Gov. Romney wants to make Title I and IDEA dollars portable—a worthy idea, just make it voluntary. Photo by Austin Hufford

Today, there’s not a single Republican in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, or running for president willing to defend federal accountability mandates. The GOP conversation has shifted to transparency, in line with what we’ve called Reform Realism. What a difference a decade makes.

The thrust of Romney’s speech, however, wasn’t his fresh view of accountability, but a major proposal on school choice. Romney wants to make Title I and IDEA dollars portable—a form of “backpack funding” from the federal level. (This one’s very much in line with what the Hoover Institution’s K-12 Education Task Force proposed in February. It’s also close kin to what Ronald Reagan and Bill Bennett proposed for Title I back in the late 1980s.) He said:

As President, I will give the parents of every low-income and special needs student the chance to choose where their child goes to school. For the first time in history, federal education funds will be linked to a student, so that parents can send their child to any public or charter school, or to a private school, where permitted. And I will make that choice meaningful by ensuring there are sufficient options to exercise it. 

To receive the full complement of federal education dollars, states must provide students with ample school choice. In addition, digital learning options must not be prohibited.  And charter schools or similar education choices must be scaled up to meet student demand.

There’s a lot to be said for making federal dollars follow disadvantaged children to their schools of choice:

• It provides incentives for good schools to attract needy kids;


• It helps those kids exit dreadful schools;


• It promotes integration by allowing federal funds to flow to schools that are socioeconomically mixed; and


• It encourages states to make their own funding more portable (a la weighted student funding)—with all manner of benefits around equity, choice, and more.

But it’s not without drawbacks:

• It could move federal funds away from high-poverty schools (which get most Title I dollars today) to low-poverty ones;


• Unless states and districts move their money, too, the amount ($1,000-2,000 per pupil) isn’t enough to pay for actual private-school tuition, so that part isn’t apt to get much real traction; and


• By giving parents “private accounts” to spend on digital learning, tutoring, and the like, it could weaken schools’ larger improvement efforts, which are mostly funded by these federal dollars.

The biggest concern comes with having Uncle Sam try to use his ten cents on the education dollar to foist major changes on the states. Photo by Mollie McCabe.

The biggest concern, though, comes with having Uncle Sam try to use his ten cents on the education dollar to foist major changes on the states. We’ve seen how that works (or doesn’t) in the context of accountability; why do we think it will work better in the context of school choice?

See this passage, in particular, from Romney’s education white paper:

To expand the supply of high-performing schools in and around districts serving low-income and special-needs students, states accepting Title I and IDEA funds will be required to take a series of steps to encourage the development of quality options: First, adopt open-enrollment policies that permit eligible students to attend public schools outside of their school district that have the capacity to serve them. Second, provide access to and appropriate funding levels for digital courses and schools, which are increasingly able to offer materials tailored to the capabilities and progress of each student when used with the careful guidance of effective teachers. And third, ensure that charter school programs can expand to meet demand, receive funding under the same formula that applies to all other publicly-supported schools, and access capital funds.

Note especially the phrase, “will be required.” We’ve been down that road before! And note how far this proposal is from the “let states do whatever they want with their federal dollars” approach of House education-committee chairman John Kline.

A better idea might be to take a page from the Obama administration's handbook and make funding portability voluntary. Give states the option to “voucherize” their Title I and IDEA funds. Make them take the steps above in order to participate in that option. Maybe offer a little extra money on top. And see if you get any takers. That’s a way to promote innovation and choice without falling into the same federalism trap that snared No Child Left Behind. And states that opt into it would very likely make their own dollars portable, too.

This plan is a good start. You’ve got five and a half months till Election Day, Governor Romney, to make it even better.

Will the NSBA and AASA react angrily to this goring of their own members' oxen?

Just to be eligible, districts by the 2014-15 school year will have to promise to implement evaluation systems that take student outcomes into account—not just for teacher and principal performance, but for district superintendents and school boards. That's a big departure from the state-level Race to the Top competitions, which just looked at educators who actually work in schools, not district-level leaders. [Emphasis added]

How very refreshing, even exhilarating, to see the inclusion of superintendents and boards in a results-based accountability system, rather than the customary focus only on schools and their principals and teachers (and sometimes the kids themselves). Will the NSBA and AASA react angrily to this goring of their own members' oxen? Or will they—as they should—welcome this logical and potentially powerful widening of the theory and practice of accountability?

“Rules Proposed for District Race to Top Contest,” Alyson Klein, Politics K-12 blog, May 22, 2012.

Tax-credit scholarship programs must be well designed and monitored or more "exposes" over how dollars are distributed will follow. Photo by Images Money.

Having gotten that out of the way, it’s also worth learning that while some of these state programs (especially Florida’s) are models of sound policy, efficient administration, and careful targeting of available resources, some others appear to be burdened by dubious practices on the part of schools, donors, elected officials, and maybe parents, too.

First, a brief refresher on what these programs are and how they work. Eight states allow individuals or corporations to take a full or partial credit against their state taxes for contributions they make to nonprofit groups that award private-school scholarships. Some states, like Florida, award scholarships only to low-income students. Others, such as the programs in Arizona and Georgia, place no income restrictions on eligibility. None excludes participation in religious schooling (and, in fact, the majority of scholarship students attend faith-based schools).  

Yes, they are cousins of voucher programs but they don’t involve checks written by the state (or district) to private schools, using money that has already entered the public coffers. The money, in fact, never enters the state treasury. Such programs thus skirt some of the statutory and constitutional obstacles that get in the way of vouchers—and in many cases enjoy smoother political sailing as well.

If Ms. Saul is to be believed, however, some of these programs are vulnerable to various forms of misbehavior, including parents getting cash in their pockets, politicians deciding which schools should benefit, even donors getting tax credits while underwriting particular students.

These programs involve credits against state taxes. Hence a state’s tax code determines what is and isn’t kosher. Certainly some of these alleged practices wouldn’t be acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service. (For example, one cannot make a gift to a college or school that is then used to provide tuition relief to one’s own kid. If that were allowed, nobody would pay tuition to Princeton; they’d make gifts instead—and benefit from the tax deduction.)

Even in Ms. Saul’s telling, it’s evident (from the Florida example) that such programs can be meticulously designed, well run, and close to fool proof. But it also appears that some are loosey-goosey and vulnerable to chicanery. Which raises the question of whose job it is to set them right on behalf of the kids, parents, educators, and taxpayers who have every reason to expect that?

The state, of course, should do much of this. It’s a state program and the state equivalent of the IRS should be monitoring its collection and distribution of money. State watchdog agencies, too, should ensure that taxpayers are benefitting, as has happened in Florida. The state education department (or local school system) should be ensuring that the kids who benefit from it are attending bona fide educational institutions that satisfy the applicable requirements for private schools to operate in that jurisdiction. And legislatures should examine the academic impact of these programs, as greater transparency often weeds out schools with shaky credentials and questionable business practices.

But aspects of this go well beyond state government and could well be superior to it. Should the private school “community,” such as it is, be monitoring its own members for their participation in and handling of such aid programs? (What is the Council for American Private Education and its state affiliates for?) How about the accrediting bodies that typically review many aspects of private schools and allow them (if they pass muster) to declare that they are accredited? What about advocacy groups (such as the American Federation for Children) that press for the expansion and replication of such programs and that presumably have an interest in their integrity and reputation? The private foundations (e.g. Friedman, Walton, DeVos) that underwrite such efforts? Why does this sector of school choice have no counterpart to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) to promulgate a code of sound practices and invite membership from organizations that adhere to these?

The more such entities do to ensure sound practices in state-level tax-credit-scholarship programs, the less temptation there will be for government agencies to clamp down on them, with likely adverse effects on legitimate schools and needy pupils.

And the less that hostile publications like the Times and "gotcha" journalists like Ms. Saul will have with which to make mischief.

PS: It’s not just “private” and “profit” that she abhors. Her piece on Tuesday was really a model of take-no-prisoners left-wing journalism! She hit at least five hot buttons: privatization, football, evolution, fundamentalism, and fracking! Somehow she missed climate change, phonics, and traditional family units.

Ed. note: Adam Emerson previously contributed to policy and public affairs initiatives for Step Up For Students, the scholarship organization responsible for administering the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students.

• “Unionized charter schools may make good sense for the unions themselves,” cautioned Terry Ryan on the Ohio Gadfly Daily, “but they would be a set-back for school improvement efforts in the Buckeye State.”


• Guest blogger Michelle Rhee warned on Board’s Eye View of an overarching approach to education policy that hurts children: “Too often decisions are made and policies are set based on the interests of adults in the system rather than student needs.”


• On the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mike Petrilli noted on Flypaper that “the question today, as for the past twenty years or so (when the forcible desegregation movement ran out of steam), is what can be done to better integrate our schools?”


• On Choice Words, Adam Emerson described a Louisiana “community that has chosen to erect a fence around its public schools.”


• “Layoffs disrupt schools, students, and teachers no matter how they are implemented,” argued guest blogger Rebecca Sibilia on Stretching the School Dollar, “but LIFO policies only exacerbate the situation by forcing many great teachers out of the classroom without regard to the quality of their work and disrupting the education of more students than needed.”


• On Common Core Watch, Kathleen wrote that Common Core supporters “shouldn’t be trying to avoid failure, we should be looking to shine a spotlight on it and embrace it as a key element of change.”

To stay on top of all of Fordham’s commentary, subscribe to the Gadfly Daily’s combined RSS feed and don’t forget to watch the replay of yesterday’s discussion from Columbus, “Digital Learning: The Future of Schooling?”

What's the point of an integrated school with segregated classrooms? Photo by woodleywonderworks.

Yet, despite our student population’s diversity, the number of diverse schools, as imagined by Brown, remains limited. Upwards of 40 percent of black and Latino students still attend racially isolated schools (where white pupils represent less than 10 percent of the enrollment). And the average black or Latino student attends a school that is 75-percent minority. Meanwhile, more than four in five white students attend schools that are majority-white—even though whites barely make up 50 percent of our school population. (All of these data are from Gary Orfield’s Civil Rights Project.)

A long Times article over the weekend described in moving terms what this type of racial isolation means for young people. “At Explore, as at many schools in New York City, children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality.” One student, Amiyah, tells the reporter: “It’s a bit weird. All my friends are predominantly black, and all the teachers are predominantly white. I think white kids go to different schools. I don’t know. I haven’t seen many white people in a big space before.”

Sure enough, most studies show the benefits of racially and socio-economically mixed schools. Even such luminaries as Eric Hanushek and Caroline Hoxby have found positive peer effects for minority students when they sit in integrated classrooms. Less rigorous research has linked exposure to middle-class students (and their culture) to better life outcomes for poor kids.

The question today, as for the past twenty years or so (when the forcible desegregation movement ran out of steam), is what can be done to better integrate our schools? The Supreme Court no longer allows explicit social engineering by race. And parents have shown—in Wake County, North Carolina and elsewhere—an unwillingness to have their kids forcibly bused to distant schools. (Not that such policies are in line with a free society, anyway.)

But there are at least two reasons for hope. First, contrary to what you might think, the rapid gentrification of many of our great cities is making school integration more feasible than it’s been for decades. As neighborhoods grow more diverse, it’s easier (though not inevitable) for their local schools to become diverse, too. Second, the charter school movement is awakening to the opportunities that charters might play in creating voluntarily integrated schools of choice.

These efforts will struggle, however, with the difficult question of academic diversity. Which brings us to this week’s other solid piece of reporting, this one in the Washington Post, on the topic of differentiated instruction—“in essence, adapting lessons for kids of different abilities within a classroom” rather than tracking or grouping students by ability.

As I wrote in Education Next last year, the wide spread in students’ prior academic achievement is probably the greatest challenge facing teachers today. No classroom is immune. But classes that are racially and socio-economically diverse are likely to have especially large achievement gaps between their high and low performers—creating a nearly impossible instructional task for mere mortals.

Consider a second Hoxby peer-effects study. In 2006, she and Gretchen Weingarth examined the schools in Wake County. For the better part of two decades, that district, in and around Raleigh, had been reassigning lots of kids to different schools every year in order to keep its schools racially and socioeconomically balanced. That created thousands of natural experiments whereby the composition of classrooms changed dramatically but randomly. That, in turn, provided Hoxby and Weingarth an opportunity to investigate the impact of these changes on student achievement.

They found evidence for what they called the “boutique model” of peer effects, “in which students do best when the environment is made to cater to their type.” They wrote: “Our evidence does not suggest that complete segregation of people, by types, is optimal...What our evidence does suggest is that efforts to create interactions between lower and higher types ought to maintain continuity of types.”

Diverse schools may wind up grouping students by achievement level for some subjects and teaching them heterogeneously in subjects like science, social studies, art, music, and P.E.  Photo by Amy.

What that means for classrooms is that it’s okay for them to contain a range of students (say high, medium, and low achievers), as long as that range is not too wide. What’s pernicious is a “bimodal” distribution of students in the same class: just very high and very low achievers, with few in between. Yet that is precisely the kind of distribution many diverse schools find themselves with. On average, upper-middle-class white students from college-educated two-parent families tend to achieve at very high levels and poor minority students from single-parents homes tend to achieve at very low levels. Put these students in the same classroom and you’ve got a real dilemma.

How on earth can a teacher instruct such a group of pupils effectively? If the answer is to keep kids in separate ability groups all day, then why not just create whole classrooms by ability instead? In schools that are not racially and socio-economically diverse—say, high-poverty inner-city schools, or affluent all-white suburban schools—it’s not as difficult an issue. There you can group students by ability without grouping students by race or class.

In diverse schools, however, such grouping will often (stress often, not always) mean re-segregating students by race and/or class. And what’s the point of an integrated school with segregated classrooms? Which brings us back to “differentiated instruction,” and the hope that somehow a teacher can reach kids of all abilities together.

Squaring this circle is the daunting challenge that diverse schools face. Most will probably land on a combination of strategies—grouping students by achievement level for part of the day, maybe for reading and math, while teaching them heterogeneously in subjects like science, social studies, art, music, and P.E. But schools that refuse to group at all—out of an ideological aversion to “sorting”—will struggle to help all their students achieve at high levels. At least that’s what the best research indicates. And if parents—of all races and classes—see that their own kids aren’t getting what they need, you can kiss those diverse schools goodbye.

• Summarizing a push by Connecticut lawmakers to study the “feasibility” of an opt-out plan for charter schools on the Choice Words blog, Adam Emerson warned, “This might be an agile way to retreat from a bad idea, but legislators should have killed the plan before committing state resources to its study.”


• When California announced it would apply for a NLCB waiver on its own terms, Mike lauded the state’s move on Flypaper. As he wrote, “While Jerry Brown, Tom Torlakson, and Mike Kirst deserve plenty of criticism for their indifference to education reform—kicking charter supporters off the state board, cozying up to the teacher unions—on this one they deserve nothing but kudos.”


• In a guest blog post for Board’s Eye View, National School Boards Association Executive Director Anne L. Bryant acknowledged the value of assessment and accountability before cautioning, “we’ve gone too far—we are currently too focused on testing and teaching rote memorization rather than inspiring creativity.”


• On the Ohio Gadfly Daily blog, Terry Ryan announced that, in its role as a charter authorizer, Fordham “would willingly be the first to go through a vetting process led by the Transformation Alliance” proposed by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson.


• “Illinois lawmakers should resist the urge to kick the can down the road,” wrote Chris Tessone on Stretching the School Dollar, “instead passing radical reform of the pension system and providing teachers with a forward-thinking retirement plan.”


• Describing a new study of differences in how teachers provide feedback to students of different ethnicities on Common Core Watch, Kathleen Porter-Magee noted that there are “some pretty deep, possibly unconscious, biases at work that go beyond exposure to rigorous content and that manifest themselves through the way we praise students.”

To stay on top of all of Fordham’s commentary, subscribe to the Gadfly Daily’s combined RSS feed.

There’s still an increment, it turns out, but it’s been shrinking: from two years more schooling (by age thirty) for those born in 1955 down to just eight months more for those born in 1980. The implication, quoth the Journal reporters: “Without better educated Americans, economists say, the U.S. won’t be able to maintain high-wage jobs and rising living standards in a competitive global economy.”

America's tendency to supersize may not be a good recipe for education.  Photo by velkr0.

This isn’t exactly news. Nor is the Goldin-Katz analysis the first time we have observed that the U.S. is no longer leading the planet when it comes to the quantity of education that its population receives. But is more education—more hours and days, more years and degrees—the cure for what ails us? Or are we already pigging out on the educational equivalent of fast food—fattening but not nutritious—and will supersizing our portions just make matters worse?

If we accept the Goldin-Katz view of what’s wrong with U.S. education, we will inevitably demand more preschool, more full-day Kindergarten, more high school graduations, more college attendance, more college and postgraduate degrees, etc. Supersizing is the standard American response. Indeed, it’s already on the election-year menu with both parties demanding that student-loan interest rates be made to stay low so that more people can afford more tertiary education. Not much talk about quality, though.

Singapore is one of those places that’s been going a mile a minute in boosting both the quality and the quantity of formal education that its population receives. For example, the proportion of Singaporeans aged twenty-five to thirty-nine that completed secondary school (meaning tenth grade) jumped from 25 percent in 1980 to 96 percent in 2010. At the same time, Singapore students beat almost everyone else in the world on international assessments of math and science knowledge.

To an American, however, it’s surprising how little rush there is to supersize Singaporean education. Kindergarten is optional. (The primary schools start at age six or seven.) And only about one in four young Singaporeans currently qualifies for the “junior colleges” (basically grades eleven and twelve) that are the usual path into the country’s four universities. Government policy is headed toward placing 30 percent of the age cohort in public universities; for now, as many as 40 percent of secondary graduates head into career-oriented “polytechnics” that resemble the best of American community colleges and some 20 percent attend the Institute of Technical Education, which emphasizes “hands-on” training.

Singapore relies on its education system to drive its economy without compromising on quality.  Photo by edwin11.

There is, to be sure, public pressure to increase the number who can enter Singapore’s universities—and some private and non-Singaporean institutions have opened to accommodate some of that demand. (Other students travel overseas for their tertiary education.) But basically nobody is saying that every young person should go to university. And remember: this in an education-obsessed country with no other resources to speak of save its highly skilled populace.

Nor are they going to take the easy path (as England and Hong Kong have done in recent decades and as the U.S. started to do long ago) and put fancier labels onto existing institutions. They are not, for example, going to pretend that their polytechnics are really universities, as we have done with hundreds of ex-teachers colleges and quondam “normal schools.” They regard that kind of maneuver as both an affront to quality control at the university level and damaging to the real-world job-preparation work that the polytechnics specialize in.

The United States, of course, tends to reject both the benefits and the detriments of Singapore-style central planning in the education space, at least when it comes to planning from Washington. But the new Goldin-Katz data, combined with OECD trend data, make clear that our system (or non-system) isn’t doing a very good job of propelling more people onward to get more education than their parents got. And we know from plenty of other data (TIMSS, PISA, etc.) that the quality of much of what they’re getting isn’t so great, either, especially when viewed in international perspective.

Any number of reform initiatives are seeking to tackle one or the other problem. Some are focused on raising academic standards, others on keeping more people in the education system longer and seeing that they emerge with credentials. Some insist that the two goals are complimentary—and the mantra that “everyone should emerge from high school both college and career-ready” tends to blur the distinction and terminate the discussion.

Are our presidential candidates crazy to yammer about cheap loans to make college more affordable for all?

But what will we do when we face hard trade-offs, such as the likely discovery that higher graduation standards will lead to a higher failure (and dropout) rate? Our track record in this regard leaves much to be desired. Even much-envied Massachusetts, which has done a commendable job of getting almost all who stay in school over the medium-high bar set by MCAS, has worrisome dropout rates, particularly among minority youngsters, and has been loath to raise its high school exit-bar to the level of true college readiness.

Are our presidential candidates crazy to yammer about cheap loans to make college more affordable for all? I understand that nobody (except maybe Rick Santorum) is going to campaign for the White House by urging fewer young Americans to go to college. But if more do in fact go and stay, will they really be getting a good education there? Or just a bigger bag of fries? What if, instead, more of them simply emerged career ready from our secondary schools, which already last two years longer than the norm in Singapore? Wouldn’t a whole lot of time and money be saved and a lot of heartache and dashed aspirations avoided?

I don’t expect these dilemmas to be resolved in Washington—though it would be fascinating to hear them discussed by Messrs. Obama and Romney in an upcoming debate. But it’s something our states had better come to grips with—including how they finance their P-20 education systems. It’s clear that rising tertiary education costs paid by consumers—and heavy debt burdens on many who enter and persist in college—are part of the problem. But only part. Maybe more attention to quality would do greater good.

In December, the organization of conservative state lawmakers adopted two Common Core resolutions in its education committee. One—the subject of the vote tomorrow at the board of directors level—calls on states to back out of the common standards initiative altogether. The second—which has already become ALEC policy—focuses instead on the federal role in the initiative, and tells Uncle Sam to back off.

Here’s the first resolution:

The State Board of Education may not adopt, and the State Department of Education may not implement, the Common Core State Standards developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Any actions taken to adopt or implement the Common Core State Standards as of the effective date of this section are void ab initio. Neither this nor any other statewide education standards may be adopted or implemented without the approval of the Legislature.

And the second:

BE IT RESOLVED, that the {legislative body} vigorously opposes any effort by the federal government to deny the authority of any state to set its own education academic content standards or to attempt to overturn decisions made duly by a state regarding any education standards deemed by the constitutionally-designated authorities in that state to be in the best interest of that state’s children.

So which is the true “conservative” resolution? The one that tells states what to do and demands a one-size-fits-all approach (pulling out of the Common Core)? Or the one that trusts states to make up their own minds—without interference from Washington? If you chose the latter, you will be relieved to know that Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Tony Bennett, and Jeb Bush—Common Core supporters all—agree.

National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: Science 2011 (Grade 8) (Washington, D.C.: United Stated Department of Education, 2012).

Terry explains,

we have doubts about the proposed Transformation Alliance and the scope of its authority, we fully understand, appreciate, and share Mayor Jackson’s frustration with the current system of charter school quality control in his city, and indeed across the state. We believe the charter community has a responsibility to offer the mayor and the city of Cleveland a workable solution to a real problem.

As a result,

Fordham—which expects to authorize one school in Cleveland in 2012-13—would willingly be the first to go through a vetting process led by the Transformation Alliance. We would see this as an opportunity to partner with the mayor and the Cleveland school district in working to create more and better school options for children and families who badly need them. Maybe together we can help Cleveland reverse its decline, while giving children and families better school choices.

Be sure to give the full post a read.

Finally, a state willing to call out the Administration on the illegality of its waiver policy.

While Jerry Brown, Tom Torlakson, and Mike Kirst deserve plenty of criticism for their indifference to education reform—kicking charter supporters off the state board, cozying up to the teacher unions—on this one they deserve nothing but kudos.

In a nine-page request (still in draft form for another month), they ask Arne Duncan to allow California to use its own accountability system, the Academic Performance Index (API), and to scrap AYP. Mimicking language Duncan himself has used, they write:

Unrealistic and ever-increasing performance targets have forced us to label 63 percent of Title I schools and 47 percent of districts receiving Title I funds as needing improvement, and to apply sanctions that do not necessarily lead to improved learning for the students in those schools. This practice has confused the public, demoralized teachers, and tied up funds that could have been more precisely targeted on the schools and districts that are most in need of improvement.

But they refuse to meet one of Duncan’s conditions for such flexibility: Namely, the creation of a statewide teacher evaluation system. From Politics K-12:

Why? The cash-strapped state just doesn't have the funds to help school districts cover the cost of a new evaluation plan, as state law requires, Kirst said.

"We're saying we just can't pay for it," Kirst said. Other states that have applied for the flexibility "must be rich," he joked.

And, in Kirst's view, the waiver request is consistent with what's actually in the NCLB law. "We do not see anything in the law about state mandates for teacher evaluation," he said.

Amen, amen, amen! Finally, a state willing to call out the Administration on the illegality of its waiver policy. (And a true-blue state at that!)

Let me be clear: I’m not saying California’s request should automatically be approved. There are legitimate questions about API, and whether it’s demanding enough (and sensitive enough to subgroup performance). As with the other states, Duncan has a right to negotiate over the particulars.

But he doesn’t have a right to demand the creation of a teacher evaluation system not mentioned in the law in return. Part of me hopes he’ll turn down the request anyway so that California can sue—and win.

• On Common Core Watch, Kathleen Porter-Magee argued that a new study is reason for optimism about the Common Core, but “supporters would do well to keep the champagne on ice. There is much work to be done before we can spike the football and declare victory.”


• “Common sense, increasingly scarce in the public debate around the Common Core among talking heads and the chattering class, still prevails in the heartland,” wrote Terry Ryan on the Ohio Gadfly Daily.


• “[Washington’s] influence on what happens in U.S. schools is indirect and limited,” explained Chester E. Finn, Jr. on Flypaper. “Yet that influence can be profound, albeit not always in a helpful way.”


• Profiling a new Florida accelerated education law on Choice Words, Adam Emerson warned that if lawmakers “care about their best and brightest, they must spend more than the minimum energy required.”


• In a Stretching the School Dollar review, Chris Tessone writes that Nate Levenson’s new book, Smarter Budgets, Smarter Schools: How to Survive and Thrive in Tight Times, “blazes a clear trail to leaner and more productive district spending—prepare to take notes."

To stay on top of all of Fordham’s commentary, subscribe to the Gadfly Daily’s combined RSS feed.

Contrary to criticisms from the Left, digital learning isn't a Trojan Horse for union-busters.  Photo by Frank Kovalchek.

Yet that is exactly what we’re doing today. Left-leaning pundits (including the gang at the National Education Policy Center) distance themselves from digital learning—decrying it a Trojan Horse for union-busters, little more than a ruse to kill organized labor and replace teachers with droids. They further vilify online learning as a mechanism to privatize K-12 education, citing Kaplan’s staggering non-completion and loan-default rates and the shaky academic-success rate of schools under K12’s watch (glossing over great examples of well-run for-profit online programs like Connections Academy). They feed on many people’s fear of the unknown.

For their part, right-leaning policy types have begun to shoehorn digital education into their own agendas—narrowly and blindly heralding the importance of privatization in the online sphere. They tout the efficacy of these selfsame for-profit providers without regard to their level of proven success. They ignore the need for public-sector accountability, despite historic proof that it’s necessary—at least on some level.

And so we stand, a line draw squarely down the center aisle, and at risk of arresting—or, at least, severely retarding—a movement crucial to the revitalization of America’s K-12 education system. To move past partisan politics will mean accepting a new tack to digital-education implementation. It will mean subjectively evaluating these entrepreneurial programs—and all other facets of online ed, discarding those that are found wanting, and buttressing those that are shown to be working. It will mean acknowledging that flesh-and-blood educators figure prominently in the digital-learning future and that for-profit providers cannot be the lone drivers on this road trip. It will mean moving slowly.

Moving smartly into this unknown future requires shedding partisan notions and strong-arm tactics.

Yes, digital learning will drive tectonic shifts in education: How we hire, train, and utilize teachers will look dramatically different twenty years in the future, for example. Technology will free them from onerous administrative duties and allow master teachers to reach orders of magnitude more youngsters daily. (Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel eloquently explain this point in their chapter of our recently released Education Reform for the Digital Era book.) Content-delivery methods, measurements of proficiency, even the basic structures of the classroom, are all slated for renovation in the digital-learning future. (Looking outside the classroom, online education is set to spur evolution on the education-financing and -governance fronts over the next two decades, too.) Class teachers will play a prominent role in scaling these changes. But so will the private sector.

The digital future is inevitable. How we reach it, and what achievement levels we get from it, depend on foundational policies and practices we lay today. Moving smartly into this unknown future requires shedding partisan notions and strong-arm tactics. We’d all be wise to remember that.

Uncle Sam is dreadful at micromanaging what actually happens in schools and classrooms. What he's best at is setting agendas and driving priorities. Through a combination of jawboning, incentivizing, regulating, mandating, forbidding, spotlighting, and subsidizing, he can significantly influence the overall direction of the K-12 system and catalyze profound changes in it (though the system is so loosely coupled that these changes occur gradually and incompletely).

Washington's influence on U.S. schools is indirect and limited—but it can also be profound, albeit not always in a helpful way.  Photo by Joe Portnoy.

It's just as well that such big directional shifts don't happen very often, because the change, however gradual, can be wrenching. And it isn't apt to happen much more often in the future, either, because the "federal government" is no single entity. It is, at minimum, three branches, two political parties, 535 members of Congress, innumerable judges, the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and umpteen executive-branch agencies—a list that only starts with the U.S. Department of Education. Nearly all of these stars must come into rough alignment before anything important begins to change. And that only occurs once in a while, often under extraordinary political or historical circumstances, usually when the country faces a big challenge, crisis, or widespread injustice.

Let's look at seven examples of federal "agenda setters" in K-12 education, one per decade.

1950s. One could legitimately cite Sputnik and the National Defense Education Act, but the decade's real game-changer was the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, striking down government-mandated racial segregation in Southern schools.

1960s. In the name of fostering opportunity, ending poverty, and giving needy kids a boost, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the modern era of federal aid to K-12 education via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, and the Economic Opportunity Act, which incorporated such high-profile programs as Head Start, the Job Corps, and the "domestic Peace Corps" known as VISTA.

1970s. Enacted in 1976, and signed (with some public misgivings) by President Gerald R. Ford, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, righted another historic wrong by declaring that every youngster with disabilities is entitled to a "free, appropriate public education" in the "least restrictive environment." Combined with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the law meant public schools now had an obligation to educate such children in ways that responded to their needs.

1980s. Though nominally just a commission report, A Nation at Risk (1983) told Americans that we faced a crisis of educational achievement and began to nudge the country through a 90-degree change of course from the "equity" agenda of the previous quarter-century to the "excellence" obsession of recent decades, complete with academic standards, tests, and results-based accountability systems.

1990 ushered in the first-ever state-by-state results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as the first-ever reporting of NAEP results according to newly established performance benchmarks. This dual development opened a new era of awareness of academic achievement in the United States and made possible the first bona fide comparisons of state performance at a time when state-based reform was in the ascendancy and governors craved such comparisons. It also launched what amounted to the first real set of standards by which to determine just "how good is good enough" when it comes to student achievement in various subjects.

2001 brought passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, a momentous reauthorization of the ESEA, declaring not only that every single student should become "proficient" in math and reading, but also that every school in the land would have its performance reported, both school wide and for its student demographic subgroups, and that schools failing to make "adequate yearly progress" would face a cascade of sanctions and interventions. NCLB transformed the federal government from funder to would-be reformer of American public education. In the course of becoming a reformer, Uncle Sam also became a regulator as never before.

And the present decade opened with the Race to the Top, the brainchild of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, based on the bold hypothesis that sizable grants of federal dollars, disbursed via a competitive process, can induce states to jump through reform policy hoops that they likely would not otherwise have attempted.

American education is a very different enterprise—and for the most part a better enterprise—as a result of these game-changing initiatives from Washington.

Add them up: America desegregated its schools, with respect both to race and handicap. It inaugurated big-time federal aid to K-12 education, initially in the name of equitable opportunity, now more targeted on academic achievement and gap-closing. It devised new ways of assessing, judging, and comparing achievement across the states—and prodded those states to make politically difficult changes to reform a system that wasn't producing satisfactory results. And in the process, unsurprisingly, Washington evolved from funder and equalizer into enforcer and regulator.

None of this worked as well as ardent advocates had hoped. All brought unintended consequences, pushback, and sizable financial burdens. But American education is a very different enterprise—and for the most part a better enterprise—as a result of these game-changing initiatives from Washington.

What causes some federal initiatives to function, at least for a while, as positive game-changers, while so many others almost immediately become duds? I see four conditions:

First, there needs to be a sizable, pent-up problem in need of a large solution—a lot of accumulated pressure seeking a release valve. That's a very different thing from a notional seems-like-a-good-idea or scratch-a-minor-itch add-on to a pre-existing portfolio of programs.

Second, the problem needs to be one that affects the whole country (for example, economic competitiveness, social justice, national security), even if the solution focuses mostly on a region (the segregated South) or significant constituency (kids with disabilities).

Third, the solution needs to be something that can be crafted by implements in the federal toolkit, which is basically limited to financial incentives, regulation of state and district practices, research and data, and litigation or the threat thereof. (And, of course, the bully pulpit itself.)

Fourth, and finally, enough political stars must align—and stay aligned long enough to make a difference.

Not all of them need to be aligned, however. (If they were, the problem would likely have been tackled already.) Congress was not about to outlaw racial segregation in 1954, for example, and plenty of prominent educators declared A Nation at Risk wrong in 1983. Lots of states dragged their heels big-time on No Child Left Behind, and any number of psychometricians denounced the NAEP achievement levels.

But there has to be enough oomph of one kind or another—moral, economic, political, judicial, even occasionally (in the case of school segregation) military—behind these kinds of changes for them to overcome resistance and gain real traction. And when that oomph diminishes—whether because of fresh election returns, limited attention span, newfound prosperity, exhaustion, backlash, or whatever—what remains may be a country with its education direction lastingly changed for the better. Or it may be the husk of yet another federal initiative that was promising at the start but grew stale, obsolete, or oppressive. Or both.

This editorial originally appeared as a commentary in Education Week and is adapted from an essay in the book Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit (Harvard Education Press, 2011).

• Analyzing twelfth-grade NAEP data, Mike Petrilli wondered on Flypaper, “could it be that increased graduation rates are driving down twelfth-grade performance?”


• Critiquing proposed charter school legislation in Connecticut, Adam Emerson warned on Choice Words, “An opt-out lottery would only discourage effective charter applicants who will see a burdensome and costly mandate getting in the way of their mission.”


• Reviewing a recent Ed Week op-ed by Tom Loveless on Common Core Watch, Kathleen Porter-Magee wrote, “the only way for states to see the kinds of achievement gains that the small handful of gap-closing schools have seen is to focus less on forcing the compliance-oriented implementation that Loveless describes and more on trying to understand how to empower teachers and leaders on the ground level to embrace the standards and to actually use them as the starting point for all curriculum development, formative and summative assessment, and instruction.”


• On the Ohio Gadfly Daily, Bianca Speranza gave kudos to Ohio State Auditor Steve Yost “for introducing a piece of legislation that attempts to create an environment of controls, increased education, and real repercussions, which in turn should lessen the temptation to mishandle public funds in the first place.”


• Matt Chingos of the Brookings Institution argued on Stretching the School Dollar, “if Obama and Romney want to buy the votes of struggling college students, they should at least propose the more efficient path of increasing the grants that students receive when they attend college, not decreasing the interest they pay after they leave.”

Want more? Be sure to download Fordham's latest publication, Education Reform for the Digital Era, and Mike Petrilli's new policy brief, "How School Districts Can Stretch the School Dollar." To stay on top of all of Fordham’s commentary, subscribe to the Gadfly Daily’s combined RSS feed.

Today, American education has the potential to be rebooted and accelerated by digital learning. Indeed, truly boosting student achievement—as well as individualizing instruction and creating high-quality options for children and families among, within, and beyond schools—will depend to a considerable extent on how deftly we exploit this potential, both in its pure form (full-time online instruction) and in various “blended” combinations of digital and flesh-and-blood instruction.

Serious obstacles block the road to realizing digital learning's potential. Photo by Brad Folkens

Making the most of these remarkable opportunities, however, hinges on our willingness—and capacity—to alter a host of ingrained practices. Fordham’s new volume, Education Reform for the Digital Era, offers a guide to that alteration, beginning with clarity about three major obstacles that today block the path.

Self-centered Interest Groups

The many adult interests that live off U.S. public education are already doing their best to co-opt digital learning for their own ends—and to ensure that nobody uses it to threaten their power, membership, or revenue base. Two such groups are especially powerful.

First are local districts and their school boards, vigorously represented by the National School Boards Association (NSBA). This crowd would stifle the openness and global reach of digital learning in the name of district empowerment and local monopoly. According to Ann Flynn, NSBA’s director of education technology, online learning “should be something that school districts can control.”

Yet leaving local districts and boards in charge of digital instruction will retard innovation, entrepreneurship, collaboration, and smart competition, simultaneously stifling students’ ability to find—and be taught by—the very best educators around the globe. It will raise costs, undermine efficiency, block rich instructional options, restrict school choice and parental influence, and strengthen the hand of other interest groups—including but not limited to already-too-powerful teacher unions.

For wherever one finds school districts and boards, one almost always finds unions equally determined to prevent digital learning from shrinking their ranks or weakening their power bases. In many places, they have secured legislation limiting the scope of digital learning or have written clauses into their contracts to counter its growth. More surreptitiously, they’ve ensured that class-size mandates (costly and dysfunctional as they are in the brick-and-mortar world) still apply to online schools.

Yet staffing arrangements—how many and what sorts of people, with what skills and training and compensation—will be dramatically different for online learning than for traditional schools, as Bryan and Emily Hassel explain in their chapter. With the proliferation of high-quality online content, solid instruction in the “basics” will eventually become “flat”—available anywhere globally (and likely at no charge). Meaning that, yes, fewer teachers will be needed. But also that their effectiveness will matter even more than it does today, as the quality of a teacher will affect learning outcomes for many more students.

Organizational Capacity 

When all the pay stubs are tallied, we find over 3 million teachers and umpteen more “support staff” working in what is today the nation’s second-largest industry. Yet education’s bulked-up employment has had essentially no effect on overall student achievement. Instead, the added HR heft has contributed to the bureaucratization, lethargy, and routinization of the K–12 enterprise, buttressing its rigid procedures, internal fiefdoms, and tendency toward compliance rather than innovation.

In order to see real jumps in student achievement, results-linked quality control of curricula, educators, and programs needs to look dramatically different.

In order to see real jumps in student achievement, results-linked quality control of curricula, educators, and programs needs to look dramatically different. Our current system is laden with input regulations like textbook mandates, certification requirements, and notches on teachers’ professional-development belts. None of these has been shown to improve student achievement (and some have actually been shown to hinder it). In the digital-learning era, these become even more dangerous tokens of “quality,” as they work to hamper innovation.

In fact, as an analysis in the volume finds, it should cost taxpayers fewer dollars to educate each pupil in the online world. As digital learning evolves, its costs are apt to drop further. Which is not to say that the choices, priority adjustments, and trade-offs associated with it are obvious or easy, only that we face a rare opportunity and—considering our fiscal circumstances—likely need to wean K-12 education from its cash habit.

Fundamental Structural Flaws

This education revolution cannot truly succeed under the customary arrangements for financing schools nor within our current governance system.

To learn more, download Education Reform for the Digital Era (available in pdf and e-book format).

Today we fund education via rigid and formulaic distribution, not paying for students or schools, much less for learning. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In his chapter, Paul T. Hill shows how we can leapfrog our customary system of school finance to fund education, not institutions; move money as students move; and pay for unconventional forms of instruction. This new model would offer parents a choice of whole-school providers while also affording them resources with which to purchase tutoring or enrichment programs, from advanced math classes to piano lessons.

Now consider our agricultural-era devotion to “local control” of public education and ask how this arrangement can possibly work well when the delivery system itself is unbounded by district, municipal, or even state borders.

To be sure, as Rick Hess points out in the book, public officials have an obligation to exert curricular quality control—for which they in turn are accountable to voters and taxpayers—and must safeguard minors from “virtual menaces.” But that is not the same as retaining local districts in control of digital learning.  Instead, a state-based model, like the one described by John E. Chubb in the volume, could provide the scale necessary to support research and development, to allow for flexible programming, and to extend the reach of top-rate teachers.

Whew! Reshape the financing and governance of public education? On top of new HR arrangements for teachers and improved quality control of content? Yes, it’s a tall order and a major reformulation of America’s education-reform agenda. It doesn’t erase the need for rigorous standards, tough accountability, vastly improved data systems, better teacher evaluations (and training, etc.), stronger school leaders, and much else that reformers have been struggling to bring about. But it says, in effect, that far more than those reforms are needed in order to bring U.S. public education into the modern era.

“Online learning is a cheaper way to educate my kids?  That’s great—where do we sign up?!”

I don’t know many parents who would utter such a remark—do you?

Our team’s research for our recent chapter of the Fordham book, Education Reform for the Digital Era, did in fact demonstrate that online learning can be less expensive—sometimes significantly less expensive—than traditional bricks-and-mortar schools. This is an important and exciting finding, as many schools today are striving to figure out ways to navigate budget crises. But it would be a mistake to focus solely on cost as the field of digital learning evolves. Of course there are cheaper ways to educate our kids. The critical question is, Can online learning be less expensive and better for students?

We don't know if online learning works. We hope it does. Technology has certainly been integrated into almost every other sector of our economy, so why not education? Our colleagues in higher education have certainly made progress integrating online learning, with a third of current postsecondary students taking at least one online course. There is every reason to hope that technology can help us fundamentally rethink the K-12 classroom and current teaching and learning approaches, which have been infamously stagnant for decades and fail too many American children.

As the nascent field of digital learning evolves, there will be successes and failures. That is the nature of innovation, as entrepreneurs and schools experiment with what works. What’s needed is a transparent system to identify the successes and failures, which doesn't look solely at costs or outcomes, but assesses the two together to understand value. In the “new normal” of school financing, we’re going to have to adapt to looking for better results with the money we’ve got, rather than layering on new reforms with new money. Doing so requires a shift in how people across our system think.

In fact, online learning doesn’t just necessitate a different way of looking at results; it requires that we rethink almost everything about how the system interacts with individual schools, students, and parents in order to foster the kind of digital experimentation that holds promise. In the book released yesterday, Fordham brought together experts from across the field to reflect on such policy issues as quality control, staffing, funding, and governance. Hopefully this collection of thought-provoking pieces can help advance the dialogue, and the action, necessary for innovation to flourish.

Consider: Nine-year-olds at the 10th percentile posted 12 points of progress between 1990 and 2008 on the long-term National Assessment of Educational Progress—10 of those points between 1999 and 2004 alone. (That’s about a grade level’s worth of gains.) Thirteen-year-olds at the 10th percentile posted 7 points of progress from 1990 and 2008. But seventeen-year-olds at the 10th percentile only gained 3 points. (The story is much the same for the 25th percentile.) The story for reading is more sobering, with big gains at the nine-year-old level, a flattening out in middle school, and actually declines in high school.

The question is how to interpret these trends. One hypothesis is about fade-out: The improvements at the elementary level are ephemeral, perhaps because the way math or reading is taught doesn’t set students up for future success. In reading, for example, it’s quite likely that a heavy focus on phonics is helping students to decode better—and post better scores as nine-year-olds—but isn’t giving them the vocabulary or content knowledge to keep making progress in middle school. Another hypothesis is that our high schools aren’t as strong as our elementary schools, perhaps because they haven’t been the focus of as much reform and attention.

Let me float a third theory: Could it be that increased graduation rates are driving down twelfth-grade performance? Recent studies have indicated that graduation rates are up significantly over the past decade; that means that we have twelfth-graders in school today who previously would have dropped out. And those students are likely to be very low-achieving. Could they be pulling down the mean? Just like we see with the SAT as more students—and more lower-income students—take the exam?

I’m not a statistician but it seems plausible to me. Number-crunchers out there: What say ye?

The policy blunders that hamstrung the charter-school movement as it grew can be avoided this time if policymakers and education leaders demonstrate foresight and boldness now. To do so, explain editors Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Daniela Fairchild, those leaders must overcome entrenched interests, public education’s resistance to change, and the system’s basic structures for financing and governing.

The new book provides estimates of the costs—and savings—for online learning models, as well as targeted chapters on how to overhaul a system that has been leapfrogged by advances in technology. These address:

• “Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction,” by Bryan C. and Emily Ayscue Hassel;
• "Quality Control in K-12 Digital Learning: Three (Imperfect) Solutions," by Frederick M. Hess;
• "The Costs of Online Learning," Tamara Butler Battaglino, Matt Haldeman, and Eleanor Laurans;
• "School Finance in the Digital-Learning Era," by Paul T. Hill; and
• "Overcoming the Governance Challenge in K-12 Online Learning," by John E. Chubb.

Download the full volume (as a pdf or ebook) to learn more.