The Education Gadfly
A Weekly Bulletin of News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
January 7, 2010, Volume 10, Number 1
Don’t miss: “A Penny Saved: How Schools and Districts Can Tighten Their Belts While Serving Students Better,” a conference co-hosted by Fordham and AEI on January 11, 2010 from 9am-5pm at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C. Find more information, an agenda, copies of the white papers being presented, and register here.
This week on The Education Gadfly Show Podcast: Songs named “Laura”
Contents
From Checker's Desk
News and Analysis
Recommended Reading
- Teaching industry goes retro?
- Competition, the universal motivator
- A new era of selective charters?
- Catching up
Short Reviews
- Understanding homeschooling: A better approach to regulation
- New Teacher Mentoring: Hopes and Promise for Improving Teacher Effectiveness
- Conditional Cash Transfers and School Dropout Rates
- Will School Reform Fail?
The Education Gadfly Show Podcast
Flypaper's Finest (The best from Flypaper, Fordham's blog)
- How different should 21st century learning be?
- Ohio unions are hand in glove with writers of Buckeye State's Race to the Top application--why this is a bad thing
Announcements
From Checker's Desk
Racing to national tests?
While everyone in educator-land obsesses over the $4 billion competition among states for Race to the Top (RTT) funding, the Education Department is readying a separate competition for less than one-tenth as much money that may nonetheless prove far more consequential for American education over the long term. I refer, of course, to the upcoming announcement of how $350 million will be meted out to “consortia of states” to develop “common assessments” that are aligned with “common standards.”
Secretary Arne Duncan’s team cannot be faulted for the pains it is taking to ensure that this grant competition is based on a transparent, participatory process with ample input from sundry experts, stakeholders, and the broader public. They’ve just scheduled three more public meetings to examine all of this, in addition to seven sessions already held. The “Race to the Top” stewards are posing thoughtful, important questions and publicizing the answers that they’re getting.
Still and all, this competition--to be “on the street,” we’re told, by March, with awards by September--is fraught with challenge and laden with portent. For example:
- The simple fact that Washington’s dollars are to be used to develop what will inevitably be termed the “national test” entangles Uncle Sam big-time in what has, to date, been a non-federal process of devising “common standards” for states to adopt on a voluntary basis. (The National Governors Association [NGA] and Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO] have spearheaded that process, using private funds.) Such entanglement carries unavoidable problems, starting with painful memories of Bill Clinton’s failed “voluntary national test” and the widespread view that, although leaving it to individual states to develop their own standards and tests has generally proven disastrous, any multi-state alternative should be “national but not federal.” (Not that anybody is sure exactly what that means or how it would work.)
- This problem is compounded--there’s already been noise at Congressional hearings and grumps from influential Republicans--by Duncan’s decision to use state participation in the “common” standards and assessment processes as criteria for determining which states qualify for the rest of the RTT dollars. The (obvious) concern is that, while such participation is technically voluntary, Uncle Sam is deploying potent incentives to prod states into joining. Duncan’s perspective is straightforward and wholly defensible: He wants the U.S. to make this very important change and will use the tools at his disposal to bring it about. But that decision inexorably blurs the lines between “national” and “federal” and between “voluntary” and “mandatory.”
- Further blurring lies ahead when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a.k.a. “No Child Left Behind,” gets reauthorized, for at that point Congress (and the executive branch) must decide how to factor the “common” standards and assessments into the academic performance and accountability expectations that will be baked into the next generation of eligibility for core federal financial assistance. For example, will there be a “common” definition of proficiency (i.e. a uniform cut-score) attached to the “common” assessment or will each participating state be free to set its own? If there’s a uniform cut-score, who decides where to put it?
- Nobody has yet figured out the optimal long-term organizational, governance and funding arrangements for the new “common” assessments (or, for that matter, for the common-core standards). RTT dollars will underwrite their initial development but who will keep them updated? Who will administer them? Pay for them? Score them? Who will ensure test security? How will these assessments and their governance relate to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and its governing board? And much more.
These are matters that we at Fordham will revisit from time to time in the months ahead. They’re seriously important and, to the best of our knowledge, utterly unresolved today.
What’s concerning today, however, is the risk of premature closure. How the Education Department shapes its upcoming grants competition--remember, this is coming within 90 days--is apt to foreshadow the answers to these major questions about the future of American K-12 education. And the proposals actually submitted in response to that competition (many folks expect there to be just one such--another joint venture by CCSSO/NGA, with subcontracts to various testing outfits) will lay the foundation on which those answers must later rest.
For instance, one of the items already docketed by the Department for applicants to address is how the new common assessments will “be able to be maintained, administered, and scored at a cost that is sustainable over time.” This is a crucial issue, to be certain, but its handling carries immense implications for who will be in charge, how all of this is to be governed, managed and financed, and how its policies will be set, not just in 2010 but also in 2020 and 2030.
As everyone knows, the present “common core” project is an ad hoc coming-together of two membership organizations, joined (with varying levels of commitment) by most (but not all) states, to develop the first round of K-12 standards in math and reading/writing/speaking/listening. Those are the standards with which the new assessments are meant to be aligned. Well and good. Assuming the standards are strong and substantive--the jury is out, because the grade-12 standards are being revised and the draft K-11 are not yet visible--this is exactly what’s supposed to happen. But nobody knows how stable the CCSSO/NGA arrangement will prove over time--their leaders, priorities and bank accounts are changeable--or whether their joint venture is the optimal governance-and-management for national standards and assessments over the long haul. All of that requires a system--a bona fide, durable structure, with plausible financing--that doesn’t exist today. Yet the winners of Duncan’s $350 million grant aren’t just charged with developing a first round of tests. They must also declare what they think such a durable system will look like and how it will function. What they submit to the Education Department this summer may prove hard to alter in the future.
Yet who is to say that the drafters of this grant competition and the proposals to follow are best positioned to make those structure-and-governance decisions? In a somewhat similar situation twenty years ago, when NAEP was being reinvented, Secretary Bennett appointed a diverse, blue-ribbon commission (the “Alexander-James Commission”) to recommend, among other things, how the “new NAEP” would operate and be governed. Many background papers, thoughtful deliberations and meetings followed. Then the White House and Congress weighed in. The result was NAEP-as-we-know-it and the quasi-independent National Assessment Governing Board, an arrangement that hasn’t worked badly at all. But what follows from the new “common assessments” is even more consequential for the nation. Nobody says the Education Department is working this out in secret. But have they fully fathomed the extent to which the process by which they’re about to dole out that money may shape the future of American education?
A version of this piece appeared yesterday on National Review Online.
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
News and Analysis
The hype, the reality
Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert C. Bobb has garnered much national publicity as he struggles to save what is arguably the most troubled big-city school system in America from both financial bankruptcy and academic ruin. As his first year of this struggle ends--he was just granted a second term, through February 2011--Bobb has made some promising strides. As John Merrow reported in October, he has been doggedly rooting out waste, inefficiency, and even fraud while chipping away at the $306 million deficit he inherited. Bobb says they’ve saved tens of millions by making changes in health care and transportation, for example, and the Detroit News recently pegged the deficit at a slightly less-daunting $219 million.
Yet an immense amount remains to be done. Detroit’s NAEP TUDA math scores for 2009 were a downright embarrassment and there’s plenty of other evidence of academic decrepitude. The recent teacher contract negotiations represented an opportunity to redirect matters. They ended just before Christmas with a new three-year agreement (through June, 2012). The Wall Street Journal hailed it as “innovative,” and Randi Weingarten used her space in the New York Times to proclaim that “Detroit Teaches America a Valuable Lesson,” one about “compromise, collaboration and mutual respect, as well as smart investments.” Bobb himself claimed $34-36 million in savings (though he concedes he was seeking $45 million).
In a system with personnel costs of $737 million (for 11,000 total employees, including 5,000 teachers), $35 million is less than 5 percent. And much of the press attention has centered on the fact that each teacher’s pay will be reduced by $10,000, spread over forty paychecks, to be repaid by DPS later (teachers have a choice of several repayment options). In effect, the teachers are giving the district interest-free loans. One might commend Bobb for his creativity in fashioning this scheme and obtaining the union’s assent to it. Yet one threatened alternative was far more draconian ($36,000 in salary cuts over five years, not to be re-paid at all), and in comparison this concession--which one can argue only saves the interest and other costs of raising those funds elsewhere--seems minor indeed. It’s a shame Bobb couldn’t use the threat of bankruptcy to dramatically restructure teacher compensation in Detroit. (Less pay isn’t the only answer, but the fact is teachers in Detroit make $9,000 more than the state average, and two years ago a Manhattan Institute analysis found that no city in the country pays i ts teachers more.)
Bobb can fairly argue that this contract lays a sort of foundation for more radical personnel changes, with a new teacher review process and new forms of school management being instituted. Yet there, too, he was unable to achieve his foremost goal: tackling tenure. The National Council on Teacher Quality called the changes “largely incremental” (though still “substantial,” given “Detroit's historically unreasonable teachers”). So it’s far from clear that he and his principals will have the tools necessary to have any significant impact on the makeup of Detroit’s teachers. It’s a double shame he couldn’t use the threat of bankruptcy to come closer to this goal, either.
This new contract is hardly the radical restructuring needed by a system so close to crashing and only in public education would it be considered the least bit bold. It may seem that both sides can proclaim some measure of success from these negotiations, but the main “success” was that they compromised at all; Motown’s students are certainly no better off.
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
Recommended Reading
Teaching industry goes retro?
The large-scale arrival of women in the U.S. workforce has brought serious change to many industries, certainly including education. The Economist peeks at the social consequences of this transition, specifically how these changes have affected decisions on motherhood. Previously, one of the few paths open to women was teaching. Hence many entered the classroom and lots of these were talented, smart, and good at what they did. As the labor market opened up, however, women had tons more options. Meanwhile, the education industry continued to grow, more teaching jobs were created, and status and salaries remained stagnant. Result: The caliber of teachers went down. Today, perhaps, a silver lining is emerging in this cloud. More women are seeking careers that enable them either to work from home with flexible hours or to follow schedules that roughly coincide with their children’s. Teaching, either virtually or in the classroom, seems to fit the bill. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, forty years after the rise of modern feminism, women chose to re-enter the careers they left behind? Might education get a talent boost as a result?
“Female power,” The Economist, December 30, 2009
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
Competition, the universal motivator
We’ve been covering the Los Angeles school-outsourcing plan for a while and it’s no surprise that teachers are among the groups vying for control of various schools. But the gusto with which they’ve entered this fray may come as a surprise--and a source of encouragement...sort of. Groups of teachers, backed by their union, are contending to run thirty struggling schools and new campuses. They’re working 24/7 to write management proposals for the LAUSD competition. "For the first time we're trying to show that we can, as teacher-educators, build a school that will benefit our children because we know our children best," says Josephine Miller, a first-grade teacher at Hillcrest Drive Elementary, a school deemed "failing." It seems that teachers are both energized by the competition--and determined to prevent their schools from turning charter and being run by independent organizations. Too bad it took the threat of actually being held accountable for teachers to sit up and take notice of their schools’ shortcomings and what they might to do rectify these. Better late than never, however.
"Teachers seek control at up-for-bid L.A. Unified schools," by Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2010
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
A new era of selective charters?
Spectrum Academy--the catchy if slightly off-putting name for Utah’s K-8 charter school for students with autism (or “on the spectrum”--get it?)--will expand its offerings to high school in fall 2010. What’s more interesting is how the school’s very existence reminds us of two contentious issues. By removing these youngsters from mainstream classrooms, indeed from regular schools, Spectrum obviously flies in the face of IDEA’s emphasis on integration. And it raises a question about charter-school admissions. In Utah, like most places, charters are supposed to accept all comers--and use lotteries when oversubscribed. Schools that restrict themselves to predetermined pupil populations risk losing (and often do lose) some funding--federal start-up dollars in particular. Gadfly thinks well of specialized charter schools with admissions criteria but public policy hasn’t really bought into that idea. Is Spectrum another trailblazer?
"New Help for Autism" by Elizabeth Stuart, Desert News (UT), December 28, 2009
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
Catching up
Hard education news was skimpy at year’s end, so the New York Times education beat folks must have been catching up on their reading--of the Gadfly, at least. Just last week, we teased the paper for its filler-like piece on the Department of Education’s absurd estimate for how long a Race to the Top application should take. Yawn. But roaring back two days later (and another two days after that) the Times stepped it up. Three recent items are worth your note, the most prominent of which being an opinion piece on substitute teaching by a former substitute teacher. (See “The Replacements” below.) Keep it up NYT.
“As Honor Students Multiply, Who Really Is One?” by Winnie Hu, New York Times, January 1, 2010
“Skills to Fix Failing Schools,” by Laura Pappano, New York Times, January 3, 2010
“The Replacements,” by Carolyn Bucior, New York Times, January 3, 2010
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
Short Reviews
Understanding homeschooling: A better approach to regulation
Robert Kunzman, Indiana University
Theory and Research in Education
2009
This sane and constructive piece by Indiana University education professor Robert Kunzman says that many states are following the wrong approach when it comes to "regulating" home-schoolers, trying to control the "credentials" of home-schooling parents, to decree what curriculum they should teach and more. This doesn't work, he says, and fosters unnecessary controversy and political conflict. In his view, any external regulation of home schooling needs to satisfy three conditions: "Vital interests of children or society must be at stake. General consensus should exist on standards for meeting those interests. And there needs to be an effective way to measure whether those standards are met." He concludes that "basic skills testing" of home-schooled children fulfills all three conditions and that states and districts should otherwise butt out. You can find it (for a fee) here.
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
New Teacher Mentoring: Hopes and Promise for Improving Teacher Effectiveness
Ellen Moir, Dara Barlin, Janet Gless, and Jan Miles, New Teacher Center
Harvard Education Press
2009
This volume is the work of the New Teacher Center (NTC) at UC-Santa Cruz, a comprehensive teacher mentoring and professional development outfit. You may recall that the federal Institute of Education Sciences used NTC’s program as one of the two “comprehensive” treatments in its Comprehensive Teacher Induction study (find year one and year two results here; year three is underway). To date, that study has found meager effectiveness gains from teacher induction and mentoring programs. Undaunted, NTC insists that, through instructionally-intensive, high-quality mentor training, districts can ensure higher teacher retention rates and improve instructional quality. Here they describe how their program has been implemented in four cities: Durham, Boston, New York City, and Chicago. Looks encouraging for teacher retention at least, but this is not a statistical analysis. There is no control for other changes underway in those districts or any proof of causality. On balance, this book describes an appealing program but fails to rebut the IES findings. You can purchase it here.
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
Conditional Cash Transfers and School Dropout Rates
Lorraine Dearden, Carl Emmerson, Christine Frayne, and Costas Meghir
Journal of Human Resources
Fall 2009
While the United States has been fussing about paying students (see here for starters), the Brits have turned it into national program. Their Education Maintenance Allowance or EMA pays low-income students between the ages of 16-19 up to £30 ($48) a week for a max of three years to stay in school past the requirements of compulsory education (a.k.a. Year 11); with extra bonuses for good attendance and meeting academic “goals” of their education contract (think IEP), the weekly payout can be much higher. The money goes directly into the student’s bank account and students enrolled in a wide variety of education options (some of which don’t look much like “school”) are eligible. The point is simply to make continuing in some sort of training/education program after the age of sixteen a viable (if not attractive) financial reality for young people from low-income families.
This well-executed study reports on a pilot version of the program (before it was rolled out nationally in 2004). It says full-time education participation rates increased by non-trivial amounts and those receiving the largest payments had the largest increases. The median payout during this pilot phase amounted to a whopping £100 weekly. Of late, however, the program has come under fire for not tracking what happens to the money, for calculating eligibility based on parents’ earnings the previous year (a boon to parents who lost their jobs during the economic downturn), and for technological bungles that resulted in late or missed payments. According to the BBC, 89 percent of students stayed in school after age 16 in 2005-06--and 82 percent of teachers thought the program a success. There’s nothing wrong with teaching poor kids the value of an education and certainly much to be said for keeping more of them in school. But £4,000 ($6,387) a year per kid seems a mite dear. You can find the study (for a fee) here.
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
Will School Reform Fail?
U.S. News and World Report
January 2010
If you missed the January 2010 issue of U.S. News and World Report, go pick up a copy. “Will School Reform Fail?” queries the cover and it’s a troubling question. Inside are multiple stabs at the answer, including articles on President Obama’s lofty education goals, the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, New Orleans’ blazing charter path, and Green Dot, Los Angeles’ union-friendly charter network. Perhaps most intriguing are the tables in “America’s Best High Schools” section, which rank the best high schools, best charter high schools, best magnet schools and more. Find a copy at your local newsstand.
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
The Education Gadfly Show Podcast
Songs named "Laura"
This week, Rick and Stafford discuss the role of social media in schools, new education leadership graduate programs, and 2010 resolutions for Arne Duncan. Then Amber tells us about new research that further debunks “learning style” theory and Rate that Reform is on paternity leave. (Not really--Mike is on paternity leave, but RTR wanted a vacation, too.) Click here to listen through our website and peruse past editions. To download the show as an mp3 to your computer, click here (no iPod required--this link will play through any music software on your computer, including Windows Media Player or RealPlayer).
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
Flypaper's Finest (The best from Flypaper, Fordham's blog)
How different should 21st century learning be?
Kathleen Porter-Magee
Monday’s EIA Communiqué linked to a lecture Scott McLeod gave to the NEA entitled, “Teaching and learning in an era of disruptive innovation.” McLeod’s lecture is a dire warning that schools of today--where students sit in desks, in rows, doing lots of “seat” work and absorbing information in teacher-directed classrooms--are not preparing our children for the 21st Century....Read it here.
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
Ohio unions are hand in glove with writers of Buckeye State's Race to the Top application--why this is a bad thing
Jamie Davies O'Leary
Before jumping prematurely to the conclusion that Ohio’s ability to achieve union buy-in for its Race to the Top plans is a good thing, let me stop you. Buy-in, cooperation, coalition-building are all nice ideas (and valued in the Race to the Top application--states garner significant points for achieving LEA support), but unless Ohio unions have had a dramatic change of heart as to what constitutes “reform,” this collaboration sounds like trouble....Read it here.
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
Announcements
Full stop or U-turn?
Do school turnarounds work? Come learn more at Fordham on January 28, 2010 from 2pm-3:30pm. “School Turnarounds: Exciting and Felicitous or Expensive and Futile?” will feature the authors of opposing Education Next articles, Bryan Hassel and Andy Smarick, and two discussants, Andrés Alonso, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, and Emily Lawson of the DC Prep charter network. For advance homework, read Hassel’s “The Big U-Turn” and Smarick’s “The Turnaround Fallacy.” RSVP to Amy Fagan at rsvp@edexcellence.net.
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
Jason Kamras in the house
Young Education Professionals and Fordham are proud to bring you Jason Kamras, a former U.S. teacher of the year and now the D.C. Public Schools’ Director of Human Capital Strategy for Teachers, for an event titled “Human Capital in Our Nation’s Capital.” Join us in the Fordham conference space on January 20 from 5:30pm-7:30pm as he talks about the District’s new effectiveness assessment system for school-based employees. More information can be found here and you can register here.
Email to a friend | Comments (0)
About Us
The Education Gadfly is published weekly (ordinarily on Thursdays), with occasional breaks, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Regular contributors include Amy Fagan, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Kyle Kennedy, Mickey Muldoon, Jamie Davies O’Leary, Eric Osberg, Stafford Palmieri, Emmy Partin, Michael J. Petrilli, Laura Elizabeth Pohl, Terry Ryan, Janie Scull, Saul Spady, and Amber Winkler. Have something to say? Email us at thegadfly@edexcellence.net. Would you like to be spared from the Gadfly? Email thegadfly@edexcellence.net with “unsubscribe gadfly” in the text of your message. You are welcome to forward Gadfly to others, and from our website you can also email individual articles. If you have been forwarded a copy of Gadfly and would like to subscribe, you may either email thegadfly@edexcellence.net with “subscribe gadfly” in the text of the message or sign up online here.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a nonprofit organization that conducts research, issues publications, and directs action projects in elementary and secondary education reform at the national level and in Ohio, with a special emphasis on our hometown of Dayton. (For Ohio news, check out our Ohio Education Gadfly, published bi-weekly, ordinarily on Wednesdays.) The Institute is neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.