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Opinion and News Analysis
Opinion: Seven for '11
By Michael Petrilli
Want to know what 2011 will bring to the field of education
reform? I’m no fortune teller, but I’m happy to offer these educated guesses.
1. Cathie Black will be gone by Easter.
A betting man might say that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will
stubbornly hold fast to his choice, but I foresee a breaking point a few months
hence. It’ll go down like this: Her gaffes continue, she loses support even
among middle-class Gotham parents, she botches the release
of teacher effectiveness data, and she stumbles with the politics of
budget-cutting. Worried about a mass exodus of the Department of Education’s
senior staff, and sensing vulnerability on a marquee issue in his presidential
run, Bloomberg finds an excuse to show her the door.
2. A new ESEA will be law by
Thanksgiving. Emboldened by their success in
extending the Bush-era tax cuts, Republicans will decide that working with
President Obama can pay dividends. Education is widely seen as low-hanging
fruit, and the parties put pen to paper in the early spring and have a deal
worked out by summer. Mostly this new ESEA is a rollback of No Child Left
Behind, with a few reform-minded elements (on teacher evaluations, charter
schools) thrown in for good measure. The education establishment and the reform
movement grump components of the bill, but it’s all just posturing. Behind
closed doors they give their tacit approval for the process to move forward.
3. Education-establishment groups will
file a slew of new funding-equity lawsuits—and charter school groups will join
them.
Aggressive budget-cutting by states will hit high-poverty districts, and
charter schools, the hardest. After all, these systems rely mostly (or
entirely) on state funding. (At least affluent suburban districts can tap local
sources too.) This will lead to legal action, as urban districts and charter
schools find room for common cause. Several of these suits will succeed,
throwing state budgets into further chaos.
4. Michelle Rhee will embrace
“paycheck protection” as a part of her agenda. By typical
standards, Rhee will raise a lot of money in 2011—in the hundreds of millions
of dollars—but won’t come close to her $1 billion goal. Along this golden road
she’ll learn a valuable lesson: The teachers unions can easily best her donated
capital just by raising their dues. Which they will do. And this will make her
a strong advocate for “paycheck protection”—policies that allow teachers to
opt-out of political contributions to the union.
5. At least one large district will go
bankrupt. As Rick
Hess has argued, several states will create incentives for districts to
declare insolvency in order to renegotiate union contracts and other
obligations, in the same manner as the GM restructuring. Once successful, this
idea will spread like wildfire throughout the country.
6. “Local control” will come under
further attack. The budget crisis will ramp up efforts
at district consolidation. States will try to find ways to keep district
spending in check. And at least one state—I suspect Delaware—will have serious conversations
about eliminating local districts outright and moving to a statewide system of
public education.
7. Diane Ravitch and the teachers
unions will criticize budget cuts but offer no alternatives.
As states and districts make difficult decisions in the months ahead, Ravitch
and the education establishment will attack every specific suggestion. Raise
class sizes? Ask teachers to pay more of their healthcare costs? Freeze
salaries? Cap stipends for master’s degrees, or years of experience? They will
find fault with all of these, but will offer no serious suggestions of their
own. As a result, they will implicitly encourage districts to take the path of
least resistance: fire their youngest teachers; get rid of art and music
classes; and pass along costs to parents in the form of new fees.
Will these come to pass? Who knows? But it is fun to
ponder. Check back in a year and we’ll determine just how good of a seer I am.
Opinion: The fierce urgency of eventually
By Robert Pondiscio
Last Wednesday, Michelle Rhee was awarded the Manhattan
Institute’s 2010 Urban
Innovator Award. In her acceptance speech, the former Washington D.C.
Chancellor discussed her new high-profile initiative, Students First, and its goal of
raising $1 billion to advocate for “real change,” which she defined as putting
students’ needs “before those of special interests or wasteful bureaucracies.”
Reflecting on her attempt to
turn around Washington’s schools, Rhee said she ultimately learned that she was
playing the wrong game. “I would spend my time, as many education reformers
across the country do, talking to politicians and trying to appeal to their
sense of what is good and right for children and meanwhile you’ve got the
interest groups like the teachers unions funding their campaigns. So at the end
of the day, who are you going to go with? The nice little lady over here who
says you can do good for kids? Or the people who are going to get you
re-elected?” Rhee asked rhetorically.
After the Manhattan Institute event, I had the opportunity
to talk briefly with Rhee about my reform game—curriculum, teaching, and
learning. I wondered out loud whether it made sense to reach conclusions about
the effectiveness of individual teachers who are poorly trained and have no say
over their curriculum or, more often than not, no curriculum at all. I urged
her to keep curriculum in mind.
“The last thing we’re going to do,” she replied with a
chuckle, “is get wrapped up in curriculum battles.”
A stunning reply if you think about it. This poster child
for bare-knuckle reform, who moments earlier was urging her listeners to
“embrace conflict,” has no stomach for a debate about what kids should learn in
school. Is it so difficult or controversial to say that all kindergarteners
must learn shapes, colors, and how to count to twenty? Confronting the teachers
unions on pay and tenure is worth a fight, yet it is too heavy a lift to say
what 3rd graders should know about American history, geography, or science—or
whether they need to know anything at all.
Michelle Rhee isn’t the only one too sheepish to talk curriculum. She is simply
the most vocal and visible representative of a theory of change that sees
structures, and increasingly political power, as the coin of the realm. I have
no illusions: “Teacher effectiveness” and charter schools and merit pay may be
sexy, but curriculum is not. It doesn’t get you on Oprah or the cover
of Newsweek. We are unlikely, now or ever, to see a bold initiative to
raise $1 billion to advocate for a coherent, knowledge-rich curriculum for
every child in the early grades, even though—for high-mobility, low-income
children in particular—it would surely be among the most impactful reforms we
could offer.
What I cannot accept, however, is that to focus on
instruction—on curriculum and teaching—is to play the “wrong game.” To accept
this argument is to believe that the educational outcome of Jose or Malik in
the South Bronx or Detroit is more deeply affected by who wins a primary for a
House race somewhere in California than what they learn in school all day. It is
to believe that electing the “right people” matters more than what teachers
teach and what children learn.
“For three decades, education has been driven by special
interests,” Rhee concluded in her Manhattan Institute speech. That’s one
diagnosis. Another one belongs to E.D. Hirsch, who points out in The Making
of Americans that our schools have gone six decades without
a curriculum. Earlier this year, at an Aspen Institute panel
discussion, AFT head Randi Weingarten hit the nail on the head when asked why
ed reformers aren’t concerned about curriculum. “This stuff is really
important,” she replied. “And it’s really boring.”
Playing kingmaker, by contrast, is the best, most glamorous
game there is. But it’s an expensive, time-consuming, long-term play. It does
nothing to effect change today, and risks writing off yet another generation of
children to mediocrity and underperformance. It represents the fierce urgency
of eventually.
Michelle Rhee and others have the perfect right to commit
their careers and their dollars to ed reform advocacy groups with whatever
mission, playing whichever games. But people must understand that this is not
the last word in “What’s Best for Kids.” The rhetoric is a bit of a sham,
frankly, since a big part of what we know works best for children is a coherent
curriculum. So call curriculum reform what you like, but don’t call it the
wrong game.
A former 5th grade
teacher, Robert Pondiscio writes about education at the Core Knowledge
Blog.
Opinion: 2010 through the Buck-eye
By The
Fordham-Ohio Team
2010 was a blockbuster in Ohio—and the political, economic,
and educational developments that occurred will create profound shifts in K-12
education. Here are four takeaways from the past year (in no particular order)
that will surely drive the education reform agenda in 2011 and beyond.
1. The status quo is no longer
fiscally sustainable. States are in trouble.
With federal stimulus dollars evaporating by 2012, property values still
falling, and competing programs (especially Medicaid)
sucking away public dollars, the vise around K-12 squeezes tighter. Add to this
Ohio Governor-Elect John Kasich’s promise
not to increase taxes, and that leaves Ohio with an $8 billion hole
out of which to dig. With little room to trim, and K-12 spending taking up 40
percent of the budget, something’s gotta give.
2. State government in Ohio is
dominated by Republicans. The November elections shone
favorably on Ohio Republicans. Republican John Kasich beat incumbent Ted
Strickland and the GOP took over the
House, extended its margin in the Senate, and gained control of every other
major statewide office from auditor to secretary of state). The implications
of this monopoly are huge. Among the things Kasich and GOP
lawmakers have already promised: They’ll take over failing Cleveland schools,
end seniority-based layoffs, take on public employee unions, and create a
statewide $20 million tax-credit scholarship program to open access to private
education.
3. Ohio won Race to the Top funding.
The Buckeye State received
$400 million to launch more rigorous school
turnaround efforts, P-16 data systems, and new programs for improving teacher and
school-leader quality, and to adopt the Common Core in math and English language
arts. Thus far, Ohio has put none of its significant application promises into
law. In the end, this iffy implementation, coupled with the slew of districts
and charters that have already dropped out of the program, raise questions
about the staying power of RTTT.
4. Multiple players began realizing
the need for charter quality. Perhaps in part
because of some very public scandals among charter operators
and authorizers,
Ohioans began to realize how much these operators and authorizers affect school quality. Fordham (with
a lot of experience in the charter world) has been vocal about
requiring a better track
record to open new schools, and testified before the State
Board of Education as well as the Ohio
House Finance Subcommittee on Primary and Secondary Education,
calling for heightened accountability as well as announcing
plans to help create a statewide authorizing entity.
Seeds of reform were sown in Ohio this past year. If the
state can make smart cuts and keep
its eye on school accountability and student achievement, Ohio just might
emerge as a serious education reformer in 2011. On many fronts, policy makers
and educators alike are looking for alternatives, educators are moving towards
embracing hybrid-learning models, and there is real momentum among lawmakers
and reformers in doing away with policies like last hired, first fired (a law
that has been on the books in Ohio since 1941).
For more about Ohio in 2010, see the Ohio Education Gadfly’s full year in review.
News Analysis: Hurry up and wait
After months of inactivity, the Washington
edu-world was abuzz last week about the omnibus appropriations bill makings its
way through Congress. Because of it, various policy battles broke out, each of
them with their own reform implications. A second round of Race to the Top, for
instance, got funding, though at a much diminished rate; the teachers unions
managed to attach a rider to the Teacher Incentive Fund making its
performance-pay programs subject to collective bargaining; and charter-school
organizations squared off against one another over a provision to hold charter
authorizers accountable. All that is moot now—or at least postponed—as the bill
collapsed, forcing Congress to enact a short-term “continuing resolution”
instead. The debate will commence again in January—and with a much more
conservative, and much more stingy, Congress, expect the whining to reach fever
pitch.
News Analysis: Learning to teach nothing in particular
It’s no secret that we strongly support national
standards for America’s schools—primarily because we see this approach as the
most likely route to higher
standards. (And the Common Core didn’t
disappoint on that score.) But there are many ancillary benefits, too.
Among them: the potential that education schools might actually be able to
train their candidates to teach a particular body of knowledge. As David Cohen explains
in a new essay in the American Educator, teacher preparation in the pre-Common
Core era focused on processes above content, offering generic references to
“competence” and little more than vapid guidance in teaching reading, writing,
and mathematics. After all, many ed schools sent teachers to multiple states,
each with their own standards—a irrelevant problem for other countries with national
curricula. It made little sense for them to dive
instruction down below the 30,000 foot level. But now, leading programs can do
just that—they can teach aspiring high school English teachers, for instance,
how to help students master the Common Core English standards. How about that?
We might have finally found a uniquely American solution to a uniquely American
problem.
Short Reviews
Review: Creating Cover and Constructing Capacity: Assessing the Origins, Evolution, and Impact of Race to the Top
By Janie Scull
In this sixth and final edition of AEI’s Education
Stimulus Watch series, Drew University political science professor Patrick
McGuinn traces the life story of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top
(RTTT), addressing the theory behind the program, its legacy, and what lessons
can be drawn to enhance its impact. The carrot to NCLB’s stick, RTTT aimed to
change the education-reform landscape in two ways, according to McGuinn: by
helping states build the administrative capacity to implement innovations and
by giving political cover to education reformers. While it fell short on the
former (state bureaucracies are as strapped as ever), it was more successful in
the latter (think: teacher tenure reform in Colorado, charter school expansion
elsewhere, etc.). Moving forward, McGuinn recommends that the Department of
Education disseminate best-practice information nationwide while ramping up its
compliance monitoring and leveling penalties against states that don’t fulfill
their promises. These recommendations may help keep Uncle Sam’s
program going as states begin to drag their feet (though he doesn’t seem too
optimistic). Whether states fulfill their promises or not, McGuinn notes that
RTTT has permanently changed the education-reform game in two ways: by
introducing competitive federal grants, and by creating an atmosphere in which
key stakeholders—including the president—can challenge entrenched interests and put
reform on the table. Was this worth $4.35 billion? We'll have to wait and
see.
Review: Charter Schools: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education
By Daniela Fairchild
What starts off as a primer on charter schools
quickly turns into a policy brief—somehow simultaneously specific and yet
unwieldy. The first few pages of this Brown Center Task Force report provide
a synopsis of some of the main themes of the charter world. It explains charter schools' overall effectiveness, their use of a lottery system for admissions, the role
of authorizers, and funding provisions. Then, capitalizing on what the task
force sees as an increased federal role in the charter sector (exemplified
through the i3 and Race to the Top grant programs), the authors offer a laundry
list of recommendations—a veritable renaissance of federal charter policy,
which could, they say, be tied to ESEA reauthorization. These recommendations
for federal action begin with specific foci: Collect and use more and better
data on the performance of charter schools, especially around school lotteries
and especially for authorizing purposes; require states to provide equitable
funding for charter schools relative to traditional schools—including by way of
facilities; and support higher standards for authorizing through a separate
competitive grant program for charter sponsors. They even address policies to
promote collaboration surrounding virtual charters and point to the need for
quality control along with charter growth. Most of their recommendations are
well thought out and provide enough detail to be implementable. One word of
caution to the Brown Center Task Force, though: Careful not to run too far ahead
too quickly. The current Administration may be on board with charter reform,
but placing blind faith in the Department to implement each of these changes well
is folly indeed.
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Susan Dynarski, Caroline Hoxby, Tom Loveless, Mark Schneider, Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, John
Witte, and Michelle Croft, “Charter
Schools: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education,” (Washington,
D.C.: The Brookings Brown Center Task Group on Charter Schools, December 2010).
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Review: The Promise of Cafeteria-Style Benefits for Districts and Teachers
By Remmert Dekker
Education leaders teetering on the funding cliff
should take heed of this short “rapid response” report—one in a series from the
Center on Reinventing Public Education. Collectively, these
reports help leaders capitalize on their budgetary red ink by highlighting
ways to strengthen systems going forward. This brief tackles runaway health
care costs and fringe benefits—which have more than doubled in constant dollars
as a percentage of salaries since the 1970s and whose escalating costs and
unpredictability make them a threat to future fiscal stability. Its solution is
simple—“cafeteria-style” benefits packages. This revamped benefits model would
fix district costs for benefits (at say, $13,740 per annum, which is the figure
given for the mock district the report assesses) and would offer teachers a
benefits-package menu from which they can pull, based on preference and need.
Teachers whose benefits-package costs are less than the district allotment at the
end of the year receive a cash bonus (purportedly this will help better engage
newer teachers). The report offers examples of how this might play out. If
young and single Ms. Garcia wishes to opt out of life insurance (say to the
tune of $100), chooses the lower-cost health insurance (saving $4,000), and
takes fewer sick days than allotted (each cost the district $120), she would be
eligible for a $4,700 cash bonus at the end of the year. Whereas, if Mrs.
Kauffman chooses the high-end health insurance as well as dental and life, and
takes her personal and some sick days, she will see a salary reduction of about
$1,000. To round it all out, the report offers advice on structure and
implementation of these cafeteria plans by laying out foreseen costs and effects
to district spending and budget stability. These few pages pack quite the
punch.
From The Web
The Education Gadfly Show Podcast: Amber plays Texas Hold 'Em
Mike and Rick get nostalgic for 2010 then turn
their thoughts to 2011. Amber goes all-in on school productivity and Daniela learns to spell “assessment.”
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Click to listen to the podcast on our website. You can also download the podcast here or subscribe on iTunes here.
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Flypaper's Finest: Ignoring our own advice
By Terry Ryan
Fordham’s new report, Are Bad Schools Immortal?, shows the folly of
school turnaround efforts—only 1.4 percent of district schools and less than 1
percent of charters that have undergone turnaround efforts have done so
successfully. … Despite all this, Fordham-Ohio (which authorizes charter
schools in the Buckeye State) is working closely with board members of a Dayton
elementary charter school to try to turn that school around.…
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Click to read the rest on Flypaper.
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Flypaper's Finest: Tax caps and tidal waves: Now or never?
By Peter Meyer
In their clear-headed if ominous essay, “A Warning for
All Who Would Listen,” in Stretching the School Dollar, James
Guthrie and Arthur Peng point out that the “hundred-year era of perpetual
per-pupil fiscal growth” is over. Indeed, our public schools face a “fiscal
tsunami” that will change our public-education system for years to come.
While Stretching the School Dollar should be
a must-read for all education policymakers, over at the Foundation for
Education Reform and Accountability, Brian Backstrom is for action. It’s
Now or Never, he says.…
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Click to read the rest on Flypaper.
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Extras
Briefly Noted: Cerfing through the Garden State
- Snooki?
The Situation? Move over. New Jersey students will soon have a new positive
role model. Governor Chris Christie announced that the immensely talented Christopher
Cerf will take over as the state’s education commissioner. And Cerf is already making moves.
- This fall, the Ninth Circuit threw Teach
For America’s future into question when it interpreted NCLB’s “highly
qualified teachers” provision to mean that TFA teachers—or anyone without a
teaching certificate—couldn’t meet the HQT standard, and thus couldn’t legally
teach in Title I schools. Luckily, this week Congress fixed the problem by
clarifying that alternative-certification candidates do, in fact, meet the
law’s requirements.
- RI-CAN
has its backpack packed and its apple for the teacher. It’s ready to board the
bus of Rhode Island education reform. The brand-new organization (a spin-off of
the Connecticut-based ConnCan) has even done some homework on why this is such a must for the Ocean
State.
- Four incoming Minneapolis school board members
collectively sent the current board a
letter this week accusing them of “ill will” toward the teachers union. The
kicker is that the letter arrived on union stationary. A few words come to
mind: divisive, inappropriate, union-owned.
Clarification: Let's try again to "get" the MET
There was some
confusion amongst our readership over the use of the phrase “teach to the test”
in Janie Scull’s review of the Gates Foundation report, "Learning About Teaching: Initial Findings
from Measures of Effective Teaching Project” last week. That was our phrase,
and it referred to the study’s finding that one of its student-survey items was
more strongly correlated to student achievement gains than another. Those items
were: “Getting ready for [the state test] takes a lot of time in our class” [0.103]
compared with “My teacher wants us to use our thinking skills, not just
memorize things” [0.202]). (See Appendix Table 1 on page 34 of the report for further clarification.)
Announcement: Forget 2.0, we want 4.0
4.0 Schools, a new venture out of the Southeast,
is locked and loaded. Its targets? The achievement gap and educational
attainment. Its weapon of choice? A network of high-quality school leaders that
it trains and supports. If you’re a school leader interested in joining their
4.0 Academy or a funder or activist interested in getting involved, head to 4pt0.org or contact the 4.0 Schools CEO Matt Candler.
Announcement: Oh, the humane-ity
The Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason
University, which promotes a freer society through knowledge and talent
development, is looking for a Senior Development
Officer and a Fundraising
Campaign Manager. If you think you have what it takes, or want to explore
other job opportunities at IHS, apply here.
Announcement: School leadership matters
In November, Fordham teamed up with the
Rainwater Leadership Alliance and the Center for American Progress to launch
RLA’s report: A New Approach to Principal Preparation: Innovative Programs
Share Their Practices and Lessons Learned. In case you missed the event on this
evergreen topic, you can check it out here.
Fordham's featured publication:
This analysis by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
finds that more than 1.7 million American children attend what we've dubbed
"private public schools"—public schools that serve virtually no poor
students. In some metropolitan areas, as many as one in six public-school
students—and one in four white youngsters—attends such schools, of which the
U.S. has about 2,800.
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