Ohio State University President Gordon Gee has been in the press lately for his ideas to “reinvent” higher education (including changes to the way professors are awarded tenure). Gee probably isn’t unique in recognizing the perverse incentive structure inherent to the university tenure process, as reflected in this quote in the LA Times:

The traditional formula that rewards publishing in scholarly journals over excellence in teaching and other contributions is outdated and too often favors the quantity of a professor’s output over quality.

But Gee is exceptional in his willingness to swim against the current, by openly speaking against the holy grail of postsecondary and K-12 education alike – educators’ tenure. In fact, it’s probably the only time you’ll read the words “bold” and “tenure” and the name of an Ohio education leader in the same sentence.

Admittedly, arguments for and against tenure differ dramatically at the university and K-12 level (there are legitimate reasons to incentivize non-teaching work in universities) and it’s important not to conflate them. But the sentiment behind what Gee is doing – suggesting dramatic changes to the status quo and probably ruffling a lot of feathers in the meantime – is something that K-12 leaders would do well to emulate.  

Read the rest of this post >>>

See Mike “The Gadfly” Petrilli in the fantastic final installment of our “Road to the Education Reform Super Bowl” video, in which we preview this weekend’s football game based on the teams’ hometown’s prospects for education reform. This week, we consider New Orleans and Indianapolis, complete with our own “half time” commercial: “Education Gadfly, Office Linebacker.” Watch the video on Fordham’s website. And don’t forget to watch the blooper reel!

See the rest of the series here, here and here.

I was busy finishing the first draft of my book (whew!) when the President’s 2011 budget came out, so all of the budget publicity and punditry passed me by. I’ve finally had a chance to give all of the documents a read, so at the risk of being late and repetitive, here are my 8 big takeaways.

1. Competitive Grants: ED was true to its word about trying to increase the amount of funding distributed through competitive grant programs. Good move.
2. Classic Washington Accretion: But rather than cutting and fundamentally changing its huge old programs, ED is just adding new competitive programs on top. This is why ED got such a huge budget increase; if you want to change the percentage going toward your priorities while not reducing the baseline, you have to add, add, add. And this is why federal budgets always grow. For example, Title I gets $14.5 billion, the same amount as last year, and IDEA gets almost $13 billion (2 percent increase).
3. Hope Before Evidence: Even though not a penny has been spent from the Race to the Top or Investing in Innovation funds, thereby providing us no evidence of their ability to improve student learning, ED is asking for nearly $2 billion in additional funding for the two. IES is undertaking a major study of RTT to find out if it will work. Prudence and humility suggest we wait for those results before doubling down. (Yes, I agree that RTT has led states to change some important policies, but there’s a huge difference between a change in policy and a change in practice.)
4. Upside of Program Consolidation I: Like so many before it, this administration wants to consolidate a number of programs, in other words jam a bunch of disparate funds and activities into a smaller number of new, bigger, more flexible programs with fancier names, such as “Effective teaching and learning for a well-rounded education” (for examples, see page 3 here). If they succeed, they will have greater control over how federal funds are spent and enable applicants to propose activities more closely aligned with their actual needs instead of tight, old program specifications.
5. Upside of Program Consolidation II: Though the new, bigger programs are yet to be defined (they’d require new legislation), it appears that the administration is interested in funding important things, like a fund for new pathways into the teaching profession and a program for innovations in educator compensation.
6. The Downside of Program Consolidation I: Every new administration sees the opportunity to consolidate programs because previous administrations have tried and failed. But there’s a reason for those failures. Yes, it might make sense to combine a group of literacy programs, but each individual program has a constituency, both outside the Beltway and inside Congress. They don’t like to see their pet programs get lumped in with others. The chances of ED getting its full way on this are infinitesimal.
7. The Downside of Program Consolidation II: Sometimes consolidation is unwise, as in the case of the administration’s proposed “Expanding Educational Options” program, which would blend several charter school programs with other non-charter programs. Based on the description, it would fund charters and an array of decidedly weaker options that states and districts create so as to protect the status quo (the wide array of “faux charters”). The beauty of a narrow, dedicated charter school start-up fund was that it couldn’t be co-opted by the establishment. This program? Not so much, as NAPCS alludes to here.  Side note: in the RTT application, states without charter laws can still get points for charter-lite “autonomous schools.” This budget conflates charters with these far weaker alternatives. I’m seriously beginning to wonder if ED appreciates what makes charters special.
8. The Turnaround Fallacy: Despite my best efforts and decades of contrary evidence, the administration is determined to spend as much money as possible on school “turnarounds.” There’s nearly a billion new dollars in the 2011 request, which is on top of the $3 billion in school improvement grants under the ARRA and a large portion of the $4.35 billion from the RTT. At least with RTT, IES is planning a major evaluation. It appears all of these funds will be spent without a close, analytical eye. My gloomy but firm prediction is that almost all of this money will be spent in the same ways as previous billions dedicated to fixing the nation’s lowest-performing schools. Those dollars will lead to virtually no meaningful improvement. The funds that are spent differently (and more “rigorously” as turnaround proponents like to say) will only be marginally more successful.

–Andy Smarick

New York Magazine has a cover story entitled “The Junior Meritocracy.” The crux of the article is that administering standardized admissions and IQ tests to 4-year-olds—a common practice for entry into top public and private NYC kindergartens—is pointless. It’s impossible to practically predict at age 4, the article argues, which students will be deserving of a spot in gifted and talented (G&T) programs when they’re 7, 10, or even 17.

Among the elementary schools cited in the article is Hunter College Elementary, a publicly funded elementary school for “gifted and talented” students that uses such a test to help make kindergarten admissions decisions.

While I think using a rigid cut score from an IQ test to make these admissions decisions about 4-year-olds is a questionable move for any school, I’m particularly distressed by the thought of a publicly-funded school engaging in such nonsense for two reasons.

First, tracking students by IQ at such a young age is a questionable decision. Many people argue, particularly at that age, that IQ is more reflective of environment than it is of innate ability, particularly for children born to poor families. (One study found that “in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse. “ In other words, that for impoverished families, environment has much more to do with IQ than genes.) Read the rest of this post >>>

“This isn’t about stopping money.  This is a huge civil rights travesty going on in Boston.  People need to open their eyes and deal with that.”
- Jane López, attorney at Multicultural Education, Training & Advocacy

“Latino groups urge US to hold Hub funds,” Boston Globe

25
The percentage of students participating in a computer-based testing pilot program in Washington state.

“Wash. standardized testing is going digital,” Skagit Valley Herald

One of the US Department of Education’s unsung heroes is its Policy and Program Studies Service, which produces all sorts of interesting and unbiased evaluations and reports. Too few people know about the office’s publications (I hope Secretary Duncan’s team is working on increasing PPSS’s public profile), which are often very valuable.

One recent report, Use of Education Data at the Local Level, deserves attention. Looking past states’ improved collection and dissemination of data in the NCLB era, the report investigates how districts and schools are using different types of information to improve student learning. Fascinating findings include that districts often have a number of different data systems that aren’t yet integrated, that teachers are still often unable to use data to improve classroom instruction, that the timing of assessment administration can improve teacher collaboration, and that timely interim assessment results will increase teacher data use.

To see how one big urban district is thinking about these issues, check out this article on Chicago. The central office, led by the new schools CEO Ron Huberman, is wrestling with the very issues raised by the report.  (More info on Huberman’s work on this front here.)

I’ve always been somewhat luke-warm on the long-term prospects of this type of data use. I’ve been of the mind that most big urban school districts are somewhere between an F and a D+ and that even the best data use would improve a system a letter grade at the most. The only way to get meaningful, sustainable change, I’ve argued, is to fundamentally alter the district structure and overhaul human capital initiatives.

But these data efforts have me more encouraged than I’ve been. I still believe those systemic changes are indispensable, but while we’re working on those, improving how we collect, analyze, and operationalize student performance information on the ground–particularly if you are a classroom teacher or professional development manager–is an important piece of the puzzle today.

–Andy Smarick

Not long ago, I praised NYC’s charter team for moving to close a Brooklyn school that had violated important parts of its performance contract. Closures in such cases, I argued, are essential for the long-term good of the charter sector, both because they remove troubled schools from the portfolio and because they show that charter accountability is true and meaningful, which will ultimately sustain the charter concept in the eyes of families and policy makers.

Gotham schools, however, reports on the other side of the coin. According to parents protesting the closure, this school, despite its operational problems, is the best option available in a terribly distressed neighborhood.

By no means do I condone authorizers who fail to shutter bad charters, but instances like these illustrate why authorizers balk in tough cases. They are forced to do something for the long-term good of public education that has very sad short-term implications.

So what’s the answer?

It seems to me that in the urban school system of the future, we will couple the announcement of a closure with a comprehensive set of compensating activities, such as announcing that a new school will be opening in the same area or that a great school is expanding. Parents would also be provided a list of other existing schools their kids could transfer into along with full information on those schools’ attributes and shortcomings.

And because I take so seriously both sides of this equation (closing failures and making sure kids have better options available), if the public school system were unable to guarantee higher performing public options, I’d make private schools available, too.

–Andy Smarick

As Andy reported, yesterday’s release of a new UCLA Civil Rights Project report on charter school diversity (or the lack thereof) has sparked another spin cycle of heated rhetoric and recrimination. Maybe the snow headed toward the Northeast will tamper down the emotions.

To the Civil Rights Project: It’s certainly appropriate for you to examine the degree of “racial isolation” in charter schools, and your basic assumption rests on good evidence: poor and minority kids generally do perform better in integrated schools than in all-minority or high-poverty ones. (Plus, for all kinds of societal reasons, we’re better off if kids of different races and classes are going to school together.) But to then imply that high-performing charter school networks should stop serving poor, inner-city kids because their schools aren’t integrated enough is way over the top. Let’s face it: for the foreseeable future, lots and lots of poor and minority kids are going to be in racially isolated schools. We should cheer when such schools find a way to be high-performing.

To the charter community: Your frustration is certainly understandable; this feels like a pot shot, especially when the charge is that charters serve “too many” poor and minority kids. After all, many state laws allow charter schools to operate only in high-poverty and/or low-performing districts; to then blast charters for doing what they’ve been asked seems perverse. Still, let’s not be afraid to admit that the world would be better off with a greater number of racially and socio-economically integrated charter schools. (I wrote about several such charters last December, including the Capital City Charter School in DC and High Tech High in San Diego.) Even “conservative” scholars like Rick Hanushek have found that minority kids do better in integrated schools. And let’s not hide behind the rhetoric that racially isolated charter schools are doing a great job serving poor minority kids. A few hundred are. Most are not.

Holding hands, like Civil Rights and charter supporters should do

Come on everybody, let’s all hold hands. There’s common ground here: Doing all we can to make racially isolated schools better, and doing lots more to reduce that racial isolation in the first place.

Image from J. McPherson on flickr.

-Mike Petrilli

The Civil Rights Project released a study today going after charters for being racially segregated. In some of America’s most distressed neighborhoods, thanks to charters, low-income African-American and Latino families finally have high-quality education options, and this report suggests we ought to be deeply concerned.

Nelson Smith does a thorough and convincing job explaining why this report is so off-base. You ought to read it.

And DFER’s Joe Williams, who always seems to have a refreshingly colloquial take on serious matters, second’s Smith’s take with pith and punch:

The UCLA Civil Rights Project seemingly wants to block minority parents from choosing to enroll their children in better schools simply because it feels those schools aren’t white enough. What’s up with that?

–Andy Smarick

“I hope you you’ll come away from this meeting with a knot in the pit of your stomach about how far we have to go.  It should keep you up at night.”
-Larry Shumway, Utah Superintendent of Schools

“State School Boards Raise Questions About Standards,” Education Week

222,493:
The number of homeless schoolchildren reported from 26 states between 2006 and 2009.

“School Districts Scramble to Help Homeless Students,” Education Week

The administration’s cruel treatment of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program continues. The Washington Post editorializes here.

There are so many angles to this, it’s hard to decide on which to focus.

That President Obama is happily sending his kids to an expensive private school while this program withers?

That the “do what works” administration is asking for $1.3 billion for another Race to the Top even though not a penny has been spent and we have no idea what results will come of it while unwilling to spend one percent (!) of that annually to keep the OSP going even though it has a gold-standard federal evaluation showing its success?

That the Department got a huge budget increase during a discretionary budget freeze but cut its final request for funding for this tiny program?

That the loss of this program will almost certainly lead to the closure of more high-performing faith-based DC schools when the administration argues for the importance of high-quality education options?

This is a black mark on this administration’s education record. Yes, ED and White House officials will continue to crow that RTT has led to some important state-level policy changes, but the low-income families of the nation’s capital won’t find much solace in Wisconsin’s data firewall removal or Tennessee’s charter cap lift.

I suspect they just want what the president has: the opportunity to choose a safe, high-performing private school when the local neighborhood school isn’t the right fit.

–Andy Smarick

“For them, it’s like standing in a soup kitchen line desperate for some sustenance.”
— Stephen M. Saland, NY State Senator (Rep.), on how states view Race to the Top funding

“State Lawmakers Unhappy with Obama Priorities,” Education Week (subscription required)

77%:
Graduation rate from voucher schools in Milwaukee, compared to 65% in Milwaukee Public Schools, according to a recent study.

“Voucher Schools’ Graduation Rates Top MPS in Study,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

The No Child Left Behind hard-liners are striking back at President Obama’s call to move beyond the goal of getting 100 percent of American students to “proficiency” by 2014, and working instead to get most students “college and career-ready” by the time they graduate. Sandy Kress complains that “scrapping that goal and replacing it with a much tougher and higher goal with no challenging annual markers and deadlines for its achievement is real fraud.” Margaret Spellings told the Washington Post last month that “It’s one of the holy grails, as far as I’m concerned. If you don’t have a real deadline, you’ve essentially gutted accountability.” And Eduwonk Andy poked fun at the supposed reasoning behind this change: “The standards in this law were unrealistically high.  So we’re going to replace it with more ambitious ones.”

College- and career-ready by 2014?

Now, there’s no need to re-litigate the original NCLB. Setting a goal of getting 100 percent of students to “proficiency” by 2014 had its merits at the time–ten years ago. It created a sense of urgency and captured the nation’s attention. But this policy has clearly outlived its usefulness.

2014 is arbitrary; getting all students to a standard by the time they graduate high school isn’t. “Proficiency” is meaningless, thanks to wildly varying state cut scores; “college and career ready” isn’t. And getting 100 percent of students to do anything is either a recipe for setting the bar low, or Utopian. Getting most students to reach a real standard is challenging, but doable.

Come on, folks. It’s time to turn the page.

(Photograph by Adam Procter from Flickr)

-Mike Petrilli

Yesterday morning I visited McGregor Elementary, a school in Canton, Ohio serving students in preschool through sixth-grade, and doing it very well. The building sits practically across the street from the sprawling Timken Co. steel plant, nestled in a neighborhood you might describe as working class. Even if you’ve never been to a northeastern Ohio city, the surroundings immediately feel familiar. It reflects the quintessence of old industrial cities, the kind whose rapid job loss and demographic shifts leave them looking worn and a little forgotten.

Glancing at some basic data, the school appears similar to other Canton City Schools: student mobility is slightly higher than the district average; its average per pupil expenditure nearly meets the district mean; its teachers are a notch above the district in terms of years of experience and salary.

But, over 90 percent of McGregor’s student population (just shy of 400 students) is economically disadvantaged, and the school knows how to educate poor kids well. Without getting into too much nitty gritty (you’ll get to hear more in a forthcoming Fordham-Ohio report this May), the school consistently meets Adequate Yearly Progress, posts achievement test scores that outpace the district average, and exceeds expected growth on state tests with its students. Read the rest of this post >>>

The Education Equality Project announced this morning that its board of directors will be led by a troika of big names. NYC’s schools chief Joel Klein, UNCF head Michael Lomax, and La Raza president Janet Murguia were elected co-chairs of the advocacy organization’s board of directors. This will give the still relatively new organization even greater standing in the civil rights community, and perhaps even positively influence NCLR’s and NCLR’s ed policy positions.

EEP is doing a good deal to publicize education reform and show that a broad consensus has developed around the need for bold change in America’s schools. Along those lines, hopefully as the organization builds steam, they will broaden their board to include reformers from the right side of the spectrum, too.

Congrats and continued good wishes for EEP.

That’s certainly what the LAUSD vote on which of 30 schools to hand over to outside operators sounds like. We’ve been covering this issue for several months, praising the fact that the district finally realized it might need to go outside its own bureaucracy to makeover some of its worst schools. (Of course, whether turnarounds are a successful strategy is a whole other issue. For the purposes of this blog post, let’s assume it is.) Parents even took matters into their own hands when they got the district to agree to a “Parent Trigger,” whereby if a simple majority of current and feeder parents said they wanted a new operator, the school would be bumped to the top of the outsourcing list. But from all accounts, the way the school voting has been set up, the “election” will be mostly meaningless.

Individual votes for each of the 30 schools are happening at each school’s campus. Eligible voters include parents from feeder schools (i.e., elementary schools whose students typically go to an up-for-a-vote middle school), feeder grades (i.e., fourth grade for middle school and eighth grade for high school), or current parents. It’s not completely clear how a parent determines if they qualify in the “feeder” category–or how a “feeder grade” parent is different from a “feeder school” parent. Can the former be from any school in the city? If a parent falls into both categories, do they get to vote twice? More questions abound…There are also two amorphous voting blocs (“community” and “unverified parents”) that allow virtually anyone from anywhere in the city (or maybe even the state? the country?) to vote. It’s unclear how these, as the LA Times calls them, “kitchen sink” voting groups will be counted in the final tally, or if they will count at all. Finally, school employees who are also parents seem to be able to vote in both capacities… i.e., twice. Same thing for parents with more than one enrolled child. Say you’ve got three kids in Middle School X. That’s three votes. Read the rest of this post >>>

“It really marks the passing of an era. The push for proficiency may have been unattainable for everyone, but it did get states to move in the right direction.”
- Jamie Gass, Director of the Center for School Reform

“Obama Education Overhaul Well Received,” Boston Globe

$3.5 billion
The proposed increase in education spending outlined in the FY 2011 budget

“Administration Outlines Proposed Changes to ‘No Child’ Law,” New York Times

I’m back after some time buried in other projects. Here are a few interesting things I found while trying to catch up:

• It’s state budget time too, so expect more articles like this and this on education cuts and, therefore, calls for another education stimulus
• Eduwonk with a very interesting (and I think correct) visual representation of reform-land and a spot-on critique of the peculiar developing CW on NCLB
• Check this out if you like maps as much as I do (per Russo)
• Diane Ravitch’s case against closing failing schools, and why I think doing so is essential

–Andy Smarick

It’s Groundhog Day, and like Bill Murray, I’m experiencing a serious case of deja vu. But I have to admit, I don’t mind it one bit. To see what I mean, take a look at these questions-and-answers from our December 2008 “open letter” to President-elect Obama, Secretary-designate Duncan, and the 111th Congress, wherein we lay out a policy agenda for “reform realists”:

Question: Whether and how to move toward a system of national standards and tests? Answer: Promote voluntary, non-governmental, “common” state standards and aligned tests and a regimen of total transparency regarding school, district, state, and subgroup performance on those tests.

Question: Whether to ease the “universal proficiency by 2014” mandate? Answer: Yes, eliminate both the “universal proficiency” mandate and the 2014 target. “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) time-lines should be tied to individual students and tethered to college and work readiness. The goal, then, should be to get a sizable percentage of students to college- and work-readiness standards by the end of 12th grade. Read the rest of this post >>>

Watch our debate on school turnarounds vs. closures, and don’t miss insightful and provocative comments from the panelists, including this one from Andres Alonso, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools:

My friend Michelle Rhee, who I’m sure you all know here in DC, I’ve heard her say that she’s heard from Warren Buffet, I think, that the quickest way to fix public schools is to get rid of private schools. Because then it would not be acceptable for half the kids not to graduate. It wouldn’t be acceptable.