What I hope to bring to both endeavors are some of the insights gleaned while serving on my small public district’s board of education and writing for the last twenty-five months (this is my 400th blog post for Fordham, but who’s counting?) about school governance...

The lessons of school board service do not quickly dissipate. My feelings about BOE service are similar to those of the new Bridging Differences interlocutory Pedro Noguera (taking Diane Ravitch’s place). Known for his education scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard, and now New York University, Noguera spent four years on the Berkeley school board. He didn’t have a good time. California was “in the midst of yet another fiscal crisis,” he reports, and he and his colleagues were having…

to make impossibly tough choices: cut classroom aides or the music program, lay off teachers or eliminate another guidance counselor. I had no idea when I was convinced to run for the board that I would be spending most of my time managing what I came to regard as the “dismal and totally inadequate status quo." I had been under the illusion that I would be able to use my position to fight for the rights of the children who were poorly served and push for changes that were needed to make schools more just and equitable. It took only a few months for me to realize that making a difference from the school board would be much harder than I had imagined.

This insight gets to the core of our democratic experiment—a word frequently used to describe the American social contract. We are constantly confronted with new information about the world we inhabit, but we’re always having to adjust the terms of the contract to reflect the new information. It’s a lousy system, as Churchill once quipped; there just isn’t anything better.

A commenter on one of my recent posts about the Chicago Teachers Union strike suggested that the messiness of the thing could be solved if we “remove[d] education from politics.” Yes, politics. That’s the “dismal and totally inadequate status quo” which helped drive Professor Noguera back to the ivory tower.

Though we are always called to make “a more perfect union,” we’re stuck with a system that thwarts perfection. This is why we argue so much. This is the American conversation—the only way of tracking the ever-changing variables of the experiment. Can there be a Eureka moment? Never. Can there be progress? Always—but only if we keep the conversation going.

Just yesterday, I received an email alert of a new post on Jay Greene’s blog. “Subject: Why ED Hirsh [sic] Should re-examine his position on parental choice.” It was Matthew Ladner wanting to argue over a 2008 Sol Stern story in City Journal. Rather, he was taking on E.D. Hirsch for comments he made in response to the Stern story. Two days before that I had pulled Hirsch into a post of mine about a Peg Tyre story about a high school on Staten Island. And on we go—as we must.

Can we remove education from politics? At our peril. Politics, and the ensuing policymaking, is the lifeblood of the American system. But if we don’t have the informed public that Jefferson warned we needed—a public informed by constant conversation and debate—we will be clogging the nation’s arteries faster than a double cheeseburger and fries.

It has been more than a little fun having the opportunity to be part of the dialogue about how to improve our public education system. And to be part of a blogging team like the one the Thomas Fordham Institute has managed to field so consistently for so long—before there was blogging!—has been a great honor. They are the best. And be it noted, Mike Petrilli, that this last Board’s Eye View post, is under 800 words! It will be a challenge to Tweet, but I’ll be twittering from @boardseyeview. And you’re invited to follow.

This comes at a time when there is some debate about the Common Core English language arts standards (see here and here, as well as The Atlantic profile of David Coleman, and just about anything our Common Core guru Kathleen Porter-Magee has written) and the first contracts awarded by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (known, mercifully, as PARCC) to write the ELA tests for the Common Core.

Tyre, who is the author of The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve and The Trouble With Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents & Educators Must Do, has a great grasp of these issues and tells us that the writing program increased pass rates for the English Regents exam from 67 percent to 89 percent and global history from 64 to 75 in just two years. It is the latter bump that prompted a friend of mine to send the story to E.D. Hirsch, which prompted Hirsch to offer some intriguing insights about Tyre’s story (see below).

One of the keys to New Dorp’s success with “writing revolution,” a program inspired by one developed by Judith Hochman when she ran a private school for the disabled in White Plains, New York, was, according to Tyre, “an intense focus, across nearly every academic subject, on teaching the skills that underlie good analytical writing.” As Tyre explains, this was “a dramatic departure from what most American students—especially low performers—are taught in high school.” Or in elementary school for that matter, where, writes Tyre, students “mostly learn writing by constructing personal narratives, memoirs, and small works of fiction.” This dovetails nicely into what the Common Core is trying to do with the ELA standards, which require students “to write informative and persuasive essays. By high school, students will be expected to produce mature and thoughtful essays, not just in English class but in history and science classes as well.” Writes Tyre:

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children do not have to “catch” a single thing. They are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts—but, because, and so.

Hochman, now seventy-five, tells Tyre: “The thing is, kids need a formula, at least at first, because what we are asking them to do is very difficult. So God, let’s stop acting like they should just know how to do it. Give them a formula! Later, when they understand the rules of good writing, they can figure out how to break them.”

Concludes Tyre:

In a profoundly hopeful irony, New Dorp’s re-emergence as a viable institution has hinged not on a radical new innovation but on an old idea done better. The school’s success suggests that perhaps certain instructional fundamentals—fundamentals that schools have devalued or forgotten—need to be rediscovered, updated, and reintroduced. And if that can be done correctly, traditional instruction delivered by the teachers already in classrooms may turn out to be the most powerful lever we have for improving school performance after all.

As noted, a friend of mine was so taken by the New Dorp story he alerted the maestro of curricular content, E.D. Hirsch. The author of two of the most important analyses of our education system and the beliefs that undergird it (Cultural Literacy:What Every American Needs to Know and The Schools We Need: and Why We Don’t Have Them), Hirsch replied with an extremely thoughtful and deft consideration of the Tyre story which Hirsch has given me permission to share here:

I had a thought or two reading this. The first is that expository writing is both a craft and a subject matter. It's a subject to be learned and a craft to be practiced. But those formal acquirements of learning how to put an essay together can take you only so far.

One also has to build knowledge and vocabulary as the key school acquisitions. I was wondering whether the emphasis on writing at New Dorp helped in knowledge and vocabulary acquisition by forcing "distributed practice" of subject matter and vocabulary, causing them to be learned more effectively by having to be written out. I was also wondering if that knowledge effect wasn't just as important or even more important than learning the craft. If so, the promise of the method lies in its efficiency: killing two birds with one stone, both writing and general knowledge. The efficiency is significant only if it's an effective pedagogical device in support of cumulative knowledge building.

Thinking of it quantitatively: there are, say a hundred or so cohesion words like but, although, nevertheless, and there are a couple of dozen rules or principles such as: where are the points of emphasis?: the beginning and end, what are the overarching principles: unity, coherence, and emphasis. How do you get coherence through repetition and word placement? How do you make an outline? Etc. etc. There are maybe one or two dozen principles that you need to know and practice to be a competent writer.

But substantively you need to know some 25,000 word groups, and the knowledge they represent. And when you learn these, you won't have much trouble with unity, coherence, and emphasis, since in comparison with that quantity of stuff there's not all that much to learn about the general principles of expository writing.

The reason this is worth mentioning is that one needs a keen eye for detecting the defects of all new methods and reforms that are chiefly structural and formal in character, and which avoid defining specifically the knowledge to be learned. How-to-ism has been the great original sin of American education, and is the thing that has caused the great verbal decline. This formalism has a charmed life, because of the American resistance to imposing content on anybody. None of this is to call in doubt the importance of essay writing in school. That's knowledge too!

As schools embark on the implementation of the Common Core standards, let us hope that educators keep in mind that they are just standards and that the heavy lifting, as Hirsch suggests, will be that of “defining specifically the knowledge to be learned.”

What does The Scream have in common with merit pay? Photo by Ian Burt.

Jay Greene takes on the issue in a wonderfully sassy post this morning headlined “In Chicago—Phony Merit Pay is Dead, Long Live True Merit Pay.” He recognizes that the ink isn’t dry on the deal hammered out between the Chicago Public Schools and the striking Chicago Teachers Union, but he suggests that it was a blessing (in disguise?) that CPS gave up on its attempt at “differentiated compensation” but retained the right to open new charter schools. As Greene argues, the former is “phony” merit pay and the latter is “true” merit pay:

In phony merit pay—the kind that hardly exists in any industry—there is a mechanistic calculation of performance that determines the size of a small bonus that is provided in addition to a base salary that is essentially guaranteed regardless of performance. You can stink and still keep your job and pay. The worst that can happen is you miss out on some or all of a modest bonus. To make it even more phony, in the few cases where this kind of phony merit pay has been tried, the game is often rigged so that virtually all employees are deemed meritorious and get at least some of the bonus.

Greene says that the most effective merit pay system is the one that gets you the best teachers.  As he writes,

The net effect of growing charter schools, closing under-enrolled traditional public schools, and only hiring back the best and most desired teachers from those schools is a true merit pay system. Bad teachers are let go. Good teachers not only get their job back, but they also get an extremely generous pay raise over the next four years for staying and being good. That’s real merit pay.

At a more micro level, recent research by Freakonomics co-author and University of Chicago professor Steven Levitt, Harvard professor and MacArthur "Genius Grant" winner Roland Fryer, Chicago's John List, and University of California San Diego's Sally Sadoff, supports this seemingly harsh view of performance-boosting incentives (for a quick introduction, read Amber Winker’s analysis). National Public Radio’s Shankar Vedantam took up the question this morning, interviewing John List about the group’s “loss aversion” study of 150 K-8 teachers in the Chicago Heights school district, a hard-scrabble community twenty miles south of Chicago proper where almost all the students are poor and only 64 percent meet minimum proficiency standards. The researchers divided the teachers into three groups, as Vedantam says,

One group got no incentive; they just went about their school year as usual. A second group was promised a bonus if their students did well at math.

The third group is where the psychology came in: The teachers were given a bonus of $4,000 upfront — but it had a catch. If student math performance didn't improve, teachers had to sign a contract promising to return some or all of the money.

The third group burned up the competition. "Teachers who were paid in advance and [were] asked to give the money back if their students did not perform,” List tells NPR, “—their [students'] test scores were actually out of the roof: two to three times higher than the gains of the teachers in the traditional bonus group." List said he believed that the loss aversion incentive was so successful because it made teachers focus on the kids who were not mastering the material and stick with them until they got it.

Writing about the study last July, The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann called it a “major breakthrough.”

There are, of course, the caveats; the data on reading scores, for instance, said Weissmann, were “shakier, since most students ultimately had more than one instructor working with them on language skills.”

And then there’s the politics of the thing. As Vedantam notes, “List warned that the bonus system needed buy-in from teachers. Teaching isn't like making widgets; it requires motivation and passion. If teachers feel they are being manipulated rather than encouraged to improve their performance, they could end up looking for other lines of work.” Or they might just choke under the pressure. “From the perspective of a teacher's union,” says Weissmann, “it's easy to see how this would make the [merit pay] concept even more unpalatable—who wants to subject themselves to the stress of seeing their bonus stripped away?”

This is where we come back to Jay Greene. A brand-new system (“non-unionized,” in Greene’s view) offers the advantage of starting fresh. Knowing the rules going in—e.g., that you will be judged on performance (yours and your students) and that you could lose your job—makes it much easier to establish a collaborative and school-based incentive system.  As Kathleen Porter-Magee suggests, “Top-down systems that bypass or undermine school leaders rarely produce excellence in the classroom.”  In this case, the “top-down” applies just as well to federal and state bureaucrats as it does to organized labor.

So, though the ink isn’t dry yet, Chicagoans may have dodged a bullet without knowing it. The new CTU contract will not have the “phony” merit pay (differentiated pay) but will have the “real” thing (school autonomy). Whether it becomes an Edvard Munch moment is anyone’s guess. But it should be better for students.

I can’t get enough of the Chicago teachers’ union strike. Leave it to the Windy City to provide educators and education pundits with drama worthy of a reality TV series: interesting protagonists, things to fight over, edge-of-your-seat drama.

Leave it to the Windy City to provide educators and education pundits with drama worthy of a reality TV series.

We thought it would be over in time to open schools this morning. But a 3 a.m. email blast from Whitney Tilson had the bad news:

In an astonishing development, the Chicago Teachers Union today voted to continue its strike until at least the middle of this coming week.

Tilson said his “first thought” was sympathy for the parents and children. But his second thought? 

…that the outrageous, selfish, greedy behavior by the union is an absolute godsend to we reformers. Parents in Chicago - and everyone else who's paying attention across the country - are so mad that they can't see straight - and it's now 100% directed at the union. This will benefit us in Chicago and nationally for years to come.

Will it?

By coincidence, while I was reading Tilson’s email, NPR’s Morning Edition was broadcasting a feature about the University of Virginia’s Bob Pianta and his work on teacher training—specifically his finding, according to NPR’s Alix Spiegel, that the better the teacher, the higher his or her expectation for student learning. The higher the expectation, the more students learn. As the headline of Laura Logerfo’s 2006 Education Next paper put it, “teachers who think they should make a difference…do!” And how do you get them to think they should—or even could? Teach them how to be good teachers. At a deeper level, as my sister-in-law would say, “Nothin’ to it but to do it.” Or, as Chris Cerf once told me, in explaining that it’s sometimes necessary to tell people what to do, “sometimes exhortation is not enough.” The UVA’s Pianta puts it this way, "It's really tough for anybody to police their own beliefs.” Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century philosopher of the mind (and who, it should be noted, was baptized “Emanuel”), believed that we don’t choose a lifestyle based on beliefs, we come upon our beliefs based on our lifestyles. Thus, practice not only makes perfect, it actually changes our hard-to-police belief system. “To change beliefs,” said NPR's Spiegel this morning, “you have to change behavior.”

What does all this have to do with Chicago?

It is the narrative playing out there, the events on the ground, which may indeed change our beliefs about education “for years to come.” The number of hours in a school day and the number of days in a school year will dramatically change the behavior of the system; as will giving principals the option of hiring teachers they want to hire; as will evaluating teachers based on student performance. And these practices will, indeed, change our beliefs about what is possible.

The reason we are so transfixed by Chicago is that the deal being hammered out now will be, as Tilson suggests, a game-changer. The contract will change behavior, which will, eventually, change beliefs.

Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teachers Union gets it. The other Emanuel, Mayor Rahm, gets it. In the Wall Street Journal’s “Weekend Conversation,” David Feith gives the mayor a harder time than David Brooks did in his New York Times column on Friday. Feith thinks that Emanuel, “his generation’s most noted political pugilist,” has gone soft:

What Mr. Emanuel doesn't note [in his defense of the current offers on the table] is the bankrupt status quo: 99.7% of Chicago teachers are rated satisfactory while the graduation rate is just 60%, only 20% of eighth-graders are proficient in reading and less than 8% of 11th-graders are college-ready on state tests. Fixing such a system is a moral imperative, and Chicago's mayor might have encouraged parents and taxpayers to see it that way.

Emanuel disputes that take and gives a good defense of what he and his education reform team have done—admittedly, mostly out of public sight—these last sixteen months (he assumed office in May of 2011). It’s the political realist Emanuel, negotiating. The teacher-evaluation system, which Kathleen Porter-Magee says is at the heart of the strike, “was actually over a year developed in collaboration with 2,000 teachers,” Emanuel tells Feith, “so they have their thumbprints all over the design of this. . . . I can't think of anything more respectful to the profession."

What is the idea at the heart of the Chicago strike?

With news today that there’s a glitch in negotiations, the pugilist Emanuel may have to reassert himself: He has promised to take the CTU to court for conducting an illegal strike. Great drama. But as an editor of mine once told me (as he slashed away at a paragraph), “the best dramatic sentence must have an idea in it." You might call this the counter-Kant.

What is the idea at the heart of the Chicago strike? Well, that’s what all the chattering is about—trying to figure it out, as it’s happening. I would suggest that part of the significance of the strike is the historic challenge it poses to Democrats like Emanuel, a close associate of Barack Obama. And this is why Whitney Tilson—a co-founder of Democrats for Education Reform, which “aims to return the Democratic Party to its rightful place as a champion of children, first and foremost, in America's public education systems,” according to its website—is right to trumpet the significance of the fight. Writes Tilson:

[S]o many teachers unions in cities and states all over the country are so disconnected from reality, so arrogant, and so used to bullying everyone that they do self-destructive things like this regularly, greatly diminishing whatever public support they might have. It may well be the greatest asset we reformers have.

The irony, of course, is that Tilson sounds a lot like Douglas Feith, who sees Emanuel’s duty here as a “moral imperative,” predicting that the only outcome of this labor dispute that will matter is whether Chicago gets better schools. “His report card will depend on student results.”

If this is a strange-bedfellow’s moment, it’s a welcome one for education reformers. And if our policymakers can continue to see student outcomes as the most important imperative, then we educators may show the way to true bi-partisanship.

It’s a testament to how peaceful labor relations have been in our schools that the Chicago Teachers Union strike has been front-page and prime-time news since Monday. A national Rorschach test on education: Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Mother Jones weighed in. Like the guillotine, the strike focused the national mind.

The strike could be over soon—and many commentators predicted as much—but no matter when it ends, it offers us a chance to take the nation’s pulse. And the following is a quick roundup of opinion from a few of our notable educators, pundits, and editorial writers; much of it quite good.

First stop, of course, should be the Flypaper’s comprehensive list of stories, put together by a crackerjack team—Joe Portnoy, Pamela Tatz, and Ty Eberhardt. (As a former newsdesk guy, I can feel their pain—worth it, though, as the site proves.) And, of course, one of the best leads comes from our own Mike Petrilli:

I had a reporter ask me this week if I could remember a teachers’ strike as “confusing” as the one in Chicago; it was so hard, she explained, even to know over which issues the teachers were striking.

That’s not an accident. The local and national unions surely realized, after an onslaught of negative coverage, that complaining about 16 percent raises on top of $75,000 average salaries was not a winning argument during a period of 8 percent unemployment. So they changed their talking points: Now the teachers were upset about evaluations that would link their performance reviews with students’ test scores. But that position is unpopular, too—and puts the union at odds with President Obama—so now they are striking over…class sizes and air conditioning?

The New York Times certainly seemed to agree. Early on, the paper of record (is it still?) editorialized with a hard-hitting headline, “Chicago Teachers’ Folly”:

Teachers’ strikes, because they hurt children and their families, are never a good idea. The strike that has roiled the civic climate in Chicago—and left 350,000 children without classes—seems particularly senseless because it is partly a product of a personality clash between the blunt mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and the tough Chicago Teachers Union president, Karen Lewis….

What stands out about this strike, however, is that the differences between the two sides were not particularly vast, which means that this strike was unnecessary. Moreover, Ms. Lewis, who seems to be basking in the power of having shut down the school system, seems more inclined toward damaging the mayor politically than in getting this matter resolved. If the strike goes on for much longer, the union could pay a dear price in terms of public opinion.

The Times stars seemed to align pretty quickly on the issue. The same day that the newspaper was convening a huge conference on education, Nicholas Kristof wrote one of the more concise analyses of the situation. Calling education “the most important civil rights battleground,” Kristof writes that “while the Chicago teachers’ union claims to be striking on behalf of students, I don’t see it.” Kristof does not hold back, calling Chicago schools’ short school day and year “unconscionable,” concluding,

This isn’t a battle between garment workers and greedy corporate barons. The central figures in the Chicago schools strike are neither strikers nor managers but 350,000 children. Protecting elements of a broken and unaccountable school system—the union demand—sacrifices those students, in effect turning a blind eye to a “separate but equal” education system.

Kristof’s columnist colleague David Brooks added his take this morning, offering an interesting compliment to Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats (traditional supporters of “Economy 2,” says Brooks, the one with people in government and education who “don’t have the sword of Damocles hanging over them so they don’t pursue unpleasant streamlining as rigorously” as those in “Economy 1”) for pushing to reform the Windy City’s schools. The new mayor’s grit, says Brooks, is “a hopeful sign that some Democrats are hardy enough to take on interests aligned with their own party.”

And no story on teacher unions would be complete without hearing from Terry M. Moe, the William Bennett Munro professor of political science at Stanford University and author of Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools, who weighed in for CNN:

It is easy to see the Chicago teachers strike as an unfortunate incident that will soon pass. This is, after all, their first strike in 25 years. The norm is that the district and the Chicago Teachers Union have regularly negotiated their way to contracts every several years. So it might appear that, almost always, collective bargaining "works."

But does it? The purpose of the Chicago school system — and of the American school system more generally — is to educate children. The way to assess collective bargaining is not to ask whether it works to bring labor peace. It is to ask whether it promotes the interests of children in a quality education. And the answer to that question is no, it does not. Not even remotely.

This seemed to be the dominant theme—that the strike hurt kids. As Mike Petrilli suggested on day one, “It’s hard to imagine the teachers winning in the court of public opinion.”

My unscientific read of things would surely support that view.

In a September 5, 2012, issue of the Portland [Oregon] Tribune an article titled “Schools beat the drum for equity” is nominally about equity in education but could just as easily be a story about the racial inequities of peanut-butter sandwiches and noontime drum classes for black and Latino boys.

Peanut-butter sandwiches are racist, the story explains, because not all cultures have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their food pyramid; specifically, the Somali and Hispanic cultures. The noontime drum classes are racist because they are targeted to black and Latino boys even though the principal says no one has been turned away, irate parents’ comments to the contrary.

The principal of Harvey Scott K-8 School in Portland is the real focus of the article. Verenice Guiterrez is working hard to make sure that there is equity in education in her school and to improve education for students of color. She is doing so by following the guidelines of the Portland Public Schools, specifically of a program designed by consultant Glenn Singleton to eliminate racial educational disparity in schools.

How is this change going to happen? Teachers are spending a great deal of time attending training and meetings to become proficient in Courageous Conversations and Educational Equity. These sessions are designed to make teachers aware of racial inequities and the pervasive whiteness in the schools. This training will be transferred to the classroom as teachers work with students to boost the performance of minority students.

I wonder when the teachers will actually have time to teach.

I wonder when the teachers will actually have time to teach. The school district is already short of funds: Why is it putting scarce dollars into this training and not into paying for a few more teachers? Guiterrez says that they are down five full-time positions this year. That means more work for the remaining staff. And they won’t be teaching, they will be “conversing courageously” and making sure that students of color feel good about themselves. But with some restrictions—there will be no more noontime drum classes and peanut-butter sandwiches, of course..

How this good feeling will bring up the academic performance of Gutierrez’s students is beyond me. In the nearby Beaverton Public Schools, the catch phrase is, “Are you culturally competent?” In either case, teachers in the public schools don’t teach any more: they facilitate and strive to make children feel good. Reading, writing, and arithmetic have fallen by the wayside.

Principal Gutierrez is correct when she says it’s unacceptable for eighth-graders to go into high school with third-grade educations. Why were those children moved on to the next grade in the first place? Shouldn’t they have been held back when they were not meeting the academic expectations for that grade level? This process of advancing students even though they are not at grade level has disastrous results. When local students graduate from high school and want to attend college their lackluster elementary and secondary education hits the brick wall of Portland Community College. A new student at PCC has to take a placement exam. Approximately one third of the graduates from the PPS will have to attend remedial math and English language arts classes to learn what they should have learned in fifth grade.

The Portland Community College website advises prospective students:

PCC uses Placement Testing to determine students’ academic skill level for appropriate course placement. Most new PCC students are required to take the Placement Test to determine their skills in reading, writing and mathematics.

There is no mention of having courageous conversations, being culturally competent, or feeling good about oneself. As PCC might have said, “Can you read? Can you write? Can you do mathematics? If not, we will teach you what you should have learned years ago and get you ready for a four year college.”

Teachers in the Portland Public Schools now teach Courageous Conversations. Before that, they taught Conflict Resolution. Before that, they taught.

There will be tremendous pressure to resolve this labor dispute quickly.

Some 140 of the district’s schools will remain open from 8:30 to 12:30, but without any of their 25,000 teachers, according to a CPS contingency plan. That leaves more than 500 schools empty in the nation’s third-largest school district (serving over 400,000 students).

According to the Tribune,

• CPS had offered a 16 percent salary increase over four years, but the CTU said it wanted more health care benefits and bigger first-year increase to compensate for longer school days.


• With rumors that CPS might close 100 schools, the CTU wanted guarantees that laid-off teachers would be recalled.


• There was disagreement over the role of student performance in teacher evaluations.

These are all very familiar issues in public education. But teacher strikes have become rare. (See Rick Hess and Marty West’s 2006 Ed Next story.) Strikes are a risky business, especially in an era when teacher unions have been on the defensive, if not on the ropes, and parents now have options they never had before; there are 114 charter schools in Chicago, all of them open today. There hasn’t been a teacher strike in Chicago since 1987, a very different era in public education, several years before the choice movement took off and long before the standards movement began to shine a spotlight on school responsibility—and, by extension, teacher responsibility—for student performance. In fact, 1987 might be a high-water mark in teacher union power (though Hess and West write that, nationally, a strike high-water mark came in 1975); after all, “before that 1987 strike,” reports the Tribune,

the threat was a near-annual event; from 1969 through 1987, there were nine work stoppages, ranging from two days in 1985 to the 19-day marathon in 1987. Classes didn't resume until Oct. 5. Teachers generally fought for higher pay, better benefits, smaller class sizes and sometimes a school holiday. In the 1985 stoppage, the teachers won a 6 percent raise—and Casimir Pulaski Day.

Though CTU teachers have been practicing the strike for a couple of months, this is a new era for the unions. In fact, Chicago’s charter schools, which are not unionized and enroll over 50,000 students, stand as a hugely visible reminder that there are schooling options; that the union’s power to shut down Chicago’s public schools does not have the sting it once did. As Mike points out in his post this morning, “This drama is playing out in Chicago but how it’s reported in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Columbus could very well impact the election.”

Given the national spotlight, there will be tremendous pressure to resolve this labor dispute quickly. After all, both President Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, are from Chicago; and the city’s new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, remains a key Obama advisor. Public-education reform makes some of the strangest of bedfellows in these politically partisan times.

My prediction: The walk-out will be brief and, in the end, will tell us more about the power of politics than about the issues facing our nation’s schools.

Shouldn’t every American citizen have a right to the best education we can deliver?

Though I’m not sure that taking out after the “instrumentalist rhetoric” of recent reports like that of the Council on Foreign Relations (U.S. Education Reform and National Security) is appropriate, Roth is right to question those who wonder “why people destined for low-paying jobs should bother to pursue their education beyond high school, much less study philosophy, literature and history.” I have written about the subject before (here, here, and here) because, as Roth argues, it’s important. It’s an education policy issue that, played out in the trenches, is very much a social justice issue, if not a moral one—and, I would argue, very much a national security issue. This was the point of my post on Earl Shorris’s Roberto Clemente program for the poor; that the poor deserve a good education too. As Shorris wrote:

If the multigenerational poor are to make the leap out of poverty, it will require a new kind of thinking—reflection…. And that is a beginning. [The study of the humanities is] in itself a redistribution of wealth.

Shorris quotes the great University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins: “The best education for the best is the best education for us all.”

Of course, there are arguments about what a “best” education is, but for too many of our urban kids who can barely read and write those are arguments at the fringe. The thin ice here, and this is what Roth is getting at, is that by determining that some kids are only cut out for the manual trades, we are denying them access to that “best” education and—this is the national security problem—thus denying the nation of a wealth of potential rocket scientists and CEOs.

Some of this is a variation on the voc-ed debate—see Checker and my dueling essays last winter, “Liberal Arts vs. Technical Training”—and Roth offers decent reasons for rejecting the “dual-track” system that sends some kids toward plumbing (or computer programming?) and others toward Hegel and Dickens. It is not a new debate: John Dewey argued, as Roth points out, that a dual-track system would, in Roth’s words, “reinforce the inequalities of his time.” (These are the same “structured inequities” that Tony Bryck said were part of what made public schools inferior to Catholic schools.)

Roth says that our current “instrumentalist perspective” is a bad thing for many of the same reasons:

Who wants to attend school to be “human capital”? Who aspires for their children to become economic or military resources?

In my “College for All! Please!” post last year I cited a piece by David Leonhardt, also in the Times, which I called a “masterful KO of the silly notion that we shouldn't encourage kids to go to college.” Leonhardt’s Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off “should take your breath away,” I wrote:

• A dishwasher with a college degree earns 83 percent more than a dishwasher with no college;


• A cashier with a college degree, 56 percent more;


• A plumber, 39 percent.

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.” There are, of course, many hidden assumptions in this “college for all” debate, the first of which is whether you mean that all kids should go to college or all kids should be able to go to college. I personally would be pleased if all kids were capable of going to college, where college is defined as something more than remedial education.

Thus, we have to broaden the standards movement to include K-20. There are many community college horror stories, but I do think we could, if we tried, agree on some basic standards for college readiness. (Kindergarten “readiness” is another question, one that should send our elementary school policymakers back to the drawing board; a topic for another day.)

I personally don’t care if a kid decides not to go to college. I would, however, demand that every high school graduate at least be capable of reading (and understanding) David Leonhardt’s story—i.e., your options are probably pretty constrained if you don’t go to college—and that every district superintendent be judged by the number of his or her truly college-ready graduates. If a student decides not to go to college, fine. But at least he or she would have, I would hope, the option of going if he or she wanted to—which is better, I would assume, than not having that option after twelve years of schooling.

The question here is the Hutchins question: Shouldn’t every American citizen have a right to the best education we can deliver? And this is what Michael Roth is getting at; that the liberal arts are, in fact, part of that best education. He quotes Dewey:

The world in which most of us live is a world in which everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do…. Some are managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for one as for the other is that each shall have had the education which enables him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human significance.

Every student deserves that education.

Many charter schools tout attributes similar to those offered by the church's schools, such as disciplined environments, an emphasis on personal responsibility and character development, and distinctive instructional and curricular approaches.

And Buddin, whose report is more broadly aimed at measuring the impact of charters on all private schools, says,

[C]harter schools are pulling large numbers of students from the private education market and present a potentially dev­astating impact on the private education market, as well as a serious increase in the financial burden on taxpayers.

As both Adam Emerson and Kathleen Porter-Magee have already pointed out, Catholic schools were in decline long before charters came on the scene. Between 1960, when Catholics educated one out of every eight American school-age children (5.2 million) and 1990, when charter schools first came on the scene, 30 percent of the 13,000 Catholic schools in the U.S. closed (with enrollment plummeting to 2.5 million). In fact, since the pace of the enrollment decline has slackened in the charter era (2,000 of 9,000 schools—22 percent—have closed in the last 20 years) one might argue that charters have served as a wakeup call for Catholics. As Fordham’s 2008 report on Catholic schools showed, the nation’s largest religious denomination was taking steps to slow the decline; borrowing many of the tricks of the trade from charters, religious orders were forming the equivalent of CMOs, operating networks of schools, and doing sophisticated fundraising. And, as Cavanagh points out, the jury is still out on the benefits of voucher programs to Catholic schools.

As a Catholic, a former seminarian, and a journalist who has written about Catholic schools (here, here, and here), I must admit to being of two minds on the question of whether Catholic schools can be saved and whether their fate should be a public-policy issue. As to the latter, the argument that the public benefits from private schools by educating students that the taxpayer doesn’t have to is compelling. Lackman estimates that Catholic students moving to publicly financed charters in New York cost taxpayers an extra $320 million a year. Buddin says that, nationwide, the exodus costs $1.8 billion. Those are significant numbers. Does that mean the public should be subsidizing Catholic schools? Vouchers offer the cleaner—and Constitutional—public-policy option.

The question of what really ails Catholic schools is the one I would hope Catholics themselves continue to consider. Here, I would offer a couple avenues worth exploring. First, there’s the pedagogical and curricular problem. Here, John Dewey, no fan of the Catholics or their schools, which he pronounced “inimical to democracy,” may have had the last laugh: Once known for their rigorous academic and organizational structure, Catholic schools now implement many of the instructional theories and practices that predominate in Dewey-inspired progressive-education schools (the dominant principle of our public schools for most of the last fifty years). The other irony, as Tony Bryck and the co-authors of the now-classic 1992 study, Catholic Schools and the Common Good, discovered, is that by virtue of their rigor Catholic schools (once) did a better job educating ordinary kids, including the poor, than did public schools. As I wrote in my 2008 Ed Next story (referenced above),

According to the Common Good authors, Catholic high schools—and many believe that this applies to elementary schools as well—“manage simultaneously to achieve relatively high levels of student learning, distribute this learning more equitably with regard to race and class than in the public sector, and sustain high levels of teacher commitment and student engagement.” One of the keys, they concluded, is the organization of Catholic schools. Parochial schools are less likely to fall into the public-school habit of “structuring inequities”: public schools offer students the chance to take weaker academic courses while Catholic school courses are “largely determined by the school.” The irony, say Bryk et al., is that such a “constrained academic structure” contributes more to “the common school effect” than the potluck served by the public schools. Catholic schools give less weight to “background differences” of their students and thus do not allow those background differences to be “transformed into achievement differences.”

Thus, Catholic schools are simply not the academic hothouses they once were.

And Catholic schools may not be so Catholic anymore either. We know that the nuns, on whose back the system was built, according to Bryck et al, are largely gone, taking with them not just their free labor, but a zealous loyalty to “the faith.” The God gene has been modified. I recall an interview with a teacher at a Chicago charter school, started and run by the Christian Brothers, an ancient Catholic order, during which the teacher complained that the school’s problem was that it could not teach about God. He had a point. The seven pillars of character that hang from pretty banners in the hallway just don’t have the same resonance as the image of Moses coming down from the mountain with the ten commandments that God had just etched in stone tablets. (There is the old Catholic joke about the delinquent public school kid whose father transferred him to a Catholic school, where his misbehavior ceased. “I got there and saw this guy hanging from a tree with nails in his hands and feet,” the boy told his father, “and I figured they meant business.”)

The point is not that charters, which are public schools of course, need more religion—it's that Catholic schools do. In their struggle to survive, parochial schools have opened their doors to students of all faiths and have, not surprisingly, watered down their evangelism. And while this has helped stem the tide of decline—as well as reinvigorate the church’s missionary zeal (the famous line from Cardinal Hickey of Washington, quoted by Kathleen, “we don’t education [urban] students because THEY are Catholic, but because WE are”)—it has also dampened the Church’s once-powerful religious belief system. It’s now hard to tell whether Church’s new ecumenical bent caused the decline in its schools or if the secularizing of the Catholic schools has made them less relevant—and less competitive. It may not be the Catholic school system that is in trouble, but the Church.

It may be well to ponder some history here and recall that the same 1884 conclave of Bishops (in Baltimore) that gave American Catholics a detailed “catechism” of belief was the same one that ordered each parish to build a school and each Catholic kid to attend it. Is it time for another such meeting?

can no longer be suspended for one-time, low-level infractions, and the youngest pupils can be suspended only for 5 days for midlevel offenses, down from 10, according to new disciplinary rules posted by the Education Department this week.

This is great news, but try to find that in the code of conduct, officially titled, “Citywide Standards of Intervention and Discipline Measures: The Discipline Code and Bill of Student Rightsand Responsibilities, K-12,” which is an eye-popping twenty-nine pages of small print and includes sections on “Promoting Positive Student Behavior,” “Progressive Discipline,” “Restorative Approaches,” and “Student Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.”

These types of documents, mind-numbing in their detail, tend to be self-defeating.

I must admit to being old school and focusing on the section called “Prohibited Weapons.” Were there some weapons that weren’t prohibited? Alas, no—the list is as comprehensive an itemization of mayhem as you can find, featuring air guns, spring guns (“or other instrument or weapon in which the propelling force is a spring or air, and any weapon in which any loaded or blank cartridge may be used”), daggers, stilettos, dirks, razors, both sling shots and slung shots, kung fu stars, nunchucks and shirkens—and, of course, your garden variety explosives, “including bombs, fire crackers and bombshells.” And that’s just Category I.

They mean well. But these types of documents, mind-numbing in their detail, tend to be self-defeating. For one thing, you’d have to be a constitutional lawyer to interpret them (though we could be minting them with these codes, since, in my experience, kids are pretty savvy about the fine print); secondly, you’d need twice as many cops as there are students to enforce the rules in anything approximating a fair and consistent manner (try this one: “Colluding (engaging in fraudulent collaboration with another person in preparing written work for credit)”); finally, in the end, there’s the all-purpose “Defying or disobeying the lawful authority” clause, which makes most of the other clauses redundant.

In the end these codes of conduct tend to be colossal wastes of administrative and instructional time and money, in record-keeping alone. But the sheer opaqueness of it all—and the level of detail actually contributes to the ambiguity (dare I say `arbitrary and capricious’?) of the thing—helps explain the results of the Civil Rights Project and National Education Policy Center’s recent reports  suggesting that African-American students were more apt to be suspended from school than their white counterparts. Student suspensions, concluded the latter “are significantly influenced by factors other than student misbehavior.”

I don’t doubt that NYC’s administrators are well-intentioned. “We want to be able to address improper behavior before it reaches a higher level,” Marge Feinberg, a department spokeswoman, told Al Baker. “And to do that, we are focused on providing strong student support services coupled with parent involvement.”

And it is commendable that being tardy, being absent without an excuse, and talking back to teachers won’t get you suspended. But relying on an exhaustive code of everything that students could do wrong to improve student conduct (and school discipline) seems less promising than planning opportunities for them to do right.

It would be simplistic to suggest that you toss the code out and invoke the other meaning of the word discipline—a subject or field of activity, e.g. an academic subject—and start giving out more homework! But we might do well to aim in that direction. In the Ohio schools I have been visiting (for our Needles in a Haystack report, due out in the fall) it is rigorous and consistent attention to academic discipline that helps ensure a culture of respect where behavioral discipline is less necessary. In these schools the emphasis on academics, at every turn and at every level, helps create a positive and proactive environment. As many students told me, “We don’t have time to get in trouble.” The KIPP schools have whittled this down even more: Work hard, be nice!

Why am I rooting for teacher unions’ decline?

Why am I rooting for teacher unions’ decline? Because, as I suggested in my last post, their dominance in school governance these last several decades has not seemed to work—for the students, the taxpayer, or the country. But even if our schools were working, we would need to be wary of union power because it violates some basic democratic principles; towit, free association and free speech. 

One of my objectives as a member of a school board—a not-so-hidden agenda, if you will—was to help create an environment where it was safe to discuss how to improve our schools, how to get our kids a better education. This was premised on a belief that debate and discussion are good and lead to better outcomes. At minimum, I assumed that, from a policy and governance perspective, two heads were better than one and that an engaged community would be more apt to deliver a good education than an unengaged (and uninformed) one.

Generally, America has shown the world that open dialogue and debate produces better results.  But if you sever the connection between the dialogue and the result (the vote), you have sabotaged the system. Public schools in the United States were built around thousands of these free associations, small local school districts making their own decisions—New York State had 10,000 school districts at the turn of the last century—and it surely could be argued that those many independent organizations combined to create the world’s best education system, if not the economic powerhouse that won World War II and that has dominated international relations for the last seventy years.

That has all changed. Not only is our economic supremacy waning, but our education system is now a middling competitor among industrialized nations. Coincidence? The evidence suggests that the principles of free association and free speech have become quite perverted, especially in our public school systems.  Power has been profoundly concentrated; there are now only 704 school districts in New York state. That concentration has lead to the rise of powerful interest groups, including teachers unions, which lobby Congress and State Legislatures – not school boards. As I pointed out in that last post (about teacher unions), I chaired a task force on school improvement that was sabotaged by our teachers union—but who elected them? I have also written about the three-to-one defeat of a school budget, a vote that was overruled by the board of education because of a state law—a law written by and for teachers. Taxation without representation? It used to be that dialogue and debate was the prelude to action; no longer.  We wonder why voter turnout is so low.

If you need convincing that the accretion of special interests in our public-school-governance world has distorted that system’s free-association and free-speech principles, you haven’t read Terry Moe’s Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools. Sure, there are plenty of special interests in our polity, but few match the power of teacher unions, as Michael Mishak so vividly demonstrated in his Los Angeles Times about the California Teachers Association. In fact, in  my last post I forgot to mention that that the Education Intelligence Agency’s Mike Antonucci, who trumpeted Mishak’s story, had pointed out that,

I dug through an old file box and found a lengthy report I wrote for the Claremont Institute back in October 1994 - long before I created the Education Intelligence Agency. It was part of a series the organization had commissioned called "The California Teachers Association: Power Politics vs. Education Reform." My contribution was a 25-page briefing titled "The Shadow Legislature."

In other words, twenty-five years later, if Mishak is to be believed, nothing much has changed in the Golden State. It is a real concern, especially if that is how it works elsewhere.

We need to wonder whether public-sector unions, by their very nature, aren’t a perversion of our democracy.

At bottom, we need to wonder whether public-sector unions, by their very nature, aren’t a perversion of our democracy: Should such unions be allowed to give money to their bosses—the legislators who write the laws that give them their privileges—and their salaries? After all, the teachers unions are private, the public does not vote on their leadership, and it has no say in their consideration of “good” and “bad” issues; nor does it (for all practical purposes) regulate them. From a special-interest perspective, teachers unions have no more right to intrude on our public schools than, say, the American Gas Association does. But by allowing public school teachers to “organize,” to pool their money, and to lobby their legislators with wheelbarrows of cash—well, is it any wonder that we have laws guaranteeing lifetime employment and salary increases even after the expiration of a contract?

None of this is to say that there aren’t schools and school districts that have reached accommodations with unions that help students. But they are the exceptions, it would seem, that prove a rather uncomfortable rule: that teacher unions exist to represent teachers. The question is, Will accommodation be enough?

Teachers are the public faces of a hugely complicated system.

The point was made clear to me (there’s that spear) when I chaired a district task force on student academic performance. About the second or third meeting of the group, which included parents, community members, teachers, and administrators, a teacher interrupted someone suggesting a longer school day. “We can’t talk about that—that’s a negotiated item,” he said. Before that meeting was done, we had touched the “negotiated item” button several more times. I finally informed the teacher that there was nothing the task force couldn’t discuss and he was out of order; he never returned, nor did the other teachers who had signed on to the committee. The administrators stopped coming as well. The rest of us forged on, produced a report with fifty different improvement recommendations, and presented it to the board, where it has languished, undiscussed, for over a year.

Life in the trenches

I was recalling these events as I read Michael Mishak’s recent jaw-dropping Los Angeles Times story about the California Teachers Association (CTA). Though I live in New York, it sounds eerily familiar. Mishak’s piece paints a rather graphic portrait of what one former California state legislator described as “the co-equal fourth branch of government.” Writes Mishak,

Backed by an army of 325,000 teachers and a war chest as sizable as those of the major political parties, CTA can make or break all sorts of deals. It holds sway over Democrats, labor's traditional ally, and Republicans alike.

Some of what we learn from Mishak is astonishing:

• The CTA spent more on lobbying than any other special interest group, including major corporations, more than $250 million during the last decade alone;


• The CTA lobbied, successfully, to amend the state’s Constitution in the mid-1980s, guaranteeing that public schools received at least 40 percent of the state’s general fund budget;


• California teachers, thanks to the CTA, enjoy “one of the shortest probationary periods in the country—lifetime tenure after two years in the classroom”;

Mishak tells some hair-raising stories about politicians who tried to take on the CTA, including a former actor (not named Reagan), whose “political scalp hangs in the fifth-floor conference room of the union's Sacramento headquarters: a framed parody of Schwarzenegger as `True Liar’ (a play on one of his movie titles) complete with a Pinocchio nose.”

It is hard-nosed political hardball. Mishak quotes CTA president Dean Vogel telling a group of his members:

“You know why people are so afraid of us? We are in every single community in this state," he told the crowd. "You cannot walk into a church in California without a CTA member being in that congregation. You can't sit at a soccer game without sitting near a CTA member. Try to be in a Safeway somewhere without a CTA member there.”

That’s scary.

The good news is that Mishak’s report can be read while mulling the meaning of two other great recent reports about teachers and unions; those from Frank Bruni and Al Baker in the New York Times. In a front page story on Saturday, Baker describes a historic shift in teacher tenure statistics in New York City: Fifty-five percent of Gotham’s teachers received tenure after three years in 2012, compared to 97 percent in 2007. Baker says that the numbers “reflect a reversal in the way tenure is granted not only in New York City but around the country.” Idaho, Florida, and New Jersey have significantly redrawn the tenure map, he reports; eighteen states did so in 2011 alone. Kathy Christie of the Education Commission of the States calls it “a sea change” in attitudes about tenure. And that change is reflected in teacher evaluations, which have also undergone major makeovers; most significantly, in adding student performance to the equation. Concludes Baker,

“The nationwide shift on tenure has been remarkable for its speed and breadth,” said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. It was awarded “virtually automatically” in most states as recently as 2009, she said.

“Tenure was looked at as much more of a sacred cow,” Ms. Jacobs said. “Once states started to move on it, then the dominoes started to fall in other states.”

Frank Bruni’s op-ed on Sunday is a closer look at the falling dominoes and the relationship between teacher unions and students that started them falling: the former want great benefits for themselves, to hell with the students. In short, there’s a valley of hurt between the two that is now, says Bruni, only just beginning to be addressed.

Bruni uses the new movie, “Won’t Back Down,” which features a mother battling school officials, to explain the problem.

The union that represents one of those [teacher] do-gooders (Viola Davis) has lost its way, resisting change, resorting to smear tactics and alienating the idealists in its ranks. What’s more, some of the people who are assertively promoting “Won’t Back Down” are those who cast teachers’ unions as a titanic impediment to the improvement of public education.

You get the feeling that Bruni wants to be sympathetic to the unions, but he keeps trotting out uncomfortable facts and quoting people who don’t like them. “When did Norma Rae get to be the bad guy?” moans a union leader (Holly Hunter) in the movie. Says Bruni, “I don’t know, but that’s indeed the state of play when it comes to teachers’ unions, and it’s a dangerous one.”

Thankfully, Bruni doesn’t use the phrase, but “teacher bashing” is a well-tread term, though not one that applies to reformers that I know. In this business it doesn’t take long—or shouldn’t—to separate the teacher from his/her union. Granted, there are too many timid teachers, afraid to take on their union bosses, just as there are too many teacher union reps who act like longshoremen and shouldn’t be anywhere near a classroom. But, as Bruni shows, even Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, is getting the message. “We bear a lot of responsibility for this,” she tells Bruni about poor state of education. “We were focused—as unions are—on fairness [toward teachers] and not as much on quality.”

And to Bruni’s credit, he also quotes a professor of education saying that union struggles to get more money and pensions made them “look like pigs at the trough.”

Reading the three pieces together, we should surely understand how far the reform movement has gone in transforming public perception of teacher unions and their role in education (Baker and Bruni). But we should also appreciate (Mishak) how big and scary they still are.

My sense of things is that the teacher unions are the victims of their own success. By astutely associating their cause with the cause of public education, the unions were able to build a formidable public image of solidarity with the cause of schooling. Now they’re stuck trying to explain the results. There are some hard truths in this business. And there is some reason to hope that more people are seeing them.

The findings in this study are deeply disturbing. Students who are barely maintaining a connection with their school often are pushed out, as if suspension were a treatment. The statistics on the use of suspension for African American and special education students are cause for great concern. We already know that African American males are disproportionately placed into categories of special education that are associated with extremely poor outcomes. We now see that these same students face incredibly high rates of suspension. Every dropout costs society hundreds of thousands of dollars over the student’s lifetime in lost income, and removing a large number of students from school undermines a community’s future. In a society that is incarcerating a large number of African American young men, with terrible consequences for their families and communities, these results are simply unacceptable. We can and must do better for young people whose future is at stake.

As Mike pointed out the other day, the report, called “Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School,” “got a ton of press attention” because of its finding that black students are suspended at significantly higher rates than whites. Mike asked, as did many commentators, “does that mean that our public schools—and the people working in them are racist?” As I read the responses to that question, there seemed to be a decidedly defensive attitude, with many people pointing out that the report did not make any conclusions about racism. (Indeed, a search of the report for “racism” and “racist” turn up no hits.)

Racism has many faces. It ranges from mean and nasty name-calling prejudice to nice and neat paternalism.

By a coincidence, I had recently finished up a series of meetings analyzing our school district’s referral and suspension numbers and found the same kinds of numbers as the Civil Rights researchers found: Blacks were disciplined (both referrals and suspensions) much more frequently than their white peers. And as I know my little district (1900 kids, 30 percent black, 60 percent free and reduced lunch) I would have to answer Mike’s question in the affirmative. Of course, the caveat is this: Racism has many faces. It ranges from mean and nasty name-calling prejudice to nice and neat paternalism. More on that below.

Which brings me to Staley, who was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1942, and grew up, as he put it with a smile, “in Jesse country—and I don’t mean Jesse Jackson.” Anyone who grew up in the fifties and sixties knew he meant Jesse Helms, a strident segregationist and five-term United States Senator. I first wrote about Staley last January, in a Martin Luther King holiday essay called a “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.”  As Staley told it, every morning he walked to his all-black school in Raleigh, passing the all-white school, deflecting a hail of racial obscenities and rocks from the white kids as he went. Then one morning, Staley would say, just after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), he woke up to the news that North Carolina schools had to be integrated. And Staley recalled his first thought, “We gotta go to school with these m-----r f------rs.”

This is a blunt description of American school integration. Even forgetting the terrible race riots of the sixties and seventies, the post-Brown era has not been an especially good one for African-Americans (see Whitney Tilson’s “A Right Denied”). But it was a problem foreseen by black leaders. As I wrote in a 2010 post, “A misplaced race card,” both W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., were skeptical of integration in education—for reasons that have become painfully clear to several generations of African-American children. This is Du Bois in 1934:

I know that this article will forthwith be interpreted by certain illiterate nitwits as a plea for segregated Negro schools. It is not. It is saying in plain English that a separate Negro school where children are treated like human beings, trained by teachers of their own race, who know what it means to be black, is infinitely better than making our boys and girls doormats to be spit and trampled upon and lied to by ignorant social climbers whose sole claim to superiority is the ability to kick niggers when they are down.

You don’t hear that kind of talk in our post-Brown politically correct era. Well, not exactly. See Lisa Delpit’s new book, “Multiplication Is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children and Mark Bauerlein’s review of it. Writes Bauerlein of Delpit’s argument,

Low performance begins with American racism. Our society, Delpit writes, has a “deeply ingrained bias of equating blackness with inferiority,” and it “seems always ready to identify African Americans with almost all negative behaviors.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., was less harsh but no less worried about the downside for blacks in integrated schools. In the late-fifties, as I wrote in my “misplaced race card” post, King said this:

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.

This brings us back to the question of racism and student discipline.  A couple of years ago, after a report on suspensions by the Southern Poverty Law Center I suggested that our schools were in “discipline disarray” in general (think: bullying, zero tolerance, codes of conduct). But just as our curricular woes these last fifty years have had an enormously disproportionate and negative impact on blacks (think: achievement gap), so it is not surprising to see the same lopsided results for suspensions. As Du Bois said, “theoretically, the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education.”

And therein is the beginning of the answer to Mike’s question.

As I wrote earlier this year the grand racial integration scheme coincided with the final victory of the Progressive Era, which had given up on teaching children “mere facts.” They entered schools that had given up on Education, with a capital E. If you add to this mix the zero-tolerance zeitgeist of the last twenty-plus years you get a perfect storm of dis-education for poor blacks. Not only did they have to go to school with people who didn’t much like them, but they were “educated” in a “child-centered” classroom in which well-intentioned teachers (and some not-so-intentioned) let them do their own thing. We have had countless “diversity training” workshops in our district, including lessons for our white teachers about how “black boys learn.” None of it works because the teachers—and their trainers—don’t appreciate the fact that the only currency accepted on the way out of the ghetto is knowledge. Pats on the head, blue ribbons, and self-esteem courses do not translate into good SAT scores. 

Poor black kids—and poor white kids, for that matter—come to school far behind in their knowledge base and vocabulary (contrary to popular belief they do not come to school “not ready to learn”). If that vocabulary gap is not closed—and it can be closed—by third grade these kids are “behind” in school and acting out. It’s downhill from there, as the Civil Rights Project report finds. Where’s the racism? Rather, it's in the curriculum that they are not being taught.

My friend Staley finished high school in a newly integrated school, where he was a football star. He went to North Carolina Central University, majoring in Physical Education and Health—and football. Rather than accept offers from Dallas Cowboys and Chicago Bears, however, Staley decided to become a teacher. And that’s what he did, for the next thirty-some years. While much of that work was done teaching black youth in “training schools” and prisons, where I’m sure he was an inspiration, another part of Staley’s legacy was educating whites to the needs of African-Americans: an Education.

And all the words in quotation marks in that sentence are meant to draw attention to the fact that the field is littered with misunderstandings, misstatements, and just plain gobbledygook.

Our public-education system is failing too many children; why wouldn’t one consider doing something different?

But first, a word from Whitney Tilson, who summarized things rather succinctly in an August 8 email blast:

All of the fraud, sleaze, etc. that’s recently been uncovered in the for-profit ed sector warrants its own email. This is probably one of the few areas Ravitch and I would generally agree on, though I suspect I’m much more open to for-profit providers – but there needs to be VERY strong regulation, oversight, audits, etc. Otherwise it’s an invitation for disaster.”

You know that something is amiss if Tilson says he agrees with Diane Ravitch. But he has a shotgun list of bad news about private- and quasi-private-sector education. He calls attention to a recent New York Times story which noted that:

• “a federal judge upheld the Department of Education’s right to regulate unscrupulous for-profit schools that leave students with big debts and valueless credentials,”
• “a Senate committee released a blistering report showing that many of these schools pocket huge profits, even though most students leave without degrees,” and
• “a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that people who started in programs awarding an associate degree—a big slice of the student population—reaped significant economic rewards with degrees from public and nonprofit institutions. Those with degrees or certificates from for-profits did not.”

Tilson cites a follow-up editorial by the Times which called for, according to the headline, “Closer Scrutiny of For-Profit Schools.” He quoted from a Pennsylvania story reporting that “a charter-school mogul was charged today in a multimillion-dollar fraud case by the U.S. Attorney's Office.”

Whew!

And speaking of Ravitch, she was very busy during this period writing blogs like: “How schools are like and not like business,” “Profiteers circling the schools, looking for $$,” “Chris Christie’s plan to privatize NJ’s Low-Peforming Schools,” and “What you need to know about for-profit online schools.”

More Whew!

But that last post by Ravitch is the most interesting. It is a plaudit for what she called “a stunning article” in The Nation from last fall, titled “How Online Learning Companies Bought America’s Schools.” The piece by Lee Fang is stunning in many ways—it’s long (almost 5,500 words) and it’s detailed, as examples—but not in its depiction of, as Ravitch states, “how certain politicians and investors and entrepreneurs are working together to privatize public education and to generate huge profits for certain companies.”

But wait. That characterization is actually quite remarkable for it could just as easily apply to the current education system—with its swirl of private labor unions delivering wheelbarrows of cash to “certain politicians” and with its profiteering text-book companies (and a host of other entrepreneurial sorts) milking public education for their personal and investor profit—as to the one Fang describes.

And this is the problem with the current debate about private and public, nonprofit and for-profit: There is no agreement on the terms, much less the reality that they supposedly describe. The ideological soup is thick.

Mr. Fang’s Nation story is a perfect case study. On the one hand, he has done a remarkable reporting job, creating what might be called a who’s who of the school-reform movement; on the other, it is a gushing guilt-by-association lecture littered with buzzwords to warm up the anti-reform (anti-business, anti-profit) chorus. Here’s a quick, not comprehensive, list of excerpts from the story (names are not necessary):

• She also advised paycheck protection, a union-busting scheme;
• Combining financial firepower of their corporate clients with the seeming legitimacy of privatization-minded school-reform think tanks and foundations;
• Policies designed to boost the bottom lines of education-technology companies are cast as mere attempts to improve education through technological enhancements;
• Gold rush of investors clamoring to get a piece of the K-12 education market
• Most education-reform advocates cloak their goals in the rhetoric of “putting children first”;
• Worked for almost fifteen years at converting the K-12 education system into a cash cow for Wall Street;
• The rush to privatize education will turn also turn tens of thousands of students into guinea pigs; and
• The frenzy to privatize America’s K-12 education system.

You get the idea—or should. (Class, please underline the words and phrases that are inflammatory but not expository.) And I don’t want to counter this kind of empty partisan rhetoric with similar broad-brush characterizations about the status-quo crowd. Indeed, there are hopeful signs that some educators in the current (failing?) system have gotten the message and are retooling. I am finishing up a report about six high schools in Ohio (due out in the fall) that have managed to do wonderful things in high-poverty urban centers—five of those schools are traditional public schools. It can be done.

But the current talk surrounding governance issues could certainly stand some critical thinking.

Take for instance, the plight of the Highland Park school district in Michigan, which I wrote about the other day, which was turning management of its 1,000 student system over to a for-profit charter-management organization. I suggested that the district had nothing to lose; the thing was practically bankrupt and over 90 percent of the kids couldn’t pass a rudimentary college-readiness exam.

Is this part a “rush to privatize education”? You bet it is. And this is why we need to ask of these new establishmentarians (like Ms. Ravitch and Mr. Fang) two questions: “Compared to what?” and “So what?” Not all American public schools are as bad as those in Highland Park, but there are plenty enough of them that we should be asking ourselves, “What do we have to lose by not trying something new?” Vouchers. Charters. Longer school days and years. Common Core. End LIFO and lifetime tenure. Kill school boards. Online learning. Why not?

My guess is that lefties who read Fang’s piece will be cheering as it seems to buck up their beliefs about the nastiness of the private sector. But I could also imagine a righty reading it and (removing all the hyperbole) applaud everything these Wall Street financiers are doing.

In fact, during this same period, I noted a piece in Forbes with the headline, “Let’s Make Education Big Business, With Profit, Loss and High Pay for Top Performers.” Exactly. Here’s how writer Carrie Lukas sees it:

When you see that Americans spend more than $1.1 trillion on education—that’s 7.8 percent of GDP—it’s tempting to call education “big business.” Except that it’s not really: 80 percent of that spending is controlled by government and spent on public schools and universities. That means that it’s divorced from the usual factors that make our competitive free market system work.

Interesting observation. Given those facts, with others suggesting that our public-education system is failing too many children, why wouldn’t one consider doing something different? We should at least ask the right questions. Does the free market work? Why not run schools like a business? What’s wrong with profit? More importantly, what’s wrong with the current system? Why is it not working?

Class dismissed.

Andrew Blumenfeld is a senior at Princeton University. He began serving a four-year term on the school board in La Cañada, California in December, 2011. Andrew is also a founding member of Students for Education Reform.

When I decided to run for a seat on the La Cañada Board of Education in Los Angeles, I needed to be aggressive. That I had graduated from this district was certainly a mark in my favor. I suspected that benefit would be overshadowed by two concerns: (1) that graduation happened only two years prior (I was twenty years old), and (2) I was a junior at Princeton University—as in, New Jersey.

Luckily, my passion could be characterized as “aggressive.” As a student, I had been frustrated by the uneven quality of the education in my district; I was tired of some standardized test scores blinding leadership to problems; and I had recently become a founding member of Students for Education Reform—an organization allying college students with the plight of student-focused education advocacy.

Considering the entrenched adult interests in education politics, it’s tempting to imagine anyone not “with us” is “against us.”

Education reform is meant, primarily, to improve student learning in the classroom. Yet, I think we betray that important principle when we overlook the room for improvement in otherwise “high performing” schools and districts, like my own. La Cañada is a K-12 district serving about 4,000 predominately white and Asian students. Nearly all our students will graduate, but, unfortunately, there are still great disparities in the quality of our program.

I stand for a great teacher for every student, and I won’t turn my head because a school or district performs well in the aggregate. Kids don’t experience school in the aggregate. Research that proves there is greater variation in teacher quality between classrooms in the same school than there is between schools ought to smack “good” schools particularly hard in the face.

So after beating out another challenger and unseating an incumbent by only ten votes (of nearly 7,000)—as well as racking up countless frequent-flyer miles—I’ve found myself a student and an elected official, bicoastal, and intent on making a difference.

Less than a year in, I can’t say I can offer something amounting to wisdom. But the learning curve is the steepest I’ve ever climbed, and Peter Meyer’s article on his frustrations resonated. Perhaps both burdened and blessed with the youthful vigor, optimism, and naïveté that keeps me bouncing from airport to airport, I am not merely undeterred but emboldened by challenges I have found with governing from the Board.*

By far the greatest epiphany was the moment I realized my four fellow Board members weren’t bad guys. Considering the entrenched adult interests in education politics, it’s tempting to imagine anyone not “with us” is “against us.” I was confronted not with the caricatures the education-reform blogosphere had primed me to confront—unthinking union puppets, die-hard ideologues, or even idiots—but instead, I found myself face-to-face with the stunning banality of enabling.

I have found serious and compassionate colleagues that care deeply about students. But the very same nature of boards that seeks to create stability, unity, and strength is also responsible for neutering efforts to make changes; they quietly enable sameness—both the tactic and the end game of status-quo defenders.

As one of the public faces of a district, the pressure as a board member to be a good spokesperson is immense. Home values, enrollment, businesses—they all rely on the success of schools, and so the expectation to put the district’s best foot forward is real. The pressure is internal, too. Having asked others to entrust in me their children’s futures, it is as much faith in my capacity to deliver as it is fear in the same that weighs on me when recounting the work of the schools I was elected to oversee.

Another such pressure is the peculiar “collective responsibility” of being a board member—a phrase often repeated, primarily as a way of reminding me I have no individual authority. Both the rhetoric and the statutory reality around the powerlessness of individual members are numbing.

These qualities of board governance are clearly not explicit obstructions to reform, but rather, examples of how such governance tends to favor stay-the-course oneness, and frown upon deviation, which we readily associate with change-agents. No one has ever reminded a member of his/her “collective responsibility,” for example, as a way of encouraging advocacy.

Knowing the right end does not dictate the means of getting there.

Rather than come to these conclusions to understand defeat, I use them to rethink “aggression” when it comes to governing on a board of education. Militancy in fervor might always be appropriate, but the battle plan must look different when combating simple opposition, versus the more complex and subtle biases towards the status quo. Determined to defy conventional wisdom of board impotence, I remind myself of a few things in the face of these pressures.

First, I am not a gadfly anymore. Communities need gadflies, and watchdogs. But I can’t merely call “foul” or agitate—I have a new role, one that involves healing and growing. If I wanted to be an outsider, I wouldn’t have bothered running. But I did. Now I need to appreciate both the work of outsiders, as well as what makes that work distinct from mine.

Second, personalities matter. A corollary: Believing they shouldn’t is a weak shield against the fact that they do. A board is people. People like some people more than others. They trust some sources more than others. They succumb to different pressures than others. If “aggression” means making the same argument about the same issue to everybody all the time, then it is a masturbatory aggression that does that argument no favors.

This leads to the third reminder: Putting the interests of students first is more straightforward in principal than in execution. Knowing the right end does not dictate the means of getting there. “Students first” is a healthy mantra, but it shouldn’t hide the complex truths behind it: There are competing student interests; there are competing interests between different groups of students, etc. This demands prioritization and strategy, and those unwilling or unable to develop a crystal clear reform vision—to guide through turbulent waters of reality muddied by challenging trade-offs—should think twice about getting into education.

I may believe I am on the right side of a battle to reformat agendas to improve transparency. But if that fight, win or lose, right or wrong, makes me more gadfly than governor—if it leaves colleagues bitter, such that I meet greater resistance when building consensus on improving teacher evaluations—then I have lost my way. Battles are costly, and everyone has limited capital. Fights can’t just be worth fighting, they have to be more important than other fights.

My musings have just begun and I continue to scale the precipitous learning curve with all the eagerness of a college student. It’s too early to list successes and failures, though there have been both. But as I continue this curious double-life I find myself counting my blessings. The best part of being both an elected official and a student at the same time? I never forget to keep learning.

--- --- ---

*Editor's note: Blumenfeld says he arranged his school schedule to accommodate four-day trips home every few weeks and hasn’t missed a board meeting. Travel, he says, has been paid for by his campaign committee with fundraised dollars, “in accordance with California law governing the use of campaign money,” he says, “as well as by frequent-flyer miles donated by generous constituents.”

Though two headlines yesterday about the just released Civil Rights Project study on school suspensions—“Suspensions Are Higher for Disabled Students, Federal Data Indicate” (New York Times) and “Researchers Sound Alarm Over Black Student Suspensions” (Education Week)—suggest our continued ambivalence about race (see Mike’s post here), I would like to take a moment to praise Chris Christie and his New Jersey education team for a watershed event on teacher evaluations and tenure that might just have some salubrious effect on student discipline.

On Monday, the Garden State governor upset a century-old teacher-tenure law, codifying a statute that creates a new teacher-rating scheme and also streamlines the process for firing both teachers and administrators. 

As Heather Haddon noted in the Wall Street Journal, the Garden State is not the first to reform teacher evaluation and tenure rules—remember Wisconsin?—and Christie did not get the legislature to put an end to last-in-first-out seniority rules which a number of other states have managed to kill, but the law signed by Christie “was most significant for where it occurred: in a blue, East Coast state with a strong organized-labor movement and a Legislature controlled by Democrats.”

The New York Post called the new law a “coup.” 

Yet Barbara Keshishian, head of the New Jersey’s teachers union said that the “legislation moves us in the right direction by making it harder to earn tenure, and less expensive and time-consuming to remove teachers who are not performing well.”

“Yes,” opined the Post, “that’s the sound of Hell freezing over.”  (Recall the infamous YouTube fight Christie had with a brave teacher in 2010.)

Derrell Bradford, executive director for the Jersey-based Better Education for Kids, told the Wall Street Journal. "In 2009, if you told me we'd have tenure reform, I would have looked at you like you had two heads."

According to the New York Times’s Kate Zernike, “The new law suggests how much the landscape has changed on revising education, and on tenure, long among the most contentious issues for teachers’ unions and legislators.” 

Indeed, as Stephen Sawchuk has been reporting in Education Week, the national teacher unions are on the defensive.  Sawchuk states succinctly the existential question:

“Can a teachers’ union successfully be both a hardball-playing defender of its rights and a collaborative force for the common good?”

The envelope, please!

As many defenders of the status quo are beginning to realize, the road to improvement cannot be paved with the same defective asphalt.

According to a report by Jenny Ingles in the web-based Take Part, in early July the ACLU and eight students from the Highland Park school district, located just outside of Detroit, filed a class-action suit against the state because students in the district weren’t learning: On a college-ready state exam, 90 percent of the district's eleventh graders failed the reading portion, 97 percent failed the math section, and 100 percent failed the social studies and science portions.

The suit, part of a long tradition of “adequacy and equity” litigation, argues that such failure is a violation of the state’s constitution, which mandates a public-education system. “This is not a system of public education,” says Kary Moss, the executive director of the ACLU of Michigan, about Highland Park. No kidding.

But the major difference between then and now—then being the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when such lawsuits resulted in court decisions ordering that states provide failing districts with more money—is that a) we now know that money doesn’t solve the problem and b) we have a vibrant and healthy charter-school sector that offers a cheaper and better alternative to litigation.

It is that second fact that Journal reporters Stephanie Banchero and Matthew Dolan explore in their “outsourcing” story. Highland Park is turning over its three schools (with 1,000 students) to the for-profit Leona Group LLC, which currently runs fifty-four schools in five states, including twenty-two in Michigan. According to the Journal, Leona’s track record is mixed—“students in almost half [of its schools] fail state academic benchmarks”—but for Highland Park, where only 22 percent of third graders pass state reading tests and 10 percent pass math, that would be a major improvement.

“This could be the new model for public education," the Center for Education Reform’s Jeanne Allen tells the Journal. "It stands to be a lab of innovation where people can see that thinking outside the box is not so scary."

The devil will be in the details, of course, but the big issues here are these:

• Unions Clearly, the freedom to hire and fire, which charter schools enjoy, is contentious. But the unions are beginning to see that LIFO and single-salary pay schedules are unsustainable. And the more that the public sees the results (in towns and neighborhoods where there is choice), the more it recognizes the fact that unions, as Al Shanker noted, represent teachers not students;
• The business of education Defenders of the status quo try to argue that public education is not a business and thus should operate by a different set of rules. Unfortunately, their arguments defy both reality and logic, as anyone who has been inside the system knows: Money talks just as loudly in public-school-management decisions as it does in Fortune 500 corporations and sound management practices are just as important to Highland Park as they are to Exxon;
• To profit or not to profit Why this should be an issue, I don’t know. But accusing reformers of wanting to turn our public schools over to private-school operators seems a bit hypocritical considering that unions (teachers, administrators, aides, etc.), which control much of our education system, are private organizations—and their members are sure interested in profiting from public schools. And then there are the profiteering contractors—busing, textbooks, etc.—which take lots of public money; and
• Transparency This, in fact, is the biggest challenge to every reform and improvement scheme. Even without choice, getting good information about student performance is crucial to the health of our public-school system. Though the power to choose is a substantial one, and will, in fact, provide even more incentive to keep the public informed, we must make sure that arrangements with private entities—whether they are unions or CMOs—safeguard the public’s right to know where its money is being spent.

In the end, however, the Highland Park experiment is well worth watching. As many defenders of the status quo are beginning to realize, the road to improvement cannot be paved with the same defective asphalt. In Highland Park’s case, as with so many schools and districts throughout the country, the students, at least, have nothing to lose by trying something new.

But there is some good news to report: The pendulum might be swinging, ever-so-slightly, toward the believers (in school).

The pendulum might be swinging, ever-so-slightly, toward the believers (in school).

First, Del Stover reports that a summer session of the Council on Urban Boards of Education (CUBE) concluded that “[t]ending to children’s social, emotional needs [is an] important part of delivering education.” It’s the “part of” part that is encouraging; the source of the problem of educating the poor may be outside the schools, but the solution is inside the schools. The CUBE seminar, according to Stover, included a presentation by Barbara Cavallo, head of Partnership with Children, a New York City social services agency. Cavallo described the many challenges (to learning, to life, to everything) faced by poor children—and what schools could do to overcome them. Cavallo’s counselors, according to Stover, “work with teachers and principals to develop a school-wide plan to create a safe and supportive school climate.”

And, according to Stover, the training is paying the kind of dividends that school reformers have long argued are quite possible:

A survey of the Partnership’s program found that school administrators reported a 25-percent decrease in students being referred to their office, and they said they spent about one-third less time on disciplinary matters.

What’s more, another study of similar programs nationwide found that schools that focused on social and emotional learning reported a noticeable bump in standardized test scores.

Next, Joe Nocera, in the New York Times, profiled Pamela Cantor’s Turnaround for Children program, also in New York City (and Washington, D.C.). Like Cavallo’s Partnership, Cantor’s Turnaround has been around for a while (there’s a nice endorsement from Joel Klein on the organization’s home page) and has taken up the reformers’ belief that schools can educate poor children if they understand how poor children learn. According to Nocera, Turnaround embeds a team of three professionals in a school for three to five years and focuses on three key players in the school:

Principals:  “[C]reate a positive, disciplined culture, where students come to believe they can succeed.”

Teachers:  Give them “tools…that will allow them to handle disruptions while keeping the other students on track.”

Social workers: “[T]rain the school social workers to help with the psychological and emotional needs of children in poverty, while identifying the most troubled students, the ones who can drive the entire school.”

There appears to be no research yet about the impact of the program, though Nocera cites “an independent evaluation by the American Institutes for Research, which showed that its schools had far fewer disruptions and were generally calmer, safer, indeed, happier places. But that same evaluation suggested that Turnaround needed to put more emphasis on improving the academic environment in the classroom.”

But at least, as Nocera reports, Cantor is showing “the importance of facing poverty squarely in schools.”

And this leads, finally, to a recent post by Richard Whitmore, author of the Michelle Rhee biography The Bee Eater, who used an ACLU suit in Michigan to review the question of whether schools can educate the poor. (See the Wall Street Journal’s excellent report about the district’s decision to “outsource” its schools to a charter management organization—a sign, at least, that the district believes that someone might be able to educate poor kids.) Whitmore notes that his research on high-poverty schools has found “many schools, and a few entire districts, that are head and shoulders above their counterparts.” Though he says that “[e]ven the best of these schools can't replicate wealthy suburban schools,… [w]hat matters in places such as Washington and San Jose is that hundreds more students will arrive in their senior year of high school prepared to take on some kind of post-high school education.” Isn’t some progress better than none?

Let’s hope that these efforts—and their successes—will motivate more school leaders to believe that they can—and must—face poverty squarely, in the classroom. As Nocera concludes, “Creating schools that are designed from the start to deal with the predicable challenges of poverty—it is the most important thing we can do next.” Yes.

Melanie Kurdys, who graduated from the University of Michigan with a BS in math and worked in Systems Development for IBM, AT&T, and Owens Corning Fiberglas, is a fulltime mom of three children, and has, for the last twenty years, lived and volunteered in schools in Michigan, Louisiana, Georgia, and California. She served on the Portage, Michigan, School Board from 2007-2011 and on the Portage Curriculum Committee from 2004-2006.

I was on my local school board, but lost my last election because I was part of a six to one majority that voted to pay off our superintendent to get her to leave before her contract expired.

A compulsory monopoly cannot be led, directed, bribed, or coerced into better performance.

When I started on the board, in 2007, I was in the minority, five to two. I am a fiscal conservative, strongly believe in using data to make decisions, and was relentless in my effort to show that the student achievement in our district was unacceptable—for hundreds of children every year and getting worse. The community has taken pride in being the top district in the region. It did not want to admit publicly, even privately, that our student achievement was declining. But you can’t fix what you don’t admit is a problem. The data was undeniable.

My intent was not to make our community look bad, which many believed. My goal was to persuade district leadership that sincere, significant reforms were needed if we were to even approach the goal of all children achieving.

With much turmoil, two board presidents and one trustee quitting at different points in time, the board finally admitted our student achievement was not acceptable and we had to make systemic changes. But the Superintendent, and administration in general, was defiantly resistant. To quote the superintendent, "I am not going to do that.”

Both the board president and I, the VP, were up for reelection and lost to two people who insisted everything with the school was fine and the trouble was us. After our resounding defeat, the new board decided our community does not want to know the truth and they have backed off any significant reforms. One of the new board members called to apologize to me once he recognized the reality, but the board majority is now back to a state of denial.

I have realized that a compulsory monopoly cannot be led, directed, bribed, or coerced into better performance. They must not be a monopoly, must face the reality of lost customers and lost revenue, must feel the real possibility of no longer being in business, to generate the will to change.

Broad parental choice is the only mechanism to drive change.

I do see Common Core standards and assessments as a barrier to true effectiveness of choice and oppose national standards in general. More on that another time.

What these schools require are fundamental changes in school governance.

South Carolina is not alone in refusing to take bold action and intervene in lousy schools but its continual resistance to school-governance reform in the face of persistent low achievement indicates that a new model is needed in the Palmetto State.

The state school board did approve school improvement plans that include teacher evaluation (including, but not limited to, tying teacher employment and pay scales to student performance) and the consolidation and reorganization of schools. But these plans are merely a tweak to the status quo. The seven schools they apply to need more than tweaks—each received an “at-risk” grade for at least eight consecutive years. What they require are fundamental changes in school governance. Even members of the state board who voted for these reforms expressed doubt that those in charge will have much success turning these schools around: Member Barbara Clarke stated, “Yes, we’re making some gains [in our school report card]. But we’re not making all that much gain for the monies that’s being poured.”

Ms. Clarke need only look to Burke High School in downtown Charleston to prove her point. Threatened with a state takeover in 2006, Burke remained under the control of local school boards and continued its lousy performance despite reform plans. The same school found itself back under the state microscope this July and was let off the hook—again.

Under the Education Accountability Act (EAA) of 1998, the South Carolina School Board has the legal authority to intervene in, and even take over, failing schools. But, as State Superintendent of Education Dr. Mark Zais has said, local communities have “in the past and likely in the future, resisted any initiatives or directives coming out of Columbia.” Those who fight to keep local control need to acknowledge that locally managed reform efforts are not working for schools like Burke. As another board member said, “I’m hearing the same thing right now I heard twenty years ago.”

The model for improvement is there in Louisiana—tested, analyzed, and reviewed. It works.

In response to habitually underperforming schools and inept local school board leadership, Dr. Zais should work to implement a South Carolina version of Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD)—and he should do it now. This new governing body for failing schools would differ from the state control that so many oppose in that it would be an independently established organization solely focused on implementing reforms in failing schools—not an extension of the already ineffective state school board. The new leadership would have the authority to turn schools into charters, invest in new teachers, and increase accountability which has been so absent from South Carolina’s school reform efforts. A South Carolina version of the RSD could mean that, like in Louisiana, failing to meet requirements for four straight years would make a school automatically eligible for state intervention. Several South Carolina schools already meet this minimum standard.  

The Bayou State’s reform model under the RSD led to significant improvements in achievement: students in the RSD “outpaced the state in the percentage of students performing at grade level and above,“ for the fifth consecutive year. The RSD has increased accountability, professional development for staff, and teacher evaluations while engaging the broader community in its reform efforts.  Yet at the same time that the RSD has granted renewed hope to the students in Louisiana, students in South Carolina have suffered at the hands of unaccountable schools. Waiting longer to begin instituting reforms will only extend this failure.

School improvement isn’t easy. It demands tough choices, accountability, incentives, and strong leadership—all components that appear to be in short supply in South Carolina. Instead of engaging in half-hearted reforms that even supporters expect to fail and making threats that won’t be acted upon, South Carolina should institute its own version of the RSD, like Tennessee has attempted to do. South Carolina deserves credit for its overall academic performance growth in recent years: In order to maintain that progress, pockets of failure cannot be tolerated. The model for improvement is there in Louisiana—tested, analyzed, and reviewed. It works. South Carolina’s model for failing schools does not and should not be allowed to continue. Dr. Zais has praised the RSD. Now he needs to champion legislative action to create one in South Carolina.

Good education seems to be one of the first things people with voting power demand.

This is why I tend to see America’s current education free-fall as a sign of a diminished democracy as much as it is a pedagogical failure. And this is why a fight in East Ramapo Central School District, a growing suburb of New York City (just twenty miles north of Manhattan), is so fascinating.

As the New York Times’ Peter Applebome describes it in Saturday’s paper, Orthodox Jews have taken over the district’s school board (they have seven of nine seats). The problem? Eighty-five percent of the students in the district schools are black or Hispanic. Even worse, reports Applebome, most of the Jews in the district send their children to private schools (where the enrollment is 19,000, compared to 8,000 students in the public schools).

Not surprisingly, a group called Padres Unidos has petitioned the State Education Department to remove the Jewish board members and, also not surprisingly, Ramapo board president David Schwartz called the group, in Applebome’s words, “chronic complainers.” The cultural, ethnic, and socio-economic divide problem is complicated by finance questions. Not only has board president Daniel Schwartz suggested eliminating graduations as “a superfluous expense,” the board sold two empty public school buildings to yeshivas for less than what Padres Unidos says the buildings were worth.

In a perfect world, the state will ensure that no laws were broken and take appropriate action based on those laws. In our imperfect world, however, it looks like a distortion of democracy. For one thing, in a variation on a theme explored by Terry Moe in his recent book, Special Interest, one could reasonably argue that East Ramapo public schools have been hijacked by a special interest. Moe talks mostly about teacher unions’ outsized influence over board and budget elections. In East Ramapo, reports Applebome, “[T]he board’s makeup reflects the electoral power of the well-organized Orthodox Jewish community.”

Good or bad? Should stakeholders (like parents of students) or taxpayers (like the Jews who don’t send their children to the schools) control public schools? Board president Schwartz, an Orthodox Jew, thinks it’s enough to be a citizen. He told the Times,

If you want to say that Orthodox Jews don’t have the right to legislate for public school children, then by extension, black people don’t have the right to legislate when it affects white people and women don’t have the right to legislate when it affects men.

But is the game rigged? In off-cycle elections, which are what New York has (school votes are in May), turnout is always low and thus gives added weight to special interests. And this raises the question of whether people who don’t even live in the district—e.g., policymakers and legislators in Albany and Washington, D.C.—should have say in these matters? Laws protecting unions (e.g., seniority rules, Last In, First Out, automatic contract extensions), mandating spending (until last year, districts could impose “contingency” budgets without voter approval), as well as off-cycle votes are all too common.

These are the governance problems which give rise to suggestions like those of the Koret Task Force: that the money follow the child, which would break the monopoly in East Ramapo, as well as the chains of state and national policymakers. As Checker and Mike have written,

Our “marble cake” policy structure of overlapped local, state, and national responsibility for schools has proven more adept at blocking or slowing needed change than at advancing it—a problem aggravated by our practice of (in most places) separating “education governance” from the regular leadership structures (and election cycles) of cities and states.

In other words, the clash in East Ramapo is not a fair fight.

Who better to speak to contemporary American youth than one of the nation's most prolific inventors and entrepreneurs? Photo by Andrew Malone.

Then along came an email from Dee Selvaggi, a former member of a New Jersey school board and a contributor to The BEV Challenge, recommending “a very interesting book,” Benjamin Franklin on Education (edited by John Hardin Best, Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1962). Wrote Dee, Franklin’s “concern [was] about the content presented to youth so they could function well in the new contemporary America.”

Who better to speak to contemporary American youth than one of the nation’s most prolific inventors and entrepreneurs? According to Franklin, 

The good Education of Youth has been esteemed by wise Men in all Ages, as the surest Foundation of the Happiness both of private Families and of Commonwealths. Almost all Governments have therefore made it a principal Object of their Attention, to establish and endow with proper Revenues, such Seminaries of Learning, as might supply the succeeding Age with Men qualified to serve the Publick with Honour to themselves, and to their Country.

And Franklin proposed a curriculum for the youth of Pennsylvania both “useful” and “ornamental”:

Art is long, and their Time is short. It is therefore propos'd that they learn those Things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental. Regard being had to the several Professions for which they are intended…. All should be taught to write a fair Hand, and swift, as that is useful to All…  Drawing, by Imitation of Prints, and some of the first Principles of Perspective.  Arithmetick, Accounts, and some of the first Principles of Geometry and Astronomy. The English Language might be taught by Grammar; in which some of our best Writers, as Tillotson, Addison, Pope, Algernoon Sidney, Cato's Letters, &c. should be Classicks…. Reading should also be taught, and pronouncing, properly, distinctly, emphatically; not with an even Tone, which under-does, nor a theatrical, which over-does Nature.

Such a refreshing approach to education—and to the meaning of “useful.”

Franklin proposed too that,

HISTORY [be] a constant Part of their Reading, such as the Translations of the Greek and Roman Historians, and the modern Histories of antient Greece and Rome [and that] GEOGRAPHY, by reading with Maps, and being required to point out the Places where the greatest Actions were done [be part of it. So to] CHRONOLOGY, by the Help of Helvicus or some other Writer of the Kind, who will enable them to tell when those Events happened [and] ANTIENT CUSTOMS, religious and civil, [as well as] MORALITY, by descanting and making continual Observations on the Causes of the Rise or Fall of any Man's Character, Fortune, Power, &c . mention'd in History; the Advantages of Temperance, Order, Frugality, Industry, Perseverance, &c. &c.”

Indeed, wrote Franklin, “the general natural Tendency of Reading good History, must be, to fix in the Minds of Youth deep Impressions of the Beauty and Usefulness of Virtue of all Kinds, Publick Spirit, Fortitude, &c.”

Have we changed all that much since Franklin? Of course, without the hindsight of history, how would we know? If, as a former state commissioner of education once told my school district’s teachers, “we must look only to the future,” how could we possibly appreciate the fact that “reading good history” could be a useful “virtue of all kinds”? By some twenty-first-century standards, the rollout of Google is ancient history; to others, it’s a data point on the long march toward a “more perfect” union.

In an era saturated with buzzwords and acronyms—STEM, critical thinking, twenty-first-century skills—and our new concerns about meritocracy and social mobility, it is nice to be reminded of the importance of the original great thinkers; we might learn something.

Guest blogger Dee Selvaggi served on the Matawan-Aberdeen (NJ) Regional School District board from 1990--1991, attended board meetings in the Holmdel (NJ) Township School District from 1991-1998 (as a parent), coordinating over 200 volunteers for the district’s Operation Get Out the Vote initiative and serving on multi-year district committees. She also coordinated a statewide (NJ) information network for board members and parents and engaged in advocacy as an individual at state board of education meetings and legislative hearings. She also served on the Monmouth Academy Board of Trustees, Howell, NJ, from 2005-2008.

What’s it like, trying to improve schools from the inside?

Perplexing, frustrating, and exhausting. Yes, I’ve taken on issues, but the idea of “winning” seems elusive—you’re defeated either by blatant digging-in-of-heels by opponents or by quiet subterfuge.  Thus, I’m inclined to pass on an analogy made by a former board colleague, who said it was like walking on a beach and leaving footprints which are then washed away by the waves.

What’s it like, trying to improve schools from the inside? Perplexing, frustrating, and exhausting.

My school board experiences were primarily in the Jersey suburbs, although for nearly five years I focused on statewide policy. I have attended school board meetings somewhere for nearly 20 years —hometowns, other towns, Trenton (as well as some legislative hearings). And, contrary to the broad strokes painted about boards by “determined skeptics,” I never saw a board taken over by employee unions.

I did see a political party winning a majority, one or two educators elected to a local board, micro-focused parents, and a senior citizen being disruptive. I also saw some showdowns, but saw a lot more congeniality and rubber-stamping of administrative agenda items. I believe what I saw was a best-case scenario for board composition because many volunteers possessed desirable skill sets for serving (e.g. telecommunications or Wall Street-manager types). Even so, I don’t believe suburban boards ever realized their “fullest potential.” 

Much of that has to do with the craziness and lack of leadership that comes from the state board of education and, at times, the state legislature. There was a long stretch when state policy became more scripted and, through mandates, increased its edu-bureaucracy due to special-interest influence. (See the chart I created after studying the state/local ed bureaucracy.) I hope Chris Cerf can make some changes, but when I left New Jersey in 2008 this massive system was suffering from extreme malorganization which included:

• Federal, state, local board and administrator levels and roles were confused and confusing;


• Local policymakers were trained to “get along,” played a passive role, often worked out of context, and failed to leverage policy to make things like increased transparency routine;


• District organization missions were idealistic or impossible to achieve;


• There was no reasonable human resources foundation for a performance-based system;


• Management authority was being usurped, in some instances, with decisions made by committee.

Serving on a school board is like walking on a beach and leaving footprints which are then washed away by the waves. Photo by Suzi Rosenberg.

Weary of various band-aid initiatives, I’ve come around to believing that school boards could be eliminated tomorrow and the malorganization would remain. The entire arrangement needs to be redesigned from scratch, including the federal and state levels. I’m quite open to considering just about anything so long as it’s in a Rick Hess “unbinding” sort of manner and the local level is redesigned first, with attention paid to which state and federal actions and mandates help and hinder. Key policy areas that need to be addressed are: 

• Governance oversight (by some entity);


• foundational documents: Focus on defining oversight and organization missions and responsibilities, as well as core values (applicable to everyone, not just students), before working on board bylaws and policies;


• disciplined, routine annual cycle to generate more meaningful data and information and increase transparency;


• revamped human resource practices with particular focus on management quality, authority, and responsibility.

Policy is not enough, however. Governing bodies would need new training, not just about what to do, but why, in what context, and how.  They need support for the tough times (so one is no longer compelled to bust into administrator meetings) and they need new communication sources that do not synthesize and circulate research and information, which merely sustains the status quo. I recognize this is radical, but agree with people like Peter Drucker and Jack Welch, who emphasize the importance of getting to the root causes of inconsistency in performance.

I do see three positive external influences in the last two decades: the American Diploma Project to improve graduation requirements; the Common Core Standards, which provide a consistent explanation of what students need to know and what the entire system is trying to accomplish; and the increased data and information transparency brought by NCLB. Otherwise, I believe a policy here or initiative there is insufficient for evolving into a contemporary education system.

 Chart:  NJ State-mandated Management Structure, 2009*

*Source: the author, based on reading New Jersey state laws.

The committee found the skills considered necessary for the 21st-century workplace generally fall into three categories: cognitive, such as critical thinking and analytic reasoning to learn “deeply”; interpersonal, such as teamwork and complex communications; and intrapersonal, such as resiliency and conscientiousness.

The “political life,” as Thucydides described it, was the way out of poverty.

That’s from a recent Education Week story titled, “Panel Parses Out Skills Needed for 21^st-Century Workplace.” I realize I’m not the only one to notice, but the problem—didn’t one need cognitive, personal, and intrapersonal abilities in the twentieth-century workplace? Or the nineteenth? Or the second?—was brought home not long ago when I saw that Earl Shorris had died. Shorris, a writer and social critic, as the headline on the New York Times obituary had it: “Fought Poverty With Knowledge.” And it was not the knowledge that proponents of twenty-first century skills are pushing; it was “rigorous readings and explications of Aristotle on logic, Plato on justice and Kant’s theory of morality.”

Shorris came to this insight about poverty while working on a book in the early 1990s, when he met Viniece Walker, a female inmate in a New York State prison, a “graduate of crackhouses,” as he would later write in a masterful 1997 piece for Harper’s. By that time he had concluded that

numerous forces—hunger, isolation, illness, landlords, police, abuse, neighbors, drugs, criminals, and racism, among many others—exert themselves on the poor at all times and enclose them, making up a “surround of force” from which, it seems, they cannot escape.  I had come to understand that this was what kept the poor from being political and that the absence of politics in their lives was what kept them poor. I don’t mean “political” in the sense of voting in an election but in the way Thucydides used the word: to mean activity with other people at every level, from the family to the neighborhood to the broader community to the city-state.

Most of us understand the first part of Shorris’ observation—the “surround of force”—but the second, “the absence of politics” in their lives, was transformational. And Viniece Walker sealed the deal. He asked her how to cure poverty and she replied, “You got to begin with the children…. You’ve got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children,” she told him. “And the way you do that, Earl, is by taking them downtown to plays, museums, concerts, lectures, where they can learn the moral life of downtown.”

That was not the answer that Shorris expected—nor, would I think, is it the answer that most modern educators, policymakers, and a population still saturated with Great Society notions of poverty, would expect. She didn’t say jobs. She didn’t say money. She said “the moral life of downtown.” And what she meant by that, as Shorris recounts, was “the humanities, the study of human constructs and concerns, which has been the source of reflection for the secular world since the Greeks first stepped back from nature to experience wonder at what they behold.”

The “political life,” as Thucydides described it, was the way out of poverty. And the humanities “provided an entrance to reflections and the political life. The poor did not need anyone to release them; an escape route existed. But to open this avenue to reflection and politics a major distinction between the preparation for the life of the rich and the life of the poor had to be eliminated.”

This is certainly not the kind of talk you hear at education policy meetings or twenty-first century skills confabs—though it should be. The “escape route” was learning the art of reflection, which came from studying those who knew.

Inspired by Ms. Walker’s advice and his own passions, Shorris went on to create a humanities course for the adult poor at the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center in New York City in 1995. Since then, the program has grown to include some twenty cities around the country, and in Canada, Australia, and Korea. (Abby Goodnough profiles a Clemente Course in Massachusetts in Sunday’s Education Life insert in the Times.)

Part of Shorris’ insight was one that E.D. Hirsch had about the value of “background knowledge,” and that is that most middle- and upper-middle-class Americans (most of our education establishment) had learned their “political life” skills (their background knowledge), in their schools and neighborhoods and intact families and didn’t appreciate the value of what they had learned, much less understand how much more crucial such knowledge would be for the poor, who had none of it.

Shorris recalled the words of the great University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins:  “The best education for the best is the best education for us all.”

Wrote Shorris,

If the multigenerational poor are to make the leap out of poverty, it will require a new kind of thinking—reflection…. And that is a beginning. [The study of the humanities is] in itself a redistribution of wealth.

If we are to bring the poor to twenty-first century table, it must be through the wisdom of the ancients and the skills of reflection.

Gene I. Maeroff has adapted this excerpt from his book School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy. He is president of the board in Edison, N.J. and is serving his second term as a member. He is a senior fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University. His biographical and contact information are available at www.genemaeroff.com.

America’s school boards are too easily diverted from larger purposes. They may get bogged down in issues better left to staff. Some school board members want to meddle and they get more involved in administrative matters than they should. Boards sometimes invest precious hours in matters of little consequence. In other words, school boards too readily waste time and effort.

School boards too readily waste time and effort.

Ultimately, a school board should be held accountable for ensuring that the district makes needed improvements. Instructional success should be the members' paramount concern. They ought to look in the mirror when they seek to affix blame for the district's failures.

The school board should specify objectives and then leave it largely to the professionals to decide which programs and what use of human resources will attain those ends. A timetable can help set parameters for judging the school system’s progress toward goals: What should the district achieve by what dates? This means that a school board can be spare and succinct in its actions. This way the board has a yardstick for measuring and evaluating its superintendent, who really is the only person that the school board can hold directly accountable for achieving results.

Are the means that the administration uses in reaching the desired ends beyond the scope of the school board’s concerns? Of course not. The methods should be fair and ethical. They should be affordable. They should be gauged against the best interests of students, taxpayers, and staff. A school board that turns its back on questionable practices that lead to desired results is derelict in its duty.

Ends do not justify means. An example of such a failure, drawn from higher education, was seen in the behavior of the board at Rutgers University in New Jersey after some members decided that they wanted Rutgers to become a big-time football power. They looked away as the athletic department spent millions of dollars without their authorization and paid the coach out of hidden accounts. The university abolished several minor varsity sports to enrich the football budget. Finally, the situation grew so egregious that the board and the university president were called to task for, in effect, allowing Rutgers’s football fortunes to soar regardless of cost or ethics.

A clear timetable gives a district a yardstick for measuring and evaluating its superintendent. Photo by tmorkemo.

Planning can help a school board operate more effectively. I joined a board that had a strategic plan created at least two years before I arrived and which extended five years into the future. Until I mentioned the strategic plan at a public meeting halfway through my first term, none of my board colleagues had ever referred to it—despite the elaborate process and countless hours that went into producing it. The plan might as well have been placed in a bottle and thrown into the nearby Atlantic.

Leaders of any organization can devote too much attention to planning and end up neglecting more immediate tasks. On the other hand, given the arc of time and the nature of formal education, which unfolds as a result of actions taken over a period of years, an educational enterprise and the students in its classrooms can benefit from conscientious planning by those responsible for the outcomes.

A good plan for acquiring and using technology as an adjunct to learning, for instance, offsets the dangers of piecemeal adoption of technology. A mathematics curriculum designed to reflect in secondary schools the impact of foundation-building in the primary grades has a better chance of succeeding than a math curriculum that fails to give sufficient attention to students’ year-by-year accumulation of knowledge.

Citizens ought to ask about the beliefs and values of their school board members. Such inquiries do not happen enough and the few members of the public who ordinarily seek such information from their boards are viewed as gadflies. Democracy should demand more of school boards in terms of planning and other responsibilities. There is no use having a board if it only goes through the motions of governance.

Citizens ought to ask about the beliefs and values of their school board members.

My district had neglected to plan for an expanding enrollment. By 2009, most of the system’s eleven elementary schools had gyms too small for serious physical activities. Many of the schools had to convert their art and music rooms into regular classrooms and art and music teachers, like itinerant peddlers, wheeled carts full of supplies from room to room to teach the subjects. In some schools, children had to eat lunch at their desks and in another school the only space available for preparing meals had previously been a large closet. School libraries had been partitioned into teaching spaces and special education students had their pull-out sessions in what had been small windowless storage rooms. There were not enough labs at the high schools to offer all of the Advanced Placement science courses for which students clamored.

A lack of foresight and inadequate planning had resulted in the construction of no new schools in almost forty years, a failure to acquire land parcels for prospective schools, and the disposal of four perfectly good school buildings on the notion that the district wouldn’t need them in the future. Admittedly, no school board has a crystal ball, but proper planning can lead to better results than a district like mine had. The board has taken steps in more recent years to address some of the problems of overcrowding, but the situation continues to fester.

The instructional programs of school districts across the country suffer from compromises forced on them by school boards that have inadequately planned. I served on a board that presided over a system in which students on one side of town achieved to a greater extent than those on the other side of town. The portion of youngsters scoring at advanced proficiency levels, for example, was much greater at some schools than in others. Any attempt to deal with such disparities requires planning, but I seldom heard discussions of this phenomenon by board members or central administrators during most of my first term on the board.

As a matter of fact, during a candidates’ debate, when I first ran for the board, I raised the issue only to have an incumbent candidate chide me for not considering demographics. Such excuses can be barriers to improvement. Donald R. McAdams, president of the Center for Reform of School Systems, did not want to let school boards off the hook in instances such as these. “When a school district fails to improve,” he wrote, “it is not the district’s workforce that fails; it is the board that fails.”

1. Our schools don’t value merit

The idea of merit implies the idea of non-merit; we can’t all be winners.

As we know, the idea of merit implies the idea of non-merit; we can’t all be winners. Yet, that is exactly the kind of talk I hear in schools all the time: We are all winners. As Thomas Edsall wrote in his Times essay, “In the business sector, particularly, other less benign qualities emerge as essential to meritocratic success: aggressiveness, ruthlessness, dominance-seeking, victimizing behavior, acquisitiveness and the disciplined pursuit of self-interest.” How do we possibly reconile the hard-edged reality of merit in the real world with the "all winners" ethos of our public schools? We don't. We have to get real at school and start rewarding merit there. It need not be cut-throat, but it needs to be something better than giving everyone a blue ribbon.

2. Our schools don’t value knowledge

In fact, since we are constantly bombarded with research about the dismal prospects of the poor, we have, as I have previously argued, mistaken effect for cause, and created a rather deafening echo chamber that creates policy to institionalize our failure; e.g. because we have failed to educate the poor, the poor must be uneducable. What does it mean that, as a Princeton political scientist says in Edsall’s essay, “policy outcomes are more strongly related to the preferences of the well off than those of the poor or the middle class”? In my experience, since the “well off” don’t appreciate—or at least, won’t admit to appreciating—nearly enough how knowledge-privileged they are, they do not push for, either out of ignorance or avarice, education policy that would deliver such knowledge to all of our kids.

3. Our culture does not value education.

The fact that most of the essays referred to in yesterday's post do not look beyond social and economic status or the acquisition and use of money as determinants of future earnings or measurements of success probably explains my second point above: Does knowledge matter? It is not just weak analysis of a fact pattern (could it not be that the poor are poor because they are poorly educated?) at play here.  Because the data clearly shows that even our “smartest” kids (the word is in quotes because it is one I’ve been reprimanded for using in school—see #1 above) are losing ground. The question is, can schools make us smarter, more moral, more tough, more able to converse with those at the table of the elite?

The social mobility gap is real. But we need to decide whether it is disease or symptom. If the former, we will aim our policy responses at the social engineering constructs that have typified education governance for the last fifty years. But if we believe that social mobility comes from a culture that values open and equal opportunities to education, then we will not only equip the poor for the merit fight ahead, we will have created a tide that will lift all boats.

I’m sure there was more, but the gist of the current hand-wringing is the news that the nation is no longer the equal opportunity society it once was. The social mobility gap is growing while our faith in boot-strap capitalism, where hard work (i.e., merit) can get you a spot at the table of the elite, is waning. My concern, at least with what I’ve read above, is the failure to include knowledge in the equation; I applaud Fordham for making the connection between social mobility and schooling and the Murray discussion teased out some wonderful insights about it.

Perhaps we can all agree that the obsession with social mobility comes from our innately American caste and class fears, part of the national DNA passed down from our hugely idealistic founding documents and Washington, who refused the aristocratic mantle. As Jason DeParle wrote in the Times’s “Two Classes” story, an epidemic of single motherhood among the poor has created “a tidal surge of inequality” that has raised “questions about a core national faith, that even Americans of humble backgrounds have a good chance of getting ahead.”

Unfortunately, most of the attention seems to be focused on the surface problems, where caste and class meet (or don’t meet, which is what everyone is suggesting). As Brooks writes, summarizing new work by Robert Putnam, “the children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly different ways and have different opportunities.” And, of course, it ends badly for the less affluent. As Charles Murray puts it in Mike’s social mobility post, we have a “New Elite that is ‘a class unto itself,’” where “the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members.” In other words, the poor need not apply. (Murray’s arguments seem to have shaken even Mike’s faith in the capacity of schools to affect mass social mobility.)

Could it be that our schools are not doing their jobs?

Few of the essays I refer to above (except Mike’s and, in a very different way, Hayes’s) mention our educational system as a possible reason for the decreased mobility. The essays do suggest, fairly often, that education attainment is one of the admission tickets to the table of the New Elite, but they skip over the obvious—to me, at least—question about why our poor kids can’t get to college, much less finish it: Could it be that our schools are not doing their jobs? I was disappointed to see Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Atlantic Monthly editor and gifted writer, not give his Baltimore magnet school credit for some of his talent (“I was saved by the relentless energy of my mother and father”) and then attribute his own son’s schooling opportunity (Manhattan Country School) to “some stroke of luck and… a greater stroke of privilege,” supporting Murray’s suggestion that social class is the new road to the meritocracy.

Murray does suggest, during his Q&A at Fordham (in the video on Mike’s post, minute 3:45, approximately), that the reason the poor aren’t going to, or graduating from, college—and thus not joining the New Elite, much less any elite—is because “the highest tests scores and the other evidences of high academic ability are overwhelmingly coming from the upper middle class.” Could it be that they have better schools? Or that the poor have worse schools?

Jason DeParle walks up to the idea, as Murray does, but slides away from a direct criticism of our K–12 schools:

The reasons [for the growing inequality] are manifold: the growing premium a college education commands, technological change that favors mind over muscle, the growth of the financial sector, the loss of manufacturing jobs to automation and foreign competitors, and the decline of labor unions.

You might call the last fifty years of public education the “When Dewey met Darwin” era.

Everyone seems to understand the value of a college education. The Pew Report even suggests, on page twenty-five, that 90 percent of poor kids who graduate from college escape poverty as adults, which would seem to be the obvious place to mention the salient fact that our education system is not getting very many poor kids a college education. What our schools do to educate our children should be THE question for those worried about the growing social mobility gap. But it’s not even a tertiary question in most of these essays, which is alarming.

Mike says “we’ve never really tried” to educate our poor, and so:

Because of low expectations, mediocre teachers, a lack of options, ill-designed curricula—name your poison—poor kids have never had a chance to see their talents flourish. Put them into the right educational environment, surround them with supportive adults, and (if you’re of the broader/bolder persuasion) provide them with all kinds of social supports too, and we’ll see our elite college campuses—gateways to the new Upper Class—democratize before our eyes.”

If you match the “never really tried” part of the bargain with what Mike says is “the ferocious sorting of the meritocratic machine,” guess who loses? You might call the last fifty years of public education the “When Dewey met Darwin” era. The terrible consequences of family breakdown (predicted by Daniel Moynihan many years ago) are certainly upon us, but if this recent spate of teeth-gnashing over the growing social mobility gap is any indication of where the country is, I’d say the country still doesn’t get it. Knowledge does count. Schools do count.

How do we get to the Promised Land and what can we do to smooth the course?

How we get to the Promised Land—and pay for the trip, lacking manna from heaven—and what we can do to smooth the course is the subject of this post. And some good answers to those questions come to us via the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, and its report, Choice and Federalism. I mentioned the report last winter, in a slippery slope back to mediocrity essay, following the House Education and Workforce Committee’s states’ rights proposals for ESEA reauthorization. I wondered then whether states’ rights were “being invoked to cover up the very inequities—the `soft bigotry of low expectations’—that No Child Left Behind was determined to remedy.” And I was heartened to know that Koret—which includes some very smart people, including our own Checker Finn, Task Force Chair—shared some of those concerns.

But the important message of the Koret report—at least, the summary of it written by member Grover Whitehurst, in the Spring edition of Education Next—is that we need a “fundamentally new approach” to education governance. While Hess and Meeks discussed the merits of a decentralized system of education service delivery, Koret shows how we might reform existing governance structures, with smart federalism, choice, and competition, to help make that happen.

As Whitehurst points out, we’ve already tried top-down accountability (e.g., Clinton, Bush, Obama) and devolving power to states and districts (the failure of which, says Whitehurst, “motivated increased federal involvement in the first place”). What Koret proposes is a third way, which, ironically, calls for going back to our roots and invoking “two principles that have served the nation exceedingly well throughout its history: federalism and choice.” It is the combination of these two all-American and, if history be the guide, hugely successful governance principles, in the context of twenty-first century demands, that makes this report such a powerful document.

Koret avoids the Manichaeism of the local control versus federal control debate and invokes memories of our uber-practical and well-educated revolutionaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the folks who designed a governance system remarkably adept at promoting and protecting individual rights while tightly constraining the federal government. Koret calls it “fiscal federalism” and says it’s characterized by two basic beliefs:

• Government services are most efficiently delivered closest to the taxpayers/consumers receiving them;


• Competition among the service providers improves the services.

The challenge, as Whitehurst notes, is that “lack of geographical mobility for large segments of the population undermines the competitive pressure that low-performing schools and school districts would otherwise expect to face.”

We could intervene from above, says Whitehurst, which is what we’ve tried to do the last fifteen years, with little success. Instead, Koret proposes that “funding must follow the student.”

Part of the answer is "backpack funding," where the dollars follow the student.

Thus, if you tear down the geographic boundaries, as Hess and Meeks suggest, and allow education service providers the freedom to contract with schools, school districts, states, and other governing bodies, you will, argues Whitehurst, “create a marketplace for schooling that will evolve toward greater responsiveness to what parents want, will be more innovative, and will become more productive.” But you’ve got to resolve the “geographical mobility” problem. Part of the answer is "backpack funding," where the dollars follow the student. But Koret also recomends that that funding be "weighted" so that "needy students [receive more] than traditional distribution schemes."

Of crucial importance in this new governance model, however, is redefining the federal role, which has sucked so much air out of our education governance room. (The Ed Next story has a handy chart, listing all the federal K-12 expenditures in 2010, by program, including ESEA ($48.4 billion), College and Career Ready Students ($14.4 billion), Native Hawaiian Student Education ($33 million), and a couple dozen other federal initiatives.) Koret would severely curtail the federal role, by defining four specific duties for our national government:

• 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.

These are such clear-headed and practical suggestions that it seems odd we have not embraced them before. But the beauty of the four principles is how they balance the duties of the federal government to ensure a free market and its duties to safeguard our individual rights, including the right to equal access to an education. The Koret folks have managed to pinpoint the greatest opportunity and greatest challenge of our age: “Market-based competition cannot exist in public education unless the consumers of public education can choose where to be schooled.”

Naturally, the devil is in the details (and the Koret report has them), but it is so very refreshing to encounter a set of principles that make both practical and historical sense that I’m happy just to see the Promised Land—that shining city in the cloud.

I spent five years on a school board and don’t think they are the problem, but do believe that more often than not they stand in the way of school improvement. Are there any other school board members who have tried to reform their districts? 

Are you out there? What is it like trying to turn around a tanker with a paddle? Are you a flamethrower or consensus builder? Did you win any fights? Were you able to improve your district? Have you come away from your experience as believer in boards of education or a determined skeptic?

If you are out there, I’d love to hear from you. Please follow this link and get in touch with me, pmeyer@edexcellence.net.

Thank you,

Peter Meyer

Hess and Meeks envision an education world organized around function not geography.

Nobody seems to like school boards (except me, perhaps), and the authors begin with a crisp summary of some of the sharper arrows shot their way. But Hess and Meeks do a brilliant job of taking us by the hand and leading us gently through the weeds of school board governance and the foothills of the popular alternative of mayoral control, until we reach the mountain top where they show us a place where we “organize schooling around function rather than geography.” It’s an amazing view.

Today, they argue, “every school district is asked to devise ways to meet every need of every single child in a given area,” and it doesn’t work. Districts are simply not capable of “build[ing] expertise in a vast number of specialties and services” or “juggl[ing] a vast array of demands [that] require them to become the employers of nearly all educators in a given community.”

Hess and Meeks are too practical to suggest the end of geography (i.e., all virtual all the time), but they understand that current school district impotence is a symptom of a problem not its cause. Importantly, their analysis of the causes also makes them doubtful that suggested alternatives to school boards, like mayoral control, move us in the right direction.

[T]he critiques voiced by those ready to abolish or overhaul boards seemingly imply tacit approval of the antiquated, geographically configured school district itself. Instead of addressing the fact that the ship itself is taking on water, those pursuing governance reforms have focused on who should be at the helm. While a good captain is undoubtedly preferred to a bad captain, reformers serious about righting the ship must be ready to address the bigger challenges.

Among the bigger challenges: The ship is sinking.

The chances that current suggestions for fixes—such as making board elections more relevant, reducing the influence of unions, or mayoral control—“will be the bearers of revolutionary change in governance are,” say the authors, “slim, at best.” They provide a useful chart showing the advantages and disadvantages of the elected school board model and that of mayoral control, but what they are really after is an alternative that would, essentially, free school governance from its place-based constraints.

Thus, you would have education providers—each offering its own set of specialties and services—roaming the country (virtually or otherwise), providing their services directly to schools or sets of schools instead of the department store model of education we now have. They write:

A glance at catalogues from the early 1900s shows the one-stop-shop business mentality of the era. The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue, for instance, features firearms, baby carriages, jewelry, saddles, and even eyeglasses with a self-test for—old sight, near sight, and astigmatism. That‘s no longer the way providers in most sectors are organized….

Today we push thousands of districts to embrace and implement unwanted programs. If the private sector operated in this fashion, Amazon.com would have restricted its clientele to residents of Washington state, while would-be imitators from across the country flocked in to learn its secrets and then return home to emulate them….

Instead of encouraging school districts to emulate the KIPP Academies model, for instance, policymakers and reformers might focus on enabling and encouraging KIPP to open schools more readily in order to satisfy local demand…

Hess and Meeks suggest the possibility of “competing boards” in a given locale; or “empower[ing] non-profit or for-profit networks that might contract directly with a state” to provide educational services. Or, a third approach “is to do away with districts altogether. One could imagine states turning every school into a charter school.”

I emailed Rick over the holiday and he was gracious enough to elaborate on his ideas in a couple of emails. “The disease is really twofold,” he explained. “Progressive bureaucracy and the perils of place-based governance.” The latter, he says “prohibits specialization, makes it enormously tough to recruit like-minded professional staff or to cater to families who have shared concerns and needs.”

A “portfolio management” governance system that could be part of the future, writes Rick, would, for instance, “allow districts to work with focused organizations to each recruit the professional who can serve the families for whom its approach makes sense.”

The digital revolution, which is just now beginning, is clearly part of the new education world that Hess and Meeks see on the near horizon, a world organized around function not geography.

Hess recognizes that “the giant challenge” here is that we have “no assurance that these providers will cover everywhere,” as he emailed, “and, as with utilities, we have a desire to see schooling available everywhere. One solution is the gradual expansion of virtual options. But the other is having localities play a role in attracting providers, coordinating them, or providing schools if no one else wants to.”

He thinks the portfolio approach is “the BIG STRETCH in today's thinking about governance,” but it’s also the one he believes is “the minimum” that needs to be done to accomplish the shift needed to create an education governance system that is truly in line with the necessities of the twenty-first century.

At some low point in my tenure on the board of education in my small school district, a friend advised, “Don’t worry. You are like gravity. They always know that you are there.”

Much good can come from keeping institutions honest.

Though I aspired to being more than a reminder of some facts of life as member of a board of education, gravity was at least a starting point. And I appreciated my friend’s larger message: that much good can come from keeping institutions honest. In fact, as I reflect on the last five years of public service, I’m thinking that keeping governments honest may be the single most important duty of every citizen.

And in honor of the holiday, I offer five lessons learned, which to my mind seem close to self-evident truths, about school governance:

1. Don’t underestimate the value of information

My claim to fame at board meetings was asking questions. What does this project cost? When would it be finished? By whom? What happens if it doesn’t get done? Does the program improve student achievement? How? “What is this, a Congressional hearing?” one colleague once complained. Watching boards in action over the years (more precisely, watching their unstudied inaction), I know this: Districts do not willingly give up information—and the public is not clamoring to get it. (See number three below for suggestions about the latter affliction.) And I also know the power of information. I once wrote a story about our district in which I noted that the windows on one of our school buildings had not been washed for years. They were cleaned the day after the article was published.

One of Thomas Jefferson’s more famous remarks was,

I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; 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. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

As E.D. Hirsch has pointed out, since the quote is usually cited for free press purposes, the part about informing the peoples’ discretion with education is not so well known. But for education reformers and policymakers, Jefferson must be heeded on both levels. Yes, it is through education that we create citizens to whom we can entrust “the ultimate powers of the society,” but it is also an informed public that is necessary to the governance of that education system.

2. Don’t underestimate the bureaucracy’s desire to impede the flow of information

I’m told I hold the record in my district for a single Freedom of Information Law request: a copy of a 120-page facilities condition report (at twenty-five cents a page!) And I have often noted my board colleagues’ votes to forgo seeing documents just to keep me from seeing them. Even the janitors get it. “These guys spend more time trying to cover up their problems,” one of them once told me, “than solving them.”

Thus the corollary to the “ultimate powers” rule above is the “least government” rule that was also part of the original governance model: Ultimate powers do not reside in the government, nor should they. Needless to say, the Founders had a healthy distrust of government—and we should too. As James Madison, Jefferson’s collaborator on the Bill of Rights and the “father of the Constitution,” would put it, the “great object” of the first ten amendments was to “limit and qualify the powers of Government.”* From the beginning, the Founders appreciated the need, in Madison’s words, to “restrain…the Federal Government” and guard against “the abuse of the powers of the General Government.”

From my observations, government mischief remains a fact of governance life if not a self-evident truth. Even at its most mundane, government is a cranky way of getting things done.

3. People do count

Though we have become a nation devoted to “data-driven decisionmaking,” we can’t avoid the reality that (especially if Jefferson is right about where the ultimate powers reside) people make the decisions. We have suffered through one long era of trying to separate educational governance from “the people” (a.k.a. politics) and have come to learn, the hard way, that Jefferson and Madison were probably right. Not all “professionals” are created equal and we hand them our fates at our peril—in this case, the peril of our children and our future.

The solution: power to the people, direct current.

We have hardly shaken that Progressive-era pretense and there’s much about “evidence-based” learning that looks like a sheep of a different color. School boards are still constantly warned about micro-managing. “You have to trust the professionals,” we were told by a consultant from our state school boards association at a board “retreat” last year. “We have,” I countered, “and look where it has gotten us.”

And one of the most pernicious legacies of that Progressive era is the off-cycle elections; they discourage popular participation and empower special interests. Numerous state and federal mandates—laws protecting powerful teacher unions are among the most frightful at the local level—further discourage public participation in the life of their schools. Last year, voters in my district defeated a budget proposal by a three-to-one margin; but because of state law, the school board could override the decision of the voters—and it did, six to one.

Though “local control” does indeed need a makeover, as Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli recommend in their paper from last December’s governance symposium, they also argue that “our `marble cake’ policy structure of overlapped local, state, and national responsibility for schools has proven more adept at blocking or slowing needed change than at advancing it.”

The solution: power to the people, direct current.

4. Don’t give up on democracy

Or as Winston Churchill famously said,

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

As I would learn in my five years on the board, there are no absolute victories and no deafening defeats in the land of education governance; just the constant hum of the bureaucracy trying to control the flow of information and—if you’re lucky—the shouts and murmurs of the “the people” complaining. Unfortunately, there is simply no alternative to eternal vigilance, but it must be vigilance in the interests of freedom and equal opportunity. There are plenty of reasons for wanting to leave “the people” out of it. They gum up the works, for one. They are lazy and apathetic for another. But what are the alternatives? I believe it was Churchill who also said, “Americans always get things right—after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

We have to get back to making democracy work again.

5. The individual comes first

As George Washington said in his First Inaugural Address,

[T]he foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.

You cannot get a much grittier, more self-evident truth than that one. And so we come back to Jefferson and the need to nourish those principles with education. More than ever we need an informed people.

*The Madison quotes are from Origins of the Bill of Rights, by Leonard W. Levy.

Are you out there? What is it like trying to turn around a tanker with a paddle? Are you a flamethrower or consensus builder? Did you win any fights? Were you able to improve your district? Have you come away from your experience as believer in boards of education or a determined skeptic?

Send your essays (or questions) to me, petermeyer@edexcellence.netpmeyer@edexcellence.net. Your story should be between 250 and 800 words, though, as mentioned, a good haiku or other creative verse will be considered. We will publish as many as we can and, at the end of the summer, Fordham staff will choose the seven best. The seven, in honor of the number of board members on my board of ed, will then convene, by email, and suggest what governance policies are most necessary to improve our public education system.

Tell your friends!

I have been trying to “fix” my little district (2,300 students fifteen years ago, less than 1,900 today) ever since my son entered first grade (he is now finishing his third year in college). I ran for the board, won, quit, helped start a charter school (which crashed on the shoals of racial politics), started an email listserv dedicated to watching the district, and ran again for the board, winning another five-year stint—and a warning from my wife: Don’t quit again. I didn’t.

Three nights ago I attended my final meeting as a member of the board, after five years and some several thousand meetings. I had outlasted two superintendents and a good half-dozen board members. But despite being the senior person on the board, I leave sitting in the same seat, literally, as when I began—the very last place in the always-awkward line-up of tables and chairs stretching across whatever room we were in; seven board members, the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, the business manager, the student representative. In a line-up where power radiated from the center—the board president and superintendent sat in the middle—I remained an outcast.

And the district remained in the same place, based on student academic achievement, as it was when I joined the fight, more than a dozen years ago. Though I can’t prove a causal relation, I do think that the system discourages reform-minded people from running for the board and, should they win a seat, defeats their best efforts to improve things.

I will save an accounting of my victories and defeats for later posts, but I still have a printout of Jay Greene’s early email counsel about my school board enthusiasms (expressed in this Education Week essay in 2009) taped to a long-dead 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. And eventually they’ll organize a challenger who will unseat you.

The challenges, especially in districts that have been failing for some time, are daunting.

I unseated myself, choosing not to run again. It had nothing to do with weighing my chances of winning; it was simply time. I was satisfied that I at least helped establish a new dynamic and, most importantly, helped bring a new superintendent to the table. Leadership change always brings hope. Will it bring improvement? The challenges, especially in districts that have been failing for some time, are daunting.

During my first (brief) stint on the board, in the late nineties (recounted in Education Next), I recall one elderly member of the community, mother of a board member, who would sit in the front row at board meetings and knit. She took to calling me “Mr. No!” and so addressed me, with a scowl, whenever she saw me, in the supermarket, at the newsstand, in church. I laughed, but what was interesting was that she had dubbed me “Mr. No!” not because I was saying “no” to everything, but because I kept making proposals to change the district, to improve it. (She was one of the nice ones. As I became more militant in my reform efforts, the local paper once editorialized so brutally that a friend remarked, “I’ve seen them say nicer things about murderers.”)

My first offense was that I was an outsider; it was a tight community (last Friday’s graduation was the school’s 129th!), with a well-honed pecking order and strict, if unwritten, rules about speaking up, let alone speaking out of turn. Thus, at first, no matter what I proposed—a new bus route, a paint job for the flag pole, or a curriculum—I was ignored. In order to get a pile of old lumber and rusty nails removed from the edge of a playground I had to threaten to dump it in the superintendent’s driveway! It was one pile of rusty nails after another and as a one-time news editor used to having things done yesterday, my first board experience seemed part barroom brawl and part waterboarding torture. I quit after six months.

I spent the next seven years pressing for reform from the outside—most of my reform efforts were aimed at getting a curriculum, stopping the disproportionate disciplining of African-American students, and the over-identification of special ed students (almost a quarter of the student body). Eventually I saw an opportunity—no one was on the ballot to fill an empty seat—and waged a stealth email campaign to win a write-in slot.

Can you suggest improvement without appearing to criticize the current administration, the current system?

Even though the community had by then gotten to know me and I found a small reform-minded following, personal politics on the board almost always trumped rational or research-based decisionmaking. In fact, I was so hated by the board that I joined (I had been a regular presence at board meetings, criticizing them there and in the letters column of the newspaper), that the board would vote not to see documents, including multi-million-dollar contracts, for no other reason than to keep me from seeing them.

Thus, my first two years of my recent five-year stint was a fairly aggressive campaign, taking on board members and administrators in heated public meetings (and more-heated executive sessions) and letters to the editor and a listserv that I started. I won that fight; several board members and the superintendent quit. For the next three years, I rolled up my sleeves and ran the board curriculum committee, chaired a task force on academic performance, and a committee on the Code of Conduct. On these endeavors the enemy has been the culture of low expectations. And that’s a tough one.

It is the existential question of school board membership: Can you suggest improvement without appearing to criticize the current administration, the current system? The answer is No. The truism is true: Everyone thinks the education system is broken—except in their school. My district is rated eighty-third out of eighty-six in the region, a position it has pretty consistently held since such lists have been kept, and yet one of the most common comments I hear when the subject of school failure comes up is, “We have good schools here; you just have to take advantage of them.” Then, of course, the conversation turns to the “lousy parents” and the “kids who don’t care.”

Should school boards go the way of the Edsel? Photo by Don O'Brien.

For better or worse—mostly, if you are a reform-minded board member, it’s worse—change comes hard. And, unfortunately, school board members trying to improve their schools must face the harsh reality about change agents. They are it. Le change, c’est moi. It can get terribly personal. At one point I created a “Meyer bashing” folder on my email program. It’s lonely when you step out of the foxhole.

In my recent series The BIG Question, Robyne Camp exquisitely explained the dangers of being a reform board member in the leafy suburbs of Westchester County, proving that reform is hard for the rich as well as the poor. And Tim Kremer, head of the state school board association, called for “student-centered, forward-thinking, intelligent school board leadership.” Is that possible? Current thinking among school reformers is that school boards should go the way of the Edsel. (Our own Checker Finn has not been a fan of school boards for some time and as recently as 2010 wrote, in National Affairs, that “it seems increasingly clear that our revered system of `local control’ by elected municipal school boards cannot cope with today's realities of ­metropolitanization, ­mobility, and interest-group politics.”)

I have written about many of my board adventures in my Field Notes on this blog (here, here, here, here). Now, I would like to hear from fellow reform-minded board members. Are you out there? What is it like trying to turn around a tanker with a paddle? Are you a flamethrower or consensus builder? Did you win any fights? Were you able to improve your district? Have you come away from your experience as believer in boards of education or a determined skeptic?

Send your essays to me, petermeyer@edexcellence.net pmeyer@edexcellence.net They should be between 250 and 800 words; though a good haiku or other creative verse will be considered. I will work with you to create a great essay. At the end of the summer, Fordham staff will choose the seven best and the seven will convene, by email, as a school board, and suggest what governance policies are most necessary to most improve our public education system.

Spread the word. The only requirement is that you serve, or have served, on a school board and have tried to improve education for all children.

…the restaurant was found to have a dirty slicer with dried food debris, a dirty floor with grease and food debris accumulation around equipment and inside the walk-in refrigerator, no visible thermometer in the prep refrigeration, absorbent tablecloths stored on the shelf underneath the cook’s prep table with dried food debris on the baking supply rack, and a can of wasp/hornet spray stored in the kitchen on the shelf next to a flour storage bin.

I wondered, What if these restaurant inspection results were sent only to the restaurant’s patrons? Why do they have to be published in the paper for all to see?

That is essentially what the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) convinced the state legislature to do for its public schools last week: Only the parents of students in a teacher’s classroom shall know if the teacher is serving up unrefrigerated content.

Only the parents of students in a teacher’s classroom shall know if the teacher is serving up unrefrigerated content.

I’m sure some will object to the analogy, but there’s no doubt that this is not the last we’ll see of this can of worms, opened last January by a state judge in New York City, who ruled that teachers’ value-added scores—with their names—could be made public.

No teacher wants his or her scores posted to the Internet, just as no restaurateur would want his or her dirty kitchen floor made public. But NYSUT, obviously more powerful than the restaurant association, managed to convince a majority of the state’s legislators (though not without some political drama, as Governor Cuomo suggested early in the week that the deal was dead) to go along. The new law requires the state to release the evaluation scores for each teacher, but without names attached; parents will be allowed to see the rating only for their current teacher—not for future teachers. Doesn’t this beg the question, Isn’t that a little late?

Mayor Bloomberg immediately called the legislation “very badly flawed” (see here, here, and here), elaborating,

The union is not there to help our students… Don’t ever think that. The union is there for its members to protect them. When they’re sex offenders, they protect them. When they’re criminals, they protect them. They do anything to protect them. They don’t focus on the students. They just use the students as a ploy.

Not surprisingly, Michael Mulgrew, president of NYC’s United Federation of Teachers, didn’t agree:

Sometimes, even billionaires don’t get their way… The mayor’s statement is a transparent attempt to divert attention from the fact that his attempts to vilify teachers have been frustrated by the governor and the Legislature.

Is this “compromise” better than no teacher evaluations? Perhaps. To have gotten this far on the accountability track is good news. But we surely seem to be a long way from getting our children the kind of educational protection that even restaurant patrons receive—not a healthy illustration of our public priorities.

Pineapplegate

Oh, the pineapple.  Photo by Richard North.

I would like to skip this one, so named for the test question used by a big testing company, Pearson, and subsequently used by a number of states, including New York, for its 8th-grade English language arts exams, that asked kids to analyze a story adapted from one written by popular children’s book author Daniel Pinkwater about a “race” between a hare and a pineapple. Leave it to the intrepid Leonie Haimson, the anti-testing and class size matters pit bull, to uncover this dastardly deed, issue a scathing condemnation that “The ONLY right answer is Pearson; for getting paid $32 million from NY State for these recycled, annoying and pointless exams,” and force the NYS education commissioner to discount the answers on the pineapple test question. The horror of it. Wrote Ms. Haimson a few weeks later, in the New York Times: “…few people who heard about a test question involving a talking pineapple could help but question the judgment of those who would include this material on a standardized test used to determine the future of children and schools.” There is but one reply to Ms. Haimson’s histrionics: “Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.’”

The mind-brain misconnection

The good news is that there’s hope for Ms. Haimson and her followers. Education Week ran a cover story in its June 6 edition titled “Learning is not hard-wired.” As a neurologist manqué (the science and math did me in), I read this story closely, cheering the wonderful optimism embedded in the new research’s conclusion: We can teach kids new tricks long after puberty. “It’s just amazing how flexible the brain is,” says Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program at Harvard. “That plasticity has been a huge surprise to a whole lot of people.” (Take the test about brain myths, e.g., “Students learn better when the instructional format, such as visual or kinesthetic, matches their natural learning styles.” True or False.) The moral here: Pineapples don’t have sleeves and schools should never give up on kids, regardless of their demographic, familial, and economic backgrounds.

Common Sense awards

In that same issue of Education Week are two stories about wonderfully sensible (I hesitate to use the word any more) reports that come to wonderfully sensible conclusions. First, the one out of Chicago that finds that ELL students’ ninth-grade grades are better predictors of graduation prospects than those students’ language proficiency. Second, mirabula dictu, testing is the best way of learning something. “If you want to concentrate on how to get people to learn durably, you need to concentrate on [testing] as a learning activity,” says Henry Roediger III, director of the Memory Lab at Washington University, which did the report.

Self-pitying tantrums

Kudos to Rick Hess for taking on “the vitriolic, mean-spirited, arrogant, and unreasoning” people who claim to be supporters of public education. Reacting to comments about his column on Scott Walker’s recall election victory, Hess noted that he was greeted by “a slew of scornful, ad hominem attacks.” This has been my own huge disappointment in coming to the education improvement debate: the lack of intellectual decorum on the part of public school promoters. “These are complex questions with lots of room for civil disagreement,” says Hess. “Yet, it seems that the self-proclaimed teacher advocates have shed any hints of civility and any attempt to persuade while rushing to indulge in the kind of self-pitying tantrums most often associated with irate teens. It's a free country, and they're entitled to rant if they wish, but they shouldn't be surprised that they're getting tuned out--or making little headway in the public square.”

Governing the commons

Speaking of intellectual heft, Paul Peterson pens a wonderfully trenchant remembrance of Nobel laureate economist Elinor Ostrum, who, says Peterson, pioneered the notion that

…public services are co-produced by both paid and unpaid labor. Each help the other to do their work effectively, and jointly they produce the service that is needed. The janitor who keeps the schoolhouse immaculate instills in students the sense of responsibility needed to keep hallways clean and washrooms unsoiled. The policeman on the beat, in talks with friends and neighbors, exchanges information necessary to discourage criminal activity.

This too seems like so much common sense, says Peterson, who points out that “its codification has huge public policy implications. After reading Ostrom, one understands why health is not necessarily improved by government-paid health insurance, and students do not learn more simply by experiencing reduced class size.” The essay is short, but it’s must-read. It provides not only a wonderful memorial for a brilliant but low profile academic, but also an entirely refreshing perspective on how we can deliver education to the public, for the public, and with the public.

Read all the TBQ essays.

Camp, who just lost a tight re-election race for the board in her small Westchester County, NY, district, offers a fascinating perspective on school reform, suggesting that reform may be harder for the rich. “Education reform here in the leafy suburbs,” she concludes, “will have to trickle up from New York City’s poorest schools.”

Tim Kremer, who directs the New York State School Boards Association, is a steady advocate of local control, suggesting that “many boards have a healthy dose of skepticism about grand, top-down initiatives such as Race to the Top, Common Core Standards and the new Annual Professional Performance Review or APPR.” But he offers a much needed shout-out in support of the reform intentions of those top-down initiatives, proposing that “student-centered, forward-thinking, intelligent school board leadership has never been more in demand.”

The head of the National School Boards Association, Anne Bryant, is equally pro-reform—“there is a need for testing and a need to hold teachers and schools accountable for student progress,” she writes—but she also thinks “we’ve gone too far” on testing and “rote memorization.”

My friend Hal Kwalwasser, whose new book Renewal: Remaking America's Schools for the 21st Century, which has just been published (and which I helped edit), offers a strong defense for schools districts as the governance organization to keep—and improve on.

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.

From the trenches, Bronx special education teacher Mark Anderson notes that “it’s rare that content knowledge, pedagogical wisdom, or other experiential knowledge is transferred between classrooms, let alone between schools or between districts.” What’s missing, he says, “at all levels, is genuine dialogue grounded in the professional experience of the classroom.”

If we could marry such local level governance ideas—that schools and school districts become more empowered through dialogue and leadership—with the free market governance mechanisms of choice advocates like Kirtley, Rhee, Harris, Allison, and Greene…. Well, we could be on to something.

Empowering parents is what drives Darrell Allison, who is President of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, and John Kirtley, a former equity firm manager who now administers tax credit scholarships for 40,000 low income Florida children. Such scholarships not only give parents a choice, says Kirtley, the program “encourages the creation of powerful coalitions for choice that don’t exist with partial measures.” Allison finds it “totally unacceptable” that “50 percent of poor elementary and middle school students passed state tests” despite North Carolina’s spending $35 billion on education over the last five years. This is why Allison’s group is lobbying for a tax credit program in the Tar Heel State. (Robyne Camp has an interesting dissent about parent engagement and school boards, suggesting that parents may not be the best equipped advocates for sensible reform at a policy or pedagogical level.)

Parent control has been one of the fundamental principles of Jay Greene’s writing for years, but his TBQ essay suggests a pragmatic political compromise. “I have no particular love for local school districts,” he writes, but “they just more closely approximate parental choice and control than does granting more power over education to the state or national governments.”

John Chubb, a member of the Hoover Institution Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, takes aim at one of the most disruptive innovations in school governance since the printing press: the computer. (Sorry, but television, that “vast wasteland,” never revolutionized the classroom.) And Chubb poses the essential questions, for which we are frantically searching for answers:

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?

Finally, David Harris, who helped Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson turn that city into a capital of choice, and Michelle Rhee, the one-time lightning rod superintendent of Washington, D.C., offer brilliant reform ideas from their new perches: Harris as founder and CEO of The Mind Trust, and Rhee as founder and CEO of StudentsFirst. Rhee, as the name of her new organization suggests, believes that if we “put student needs at the center of decision-making in our schools,” the rest will follow:

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.

While Rhee’s organization has spread the net wide and is now working on reform legislation in more than a dozen states, The Mind Trust goes a mile deep, focusing its considerable reform heft at Indianapolis, recruiting “proven programs” to the city and “incubat[ing] life-changing schools and initiatives” that has, Harris says, “sparked a robust community conversation” about school reform and has attracted great new education leadership to his city.

Each of these essays provides important and nuanced information to the question of how we can best govern our public education system; together, they are not a bad blueprint for systemic reform.

Thanks again to our TBQ contributors.

Guest blogger Robyne Camp served three years on her board of education in Irvington, New York, losing a tight race for re-election in May. Her first career was in financial services, specializing in complex lending to insurance companies. Her second career began in her 40s, after she was widowed, when she became a lawyer. She has worked as a pro-bono assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, representing abused and neglected children in appeals cases and prosecuting domestic violence crimes.

Three years ago, in a landslide election six months after the crash, I won a seat on my local school board in Westchester County. This May I lost my bid for re-election in a hotly contested five-person race for two open seats. I learned some lessons.

When I ran, I was a reform candidate in an affluent district where reform candidates rarely run (and don’t win if they do), but the village was then in turmoil, and the rules had been suspended. I was swept into office and assumed responsibility (along with four colleagues) for oversight of a district whose salient demographics can be registered in a glance:

Projected enrollment school year 2012-13: 1740

Projected per pupil spending 2012-13: $29,400

Reduced-Price Lunch: 2 percent

Limited English Proficient: 2 percent

Black/Hispanic: 6 percent

Asian or Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander: 9 percent

White: 83 percent

Small, affluent, majority white—with a cadre of devoted and highly engaged parents. Unfortunately, I was not a parent, and that became a problem.

Education reform may be toughest in the 'burbs. Photo by Jan-Erik Finnberg.

I came in third this spring, twenty-seven votes behind a recent president of the Parent Teacher Student Association. The election was nasty, with much of the vitriol focusing on the fact that I do not have children attending the schools. At the height of the campaign, public attention turned to the more concerning reality: that I do not have any children at all. One of my fellow board members released a Mother’s Day message asking residents to vote for two of my opponents (both mothers) because we have no “mothers on the board.”

The Mother’s Day endorsement prompted one of my closest allies to produce a pointed resume of my good works and marital history, all but calling out my colleague as a cad (you can see it here); another supporter suggested that my mothers on the board-endorsing colleague consider resigning from the board since he wasn’t a mother, either.

Needless to say, these interventions did nothing to quell the furor, and on election day a blogger on a “Pro School-Parent” site ventured the opinion that “We doubt [Camp’s husband] even looked at her as motherhood material….”

Obviously, this is not what policy experts have in mind when they extol the virtues of “parent involvement” in the schools. Given my experience, though, I think the experts are wrong to encourage it. Involved parents can help their own children, but when it comes to the school as a whole, involved parents are divided amongst themselves and have virtually no ability to influence curriculum, quality of teaching, or educational outcomes for all children.

As I review my brief board tenure and recent electoral loss, I’ve come to the conclusion that I won the first time because of the crash—and lost the second time because the school establishment got back on track—with a vengeance!

In 2009, I was the “cost-cutting” candidate. I had a financial background, and the town (including many parents)—was in an uproar over an unpopular and free-spending superintendent whose five-year contract was being rolled over each summer while no one was paying attention. The superintendent was permanently in the first year of a contract with four years left to run, with very few people being aware that was the case. Just a few short months after the village learned the meaning of the term “evergreen contract,” the economy crashed, and parents and ‘non-parents’ alike were in open revolt. I was their candidate.

At the same time, a small but determined group of reform-minded parents had coalesced around issues of curriculum and accountability some three years before I ran. These parents had created a list serve they called the Irvington Parents Forum, where they posted “citzens’ op eds” pressing their case. Their mantra at the time of the crash: District spending had doubled in ten years time with no measurable gains in student achievement. I became their candidate, too.

Perhaps because of the Parents Forum, my town never reached the point of having a tax revolt. We had an accountability revolt instead, which united residents whose primary issue was taxes with parents whose primary issue was curriculum and student achievement.

A pre-existing and public parent group lobbying for academic improvement, an unpopular school leader, and a once-in-a-century economic catastrophe: if that’s what it takes for a reform candidate to run and win in the “leafy suburbs” (see Mike Petrilli’s op-ed), we won’t see many reform candidates running and winning in those suburbs.

Nevertheless, I was able to get a number of things done. The superintendent was out by the end of my second year, a major accomplishment, and one for which I feel entitled to claim the lion’s share of the credit—certainly for the speed with which her administration drew to a close. But it was a bitter fight that included standing-room-only board meetings and name-calling.

Although every day seemed to bring a new slugfest, I managed to deliver on my platform where spending and transparency were concerned. It wasn’t easy.

I spent my entire first year in office trying to find out what the average teacher in our district earned. The assistant superintendent for business refused to tell me, and my four fellow members of the board backed him. Not surprisingly, construction projects were a money sinkhole. During my second year on the board, the district undertook the renovation of an athletic field to bring it up to code for girls’ lacrosse. It was never clear whether voters had actually authorized the renovation, which was problem enough. But then, once the job was completed, administrators discovered that the finished field was 30 feet too short. Taxpayers spent another $50,000 to re-build the field as drawn on the architect’s plans.

Today, I think most of these problems are behind us. And we have four fewer administrators than we did when I was elected.

The assistant superintendent for business was replaced by a straight shooter who has spent the past year rectifying (her word) numerous problems left behind by her predecessor, a man who earned more than the superintendent of neighboring Scarsdale during his last year on the job. In the run-up to the recent election, a constituent asked our new business manager to calculate the average teacher’s total compensation in the district—and she did: $129,872.27, not including ‘lane’ increases, which are the raises given upon completion of education credits. That’s progress.

And, finally, the full board hired a new superintendent who used data-driven instruction and professional learning communities in his previous district: a man who, when he was a student teacher, videotaped himself and his peers so they could analyze their work. He is all about accountability and results, and was the unanimous choice of the board.

It’s hard for me to imagine local school boards taking steps to change this situation, if only because so few citizens believe anything is (or could be) amiss in suburban schools.

Unfortunately, curriculum was another story altogether. Our district uses Math Trailblazers, one of the weakest of the constructivist math curricula on the market. I spent two years pressing the district to consider adopting “Singapore Math.” But despite having a large group of knowledgeable parents behind me, I made absolutely no headway. The board president, who had majored in math at an Ivy League college, told the audience that in her opinion Trailblazers was weak and “Singapore Math” strong, but that she was voting to keep Trailblazers because, she said, “We have to do what the teachers want.” And that was the sign of things to come.

One of my supporters recently shared with me Richard Elmore’s 2006 article “What (So-called) Low Performing Schools Can Teach (So-Called) High Performing Schools” (You can find a copy here, but may have to pay.) My experiences echo his observations:

• Affluent suburban schools often define learning difficulties as a “problem to be solved by students and their families” (via private tutors) not by the school;


• Affluent suburban schools often see variations in student performance as natural and completely unrelated to teaching or curriculum;


• Affluent suburban schools sometimes intentionally limit access to high-level courses  (even more alarming, sociologist Paul Attewell found that affluent schools often keep talented students out of advanced classes via artificially tough grading and grade deflation);


• Leaders who want to improve affluent suburban schools may find themselves in a “risky place.”

It’s hard for me to imagine local school boards taking steps to change this situation, if only because so few citizens believe anything is (or could be) amiss in suburban schools. Students in villages like mine always score higher than students in urban or rural schools, and the number of parents who know enough about curriculum, teaching, or international comparisons to protest balanced literacy and constructivist math is small. Most parents seem to believe that teachers and administrators know best—and that school boards should not “interfere” with the core functions of the school.

As for parents who dissent, the window of time during which they can openly advocate for better curriculum or accountability comes to a close when their children reach adolescence. Pre-teens and teens dislike having their parents in the limelight for any reason, but they find it especially painful to see their parents gain notoriety as vocal critics of the school they attend.

Generous funding, perennially high scores on state tests, and the absence of a lobby for reform mean that there is no limit to the number of education-school “initiatives” that can be “rolled out” in a high-performing suburban school district. Balanced literacy, constructivist math, reading workshop, peer editing, group projects, writing workshop, flipped classrooms, flip books, technology, grade deflation, and tutors: The entire constructivist project will continue to grow and flourish in affluent suburban schools. It’s no accident that E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum has been adopted by a few schools in Queens and the Bronx, but not one in Westchester or Long Island.

Education reform here in the leafy suburbs will have to trickle up from New York City’s poorest 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.

Guest blogger Timothy G. Kremer is the executive director of the New York State School Boards Association.

Mark Twain once famously remarked "I'm all for progress, it's change that I can't stand."  Of course, Twain fully understood progress does not happen without changes to the status quo.

What constitutes progress for a school board? Hiring a great new superintendent and forging a harmonious partnership? Often, school board progress is defined in the form of a strategic plan that the entire staff and community rally around. Both are reasons to be proud because they can lead to great accomplishments.

School board members must welcome all rational forms of change that serve the goal of raising student achievement.

Ultimately, though, progress has to be measured in terms of student achievement gains. Unlike Mark Twain, school board members must welcome all rational forms of change that serve the goal of raising student achievement.

School boards have generally been supportive of the New York State Regents Reform Agenda, although it is fair to say that that many boards have a healthy dose of skepticism about grand, top-down initiatives such as Race to the Top, Common Core Standards and the new Annual Professional Performance Review or APPR.

Isn't it interesting that after all these years, New York and seven other states recently were granted a waiver from the punitive, one-size-fits-all requirements of No Child Left Behind that have proven to be, in the words of New York Education Commissioner John King, "unproductive and unrealistic?"

The emphasis now is on "college and career readiness," individual student progress and teacher evaluations.

The New York State School Boards Association (NYSSBA) is in close contact with the New NY Education Reform Commission assembled by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, which could provide us with a great opening to achieve some of our most elusive goals or create another heavy-handed hammer that obliterates school boards' authority and local community control of their school systems.

Think forced consolidations, countywide governance structures and removal of school boards and superintendents in underperforming school districts.

But if the governor's commission can help you raise student achievement, better protect the school learning environment, help strengthen your workforce, recommend a sufficient and fair state aid formula, and engage an often distracted community, more power to them.

However, the reform-minded, New York City-centric, CEO-heavy, charter school-friendly commission members might heed the words of another, less noteworthy philosopher—one of my former colleagues, in fact—who once told me "no job is too difficult if you are not the one doing the work."

NYSSBA will be a constant reminder to the commission that in the real world school districts are rapidly depleting reserve funds, relying on attrition and retirements to control costs, trying to be creative at seeking hard-fought concessions at the bargaining table, and conducting layoffs of both instructional and non-instructional staff, including administrators. School districts are also making long-term structural changes, perhaps overdue, by closing schools, reorganizing functions around new technologies and sharing staff and programs with other districts. 

The results of the New York's statewide 2012 budget votes made it clear that school boards realized that their communities were acutely aware of the new “2 percent” tax levy cap and opted to stay within the allowable limit.  If so, the budget was almost guaranteed to pass. But at what price?

There are many districts across New York State that are in current fiscal distress. They have little or no reserves, a shrinking tax base, and what some of you might consider an unacceptable academic program. Perhaps you have heard of them. What will become of their students?

Those of you who have been involved in public education for any length of time know that the notion of reform seems to be more of a permanent endeavor than a transitional state in education.  But, honestly, given rapidly changing demands on our students, we can't afford to stand still or rest on our laurels. We constantly have to ask ourselves: what should students be learning today that will make them prepared for tomorrow?

All students need the ability to apply classroom learning to meet real-world challenges in all subjects, including language, math, science, and social studies.  Students who can think critically about information, solve novel problems, communicate and collaborate, create new products and processes, and adapt to change will be at a great advantage throughout their lifetimes.  But, to produce independent and creative thinkers, students also need to know about literature, art, and history. Critical thinking and problem-solving rely on content knowledge and cannot be taught in isolation.  For success both on the job and in their personal lives, students must know how to apply what they learn toward real world challenges, rather than simply “reproduce” the information on tests.

The true test for any board's leadership capabilities comes during times of fiscal uncertainty due to uncontrollable conditions.

As an elected representative and student advocate, a school board member must be engaged, aware, and up-to-speed regarding issues that drive student learning. Today, school boards have become policymakers responsible for meeting state and national reforms with local resources. It is a hard job that is getting harder. Everyone in your school district, including your board, is expected to embrace a dynamic global perspective and find local ways to prepare students for success in a changing world.

The true test for any board's leadership capabilities comes during times of fiscal uncertainty due to uncontrollable conditions. This is when boards must "own the mission," in other words; protect the traditional core programs, especially curriculum development and quality instruction. Simultaneously, boards and professional educators must adapt to a new normal that commands new teaching and management methodologies and efficiencies. This phenomena—exciting and excruciating, depending on specific circumstances and one's point of view—is on display in school districts across New York.

Student-centered, forward-thinking, intelligent school board leadership has never been more in demand.

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 Darrell Allison is president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, which supports greater educational choice for all parents and students across the state. For more information, please go to www.pefnc.org.

As president of a statewide organization devoted to ensuring that ALL children—regardless of income or zip code—have access to a quality education, I hear plenty of opposing talking points…that we need to spend more on public education, that education reform measures will lead to the death of public schools, that public tax dollars are being used for private gain.

In spite of tremendous spending, our poorest kids are still missing the mark. And this is totally unacceptable.

When I hear this type of rhetoric I think of how North Carolina has spent over $35 billion on education over the last five years, yet only 50 percent of poor elementary and middle school students passed state tests—compared to nearly 80 percent of their wealthier peers.

In spite of tremendous spending, our poorest kids are still missing the mark. And this is totally unacceptable.

I’m all for “public education,” but I believe “public education” should consist of a system based more on the quality of schooling a child receives and less on the particular educational model. In an op-ed that was published across North Carolina earlier this year, I wrote that each of our state’s educational models, including our traditional public schools, help to support our shared responsibility to fully educate all of our children.

By embracing such an idea, our low-income students could better receive the resources and attention they so desperately need. As we all know, the lower a child is on the socioeconomic scale, the less access he or she has to resources, thus making them more susceptible to incarceration and dropping out of school.

Based on these concerns, the most important education issue we face today is making sure our poor kids have better access to a quality education—whether traditional or nontraditional. It is why Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina is currently advocating for House Bill 1104 NC Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit Program. This measure allows corporations to receive tax credits for contributing to nonprofit organizations that provide private school scholarships to low income children.

We know that tax credit scholarship programs work and save taxpayer dollars. Independent studies have confirmed that Florida’s program has resulted in increased student achievement for scholarship and public school students. According to a state fiscal impact analysis, Florida’s program has saved taxpayers over $98 million since 2001 because the scholarship amounts are less than the cost to educate a traditional public school student. The Sunshine State is expected to save an additional $53 million next school year, savings which can be reinvested in public education. Moreover, House Bill 1104, which is modeled after Florida’s program, is expected to save North Carolina taxpayers over $28 million within the first three years—savings that can also be used for public education.

At the end of the day, if an affluent parent believes their child is not receiving a quality education, they can write a check for private school tuition or move to a neighborhood with better schools. But what happens to a poor parent facing this dilemma? Should we just tell their child to stick it out and wait for an answer? Or do we create an education system that ensures ALL children, regardless of income or zip code, receive their constitutional right to a quality education?

I support the latter.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 Kristof 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.

Kristof 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.   

-----------

***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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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*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

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

*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: