Education Next and Core Knowledge ? the curricular train is finally on the tracks and pulling into a district near you. And guess what?? The teachers are so relieved!

For the first time in my district, teachers are talking about aligning content, vertically and horizontally. Okay, so it's just a reading textbook (Journeys), but it is the first time that K?6 teachers have ever used the same text!? And they love it. And Yes, teachers are not necessarily the best people to be writing K?6 curriculum (please, no threats!), but the process of entering the names of the subjects they're covering and the documents and books their kids are reading in Rubicon Atlas -- and adding to it from sources like the Common Core -- has begun the process of seeing schooling as a true scaffolding of knowledge, specific, content rich knowledge. And, importantly, they have come to begin to grasp the essential concept of ?common knowledge? as?a common content language, a means of communicating, a standard by which to judge differentiation. They are understanding?its benefits?for productive group activity, learning,?and growth ? and I am confident that they will begin to see that this has implications for our country. ?

We've come a long ways in my district. When we were interviewing for a new superintendent three years ago, each board member was allowed to ask the candidate one question (pre-approved by the rest of the board and asked of each candidate). Mine was something to the effect, What did you think of E.D. Hirsch and the views he expressed in his book Cultural Literacy?? It was a trick question, obviously, and it worked: none of the six candidates admitted to not reading Hirsch, but all of them gave great speeches about bringing diversity training to the district.? Except for one of the six (and he was 25-year-veteran teacher and principal), all of these people were veteran superintendents, all having ten to fifteen years of administrative experience under their belts.? My view then ? and now ? is that no one in education can be taken seriously on the subject of curriculum unless he has read Hirsch.

So, who would have thought that New York State would now have a Commissioner of Education, David Steiner, who has written about Hirsch and has more than a passing acquaintance with the subject; or an Assistant Commissioner, John King, who co-founded a charter school (Roxbury Prep) praised by Hirsch for its content rich curriculum.? We now have a slew of state chief executives (see Checker's Rebirth of the Education Governor) who get it. None of the teachers in my district want to be told how to teach. But most of the ones who have been shown the Common Core or Core Knowledge Sequence or even the drafts of curricula that Steiner's Education Department is preparing ? they are not complaining. The news from the front: we are happy.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Curriculum is the newest old question of the hour (see Liam's The Same Thing, Over and Over), brought on by a ?a bipartisan group of [250] educators and business and labor leaders,? according to the NYT, signed on to a Shanker Institute statement in support of a national curriculum. Unfortunately, it shook some old trees, which brought a flutter of dead ideas back to clutter the education sky.?

Could someone explain why educators ? and Cato -- are so afraid of curriculum? I thought we were beginning to overcome our fear of knowledge. I recall the first time I showed my school district's Curriculum Director ? a former psychologist ? a copy of the Core Knowledge K-8 Sequence and her remark was, ?No, we don't do that. Our job is to teach children how to think critically??? Think critically about what? I asked. ?I showed the same book to a local community college administrator and he said, ?Who's he to tell us what to know??? ?

That was more than ten years ago and I thought that they were ten years behind the times -- well, a few centuries behind, but that's another story.

As I wrote last month, (here and here) our curricular phobias?lead us to some pretty nutty ideas and practices.? One is our obsession with developing standards and tests ? divorced from content. Aren't standards a synthesis of the content? ?But what content? Why does the Civil War figure in our standards? Didn't very certain things happen at very specific times? Can't we agree on those specific things and times as something our kids should know?? But the content has become secondary ? if not a distant unknown, forgotten in our new age?of Schools of one, ?Individual Education Plans, Differentiated Instructions,?Child-centered classrooms.

Not that E.D. Hirsch, godfather of the modern curricular movement, couldn't have predicted it.? In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books he wrote,

With the current emphasis on testing and accountability it might be assumed that the days of child-centeredness are now over. But that assumption would miss an essential point. The schools still lack a definite, pre-set, year-by-year curriculum (though this is changing in math) and yet at the same time schools are being required to make measurable progress on year-by-year tests.

This contradictory and self-defeating situation has arisen because of a quirk in child-centered educational theory. Though it is opposed to imparting facts in a definite curriculum, it is not against inculcating all-purpose general skills?such as reading strategies and critical thinking. ?Rote learning? and a set curriculum are to be regarded with scorn, but students may be subjected to drills in how-to skills that will prepare them to pass tests.

My friend Robert Pondiscio at Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation sounded an early alarm about our neo-no-nothings, with a series of posts: A Curriculum Manifesto, ?Ed Reformers for Illiteracy, Pascal's Wager on Curriculum. This is one of the better blog trilogies on the subject; must-reads. ?

But I'll give the last word to Checker, who threw up?his arms in his recent Rational thinking on common curricula,

For Pete's sake, people, this is an effort to help teachers do a better job of getting their pupils to a higher standard of achievement in English and math, not to repeal local control, eliminate autonomy and choice, or impose the federal government on state and local education agencies.

?--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

But is the model working? When the fifth graders took the New York State math and reading exams, the results were disappointing. On average, other schools in the district scored better than TEP.? Some people watching this might be thinking, "Hey, they're paying teachers $125,000 a year. They've attracted the best and the brightest. These results don't really add up."

The camera cut back to Vanderhoek and to my eyes I saw the previously self-assured and articulate young man look as if the blood had drained from his face. I thought I saw sweat.?

"We don't have a magic wand,? he said,?a bit?defensively. ?We're not gonna take kids who are scoring below grade level and bring them up in a year."?

Part of the shock here, of course, was that the piece had seemed so sympathetic to what TEP was trying to do -- even the teacher who was dismissed said she was "relieved" to be going -- and part of it was that I'm still not used to the Today Show ?Katie being the gotcha girl.?

"You're the head of the school, the principal," she pressed. "Why do you get to keep your job?"

This could have been a disastrous television moment for Vanderhoek,?but he rallied:

Ultimately to build an excellent organization is going to take time. And if that doesn't happen let's say four years from now, then I shouldn't keep my job.

Cut.

This is one of the big money questions in education: how long do you wait?? And what are you waiting for? Can you tell in a year whether a teacher will work or not?? Or a principal?? Or a law? Or a school system???Who makes the decision? How do they make it?

One of the hallmarks of a free market, because its engine is run (in theory)?by the invisible hand of non-coerced individual associations, is its nimbleness. Broken on Monday, fix it on Tuesday -- or you might lose your customer base. With government entities, because they are, by definition, monopolies,?there is no such free association ? need more money, order it up with taxes or the printing press.? I'm old enough to remember, "Love it or leave!"??At least it's working the way Madison and his cohorts designed the thing: it is not supposed to be nimble (they?just never?expected it to be so?gosh-darn big.) ?Broken on Monday, form a committee on Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, filibuster next month, etcetera. So, Which standard should apply to The Equity Project? is the one-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand dollar question.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Kristof doesn't tread new ground here, but he dexterously handles three important issues at the heart of the teacher problem:? the talent gap, the salary gap, and the union practices which exacerbate the two.? And admitting that he's a ?novice? on education issues, the?veteran columnist?also has a refreshingly perceptive sidebar blog post in which he explains the origins of his new curiosity about the subject:

My interest in education arises from its role as a long-term driver of economic competitiveness and its role as an effective tool to chip away at poverty. In general, anti-poverty programs in America haven't been enormously effective, and increasingly I've come to believe that education (early childhood, k-12 and tertiary) is among the tools that really can work. The best study of this is ?Race Between Education and Technology,? by two Harvard economists, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz ? a dense but hugely important book.

Thanks to clear-headed writers like Kristof, we'll get to a good education place faster.? Playing off the McKinsey report on ?Closing the Talent Gap,?? he describes?the profound disruption in the profession caused by a mass exodus of talented teachers.? (See my post on Carnegie's new teacher talent initiative.) ?These days,? writes Kristof, ?brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers ? and 47 percent of America's kindergarten through 12^th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores).? ?

Economists Caroline Hoxby and Andrew Leigh described the problem pretty succinctly?in a 2005 Ed Next report:

First, within the teaching profession, the pay scale of public school teachers has become increasingly compressed since the 1960s. The salary distribution has narrowed so that those with the highest aptitude earn no more than those with the lowest. This may have pushed able women out of the field of education.

Second, outside of teaching, college-educated women have achieved greater parity in their pay vis-? -vis male workers, luring more able women to alternative professions. High-aptitude women may have pulled away from education in order to take special advantage of the new opportunities.

Hoxby and Leigh concluded that school districts needed ?to reward teachers in the same way that college graduates are paid in other professions, that is, according to their performance.??

That seems like such a long time ago.

Kristof gets there, citing Eric Hanushek's findings that an excellent teacher ?raises each student's lifetime earnings by $20,000? and criticizing teacher unions for using ?their clout to gain job security more than pay, thus making the field safe for low achievers.?? Kristof understands the crucial connections between better pay, better quality and the need to radically restructure the profession to get them: ?

Teaching is unusual among the professions in that it pays poorly but has strong union protections and lockstep wage increases. It's a factory model of compensation, and critics are right to fault it. But the bottom line is that we should pay teachers more, not less ? and that politicians who falsely lambaste teachers as greedy are simply making it more difficult to attract the kind of above-average teachers our above-average children deserve.

It surely may be true that teachers are not overpaid. But, thanks in part to the battles like those being waged in Wisconsin, we've got a better understanding of the role the unions have played in keeping those wages low.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

It promises to be a good story. But I like the part where Couric says, with almost breathless bewilderment,?that $125,000 ?is a lot of money for a teacher in this country.??? Hah.? In New York City, as Katie should know,?that's practically homeless!

But stay tuned; rather, tune in, but don't drop out.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

According to an Associated Press report?on the Kansas?decision,? allowing individual jurisdictions to set their own tax ?could bring down the state's entire school financing system.? The parents in Shawnee Mission wanted just the right to ask local voters if they wanted to pay more. The court said No. (Read the 21-page?order here.)

As the pressure to hold down school costs mounts, property tax caps have become a favored option because they remain a favorite form of funding local government agencies, including school districts.??But the objections from wealthier communities, which can afford to pay more, are also mounting. ?Twelve towns in New Jersey have announced plans to have votes on exceeding the Garden State's new property tax cap, a local opt-out option that the new cap law allows.?

Though there is more to learn about this case and its legal implications,??if the press reports are accurate, the Kansas ruling appears to mean that there can be no opting out of the cap, even if local voters wanted to. ?This hits hard at some core American principles. ?The local option tax is capped so wealthy districts do not have an unfair advantage over poorer ones,? reports the A.P. ?In the battle to get poor school districts adequate or equitable funding, at least there seemed a moral purpose to the?argument.??But the Kansas case seems to issue a different kind of challenge, ?especially as more states opt for centralized funding mechanisms.? Will?we allow the kind of inequity which?allows for?excellence? ?I predict?a new Lake Wobegon, where??all the children and their teachers?are?average.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The troubling?part of Arne Duncan's Capitol Hill testimony yesterday?is that he concludes from the dismal statistics ? that 80,000 of our 100,000 public schools are failing ? that it's the law's fault. ?This law is fundamentally broken, and we need to fix it this year,? he told the House education committee. We all know what ?this law? means: No Child Left Behind.

Harping about NCLB's tough love approach to school improvement has dogged the revolutionary bill almost from the beginning ? I say almost because it was at first hailed as a masterstroke of nonpartisanship. Under intense pushback from teachers and their unions, however that coalition quickly splintered along predictable partisan lines. Then came a host of nitpicking, from left and right, that has made the NCLB brand poisonous.? ???

The huge law no doubt has flaws. Liam says that ?a seminal problem? with it is ?its focus on race,? the infamous subgroup standard that has sent many schools to the proficiency woodshed. President Obama says we need to replace NCLB with ?a law that's more flexible and focused on what's best for our kids.?? Mike says??NCLB has done ?some good,? mostly for poor and minority students, but has had some ?unintended consequences,? including too much testing in too few subjects.? But the major benefit of NCLB -- and the reason it should not be gutted -- is that it has forced the country to face the facts that Duncan highlighted.?

The big question as the administration pushes ESEA reauthorization forward is whether we close our eyes to the facts yet again. What will happen to accountability?? As effective as Race to the Top has been in wooing states to make long awaited reforms,?there's nothing there to punish those who quit?the race. ?The danger going forward is that the demand for ?flexibility? will send us back to the future, where we adjust the goal line to suit the weakest players rather than bulk those players up with a good diet of rigorous, comprehensive, written, taught, and tested curricula.? Carrots are great, but what if you don't like them??I suggest a new way forward, with a mission statement something like,??Eat your carrots or you'll have to stay after school.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Florida Moves Teacher Bill Forward. It looks like new Sunshine state governor Rick Scott will right the wrong of his predecessor Charlie Crist, who vetoed a pioneering teacher evaluation reform bill last year ? what Andy Smarick called ?the most disappointing education policy decision by a major Republican officeholder in recent memory.?? The revived and revised bill, introduced by Florida legislator Erik Fresen, would link teacher evaluations to student performance, put new teachers on one-year contracts, and institute an evaluation system that would determine raises and firings. ??We are under siege,? the head of one teacher union told the Times. Yup. And it may be time for besieged teacher unions to start thinking of the besieged students who can't read or write.

A Merger in Memphis.? Voters in Memphis decided by a large margin on Tuesday to hand over the reins of their ?103,000-student public school system to their smaller -- ?47,000 students ? suburban neighbor in Shelby County, ?effectively,? as the Times reports, ?putting an end to the city school system.?? The two systems already had a complicated financial relationship, with county residents kicking in extra funds to help finance the poorer city schools, and last December the city school board voted to dissolve itself.? The question is whether this signals the beginning of major mergers of school districts.

Obama Cheerleads in Boston.? Okay, so it's photo-op time for the President, who traveled to the tea party city with Melinda Gates to tout TechBoston Academy.? I have my doubts about putting technology before the horse, but I can't quibble with a guy whose mother woke him up at 4 in the morning to study, when he says, ?there is no better economic policy than one that produces more graduates with the skills necessary to succeed.?

New Strategy for Failing Schools. One of the most underappreciated accomplishments of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's makeover of New York City's schools is his ability to make the one-million student system seem as nimble as a district of a couple thousand kids. His critics have complained that he and his reform chancellor Joel Klein changed course several times, showing their fickleness.? But that, in fact, was part of the point of mayoral control: if it's broken on Wednesday, fix it on Thursday. This story illustrates that responsiveness quite well, as Times reporter Fernanda Santos explains how Green Dot founder ?Steve ?we're going to do it one way or the other? Barr is being welcomed into the Gotham schools fold (with all due respect to Gotham Schools, the best big city education reporting team in the country) as a turnaround specialist.? It was Barr, a charter school enforcer from California, who invented the alternative to closing bad schools.? He made his turnaround strategy work, famously, in L.A.? Kudos to Bloomberg for recognizing the downside of school closures and bringing? in Barr as neighborhood peacemaker.

Oh, Yes, How the Other Half Educates. ?Okay, so you may have to dispense with teaching Mandarin in sixth grade.? Should we feel sorry for the financial worries of the residents of Bronxville, one of New York City's wealthiest suburbs?? Most family incomes in Bronxville, says the Times, are in the six ? and seven! ? figures. And one of the fellows who lives there says he pays $50,000 a year in property taxes, much of which goes to educating the Bronxville Union Free School District's 1526 students (zero percent Free and Reduced Lunch), who can join the golf, lacrosse or skiing teams, or have Steak and Cheese Quesadilla w/ Fresh Tomato Salsa in the Bronco Cafe, or take Latin, or a course in French Culture, Civilization and Cinema. ?The question is, Do we sweat with envy or expectation?? We may not get the steak and quesadilla in the real Bronx, but who's stopping schools from teaching French culture?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Class Size.? Sam Dillon, the current education heavyweight at the Gray Lady, takes on one of the big topics du jour: how many teachers is too many teachers (aka class size). It is perhaps an inevitable issue, given the budget cuts, but Dillon at least puts the subject in a cost-effectiveness context where it has always belonged.? Despite a paucity of evidence of the true value of class size reduction ? a Tennessee study from the 1980s remains one of the few solid research supports for class-size reduction proponents ?? and lots of evidence that?the impacts of our teacher-hiring frenzy have been?small and costly, class size ?will most likely wither as a hot-button?issue in the face of economic realities.?

Grading Teachers. The headline over Michael Winerip's story is intriguing: ?Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie.?? Winerip makes a convincing case for what Mike has dubbed ?Kafkaesque evaluation protocols. Writes Winerip, ?Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that iin `Good Will Hunting' only Matt Damon was capable of solving.? And the illustration accompanying the story ? which the Times says is ?a statistical model the school system uses? ? is a bit chilling. Unfortunately, Winerip (for a brief bio see my post from last August), focuses on a single new teacher, who's not even sure if she wants to keep teaching, to illustrate what promises to be the next?evaluation crisis. The question is whether, when we get there,?Winerip will recognize the solution (local, school-level control) when he sees it.? See next entry.? ??

Firing Teachers. Another headline worth noting in full: ??Fairness in Firing Teachers.? ??The editorial is an appropriate corollary to Winerip's teacher evaluation story; actually, it takes the road that the Winerip story seems to warn against:? the mirage of??objective evaluations.?? Again, the Times walks right up to the solution, but looks the other way.??Instead of realizing that the ?Herculean effort??needed to put an objective evaluation system in place may mean the effort is misguided, the Times argues that we continue the search?for?the Fountain of Fairness.

Common Core.? Contrary to popular belief (especially in some Tea Party circles), a national curriculum, done properly, does not threaten local control.? As we learn in this story, plenty of folks, including Randi Weingarten and our own Checker Finn, have signed on to a ?common curriculum,? which its proponents say will constitute only about half of a school's ?academic time.?? Republican Congressman John Kline, who heads up the House Education Committee, has signaled his opposition, but his criticisms revolve around the rush to write the tests ? for a curriculum that isn't done.? Our own Kathleen Porter-Magee, on the other hand, argues that ?states should focus on assessments, not curriculum.??

Last in, Most Worried.? This a?sweet profile of several young New York City teachers who will most likely not have teaching jobs next year.???It's the human side of LIFO, a reminder, if we give it proper consideration, that the opposite of arbitrary and capricious is not necessarily a statistical model.? But it's also a reminder of why LIFO seems so reasonable:? these kids aren't really all that worried.

Teaching is an art, one worth studying and practicing.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The Times does not paint a very pretty picture of New York:

At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits, New York State is paying 10 times more for state employees' pensions than it did just a decade ago. ?.

In all, the salaries and benefits of state employees add up to $18.5 billion, or a fifth of New York's operating budget. Unless those costs are reined in, New York will find itself unable to provide even essential services?.

And the Governor's?mandate relief commission, a politically astute way for Mr. Cuomo to deliver bad news, just reported that:

• New York has the second highest combined state and local taxes in the nation;
• New York has the highest local taxes in America as a percentage of personal income - 79 percent above the national average;
• Median property taxes paid by New Yorkers are 96 percent above the national median;
• Property tax levies in New York grew by 73 percent from 1998 to 2008 - more than twice the rate of inflation during that period.

Whether you call it Empire State exceptionalism or the canarie in the mineshaft, you have to admit that the show is worth watching.

A better show to watch, however,?is Mike's?succint video about stretching the dollar? (see here ).?

These are times to?change the way?we do education.? This?is a huge challenge for an education status quo used to throwing money at problems?and not solving them???which reminds me again of the old USSR and the joke about the laborer who was asked to explain the socialist economy: ??We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.?? -- but we better do something.

Also, however, if we?view the current fiscal crises?only as ?failures to bargain smartly with our public employee unions, we risk spending a lot of time fixing the carts? when, in fact, the horse may be lame.

The Times, for instance, points out that,

Last April, in the midst of one of the worst financial crises that New York and the nation have ever faced, the state's unionized workers got a 4 percent pay raise that cost $400 million.

The average salary for New York's full-time state employees in 2009 (even before the last round of raises) was $63,382, well above the state's average personal income that year of $46,957.

This surely proves how nimble government is -- not. But these dismal facts should also?tell us more than that legislators aren't tough or smart enough bargainers. And the Times doesn't address the larger question: could those imbalances be attributed to structural weaknesses?

The Times dances right up to the?question, attributing the problem to the ?outsized generosity to the state's powerful employees' unions in the early years of the last decade." But it doesn't see that such generosity is part of a?self-defeating system of?incentives?that our Founders strove mightily to avoid?when they?devised?their ?limited? government scheme. The Times even understands that ?the Legislature, ever eager to curry favor with powerful unions, added sweeteners to pensions and allowed employees to stop making contributions after 10 years.?

You don't have to be anti-union to wonder whether there isn't something odd about voting for the same people who are paying your salary; or, more importantly, paying the salary of the people who are paying your salary. It is no coincidence that last year the second largest lobbying donor in Albany, showering the legislators with $7.8 million (more than $36,000 for each of the state's 212 legislators) was the New York State United Teachers (see here).

Such oddly "outsized generosity" may indicate a big problem with the system.? Which reminds me of a conversation I had with Jim DeMint, then a freshman Congressman, in 2000.? "When this country was being formed," he said, "the critics of democracy said it won't be a permament form of government because sooner or later people are going to figure out that they can vote themselves more benefits from government without paying for it."

It seems essential, then, to keep asking ourselves what role, exactly, do unions play in our public schools.??We need teachers, no doubt about that, but are the negotiations their unions have with legislators? the political equivalent of??one hand clapping.? As Frank McNamara Jr, a former United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts, wrote in a letter to the Times:

The historical touchstone of labor union existence ? the balancing of asymmetric bargaining power between worker and management ? is no longer in play (if it ever was) for the public servants of today. The largely superfluous public employee unions have introduced a new dysfunctional asymmetry in favor of public employees that badly needs to be redressed.

Such asymmetry surely played a large part in the collapse of the Soviet Union.? And though I'm not looking for hate mail from teachers for saying this, there are surely parallels?to look for while examining the way we pay for our public education and distribute its benefits.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Merrow had written?about a popular, three-day ?Campaign for Grade-Level Reading? event in Washington, saying that he was then editing a piece for PBS NewsHour?.

?about what is often called ?the vocabulary gap' that develops in the first three years of life, I am especially aware of the need for public action.? We know that about 75 percent of the children who aren't reading competently and confidently by the end of third grade will never catch up?. No mistake: This is a crisis!

Indeed, it is a crisis.??But?quoting from his new book, The Influence of Teachers, Merrow warns against some popular and simplistic notions about reading:

Children do not need more drill in decoding. Reading specialists often draw a false distinction between decoding and comprehending, and because most tests reward decoding, teachers in the early grades may be tempted to treat it as a goal rather than what it is: a means to an end.

As Merrow suggests, this is not an?obvious point for many teachers, but?he says he got?"wake-up calls" from several people about his post, including E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (of Core Knowledge fame), who sent Merrow a copy of his February speech to the Virginia House of Delegates. The two?drilled a little deeper into the reading skill problem.

Merrow says that Hirsch welcomed the attention to reading but ?warned against focusing on the abstract concept of ?reading.' What matters most is not the skill set associated with reading (phonemic awareness, etc.), but vocabulary and content knowledge.? ?He quotes from Hirsch's speech:

The persistent achievement gap between haves and have-nots in our society is chiefly a verbal gap. There is no greater practical attainment in the modern world than acquiring a bellyful of words. A large vocabulary is the single most reliable predictor of practical, real-world competence?.

Okay, everyone gets that (in theory, at least), and it would seem to mirror what Merrow had already said.? So, he asked Hirsch, ?What does all this have to do with learning to read??

Simple, he said: it's all about content knowledge. You don't just learn to read in the abstract. You learn facts, content, concrete information. There's no ?learning how to learn' or teaching ?critical thinking skills' or ?comprehension strategies,' he warned, because those are a dead end. That approach might yield a temporary up-tick in reading scores, but no genuine lasting learning.

In my own experience, disabusing teachers ? and ?literacy coaches? and even curriculum directors ? of the notion that reading is a ?skill,? like fishing, and once learned, a child is free to learn ? well, it is as fixed an id?e fixe as you'll find. ?And because of it, we have legions of teachers?drilling ?literacy skills? into kids' heads, not just to the exclusion of other subjects, but to their continued dumbing down.??The latest invasion is that of?the reading program and reading textbook that -- let's cheer! -- include content.? A little science here, a little history there.? Neat.? See, we believe in content.

Unfortunately, as Hirsch long ago predicted,?because of our misapprehensions about reading and the failure to focus our attentions on the core subjects,?we will continue to see knowledge gaps in science, literature, history, geography,? art, and math?widen.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The story from Detroit is simply heartbreaking. This is a city that doesn't seem to need a hurricane to destroy it (see Time magazine's yearlong series on the place).? The Motor City public school district* faces a $327 million deficit ? take that Rochester, which only has an $82 million budget gap ? and the district's Emergency Financial Manager, Robert Bob, is proposing closing half the ?district's schools, which could put up to 60 kids in a classroom.

Will Randi Weingarten denounce the insanity?

But listen to the voice of Lorena Craighhead, a Detroit?teacher, who says the school system has failed the children ?on so many levels.?? Her voice is hauntingly sad:

We continue to get thrown these leaders who don't show that they care, battle with our unions who are supposed to be on our side, and have to kind of motivate and invigorate parents who've gotten apathetic, teachers who feel beaten down and kids who hear all these things being said about them as if they don't matter.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

*What is so sad about these stories is the glaring disconnect between the reality and the press release. Top story on the DPS home page is that Detroit Public Schools ?is creating Centers of Excellence in every school in every neighborhood. The district's primary mission is educating students to perform at high academic levels?.?

would expand the criteria by which teachers are judged, [but] would leave intact a provision in state law that requires layoffs to be carried out in reverse order of seniority, a policy known as ?last in, first out.? And the specifics of the evaluation system would still be subject to negotiations with unions, which could delay putting it into effect.

Though aides to the Governor tried to argue that the new evaluation system would ?supersede? (the Times word) LIFO problems, nobody was fooled, especially Mayor Bloomberg, who said,?

Anything short of [abolishing the seniority system]?will harm our students and jeopardize the progress that we made in the schools....? It simply kicks the can down the road, and it will kick some of our best teachers to the curb.

The Daily News was even?blunter:

How horrible is Gov. Cuomo's purported plan to avert the disaster of seniority-based teacher layoffs?

So horrible that it betrays the best interest of New York's schoolchildren.

So horrible that it is the functional equivalent of a fraud.

Hey. This is New York. Whad'ya expect??

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

They are reaping a bitter harvest that they didn't individually plant but their profession has planted over 50 years, going from a respected profession to a mass work force in which everyone is treated as if they are interchangeable, as in the steel mills of yesteryear.

There is a lot to the bitter harvest.? The interchangeability problem is a deep and profound one --?it flies in the face of the autonomy that many teachers claim they deserve in their classrooms.? It undermines the argument ? rather, calls attention to the contradiction ? that making more teachers better or making better teachers will improve the system since the assembly line can operate no better or faster than its slowest worker.

In my district, it is painful to watch: hardworking, dedicated teachers paying dues to union reps to defend the rights of undedicated and ineffective teachers who defeat the value of their hard work and dedication. It is painful to read the comments to the NYT story.? Teachers feel demonized and victimized, without appreciating the fact that it is their unions which have done them ill ? and it is their unions which reformers are attempting to turn around.?

?This is in no way, shape or form an attack on teachers,? Tony Bennett, the superintendent of public instruction in Indiana, tells Gabriel. ?It is a comprehensive effort to reform a system.? ?

For years the public has been lead to believe ? thanks, in large part, to union lobbying -- that teachers were the most important part of the education process and the public has rewarded them with decent wages and benefits (wages and benefits which would be even greater if not for the assembly line problem).? But the chickens have come home to roost: if teachers are the most important part of the process, and we have been rewarding them nicely, signing on to 100-page employment contracts, dishing out wonderful lifetime benefits, why has our education system gotten so bad??

Why are teachers ?expendable?? asks the Times.? Teachers would do well to look at their contracts for the answer.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

My friend E.J. McMahan at the Empire Center in Albany has a great headline for his blog post this morning: ?Volatility, thy name is `income tax.'? ??Though no one in government these days should need reminding of the problem in predicting public revenues, McMahon cites a new study from the Pew Center on the States and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute in Albany which calls incomes taxes ?the biggest culprit? in thwarting government's prognostic powers.?

Quoting from the report:

Traditionally, personal income taxes are a more volatile income stream than the sales tax. That is in large part because many states rely heavily on non-wage income such as dividends from investments, which can rise and fall with the performance of the stock market.

McMahon then notes:

As if on cue, on the same day that the Pew-Rockefeller report was released, [New York State] Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said his 99-member Democratic majority will push for a budget bill that makes New York more dependent on the income tax?.

Also, as if on cue, Silver scuttled a bill -- passed by the Republican-controlled Senate by a vote of 33 to 27 ? that would have allowed districts to lay off teachers based on factors like performance and disciplinary records, rather than seniority. ?Silver, according to the New York Times, said that he wanted to wait until the Education Department, in collaboration with the teachers union, ?creat[ed] an objective system to evaluate teachers.??

Thus, on the same day that Silver is increasing funding volatility for schools, he's pursuing an evaluation system that he hopes will take all guess work out of the process of laying off teachers.? What the two have in common is the further erosion of local autonomy.

Since income tax remains a federal and state government duty, the more school funding relies on it, the more dependent districts are on distant legislatures.? And the more those powerbrokers try to create so-called objective systems, the less control districts (already strapped by mandates)?have over the process of hiring and firing.?

It will no doubt be tricky to negotiate the potholes of the current collaborative moment ? I refer to the recent Denver confab not the mayhem in Madison ? but the obsession with creating the perfect, ?objective? teacher evaluation system through that process?also has its corner cliffs. As we put union and education bureaucrats in a room to devise something (will it be longer and denser than our district's proposed nine-page anti-bullying policy, I wonder?) that takes management discretion out of a process that Randi Weingarten says must have ?due process? -- well, as Mike said,?the result?could just be ?Nuts.?

If teachers fear arbitrary and capricious principals, parents and taxpayers should fear the 100-page teacher evaluation system that will tie up their money and their schools in ever-growing rolls of red tape.? ?

All these roads seem to lead back to the one place where decisions are best made: the local level.? Just as autonomous schools can be the most nimble educators in the face of funding volatility, those schools are probably the best judges of effective teachers. At least, we shouldn't forget that it was tens of thousands of tiny and autonomous school districts ? funded locally! -- that created the world's best public education system. ?Go figure. ??

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

John Thompson:

You don't hear much from teachers about policy disputes, but you get an earful on them from union reps. Of course, most teachers don't pay much attention to policy. That's one reason to pay union dues to people who do. How is that surprising? How is that a criticism of union leaders?? I think my union leaders have conceded too much on seniority, and test-driven ?reform.? But I know that they are the experts in the nitty gritty of making deals. I'm paid to teach, and they are paid to keep the wheels from coming off school systems.

This makes sense.? Teachers are supposed to teach. We shouldn't expect them to be policy wonks.

Stephen Lazar:

In terms of teachers' relationships with labor in terms of having our voices heard on policy issues, I imagine this is much more of an issue of journalists going to the union for responses as opposed to teachers. Most teachers I know with more than a few years of experience are well versed in all major policy issues, and would be very happy to have people asking them what they think.

This takes the discussion a bit farther ? to where I think we need to go: let's get teachers directly involved in policy discussions -- but outside the contractual or collective bargaining arena. Even if, as John Thompson suggests, we shouldn't expect teachers to know policy, we need to find a way to put teachers ? not their union reps! ? in the same room as the journalists and the policy experts.

Teacher Jose Vilson addressed the lack of teacher representation on the teacher quality conference panels.

Jose Vilson:

[W]hile the panel was great, our main concern, as always, is that people want to speak for us and not let us speak, as this essay indirectly exhibited. Yes, many of the panelists were great, and gave a perspective in line with many of the teachers there. It just seemed from some people's perspectives that teachers as a whole aren't experts in all facets of their profession, which Stephen Lazar obviously proved otherwise.

Indeed, while I do not believe that there are many teachers out there who know much about curriculum development (which I consider very much a policy issue; in fact, I consider it the policy issues), this surely doesn't mean that aren't a lot of teachers who know a lot about teaching ? and we need to hear from them.

Stephen Lazar:

I agree with you that we need to spend more time discussing what teachers teach and how they teach it. I have found the latter to be a discussion topic that most teachers are scared of engaging with. For what it's worth, the position of the UFT [United Federation of Teachers] is that the current NYC administration has done way too much on assessment and accountability, and not nearly enough on curriculum. Klein even eliminated the Division of Teaching & Learning.

While I can't speak for other programs, I know most of my prep was around curriculum writing, and that it is also the majority of the professional development work we do in my school. Every one of these conversations starts with what the national or state standards are that have to be dealt with, which in history, are nearly always fairly clear and elaborate. Of course, you and I both are unhappy with these standards, though for very different reasons, but to suggest that there is not clear content that is to be taught does not seem accurate.

So, there we have it: some voices from the trenches; voices worth hearing.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Uh?? This would seem to presume that the union is for merit and effectiveness layoffs.? I guess she has forgotten?about?the Last In First Out union rule.

?--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The news out of Providence, where mayor Angel Taveras sent termination notices to all the town's 1,926 teachers, is bound to shake more rafters in the reform arena.? What looked like another union-bashing gambit by another power-adled Tea Party politico turns out to be the act of a Democrat following the law -- a law that, most likely, ?was passed at the behest of teacher unions: teachers have to be notified of possible layoff or termination by March 1.????

According to Abby Goodnough's Times report the mayor's spokeswoman said the decision was the fiscally prudent one.? Layoffs are?more costly than terminations since you have to keep laid off teachers in a substitute pool and maintain other contractually mandated benefits.?? ?

The move seems to have left the local teachers union president, who did return calls from Goodnough, speechless.? But not Randi Weingarten, who told?the reporter?that ?What's going on here? is somebody has an idea about wanting to arbitrarily and capriciously choose who they want teaching in schools next year.?

Fancy that. Someone other than a union boss might hire a teacher.

Let the walls come tumbling down!

Not so fast.? I have been writing about Catholic schools for a while ? see my 2007 Ed Next story Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?, Fordham's 2008 report, Who Will Save America's Urban Catholic Schools??,?and in Flypaper?-- and had not encountered anything quite like what these education reformers were attempting in the Windy City. These are not Catholic schools -- well, not in the traditional sense.

It started almost ten years ago when Arne Duncan, then the head of Chicago Public Schools, asked the famed, 320-year-old Catholic order, which operates thousands of schools in 80 different countries, including dozens in the U.S., to start a charter school.? Duncan had visited the Brothers' two San Miguel middle schools, which the?order?operated on the city's poor Westside, and said, ?We can do this.??

How they did it is a fascinating tale of grit and determination,?about a committed group of Catholics who gave up their icons, statues, prayers, and catechism, ran a gauntlet of church/state hurdles, partnered with a Baptist congregation in one location and weathered an angry black community in another location ? and are now educating hundreds of Chicago's poorest public school children.

Read the story, listen to the podcast:? here. ?Catholics, cover your eyes ? but remember the oft-quoted comment by Cardinal James Hickey of Washington, D.C.: ?We don't educate these children because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic.?? Amen.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

A crucial distinction has been lost in the debate over [Gov. Scott] Walker's proposals: Government unions are not the same thing as private sector unions.

It is a point well-worth making.? While private sector unions came from the ?bloody adversarial relationship? between management and labor, says Goldberg, public unions are ?rankly political? animals. They deliver money to legislators who, not surprisingly, vote them nice salaries and benefits. Public sector unions are simply ?the party of government.?? It's like bargaining with yourself.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

In New York State, the Regents recently entertained a proposal to replace their Regents Exams with tests developed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).? Those are the folks representing 26 states which educate 60 percent of our K--12 students.?

Rick Hess weighed in last week with an essay wondering whether the common core was ?running off the rails already.?? Hess's worries derive from a recent symposium on ?through-course assessment? that was attended by ?a slew of heavy-hitters from the world of assessment and test development,??including PARCC.

What surprised Hess, as he writes, was ?a seeming disregard for the policy or practical impact of this whole enterprise.?? One problem is that there are laws prohibiting?the use of?federal funds to develop curricula.? Then there's the money problem: who's going to pay for the new assessments?? As mentioned before (here), Rick also has questions about how a national curriculum will impact the experimentation values of the charter school movement.

All of this suggests?a larger problem:? while we? inch toward a common curriculum, we are getting bogged down?in a distracting?debate on state autonomy while?the standards and testing industry is zooming ahead, already writing tests based on standards -- and no curriculum. ???????

As Catherine Gewertz at Education Week?noted, "Where's the beef?"? She picked up on the problem?in a report on a meeting with?the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)? committee working on implementation of the common core.?

Writes Gewertz:

The version being articulated here at AFT headquarters on Capitol Hill was a collective concern that common standards and assessments are being developed, like so many slices of bread, without the curriculum or content that's the meat of the sandwich. ?

Apparently, Randi Weingarten gets it.? Gewertz continues,

Weingarten told me afterward that the field needs "common, sequential curriculum" so teachers "are not making it up every day."

[David] Sherman [an assistant to Weingarten] said that part of the committee's job is to grapple with how that curriculum takes shape. It wouldn't be one mandatory curriculum, he said, but should it be one voluntary curriculum? Various curricula or curricular pieces that the union and its members assemble to see what fits, and can be adapted from place to place to meet local needs? Those questions are still being batted about.

But Weingarten was clear: The field needs some kind of curriculum for these new standards. Because "right now," she told me, "we got nothin'."

We have a great opportunity to finally get the curriculum donkey in front of the testing cart; in fact, let's get it in front the standards cart as well.? And let's hope our policy gurus can keep the assessment industry out of the room until we get a good curriculum, not just in math and English, but in science, history, and art and music as well.? Getting rid of the anachronistic prohibition of using federal funds to develop curriculum would sure be a start.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Who would object?

In fact, as the two Carnegie researchers noted in?a Boston Globe essay about the initiative, if there is a consensus on anything in education these days it is the importance of teachers to the educational enterprise. ?So,? they ask,?why haven't we done it yet??? Meaning, why haven't we fixed the system that is producing so many mediocre teachers?

Cahill and Milgrom-Elcott, who have impressive credentials, including stints with the Bloomberg education reform administration (Cahill masterminded the city's small schools program), argue?that the reason we still have so many mediocre teachers in too many of our classrooms is not money.??They artfully stay away from the role of the unions, which some would argue is the elephant in the teacher quality room, and rightly focus their attentions ? i.e. the talent strategy ? on substance: ramping up the quality of teacher training, giving prospective teachers more ?hands-on experience,? and holding schools of education ?accountable for proving that the students their graduates teach are actually learning.?? Another big part of the strategy is getting school systems to tighten up their applicant standards. ?The top-performing systems outside the United States recruit 100 percent of their teachers from the top third of graduates," they write.? "[T]he comparable United States figure is 23 percent.??

All of this seems eminently reasonable. Even Carnegie's recommendations to include teacher effectiveness metrics in decisions about promotion and firing ? and Cahill and Milgrom-Elcott say ?we must be much more deliberate about whom we grant tenure to? ? hit at the major problems with our teacher quality pool.?

I was mightily impressed by the caliber of the EWA conference participants -- but also?unaware of ?the underlying drama,? as teacher Jose Vilson put it, before the conference started, about?an ?utter lack of teacher representation? on the panels. ?Interesting point. Apparently, writes Vilson, when the teachers who were invited to the event looked at the agenda ? which included panels on education schools, recruiting and hiring, and professional development ???we saw just another meeting where the teacher voice would get restricted to that of object and not subject. We would get to ask questions but not provide answers.?

I thought the three panels had some pretty fine talent on them ? including Kate Walsh of the National Council on Teacher Quality, Dan Goldhaber of the Center on Education Data & Research, Ted Preston of Achievement Network, and Judy Zimny from ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), among others ??and the teachers in the audience?came out of their corner swinging, making up for their poor panel representation.? But Vilson does have a point.? We don't hear a lot from teachers in these policy disputes. We get earfuls from their union reps, however, which suggests to me that perhaps the?teachers' complaints were misdirected: they need to rethink their relationships to their labor organizations.? (I once chaired a task force on student academic performance in my school district and the teachers refused to participate because they considered most of the issues ?contractual.?)?

But it was a great verbal free-for-all, a reminder, as one?teacher-turned-journalist pointed out, "how similar teachers and journalists are."? (One of the journalists, however,?put an end to the complaints about teacher pay when he mentioned how little journalists make.) Several other teachers posted accounts of the event ? see here, here, and here.? History teacher Steve Lazar, an outspoken participant at the conference (from the audience, of course) has a great blog, Outside the Cave, and gives frequent advice to journalists on stories they should be covering. ?And after the?conference,?he offered these suggestions to journalists for followup stories: "Why would anyone want to be a teacher?... Parental Views of Good Teaching?.? Accountability for Administrators? The Testing Industry."

Not bad.?

And one more: retention. ?Lazar says that 50 percent of all NYC teachers leave the profession within six years.? ?While Michelle Cahill and Talia Milgrom-Elcott at the Carnegie Corporation, McKinsey, Teach for America, and other high profile voices, focus on recruiting more highly educated candidates to the teaching profession, those of us in the trenches realize we do not have a recruitment problem; what we have is a retention problem.?

I agree.? We have a serious problem recruiting good teachers ? and an equally serious problem trying to keep them.

But here's my concern:? Only once during the daylong discussion (maybe twice) did anyone address the question of what teachers teach and why what they teach is important to educational outcomes. ?(This is different than the question of ?subject mastery,? which was discussed, along with the almighty STEM. It is also a different question than?one about ?the damage?done by the misguided emphasis on math and ELA, which came up a few times.) I tried to get at this with a question to one of the panels about whether teachers are being taught anything about curriculum ? as opposed to pedagogy ? and whether, in fact, in the future teachers should be expected to be curriculum experts or have an appreciation for the value of content knowledge to educational outcomes.

In my district, our teachers are currently engaged in a time-consuming curriculum-mapping project? that is supposed to, eventually, give us a K?12 curriculum in the core subjects. ?But do the teachers know what they're doing? And should they be the ones writing the curriculum?? It is fine to desire Great Teachers; it is not fine, to paraphrase Martin Luther King,?to hand over our children's minds to?the?Not So Great ones.

I did not put all that in my?query to the professional development panel, but, unfortunately, because I dropped Paolo Freire and E.D. Hirsch into the question (and cited David Steiner's Education Next study of ed school syllabi), the main point was lost is in the ideological flames and the question went unanswered.?

Fortunately, Judy Zimny from ACSD, did talk about the ?backbone? of the educational enterprise, which she said was ?knowledge,? and she stressed the fundamental duty teachers have to appreciate the importance of that knowledge. She avoided the term ?curriculum,? though, which probably has something to do with the organization's name change. (?Why is everyone?so afraid to talk about curriculum?? one editor confided to me later.)? The failure to address the question of curriculum matters in teacher training doesn't mean that teachers don't care about content; in fact, the good ones ? the Great Ones ? have extensive reading lists and meticulous lesson plans and, in their own ways, do the requisite drill-and-kill exercises (without calling them that, of course). ?Steve Lazar, who teaches the underprivileged in a Bronx high school, sent me a syllabus for his Advanced Reading and Writing in Government & Economics course and it's impressive: books for discussion include The Leviathan (Hobbes), The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), and Second Treatise on Civil Government (Locke).? Impressive. And, he says, his students are going to good colleges.

The problem, however, as even Lazar must know, is that not many teachers have read these works and so might not understand that such books could be important to learning. ?More importantly -- and this is where we wade into the deep end of the backbone question ? most teachers are simply not the best judges of what children should know.? At one level, of course, we?have a policy question: as society (whether local or national) we the citizens have to decide what we want our children to know. At another level, however, it would behoove us, once we make those decisions, to have our science, literature, history, art, and math experts (and let's please just decide that such people do exist) tell us what we should know at various stages of our learning life. ?That, my friends, is a curriculum -- the Voldemort of education. And just because we have our spats over evolution and our ideological fires in Texas, is no reason we shouldn't answer the question which the panel avoided: should teachers be taught something about the significance of curriculum before they start writing it?? ?

Here's my quick theory about our avoidance problem:? it comes from our fixation on the importance of teachers, which has led us to an obsessive belief in teacher autonomy, which in turn has lead to an excessive obeisance to teacher buy-in. All of which, with all due respect to the many wonderful teachers out there, has lead to a rather fast trip down the slope to the valley of fractured knowledge.?And all of that is also why, to answer Cahill and Talia Milgrom-Elcott's question, ?we haven't done it yet.? ???

Rick Hess raises a related question in his recent ?Common Core vs. Charter Schooling?!!? essay.? Will the common core folks take away the autonomy of charter schools?? And who's writing the common core?? What if it's not as good as what the Great Charters ? and the Great Teachers ? think it should be? Will they be forced to teach it?? Good questions, but let's not be frightened by the difficulty of writing good curriculum. Or, as Cahill and Talia Milgrom-Elcott, say, ?we must keep the quest for a perfect system from becoming the enemy of a good one.? We need great teachers. But we also need them to teach great content.?

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

The question followed what had been a bruising roundtable discussion between journalists and educators about the value of testing ? good or bad?? High-stakes or benchmarking?? Standards-driven or curriculum-driven?? And the newspaper editor's question was whether the pressure to perform isn't causing some testing impotence among our educators.? Another reporter, from another state, at this quiet corner conclave, admitted that he had been wondering the same thing.? ?Who scores these tests?? he wondered.?

The testing/cheating question reminds me of the military-industrial complex conundrum (or the public employees union contradiction):? do we have a phalanx of foxes guarding?our hen houses?? To paraphrase President Dwight Eisenhower, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the educational testing complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Though the cheating scandal du jour is in Atlanta (not to be confused with the education leadership forum Checker is moderating there on Monday), the range and depth of the problem, especially given the improbability of a conspiracy, is troubling.? Lacking a conspiracy, we are left with an explanation of ?moral and ethical breakdown of epidemic proportions.? And the question: how is the virus spread?

The New York Times suggests an alternative in a headline this morning:?

City to Toughen Audits Amid Concerns That Some Schools Manipulate Data

?So, we go from ?cheating? to ?manipulating.?? The key here, in Sharon Otterman's story for the Times, is this sentence,

?The Regents exams [the statewide tests that seniors must pass to graduate] are graded by teachers within schools, and teachers are not barred from grading their own students.

This would not be such a big deal were it not for the collateral damage implications: test results are, increasingly, being used to judge the teachers of the students and the schools themselves.? We are now asking the inmates to score themselves.

The New York city Regent exam score results suggest the problem, as Otterman reports:

At one Queens high school, the number of students scoring 65 to 69 [65 is the passing grade] last year in the five most popular Regents exams ? integrated algebra, global history, biology, English and United States history ? was more than five times the number who scored 60 to 64.

We have a huge testing problem in the United States, but we should see it as a symptom not the disease.? Whether at the district, state, or federal level, we should not expect kids to take tests that are not based on specific and known curricular texts.? The current practice of testing kids on vague, black-hole standards, only encourages the kind of shortcuts that teachers are taking: teach to the test (whatever it is), then score it so that you can keep your job!

Something is wrong with this picture.? For better or worse, mostly worse, we continue to think of our education system as a quiz show ?? what will the test-writers think of next? ? rather than a system to impart knowledge to the next generation.? Our education system is not a game of Jeopardy.? We need to spell out what we expect our children to know, at what age, and then test them ? and their teachers! ? on how well that knowledge is learned.?

?--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

More importantly, perhaps, than the fighting in Madison is the hand-holding in Denver.?And, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said yesterday, at a press conference concluding ED's two-day Advancing Student Achievement through Labor Management Collaboration conference, he foresees ?a movement? of cooperation between unions and management that will transform education. Many people called the conclave, which brought together representatives from 150 school districts, including management and labor, historic. (See my report here.)

It was quite a confab, one which highlighted the success of collaborations in places like Helena and New Haven as well as the pioneering?union-friendly work of?Green Dot, the?charter-management organization. The sponsors of the Denver conference?included the National School Boards Association, the Council of the Great City Schools, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the American Association of School Administrators, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Ford Foundation and their representatives. At the concluding press conference several of the leaders of those groups complimented participants for their ?courage,? but it was grand diplomacy that was most on display.

The first questioner asked Secretary Duncan to be more specific about ?seniority-based layoffs,? one of the hottest topics in education, and here was the Hyde Park mediator at his best:

These are obviously very complicated budget times? We've seen lots of layoffs??If we're serious? [we'll put] student achievement at the heart of these agreements, ? [but we] have to be very creative ? not making things worse through these layoffs ? [This is] the definition of a hard issue? There are a couple different ways of going about it that I don't think get us to where we want to go. One temptation is that you fire your most effective teachers, your great veterans.?While that may work from a cost efficiency standpoint, when you have great veteran teachers, that gives a grave disservice to children. Another way of doing it is to fire all the new teachers?and you have great talent in that pool as well.?That's a challenge. I worry, particularly, in historically underserved communities, where you have schools with constant turnover, those students need stability? we must be much more creative in how we do that.?Those are two ways not to do it?

Two ways not to do it??It could be argued that this is wishy-wash. Or, as it seems, Duncan shows the skills of a veteran diplomat, finding a language of conciliation that propels antagonists forward.?(I like his keen understanding for the fundamental need of students in low-income schools: stability and continuity. ?Where you have to make the tough calls,? said Duncan, ?particularly for the most disadvantaged children in the most disadvantaged communities, how do you keep the best teachers in those schools so that they have the sense of continuity that they so desperately need.?)

Duncan did let his hair down a bit when asked about the big districts that didn't show?notably, New York City and Washington, D.C. ?Obviously we're disappointed that any district can't spend 24 hours together to work on these tough issues,? he said. ?I think it's a sad reflection of the reality of the dysfunction?er, the challenges?in those places. ? I think it's a reality check that folks are at different levels in their ability to work together.? He then did what he does best, moved the ball forward.

We have a whole set of districts that are frankly going to lead the country where we need to go. And we have some districts that aren't quite there yet. That is a reality ? do everything we can to move from a handful of superstars, from 15, to 50, to 150 to 1,500?this is going to be a movement.

We hope so.?But there seems a weak link in this collaboration that the sponsors would do well to pay attention to: the parents and taxpayers.?Dennis Van Roekel, president of the NEA, alluded to it, perhaps inadvertently, when he said,

I just?can't help but note the disconnect between what's happening here [in Denver] and what is happening in state houses around the country. ? That demand [for school improvement] out there is not coming from the education community. Because here we are all talking about collaboration, about trust, about building partnership, all in the best interests of students.

It is a disconnect. And it is up to the nation's school boards, the only group at the conference that, nominally, represents parents and taxpayers in this school-improvement debate, to make?or remake?that connection. Once they do so, they can then come back to the bargaining table, not just talking about collaboration, but fully aware of who it actually represents.

?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Anyone who has had any experience with the post-Columbine Code of Conduct panic will understand.? Such Codes are dense, intricate documents that attempt to foresee ? and ban! ? every conceivable social indiscretion. Most of the kids who get caught up in this web ? and get suspended from school or sent to In-school Suspension rooms?? are the hapless ones who most need to get educated.? It is fairly well known that history's harshest dictators rule not with an iron fist, but with razored talons paging through volumes of laws banning just about everything, offering such rulers?complete authority under the rubric of the ?rule of law.??It's not much different in school districts, especially those?with sizeable minority student populations,? few minority teachers or administrators, and poor academic standards. Black kids take it on the shins when the Code is long and dense and intricate. The word ?targeted? is no joke. However well-intentioned?the school policies, most of them are impossible to enforce in any equitable or fair manner -- which means that they are enforced in the breach.

Now comes research to document the social status implications of our anti-bullying binge -- and will, hopefully, sound the alarm about our latest witch hunt.? First reported in Education Week last week, the new studies are also discussed in this morning's New York Times by Tara Parker-Pope.? We learn that bullying is part of ordinary life in our schools and that, contrary to popular opinion,??the school bully? is not ?maladjusted or aggressive by nature.?? Instead, ?teenage aggression and victimization occur throughout the social ranks as students jockey to improve their status.?

It is not reassuring that Parker-Pope quotes a researcher recommending that ?school districts need to have policies that deal with this? ? by the time ?this? gets to the school, it will look more like ?that,? with only the misfits and hapless, as with codes of conduct, getting caught.? Let's hope we can slow the anti-bullying juggernaut that has spawned school policies like the one proposed for our district: a 3,400-word, nine-page document that is one-fourth the length of the entire Code of Conduct, most of it wrapped up in psychological mumbo-jumbo like this:

?Bullying is characterized by:?

1.??????????? Power imbalance - occurs when a bully uses his/her physical or social power over a target.

2.??????????? Intent to harm - the bully seeks to inflict physical or emotional harm and/or takes pleasure in this activity.

3.??????????? Threat of further aggression - the bully and the target believe the bullying will continue.

4.??????????? Terror - when any bullying increases, it becomes a ?systematic violence or harassment used to intimidate and maintain dominance.???(Barbara Coloroso, The Bully, The Bullied & The?Bystander, 2003)

?There are at least three kinds of bullying: verbal, physical and psychological/social/relational.?

• Verbal bullying includes, but is not limited to, name calling, insulting remarks, verbal teasing, frightening phone calls, violent threats, extortion, taunting, gossip, spreading rumors, racist slurs, threatening electronic communications, anonymous notes, etc.
• Physical bullying includes, but is not limited to, poking, slapping, hitting, tripping or causing a fall, choking, kicking, punching, biting, pinching, scratching, spitting, twisting arms or legs, damaging clothes and personal property, or threatening gestures.
• Social, psychological or relational bullying includes, but is not limited to, excluding someone from a group, isolating, shunning, spreading rumors or gossiping, arranging public humiliation, undermining relationships, teasing about clothing, looks, giving dirty looks, aggressive stares, etc.

God forbid anyone gets caught doing?etcetera.? But here's the velvet-wrapped stiletto;?naturally, the concluding paragraph:

While the focus of this policy is on prevention, bullying acts may still occur. In these cases, offenders [all those ?teasing? 6^th-graders giving ?dirty looks? and ?aggressive stares,? not to mention the dreaded ?etc.?] ?will be given the clear message that their actions are wrong and the behavior must improve. Offenders will receive in-school guidance in making positive choices in their relationships with others. If appropriate, disciplinary action will be taken by the administration in accordance with the district's Code of Conduct, as applicable.? If the behavior rises to the level of criminal activity, law enforcement will be contacted.

I guarantee you that, if past practice is any guide here, the only part of this policy that anyone will pay?much attention to, besides the offensive etcetera, is the ?disciplinary action [that] will be taken by the administration.? And the only ones disciplined will be?the ones who get ?caught.??

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

?

Okay, everyone hold hands.? Now, repeat after me:

We Will? Love -? Each Other -- And ?Educate ? All ?Kids!? ?

Or, try this: ?

You two shake hands, and don't let me catch you fighting again!?

That's a quick glimpse of schools, now and then ? and school governance, now and then.? Then, it was desks lined up (I?once visited a 19th century?Brooklyn ?school -- still in use -- where you could see the plugged holes from the days when desks were nailed to the floor); now, it's classrooms with pillows and rugs and a jumble of round tables. ??Then, it was ?top down? management, with principals ruling with rulers; now, principals spend much of their day parsing language of Codes of Conduct and labor contracts and writing up referrals and evaluations that can withstand a constititutional challenge.?

These caricatures of American public education governance are fleshed out admirably in Sam Dillon's NYT report this morning on a unique Denver conclave to bring education labor and management leaders together.? It?is being?convened by America's?Principal, Arne Duncan, who continues to work the education reform room with a stick in one hand and carrot in the other.? (I've heard he's teaming up with Doug Lemov on a new book:? Rule like a Champion!? 49 Techniques to Put Educators on the Path to Excellence. Just kidding.)

Let's hope that the two-day confab in the mile-high city is aided by the thin air. It is called ?Advancing Student Achievement Through Labor-Management Collaboration,? which seems a promising experiment in getting key educators to talk.? In fact, taking a page from many successful schools' playbooks, Duncan's Department of Education made each participant, according to Dillon, ?sign a pledge to collaborate in good faith to raise student achievement.?? Apparently, eleven of the nation's 25 largest school districts signed, as did 140 smaller districts from 40 states.? ?We have to learn to problem-solve together,? Duncan told the group.?

To Dillon's credit, a good portion of his story is devoted to the elephants not in the room. In fact, he points out that New York City wasn't there because Gotham's labor-management school issues are ? well, rocky. ?I wasn't going to walk into Denver with the chancellor and say, `We're the hypocrites, here for the conference,'? United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president Michael Mulgrew told Dillon.? (In fact, Mulgrew was one of the hecklers at a recent public hearing in New York, convened by chancellor Cathleen Black (see here.) On the other hand, I'm wondering what Mulgrew was really thinking when he was sitting next to Joel Klein at last summer's Race to the Top presentation (see here). ?Black's office issued a kindly ?we need to work together? statement, while the chancellor was spending her time in Albany, begging the state legislature for more money. See also Sharon Otterman's interesting account (I hope I have this right) of the television ad ?war on teacher layoffs.?)

When the current collaboration dust settles, perhaps we will be further along the road to making teacher unions true professional organizations (eliminating the wasteful contradictions of tenure and seniority rights, and paying good teachers what they're worth, in the process).?

But there are also more existential issues being debated, according to Dillon, which may contribute to the momentum of teacher professionalization. Some states,?writes Dillon,?want to bar unions from schools completely.? That's a proposal in Tennessee.? And in Wisconsin, where new GOP Governor Scott Walker wants to end teacher collective bargaining rights and Republicans ?command large majorities in the Legislature.?? As Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute commented in the Times in January,

Public unions have had no natural adversary; they give politicians political support and get good contracts back?.? It's uniquely dysfunctional.

As?Charles Kerchner of Claremont Graduate University tells Dillon:

This is the harshest time for teachers' unions that I've seen since the advent of legislatively sanctioned collective bargaining half a century ago.

Could that be a good thing for our kids?

?--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

To change metaphors, I could spin the globe, eyes closed, and put my finger just about anywhere on our little school district map to find what to my eyes looks like a train wreck and to others, based on the reactions,?the regular delivery van.?

Last night, our board received a ?hand carry? sheet titled, ?2011-12 Budget Development Information.?? (A ?hand carry? is always bad news; by definition, it is what the administration wants to spring on the board, at the public meeting, so it has no time to review it or prepare.)? Our tiny New York state district ? 2,000 kids ? faces a budget gap, according to the sheet, of $3,688,033 and a choice ? this is only preliminary, mind you -- between raising local property taxes 14.9% and laying off 32 teachers (16% of the total faculty) or raising taxes 3.9% and shedding 71 teachers (35%).? If it sounds Hobbesian, it's meant to.?

Sure, the district is overburdened with too many overpaid administrators and too many underpaid aides, too many uncoordinated programs, too many bad teachers, too many special ed kids, no curriculum -- but chopping-block budget numbers are always limited to teachers so that?parents will start conjuring up images of classrooms of 50 and 60 students.? Oh horror!

The real horror, however, was on a one-page sheet ? this was not on the agenda and was meant to be buried -- titled, ?Summary of January 2011 Regents.? ?The sheet had a very simple chart showing results of the Regents Exams -- the tests taken by all New York State high schoolers, many of which have to be passed for graduation. Easy to read:? Exam subject, number of students who took the exam, number of students who passed: ?41 kids took Integrated Algebra and only 10 passed; 27 took Global History, 5 passed.? Of the ten exams given that fateful January day, only 34 of the 129 students who took them (26%) passed.? And this was before any budget crisis.? ?We'll look into it,? said the Super.?

When failure has taken hold of a district, it is very difficult to root out.? ?I hate to say it, but in many ways I welcome the fiscal crisis.? It?may just be our National Guard and may, I hope, throw open the school house doors.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow