June 2011 Archives

In the past two decades, the cost of a college education has risen steadily. Tuition and fees have increased at twice the rate of inflation, outstripping growth of family incomes or the rate of increase of just about every other good or service on the market. Policymakers and college leaders looking to rein in costs can be flummoxed by the paucity of promising models. Now, Oklahoma State University business school professor Vance Fried has offered up an intriguing take in his new white paper, "Opportunities for Efficiency and Innovation: A Primer on How to Cut College Costs" (full disclosure, the piece was published by my AEI shop).

Fried starts with a simple but provocative thought-experiment: What would it cost to educate undergraduates at a hypothetical college built from scratch, if the college focused on student learning and nothing else? Fried proceeds to identify opportunities for substantial cost savings. He argues that the real levers for increasing efficiency are not the conspicuous, big-ticket items, like football stadiums and plush dorms, but more mundane expenditures that soak up scarce funds. Fried flags five promising cost-cutting strategies: eliminate or separately fund research and public service, optimize class size, eliminate or consolidate low enrollment programs, eliminate administrator bloat, and downsize student life programs.

Offering up alternative practices on each score, Fried is able to sketch a greenfield, high-quality college with a per pupil annual cost of $6,700--compared to $25,900 for a public research institution or $51,500 for a private research institution. When compared to similarly-sized traditional research institutions, the per pupil cost is one-fifth that of privates and just over one-third that of publics. Fried even takes on community colleges, suggesting that they are still 20 percent more expensive per pupil than Fried's four-year construct. Fried takes on online learning, too, suggesting that the projected savings only materialize when the alternative is small classes, while larger classes in traditional institutions price out similarly to online alternatives.

Fried suggests ways in which policymakers can encourage colleges to embrace cost-effectiveness. He urges states to take advantage of market mechanisms to drive cost-cutting, by creating autonomous pilot colleges to incubate cost-cutting approaches and leveling the playing field for new providers by reducing subsidies for established institutions. Fried also argues that venture philanthropy can support and invest in low-price, high-quality models.

State revenues are just starting to recover, but the end of stimulus dollars, new obligations created by health care reform, and the likelihood that deficit reduction means Washington will be dialing back domestic spending mean that education isn't even close to being out of the woods. The road ahead promises to be bumpy, for both K-12 and higher ed, and Fried's thought-provoking piece is the kind of analysis that can help made the course a little more manageable.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As I wrote Monday, I dug the new film Bad Teacher. This kind of black comedy (think of Billy Bob Thornton's Bad Santa) scrapes away familiar sentiment and can permit funny, unnerving--and frequently revealing--glimpses of human nature. Take the movie's treatment of merit pay. Cameron Diaz's "bad teacher," having been dumped by her fiancée, decides she needs plastic surgery if she's to land a wealthy husband. Lacking the $10k she needs, she pockets cash from an R-rated middle school car wash and bribes from parents at parent-teacher night. When she learns that there's a $5,700 cash bonus for the teacher at John Adams Middle School whose class scores highest on the state test, she turns from a burnout serial-movie-shower into a motivated (if inept, mean-spirited) instructor.

As my friends at NCTQ have pointed out, the merit pay scheme in question bears little resemblance to what actually exists. Far more interesting, though, are the truths it tells about merit pay. After all, today's vaunted merit pay experiments (think Nashville or New York City) basically offer cash in return for good test scores. This may be a dumb and unhelpful way to approach differentiated pay--for my own take, see here or here--but there it is.

Bad Teacher offers the most straightforward accounting of the underlying assumptions of paying-for-scores that I've yet seen, in print or on screen. A lousy, unmotivated teacher who desires breast implants is inspired to work much harder to earn the cash. There you go: honest, straightforward, incentive-driven--and utterly disinterested in social justice or the larger purposes of schooling. She changes her behavior because there are rewards for doing so. There's no expectation that the change is permanent, that it alters the content of her character, or even that she'll teach any better--only that she'll teach harder. And, it should come as no surprise that she looks for an opportunity to cheat when her other efforts aren't getting it done. At the same time, for all these thorny issues, I'd absolutely argue that her kids are better off after she learns about the bonus than they were before.

Yet, many merit pay champions seem bitterly disinclined to talk honestly about any of this. They don't want to discuss the limits of cash-for-scores, ignore perverse incentives, are shockingly cavalier about possible cheating, and blithely presume that there are no larger implications when a teacher is motivated by the lure of top-shelf plastic surgery. Instead, merit pay enthusiasts merely prattle that this is all "for the kids" and pretend that such policies easily coexist with their grand ambitions of recruiting educators fueled by an evangelical commitment to serving the poor and downtrodden.

There are contradictions, complexities, and tensions here that are hardly ever addressed. Me, I'm fine with self-interest, think it's a mistake to place too much emphasis on rewarding teachers based on today's test scores, and therefore will reiterate that I ardently support differentiating pay based on work and role--with student performance constituting one part of that.

The bigger point, especially for those of you supporting rethinking pay, is that there are downsides and unanticipated consequences which are too rarely addressed. Figuring out how to do this well is a helluva lot tougher than most policymakers and self-proclaimed reformers think. And I wish our debates about merit pay were as attentive to motivation and potential conflicts as Cameron Diaz's risqué popcorn flick.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Andre Agassi, the former tennis champ and high school dropout, and Canyon Capital Realty Advisors, recently announced the creation of a real estate fund that will spend $500 million to capitalize on and promote the movement for U.S. charter schools. The Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund plans to develop more than 75 urban campuses with space for about 40,000 students over three to four years, according to a statement from Canyon Capital and Agassi Ventures LLC. The partners already have drawn investments from Citigroup, Intel, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

I had the opportunity to meet Agassi a few months back in Vegas and was terrifically impressed. I found him smart, thoughtful, humble, and interested in listening; in truth, I found him a whole lot more impressive than any number of education officials, experts, consultants, and professors that I've encountered. Having a smart, wildly successful, internationally regarded tennis champ pouring his passion into launching great schools would seem a terrific thing--and a uniquely American way to tap our strengths and resources.

Yet, in a revealing bit of irony, the Agassi-Canyon announcement came on the heels of another self-satisfied, big-ideas report from the National Center on Education and the Economy. Telling us what American education should look like, NCEE's grandiloquently titled "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform" went out of its way to dismiss entrepreneurs and charter schools.

The NCEE report was another of these increasingly tedious "international best practice" reports that NCEE and McKinsey have made into a thriving little industry. You know the drill. NCEE's authors identify a couple countries the size of Minnesota that seem to have good test scores, do a few school visits and talk to a couple government officials, cherry-pick some of the practices that the authors like, and then spin those into broad prescriptions for the U.S. The NCEE wish-list includes expanding the Common Core, improving teacher quality, and moving from local to state control of school financing.

(Quick aside: If the exercise were more cognizant of the scholarly and policy limitations, or was more interested in lessons and possible unanticipated consequences, I'd be more amenable. But it's the arrogance of these exercises--the certainty with which they promulgate grand recommendations, brush past the shaky analytic underpinnings, and try to use "expertise" to stifle dissenting voices--that I find so problematic.)

The NCEE report asserts, "Neither the researchers whose work is reported on in this paper nor the analysts of the OECD PISA data have found any evidence that any country that leads the world's education performance league tables has gotten there" by embracing charter schools and vouchers, the role of education entrepreneurs, or the use of student performance data to reward teachers. Today, let's set aside the empirical foundation for the analysis and just go meta.

The whole McKinsey-NCEE "let's-find-someone-to-mimic" industry is undoubtedly great at generating support from foundations eager for someone to tell 'em "what works." But, to me, it looks like a triumph of the bureaucratic mindset and disdain for American dynamism and heterogeneity.

I can't help thinking how much I would've loved to see NCEE's recommendations to the Founders back in 1787 if they'd been tasked with generating some recommendations for a Constitutional design. They would've identified a few countries that seemed to have high GDPs ('cause that's all they could measure), and sent a few consultants or scholars to poke around and interview a couple folks. I can see the report now, "Honored sirs, none of the successful nations in question are republics--and it has been more than a millennia since the last successful republic. Rather than pursue an impossible dream, the Constitutional Convention would do well to emulate the British monarchy. We spent a week speaking with several members of the royal family and scholars at Oxford, and here's what they recommend."

Or, I can see the report to FDR in1940. "Mr. President, the data suggests that capitalist democracies are just not equal to the challenges. Based on measures of military and economic performance, the best-practice success stories are clearly Japan and Germany. We recommend an effort to emulate their practices." Or, three decades ago, when every NCEE-style expert wanted the U.S. to do its best to mimic the Japanese industrial model, "We've seen what works, and it's clearly Japanese-style central planning. There's no evidence that entrepreneurial efforts can help the U.S. tech sector catch up." (Of course, as Japan got mired in its "lost decade," such calls tended to dry up.)

The WaPo's Charles Lane had a terrific piece on a related topic yesterday, in which he derided the current fascination with Germany's economic "miracle" as another case of latching onto a "foreign flavor of the month." He recalled the awed enthusiasm that the economies of "Japan, Inc." and Soviet Union once inspired among the smart set, and noted that today's German success is related to liberalization "that made the country a little bit more like...the United States." Lane closes with some wise words: "[While] there's plenty we can learn from the Germans, Japanese, Chinese, [and everyone else]...Americans need to identify our comparative advantages--social, cultural, political and economic-- and exploit them, instead of worrying about copying the competition."

Ah, well. Folks like things that seem certain. And NCEE is hustling, alongside McKinsey, to corner the market on "big" ideas that can still be peddled as safe. That's their right. I just wish the press and policy community would evince a little more independence or skepticism when reacting to and reporting on this stuff.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

On Friday, I finally walked out of an edu-movie without having to scrape off the sanctimony and treacle. Whether heartrending dramas or documentaries, edu-cinema has long gone for the mawkish affectations of ridiculously heroic educators reaching ridiculously noble kids.

After decades of watching (and digging) these movies, it was sheer joy to watch the just-released Bad Teacher, starring Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Justin Timberlake, and Molly Shannon. Bad Teacher is rude, profane, frequently mean-spirited, and shockingly cavalier about things we're supposed to speak of in hushed tones. I took my AEI team to see it on Friday, opening day, and not everyone had much use for its gratuitous sex, drugs, and general nastiness--and its failure to push harder on the satirical possibilities.

The complaints are all valid. But, I dug Bad Teacher because it treated teachers, students, and schooling with snark, humor, and attitude, rather than the kid-gloves sentimentality that turns almost every edu-movie into a tedious, predictable morality play.

Now, I love uplifting school movies as much (hell, probably more) than anyone. I get teary-eyed every time I watch Teachers; Stand and Deliver; Blackboard Jungle; To Sir, With Love; Lean on Me; Coach Carter; and the rest of the oeuvre. But running through them is a messianic, sanctimonious vision, in which teachers lose faith, are saved by rediscovering the import of serving their flock, and become agents of salvation. None of this shows much interest in whether unredeemed sinners can be good teachers, whether annoying kids may sometimes have only themselves to blame, or in having fun with the pained routines of the schoolhouse.

And that's a shame, because cinema can help us contemplate and discuss these kinds of questions. I'll lay odds that Office Space has spurred more self-recognition among bosses and office workers than any of your Boiler Rooms or Wall Streets. That's because earnest sincerity is good at telling viewers what they're supposed to admire, but isn't real good at prompting uncomfortable or complex conversations.

Bad Teacher is full of moments like that. Cameron Diaz, as the dope-addled, hard-drinking, ill-mannered bad teacher of the title, has exchanges with kids like you never see on the big screen. She's unapologetically bored by a moony-eyed kid's awful middle school poetry and tells him that he's never going to do well with the ladies wearing the same battered sweatshirt three days a week. Faced with the perky suck-up who tells her she wants to be president, Diaz asks whether she really means it--and tells her that remark is the kind of obnoxious statement that'll get her punched.

The scenes with the principal, in the faculty lounge, and among teachers staffing lunch, are cringe-worthy rather than saccharine. And, even if that's just a window into my own blackened heart, I found the experience a sweet breath of fresh air.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There's been a heavy emphasis of late on teacher evaluation, with states and districts making it a pillar of their efforts to rethink tenure, pay, and professional norms. States and districts have adopted systems that rely heavily on observational evaluation to complement or stand in for value-added metrics. In many cases, they are turning to celebrated edu-consultant Charlotte Danielson's "Danielson Framework for Teaching." Just last week, Danielson was in New York City with NYCDOE chief academic officer Shael Polakow-Suransky to discuss NYC's reform efforts (NYC is using Danielson's framework as it designs new teaching standards). The Consortium on Chicago School Research is currently in the midst of a two-year review examining the adoption of the Danielson Framework in Chicago. The first report, released last year, termed the Danielson Framework "a reliable tool for identifying low-quality teaching" and said it "has potential for improving teacher evaluation systems." In light of all this, I thought it worth chatting with Charlotte about some of the ins and outs of teacher evaluation and what cautions or advice she might have for practitioners or policymakers.

Rick Hess: For context, can you say a bit about where the Danielson Framework came from?
Charlotte Danielson: It's an outgrowth of work I was part of at ETS on Praxis 3 [in the late 1980s]. Praxis 3 was an observation-assessment of first year teachers for the purpose of a continuing license. In order to do that, ETS had to commission a lot of serious research as to what is good teaching. I got hired to be part of the project because they realized if you wanted to have live observations of teaching, you had to have trained observers. Which is a no-brainer, but I was the only person who had actually developed training programs.

I could see that there was a need for [observational evaluation] beyond first-year teachers. We've seen what happens when people get National Board certification--the preparation you do for it, it was valuable professional development. It struck me that the same philosophy could apply if we had clear standards of practice for regular teachers. That's what caused me to write the framework... I wrote this book and didn't have a clue that anything would ever come of it, I just did it because I thought there was a need. It came out of assessment but I didn't see it as a framework for assessment, I just thought it was good for understanding practice. ASCD published it, and they made it a member book, and so it got sent out to about 90,000 people.

RH: When was this?
CD: It was published in 1996. And then I started getting emails and calls from teachers all over the world thanking me for writing the book, and saying, "Now we have our new teacher evaluation system." And I had to break the news to them that actually they did not, because in order to have an evaluation system you needed a whole lot of other things--like procedures, training, and you need to make a lot of decisions. A system is more than just your evaluative criteria and level of performance. Before that, I'm not aware that anybody had created a rubric for teaching. We had rubrics for student learning, and we realized that if you're going to assess student performance in complex learning, you needed a rubric--and it wasn't going to be about right or wrong, but a continuum of performance. And I thought that's teaching; it's complex performance.

RH: When you work with districts employing your framework, what do you see that gives you confidence they're using it well?
CD: Let me give you a story of when it's not done well. I was contacted early on by a large urban district in New Jersey that...had a horrible evaluation system. It was top-down and arbitrary and punitive and sort of "gotcha." And they developed a new one based on my book, and it was top-down and arbitrary, and punitive. All they did was exchange one set of evaluative criteria for another. They did nothing to change the culture surrounding evaluation. It was very much something done to teachers, an inspection, used to penalize or punish teachers whom the principal didn't like...[and] I discovered that if I didn't do something here, my name would get associated with things people hate.

So I thought about what it would take to do teacher evaluation well. And I discovered that doing it well means respecting what we know about teacher learning, which has to do with self-assessment, reflection on practice, and professional conversation. And when you do those things, you have enormous growth... [because] people appreciate the opportunities to talk in-depth about the challenges of practice, and it becomes a vehicle for professional learning instead of just a ritual you go through.

RH: In general, how faithfully have schools and districts applied your framework?
CD: I don't have a valid answer to that question because I don't know what goes in the numerator or the denominator. Up until now, there weren't a lot of people who were just adopting this thing whole-scale without a lot of assistance from me or one of my consultants. So I think reasonable fidelity was pretty high because they had some good coaching. But now, I have absolutely no control over it and I don't try to be a policeman--I've never thought that was productive. But, even if I wanted to, I don't think I could. People need something, so they are grabbing something and this looks as good as everything else. So there is a potential for this to be used badly, absolutely.

RH: What can you do to help ensure that your framework is used thoughtfully?
CD: We do training. I've developed some online training programs with online vendors, so when people use those they at least hear me talking, but I don't even know how well they implement those things. There are a lot of unknowns here.

RH: If states or districts are using these systems at scale, it creates an enormous need for people who can do these evaluations well. How big a concern is that?
CD: People evaluate teachers now, and we've found that it doesn't really take any longer to do it well than to do it poorly. But it does take longer to do it well than to not do it at all. You do need boots on the ground to do this, but it doesn't have to always be administrators--it can be department chairs or supervisors. For teachers in good standing, they don't have to do a comprehensive, formal evaluation every year--they do it every other year, or every three years, and the other years teachers engage in rigorous, self-directed inquiry.

With video technology, you can do a lot of this remotely, and that's very powerful. So there are other options, but it is labor-intensive. And to the extent that the public does not trust educators to do evaluation well--and it hasn't always been well done, historically, and we have plenty of teachers not teaching well and schools not doing anything about it. So the policymakers have a point. But just more inspection isn't the answer--it seems to me the answer is high-quality teacher evaluation. And that's not impossible to do, we know how to do it, but there is a school-level capacity problem. It takes training, and in order to evaluate teachers well you need a good three or four days of training.

RH: Are you working at all on this question of ensuring that observers have the training to do high-quality, consistent observation?
CD: I'm doing some work with Teachscape. And we're developing a proficiency test for observers, which is a requirement that has been written into law in a couple places, including Illinois and New York. They are saying, "If you're going to evaluate teachers in this state, you've got to pass a test." Now, they aren't specifying what that test ought to be, but I don't know anyone else trying to develop a test. But we are, and it's far down the track. It should be available in mid-October.

RH: In places like DC and Florida, policymakers have required the use of observational evaluations to help make decisions about job security and compensation. What's your take on such efforts? Do you have suggestions or cautions that apply?
CD: My experience with those issues is mixed. School districts have an absolute obligation to ensure quality teaching. The question is what counts as evidence, and how do you attribute evidence to the teacher. That's why the assessment of teacher practices, we'll always have to have that. Partly because it gives you diagnostic information--if things aren't going well, if kids aren't learning, then why not? But the net result is you have to have student learning.

On the question of observation and if it's productive, how high are the stakes if a rating is given? A lot of the policy types, they want a number. And this stuff doesn't lend itself to numbers. But the minute a teacher's performance rating is a high-stakes matter, people are going to do whatever they have to do to be rated highly. And the things you have to do to be rated highly are exactly the opposite of things you'd do if you wanted to learn--you wouldn't try anything new, you would be protective, you would be legalistic about the ratings, and you'd argue. None of that makes you open to improving your teaching. So my advice is to only make it high-stakes where you have to. If someone is on the edge of needing remediation, then that is high-stakes and you should use it. But if your main purpose is to say these 80 percent of our teachers are performing pretty well, so let's use this process to get better, that's a very different way of thinking.

RH: Right now, we're see widespread efforts to use observational frameworks as high-stakes tools. Are you suggesting that that's a concern?
CD: What I hope people guard against is, so long as practice is above a certain level, then it shouldn't be high-stakes. If you aren't going to fire the person, then what's the point? Some people who are driving this policy have a "get rid of the bad apples" mentality, but I'm [not sure there are sufficient replacement teachers out there]. If we assume that most of these teachers right now are still going to be on staff in five years time, then the challenge is how do we get better? And that entails very different procedures and a different culture than it does if your goal is to smoke out the bad apples.

RH: If you have one bit of advice for those seeking to do observational evaluation well, what is it?
CD: The first thing to do is to arrive at consensus around what is good teaching...Having a shared and common understanding about what is good teaching is important. Ask teachers, what does this look like in my classroom? If you do nothing else but that, you'll improve because a lot of other things fall into place. That is, if you know what good teaching is, then how will you know it when you see it? How do you evaluate it? But that conversation shouldn't be shortchanged.

RH: What do you say to policymakers who fear that sounds like a recipe for foot-dragging?
CD: You pay a month or two to understand the instruments. Call it training. Call it whatever you want, it's people understanding the criteria on which their performance will be judged. And that, of course, is a fundamental principle of equity, that you don't evaluate people on something they don't know. Having this conversation gets people on board, and I've never had it not work. A criterion of something worth doing doesn't have to be that the teachers don't like it! And to hear all these [reformers] talking, you'd think that was their criterion.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:58 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

U. Missouri's invaluable Mike Podgursky and Fordham's Amanda Olberg have just issued a study of the kind that we'd have been swimming in years ago, if ed reformers were serious about cost structures or charter schools as an opportunity to rethink the industrial school model. In studying the simple and immensely practical question of how charter schools handle teacher retirement when state law allows them to opt out of the state's pension system, Podgursky and Olberg examine just how much rethinking charters are doing when it comes to the familiar, expensive, and binding routines of schooling--and what lessons that holds for schools more broadly.

The inattention to this question is really pretty astounding. As Podgursky and Olberg remind us, pension costs accounted for 15 percent of teacher salaries in 2010, and pensions probably amounted to more than ten percent of all school district spending last year. Big savings there could alleviate the need for so many of the difficult decisions with which supes, school boards, and school leaders are wrestling.

The authors examined six charter-heavy states--including giant states like California, Florida, and New York, and charter hotbeds Arizona, Michigan, and Louisiana. In California and Louisiana, where school participating in the pension system are free from participating in Social Security, the participation rates were 91%+ and 71%, respectively. In other words, nearly all charter schools chose to participate in the state pension system. In the other four states, where schools could opt out of the pension plan with no repercussions, between 23% and 41% still opted to join the pension system.

The authors find that charters which opt out of the state pension system most often offer teachers defined contribution plans (e.g. a 401(k) or 403(b)), with employer matches that look a lot like those offered to university employees or private sector professionals. Seventy-seven percent of schools that opted out provided a retirement plan with a match, nine percent offered a plan but with no employer match, and fourteen percent provided no alternative retirement plan.

The bottom line here is mixed, and intriguing. First, it's clear that, as always, state statute and regulation play a huge role in determining what charters can and will do. Second, when given the opportunity to opt out of the state pension system without incurring new costs, a majority of charter schools take advantage of the opportunity--though a sizable number decline to do so. Third, charter operators have generally chosen to offer relatively attractive defined benefit plans, though these appear less costly and more flexible (for both educator and school) than the established state system.

Finally, though, this terrific study raises a lot more questions than it answers. How much can schools save by opting for alternative benefit plans? Why are so many charters opting to stay with the state system? How do teachers feel about these alternatives? How do these choices impact recruitment, retention, or talent management? What makes school leaders more or less likely to embrace cost-effective alternatives? And, finally, given that Minnesota enacted the first charter law twenty years ago, why has it taken this long for scholars to start to dig into the big questions about how and why charters are (or aren't) seizing opportunities to rethink industrial era cost structures and staffing routines?

Posted by Rick Hess at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Richard Barth is CEO and President of the KIPP Foundation, supporting KIPP schools that now enroll over 27,000 students at 99 campuses. Just recently, KIPP released its long-term study of its earliest cohorts--those students who had completed eighth grade ten or more years ago from its initial Houston and New York City campuses. The report found that 33% had finished college within six years. These results were cheered by some as "a substantial and commendable improvement relative to today's status quo" and a welcome example of transparency. At the same time, the KIPP leadership readily noted that these results mean even its heralded schools can do much better. Last week, I had the chance to chat with Richard about the findings, what KIPP's learning about getting its kids through college, and the risks and rewards of this kind of transparency.

Rick Hess: So, you all recently issued a report tracking the first cohort of KIPP students. What prompted you all to do the research? After all, most middle schools don't track the college completion rate of their alums.
Richard Barth: We've been committed to tracking--and these are, again, our original eighth graders--since the beginning. There's been this commitment, starting back with [KIPP founders] Mike [Feinberg] and Dave [Levin], to make sure that we're preparing our kids for success in college and in life. We've been tracking this data and a couple things made us say, "Is there something here that we should be sharing more broadly?" The accepted practice for tracking kids when it comes to college completion is six years out of high school; our first couple classes were hitting that mark. And we needed to tell that story internally because we have a huge wave coming. We have 1,000 KIPPsters in college today and will have over 10,000 in 2015. And we realized if we didn't get the story of what we're learning out to the KIPP network, we'd be deeply regretting it in 5 years.

RH: So what did you learn?
RB: First, our kids are outperforming national averages for completion. Of our eighth graders, a third are finishing with a BA degree in six years, versus 31 percent of all US students. So we're outperforming all Americans, and [doing] about four times what's expected for low-income kids, which is about eight percent. We also learned that over 80% of our eighth graders are going to college, but only a third are finishing. So while we're proud of what's going on, given what they've done relative to the whole population, we think we can do better. We think there are a few core things we can do to get us to our next goal, which is a 50% completion rate over six years.

RH: What are those key things you need to do?
RB: The number one thing is academic rigor. We've committed to going kindergarten through twelfth grade in KIPP schools across the country. The original cohorts that we just [reported upon] only got fifth through eighth grade. So [we're going to] start with our kids earlier and stay with them longer. The second thing is we've got to do a much better job of finding the right match when it comes to college. We are sending too many of our kids off to campuses that have low graduation rates. We know that even at each level of selectivity, there are schools that have a much higher graduation rate than others. So we're convinced that one of the simplest and clearest things we can do is to form partnerships with colleges that are doing a better job of not just taking kids, but seeing that they finish. We also think we can do a better job of making sure our KIPPsters are better aware of the financial costs of college and are preparing for that. It is pretty clear that as the original KIPPsters went off to high school, they weren't sure what it was going to take from a financial standpoint to get to college. We're piloting a match savings program, so for every dollar a family commits, they can get a match dollar.

RH: What's that entail?
RB: With a grant from Citigroup, we're piloting a match college savings program in five regions. We want to [see] whether poor families, if given an opportunity to save with a match, will put money away for college. We're also doing a partnership with the University of Chicago, they are doing a financial literacy program called "6-to-16" and we're rolling that out to 18 schools, and trying to build a powerful online curriculum.

RH: Regarding that 33% college complete rate, some critics have asked, "Is that really four times the comparable cohort, given that KIPP students have chosen to attend and then have completed KIPP schools?"
RB: Again, we welcome these tough questions. What the Mathematica research is showing is, in the case of academic readiness, our fifth graders are coming in really, really behind. They are coming in farther behind the students in districts in which these schools are located. Over time, our research is showing that our schools can make a big difference. And we're incredibly proud of our outcomes.

RH: Once kids are in college, any thoughts about what KIPP can or should do?
RB: We need to make sure that once they are on campus, we're doing things to help with their social and academic integration. We're looking to get 25 pilots set up in the next 13 or 14 months with colleges to make sure that when first generation kids of color get on campus, the set-up is conducive to them not just starting, but finishing, college. One idea we're working with is having upper classmen, as their work study program, being responsible for welcoming in a new cohort of freshmen. New students have to deal with admissions, with enrollment, with financial aid, and get their courses...While so many of us went to college knowing how that world works, for our [KIPP] kids, there's no one in their family who had the experience before. So we need to make sure there is someone looking at it from their perspective, to make sure they get enrolled in the right courses.

RH: Any big takeaways as to what colleges may be doing wrong when it comes to serving KIPP alums?
RB: There are a lot of colleges that have very low completion rates. Does the public understand that on many campuses across the country, only one-in-three or one-in-four freshmen complete college? Why is that? Rigor is one. There are kids who get to college and end up in remedial courses and face this long uphill climb. [But] it's more than the kids not being prepared. The way financials work for higher ed, they get paid during the first semester and then lose kids over the course of the year. A lot of institutions are like gyms--which advertise at New Year's and again at the beginning of summer and then count on the fact that only one-in-three people will come in regularly, after they've taken your money up front.

RH: When you look at the outcomes, do you see anything that's made you think you need to retool elements of the KIPP model if you're going to equip kids to complete college?
RB: We have kids at far too many campuses given our numbers, and we haven't been using good third-party information and our own experience to drive the counseling process. We have a little over 1,000 kids on over 300 campuses... If we could have 30, 40, 50, 100, or 200 kids on a campus, the social capital is huge. So we've made a mistake, and we would not have 1,000 KIPPsters on 300 campuses. The second thing is we made a mistake not recognizing that we'd need to get into the business of high schools. And we paid a price. We sent a lot of our kids to high schools that we thought would keep the progress going and they didn't. Now we have 15 high schools across the country, so we're getting into that business, but it's too late for the original cohort. The third thing is to make sure that what we're learning informs our schools and our kids. This is early stage, but the vast majority of our kids are going to college within 200 miles of home. On some level, it makes all the sense in the world, but the reality is some of those matches aren't good fits. There are specific situations where helping our families understand that their child, if they have the option of going away to school, is a really good thing. Waiting to twelfth grade to cultivate that understanding is too late.

RH: Some observers have asked whether some of the established instructional practices at KIPP may not do enough to prepare kids for college-level work. What's your take on that?
RB: I do think it's worth examining. As we've gotten into the high school business ourselves, there's been a really big push on writing, which we think is a proxy for critical thinking skills. And we're trying to learn how to let go of the supports and scaffolding [so as] to let kids be more responsible for decisions on their own. Our middle schools are highly structured, and as we've gotten into high schools, we've realized we have to prepare them for a world with far less structure. We've got to get better at that.

RH: Transparency is always a complicated thing when it comes to edu-reform. For any successful provider, examining these long-term may complicate a seemingly happy story. That's one of the reasons, I'd argue, we see few efforts of this kind. That downside is doubly true for KIPP, when you consider that you've got a big profile and skeptics who have been energetic when it comes to questioning KIPP's record. Can you talk a bit about the costs of this kind of transparency?
RB: So the cons of doing this, externally, you're doing research for the skeptics, you're giving them the ability to come in and criticize, to say, "Look, only a third of their kids are getting a BA." The upside is, first, it keeps everyone at KIPP--and we now have over 2,000 staff--aligned with the very real picture of what we signed up for and how difficult this is. Our teachers know from the beginning that this is the mountain we're climbing. And second, we hope it plays a small part in helping people redefine success. One risk is we've learned "to college" is not "through college." The whole country is focusing on high school graduation rates and getting kids to college. We're shedding light on the fact that the difference between "to college" and "through college" is massive. And lastly, this is a topic that a lot of people are scared to talk about, what happens to first-generation kids of color who go to college. We want to make it safe to have a dialogue on this. And we want to make sure people understand that what we've done is an incredible accomplishment even if it's short of where we want to go.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The past decade has seen remarkably little attention to citizenship education in American schooling. That, I'd argue, is one factor contributing to the latest, dismal NAEP results in civics and history. What such results don't tell us though is what Americans themselves think about citizenship education. Do they think it's important? Do they think particular topics deserve more attention? Do they have strong feelings about how it's taught? Indeed, the last study to address this question was Public Agenda's 1998 report "A Lot To Be Thankful For;" the annual Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup poll has not asked about this topic since 2000.

That's why I've been championing more serious and sustained attention to these questions. Last fall, you may recall, my AEI shop published Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett's study "High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do," which examined the behaviors and beliefs of high school civics teachers. Farkas and Duffett found that social studies teachers felt marginalized in the NCLB era, with few confident that their students were mastering key elements of citizenship like, you know, being able to identify protections in the Bill of Rights.

Now, in a companion study, my colleagues Daniel Lautzenheiser, Andrew Kelly, and Cheryl Miller, have crunched brand-new data they've collected on public attitudes to examine how similar or different are the attitudes of teachers and the public when it comes to civics education. The report, "Contested Curriculum: How Teachers and Citizens View Civics Education," compares teachers' views with those of the general public using data collected as part of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study in 2010. Lautzenheiser et al. conclude, "While citizens and teachers often have similar beliefs about what topics and concepts are most essential to teach about citizenship, important differences emerge on issues like whether schools should emphasize teaching facts and dates and on topics like tolerance and global citizenship...We also uncover a significant amount of pessimism from the public about whether high school students are actually learning much about citizenship in high school." Some key takeaways:

First, citizens were nearly twice as likely as teachers to rank "teaching facts" as a top priority. The public was also more likely to rank "instilling good work habits" higher, with 63 percent of the public (but just over 40 percent for teachers) ranking it as one of their top two priorities. This does raise the question that I broached last fall regarding "transactional citizenship," and our inclination to sometimes seemingly reduce citizenship to the basket of skills and habits that will get students into college or a job. Meanwhile, just 18 percent of the public wanted schools to promote civic behaviors (such as voting and community service) compared to nearly 50 percent of teachers.

Second, there was substantial doubt on the part of the public that students were actually learning knowledge or skills related to citizenship. Only a third of respondents are confident high school graduates can identify the protections in the Bill of Rights and know facts (such as the location of the 50 states) or key dates (such as Pearl Harbor).

Third, there's a bizarre inverse relationship between the items that the public thinks important for citizenship education and its confidence that high school graduates have learned them. The authors term this "incongruence." Remarkably, the issues that the public thinks are most essential for students to learn are the ones they are least confident high school graduates know, while the four issues the public deems least important for students to know are the same four they feel most confident students are actually learning. (These four all involve civic behaviors rather than content; they include community service, tolerance of different groups, and learning to be an activist who will challenge the status quo.)

Finally, the authors report Republicans and Democrats are divided on a number of key items. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to view teaching facts and understanding American government as top priorities, while Dems were about three times more likely to view embracing core values (like tolerance and equality) as a top priority. At the same time, both Dems and Republicans agreed that instilling good work habits was the top priority overall and that promoting civic behaviors was the lowest priority.

As a former high school social studies teacher (and, let's not forget, author of Bringing the Social Sciences Alive), I've got a huge soft spot for this stuff. If you're with me on that, it's worth checking out.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Districts are struggling to stretch the school dollar as they deal with current and looming budget shortfalls. Yet, while they know it's a huge cost center, few district leaders know how to effectively or legally pursue cost savings in special ed provision. Between federal statute, court rulings, extensive processes, and sensitive politics, most school boards, supes, and school leaders are content to slink away and try to shave costs elsewhere.

Indeed, districts are prohibited from even considering costs when designing student education plans. The result has been a steady increase in spending accompanied by remarkably little attention to efficiency. That's a losing strategy, given that special education spending has grown from 4 percent to 21 percent of total school spending between 1970 and 2005. Stretching the school dollar requires taking a tough look at the efficacy of special ed service delivery alongside other district operations.

State and local officials generally accept this diagnosis in principle. But, when I talk with them, they often want to know where to get started, and how to move forward without asking for legal headaches. Happily, Nate Levenson, the managing director of the District Management Council, has stepped into the breach to offer some guidance. Levenson, a former Massachusetts superintendent and an MBA, penned the new white paper, "Something Has Got to Change: Rethinking Special Education" (Full disclosure: the paper was published by my shop at AEI).

Levenson's charge: "Districts must tackle the twin challenges of controlling special education costs and improving student achievement. In short, we are asking districts to do more with less." He draws on long experience as a superintendent and special education consultant to offer a number of field-tested practices for taming out-of-control special education spending while serving students better. Specifically, Levenson offers four pieces of advice to schools and districts: focus on reading and integration with general education, rethink deployment of support staff, design more sophisticated metrics to gauge teacher effectiveness, and employ more strategic management structures.

Levenson shares experiences to illustrate the challenges and explain how superintendents and school boards can confront them. In his own tenure as supe, for instance, he oversaw a program that reduced special ed costs even as the share of special ed students achieving proficiency in a three-year trial program increased by 26 percent in English and 22 percent in math. A few of his recommended solutions:

• a relentless focus on reading, including clear and rigorous grade-level expectations for reading proficiency, frequent measurement, and early identification of struggling readers with immediate and intensive additional instruction, up to 30 extra minutes per day;
• rethinking what special ed students are taught in general education classes to avoid overplacement of special ed students in special classes and keep them in front of the best teachers;
• maximizing class time with content expert teachers.

Also in for some tough medicine is the practice of co-teaching, where a special ed teacher is paired with a general ed teacher in a regular classroom for students with and without disabilities. Levenson writes, "Co-teaching is like dieting. Lots of people want to lose weight and look good in a bathing suit, but actually doing so is hard."

Levenson concludes with a handful of policy recs. These include focusing regulatory oversight on outcomes rather than inputs, collecting different and smarter types of data, and creating unambiguous standards for student eligibility and services. Anyway, check it out, if you're so inclined. I'd say it's interesting reading for most, but essential reading for school board members, supes, and school leaders trying to close budget shortfalls without compromising educational quality.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There seems to be some confusion about the problem with our earnest Secretary of Education's chest-thumping promise to take things into his own hands if Congress doesn't fix NCLB by August. The problem is not that he's pledging to waive some of the law's goofy provisions. No one is disputing that he's empowered to do so (see, for instance, Mike Petrilli's take here).

So, what is the problem? It's that Duncan has said that he plans to attach "strings" to those waivers, so that states will have to adopt his priorities in order to gain flexibility. He has clearly signaled that he regards this as a back-door opportunity to promote his preferred approach to teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and such with or without Congressional permission. This is what has so infuriated observers (see Alexander Russo's roundup here).

Duncan wrote yesterday in POLITICO, that, "Our children get only one shot at an education. They cannot wait any longer for reform...Our children...deserve a world-class education--not some day, but today." Striking was the vaguely Trotskyite sentiment and the disdain for democratic process. Fact is, I agree more than I disagree with the agenda Duncan is itching to impose. But we are a nation of laws. And, however nifty Duncan may be, there's a lot of reasons to resist giving Cabinet secretaries free rein to impose their will just because they think it's the right thing to do.

Today, we'll skip the practical and political questions raised by Duncan trying to force-feed states an agenda that Congress rejects, and in a manner sure to rile conservatives who might otherwise support many of his proposals. Rather, given Duncan's distressing suggestion that he's too busy saving kids to worry about Constitutional niceties, it might be time for a quick refresher on American government.

First, as a general matter, the executive branch is not empowered to make laws. It's empowered to execute the laws that the legislative branch writes (hence, the term "executive branch"). If Duncan doesn't like that, or finds it too restrictive, he can take it up with Madison...or Montesquieu. But that's the deal.

Second, the executive and the legislative branches are not co-equal. The American founders very explicitly embraced the logic of legislative supremacy, which is why Article I of the Constitution is devoted to the legislative branch and spells out all those cool powers, and why the legislative branch, and only the legislative branch, gets to write laws. Congress can sometimes choose to delegate rule-making and administrative authority to executive agencies (e.g. the SEC or FDA), but it has not done so in this case.

The executive branch has no authority to issue legislative timelines to Congress, and Cabinet secretaries have no authority to impose their will if Congress doesn't behave as they'd like. In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act. Like it or not (and, as readers know, I've never been crazy about it), NCLB is the law of the land until Congress says otherwise. The law gives Duncan the authority to grant waivers, but not to use that authority to compel states to adopt other measures as a quid pro quo. This scheme for back-door legislating of which Duncan seems so proud, and to which it appears ED's general counsel has (unbelievably) signed off, is as politically tone-deaf as it is Constitutionally offensive. I can only imagine how loudly (and reasonably) Obama partisans would scream if a Romney administration started using Heath Care Reform Act waivers as a strategy to compel states to accept legislative changes that Congress wouldn't endorse.

After all, however convinced Duncan is of his rightness, there are many who may disagree. That's right and honorable. The way we settle such disputes in a democratic nation, for better and worse, is through the slow, frustrating, and flawed democratic process--not via administrative fiat. If Duncan has a problem with that, I think he may be in the wrong line of work.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Our earnest Secretary of Education, who famously (and bizarrely) promised Congress a billion-dollar edu-bonus if it reauthorized NCLB by the administration's deadline and to the President's satisfaction, was back at it on Friday. Exhibiting the administration's patented disinterest in the niceties of the U.S. Constitution, he announced that he's getting ready to waive NCLB requirements for states if they agree, as the New York Times put it, "to embrace President Obama's education priorities, a formula the administration used last year in its signature education initiative, the Race to the Top grant competition."

Ed Week's Michele McNeil observed, "Any new flexibility would come with strings attached, as states would be asked 'for courage and for reform.'" Duncan highlighted labor-management collaboration, laws that establish new teaching standards, and "the next generation of assessments" as the kinds of things he'd insist upon. McNeil reported, "Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for Mr. Duncan, said that unlike the Race to the Top, which allowed states to devise their own education improvement plans, the department would present states with a basket of strategies they would have to adopt in exchange for relief."

So, let me get this straight. After barely convincing Congress to keep Race to the Top on life support, Duncan is intent on unilaterally pushing his same pet priorities through the back door? He's planning to offer regulatory relief only if states adopt reforms that are utterly absent in the relevant legislation? Facing backlash on the right and left over concerns that the administration coerced states to embrace test-driven teacher evaluation and the Common Core through Race to the Top, Duncan's strategy is to double down? Well, no matter, I'm sure the Republican majority in the House will cheer Duncan's enthusiastic willingness to lead. Or not...

The National Journal's Fawn Johnson wrote, "President Obama has called for lawmakers to rewrite No Child Left Behind by the start of the new school year. Now he's giving them the second warning before sending them to the principal's office: Do your job or we'll do it for you." Now, I know the President is a Nobel Prize winner and all but, back when I was earning my Ph.D. in political science, I don't remember anything that empowered the President to issue Congress legislative deadlines or usurp Congressional prerogatives if the administration's timetable isn't met. Sandy Kress, former Bush administration education adviser, observed, "I don't get all the drama. It almost has the feel of a threat to Congress."

At a time when Obama partisans are seeking to dismiss Tea Party critiques of administration moves on health care, auto bailouts, financial regulation, and the stimulus as conspiracy-minded lunacy, do they really not see that this is precisely the mindset that raises such hackles among critics? I'm curious whether any of the lawyers at ED tried to explain to Duncan that he's not permitted to remake federal law on the fly, just because he and the President think it's a good idea, or whether they're cheerfully along for the ride.

After having turned the Common Core into a hot button issue by tying it to the Obama administration's federal agenda--drawing fire from GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney in the process--you'd think Duncan would've been more attentive to the signals he's sending. You'd have been wrong. Is ED abashed about any of this, or even aware that this kind of brazen overreach is precisely what has driven Hill Republicans to distraction? Nope. Indeed, an ED press official sent around an e-mail advisory on Sunday that proudly linked to the stories on Duncan's "I'm in charge" chest-thumping.

Living in a nation of laws means that it matters not only what public officials do, but how they do it. Yet, as with "Edujobs," TARP, RTT, federal funding for the Common Core, gainful employment regulation, and much else, Duncan has shown little interest in such highfaluting concerns. Rather, in the classic Chicago style, the attitude seems to be that if the administration wants to do it, that's good enough--whatever the statutory or Constitutional complexities, and regardless of whether this is all likely to turn out as intended.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'm up here today at UPenn's "NEST" gathering (Networking Ed Entrepreneurs for Social Transformation). Last night, after the opening dinner, a slew of interesting folks headed out for shop talk and Game 5 of Heat-Mavs. Given my knack for annoying my friends, I found myself wondering aloud about a question that a person of discretion really shouldn't ask at a gathering of entrepreneurs: namely, who's the most overhyped edu-entrepreneur of the moment?

Now, I always say that you can't much blame the hypee for being overhyped. Any smart entrepreneur is going to take advantage of opportunities to extend their work, so they're hardly to blame for taking advantage of a hype machine that's mostly the product of lazy journalists, fad-embracing reformers, thrill-seeking philanthropists, and wishful thinking. Nonetheless, the disappointing reality is how often we've taken terrific ideas and turned them into disappointments by blowing them up into fads.

Folks had various thoughts on the matter. But I won't put anyone else on the spot. Instead, for what it's worth, I'll share my own take. My answer? The Khan Academy.

Now, don't get me wrong. Khan Academy is a smart, thoughtfully executed idea and what I've seen of it is impressive. Kahn has posted more than 2,000 lessons, and the one I've watched are terrific--certainly a helluva lot better than most of the lectures I've seen delivered in classrooms over the past two decades. The whole endeavor is necessary and inevitable. Why? Because it merely does for schooling what books did five centuries ago, which is take the rote exercise of explaining stuff to students and permit experts to do it in a more careful and painstaking fashion, while freeing them from doing it again and again. Rather than explain the same points to twenty kids at a time, over and over, it becomes possible to devote that time to exquisitely preparing a lecture that can be experienced by 20,000 or 20 million students at a time. Truth is, this is how most of us experience Pachelbel, or Mozart, or Springsteen, or Lady Gaga--we enjoy the fact that the music is available as audio files, allowing us to access the music we want, when we'd like, and in the comfort of our home or car. Khan Academy makes it possible for teachers to start focusing more on, you know, teaching and mentoring and engaging with students, rather than on having to tell them stuff.

The problem isn't with the venture. The problem is that it has been quickly blown--by fad-seeking enthusiasts, Colbert bookers, overcaffeinated philanthropists, and groupthink reformers--into "the future of schooling."

Sigh... Look, Sal Khan is clearly smart as hell, a Renaissance guy, and a terrific teacher. But what he's done, more or less, is make a bunch of excellent lectures available on YouTube. That's an excellent development, and a promising platform. In the vernacular of my Education Unbound, it's a textbook example of a brilliantly executed 1% solution. Where I get lost is why the hype portrays this as so radical and newsworthy. We don't see medical device makers on TV or in Forbes every time they devise a terrific new stent.

What Sal Khan has done is something that many have been calling for and that folks could've, should've been doing a few years ago (instead of filming and posting cute kitten videos). It's something that could've, should've come from folks in ed schools or school districts--and Kahn's energy and talent show just how pallid and negligent the edu-space has been when it comes to leveraging new tools and technologies. Kahn has a great story, is clearly a terrific lecturer, and the notion that students should listen to lectures at home and do their actual work in school is a sensible one, but it's not real clear to me why Kahn is popping up on Colbert or being feted as a star at high-profile edu-conferences.

I don't mean for any of this to be read as a critique of Khan Academy. I admire what Sal Khan has done and don't know it well enough at this point to have any particular concerns about his venture. But we do have this ugly habit in education of taking sensible ideas, overselling them, turning them into fads, inviting backlash, and then slouching away when they inevitably fail to deliver on ludicrous, inflated expectations. And my hope is that we're not revving up for one more go at that familiar treadmill.

Posted by Rick Hess at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Yesterday, at AEI, I hosted a lively panel to discuss Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe's new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools. In addition to Moe, the panel featured TFA director of research Heather Harding and Central Park East impresario (and Ed Week blogger) Deborah Meier. You can watch the 90-minute conversation here. Speaking to a full house, the three powerfully elucidated and clarified some of the fault lines in the heated debates about teacher unions.

To me, it looked like two key fault lines ran through the discussion. One was the notion of "reform unionism" and professional voice. The second was how to judge whether schools or teachers were doing well. Moe, for reasons I'll explain in a moment, thinks "reform unionism" is a pipe dream and that the only effective way to drive school improvement is by getting the system incentives to emphasize performance--which requires measures of student learning. Meier argued that collaboration has repeatedly proven successful, in locales such as New York's district four, and that it has been management and policymakers who have squelched it. She rejected the notion that test scores measure learning in a useful fashion, and noted that Moe's critiques of teacher evaluation or tenure all rest on the notion that test scores can usefully measure teacher performance. Harding praised Moe's efforts to talk about union incentives and behavior, accepted the notion that test scores are useful measures of learning, and suggested we can all "put our heads in our hands over the state of [teacher] contracts." But she also confessed to a "soft spot" for collaboration, expressed faith that districts and unions could collaborate to drive achievement, and cautioned that reformers eager to reduce the role of unions need to "be careful" about finding ways to "replace important protections" for teachers.

If you haven't seen Moe's 500-page tome, it's worth a careful look. The result of a decade's worth of scholarship, it assembles a wealth of data on teacher attitudes, collective bargaining, union influence on school board elections, NEA and AFT political activity, and so on. Yesterday, Moe sketched the book's argument, saying, "Teacher unions are the most powerful force in American education...from the bottom up and the top down." He said that fully understanding this dynamic is essential to making sense of why education policy "has been such a disappointment for a quarter century," because schools are organized like they are largely due to the pressures exerted by teacher unions.

Perhaps Moe's most intriguing assertion is that both union leaders and would-be reformers routinely mischaracterize union sentiment: union leaders when they say they're seeking to protect students and would-be reformers when they charge that callous union bosses are ignoring the wishes of their membership. Rather, Moe argued, "Members expect union leaders to protect their jobs [and perks]...and union leaders need to do these things if they are to stay union leaders." He said, "Leaders are going to protect union member job interests come hell or high water, even if these lead them to do things that are bad for kids or for schools." This isn't because union leaders are foisting an agenda on teachers, but because they are responding to teachers' common, fundamental concerns. He noted that none of this means that union members or union leaders are bad and that, as individuals, they likely want what's best for kids. But, he argued, the logic of unionization trumps those individual concerns. While he sees great value in "teachers having voice," the "dilemma" is that when teachers organize to make their voice heard, it becomes "about job interests and not just voice anymore."

Moe offered a bleak prognosis for "reform unionism," deeming it wishful thinking. He said that those who put their faith in such reforms are "expecting cats to bark," and argued that the logic of any collaboration is that union partners will try to "minimize departures from the norm." He also argued that Republican efforts to curtail union power in the states are unlikely to make much headway. In the longer term, Moe sees two trends that will reduce union influence. One is the "ferment" in the Democratic party, with reformers like the Democrats for Education Reform "put[ting] unions on the defensive." The second is technological change. Echoing a point that he and John Chubb argued in Liberating Learning, Moe said that technology will reduce the need for labor, that online learning will lead to teachers being more geographically dispersed, and that new tools will lead to a proliferation of new school options--all of which will cost unions members, dues, and influence.

Meier argued that Moe credited teacher unions with far too much influence. She argued that schools have always been infused by rules that stifle sensible practice, and that that these rules were historically imposed by management. She observed that in St. Louis, in 1950, a married woman could not teach and that, in Chicago, she could not have taught if she looked pregnant. She argued that unions have tried to address "the shameful history of how teachers were treated." She argued that doctors are not regarded as a "special interest" but are listened to when they speak with professional consensus, and asked why the unions are treated any differently. Indeed, she said that "healthy civilizations respect seniority and age," and argued that policies which advantage veteran teachers are defensible on those grounds.

She said she's perplexed by efforts to cut teacher benefits. She said, "I'm a retired teacher, collecting two-thirds of my teaching salary [in a pension]. I run into people with 3.2 million dollar bonuses. To begrudge me my two-thirds of salary, that's shameful. It's what the middle class was supposed to be." She also challenged Moe's notion that others pay more attention than the union to the needs of the students. "Who puts the interests of the children first?" she asked. She said it's not the nation, which "ranks at the bottom on child welfare." She asked, "When we decided not to tax the rich the way they should have been, was that because they were thinking about American children?" And, she asked, what are we producing high schools graduates for, anyway? "There are no jobs," she said. "Companies move locations, pick up a factory here and move over there without thinking about the children."

There was plenty more, with Harding frequently occupying the ground between these two forceful voices. Ultimately, I think two clear patches of common ground emerged. One was agreement that schools have indeed been larded with destructive rules by pols and management. Moe happily conceded the point, noting that schools occupy the bottom rung of "a democratic hierarchy," reminding the audience why he has long advocated for choice-based reform. He agreed with Meier that management has long been inept and unproductive, but argued that this has been due to incentives--and that he thinks that's entirely consistent with his assertion that teacher unions are having the biggest and most destructive impact on schools today. Second, there was clear agreement about the value of teacher professionalism and voice, with Harding flagging the promise of new organizations intended to give teachers a voice in policy. The question was really about how that voice can and should be channeled.

Anyway, a lot was said, and space and time limit what I've been able to touch upon. If you're curious, pop over here and check it out for yourself.

Posted by Rick Hess at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

For several years now, I've worked with my friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC) to provide the training and support that can help state and local business leaders become more effective partners in promoting educational improvement. I've frequently given a speech to the USCC's LEADs seminar for local and state business leaders titled "Has Business Been Bold Enough?" The answer has been straightforward: Nope.

Today my colleague Whitney Downs and I release a new USCC report that seeks to provide a roadmap for those business and civic leaders tired of genteel gestures, aimless initiatives, and sitting on their hands. In "Partnership Is a Two-Way Street: What It Takes for Business to Help Drive School Reform" we argue, "Too often, business has put its good intentions to work in the service of ineffectual systems...If business leaders are serious about school improvement, they must play a more forceful role and drive harder bargains with state officials and school district educators." To see how business can do better, Whitney and I closely examined three geographies--Austin, Nashville, and Massachusetts--where business has played an invaluable role to see what lessons might be learned.

In Austin, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce has worked with the Austin area's 15 independent school districts on issues of data transparency and college enrollment, as well as providing expertise and sustained pressure for both goals. As a result, 64 percent of Austin area high school seniors submitted the Texas Common Application in 2009, up from 47 percent in 2006. FAFSA submissions are up 85 percent.

In Nashville, the district has established twelve academy high schools, each with its own specialty. There are 46 industry-themed academies at the twelve schools, and a total of 117 business-academy partnerships and six industry-based partnership councils with 22-25 business leaders meeting once a month. This academy model, with businesses as a committed partner to local schools, has led Nashville's graduation rate to improve from 69 percent to 83 percent, as well as the percent of high schools in "good standing" under NCLB to rise from 41 percent in 2007-2008 to 53 percent in 2009-2010.

The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education has been a crucial policy advocate, in particular issuing an influential report that helped Massachusetts policymakers embrace the Common Core standards. "The fact that the report emerged from MBAE, which is seen as the guardian of education and a mainstream business group, [made it]...more effective," said Massachusetts secretary of education Paul Reville. A number of sidebars in the paper further addressed such topics such as "generating research that has an impact," "working with legislators," and the importance of savvy leadership.

Five key lessons emerged from the cases:

Be a partner, not a pawn. Partnership is a two-way street. Working with school districts or policymakers doesn't mean carrying their water; it means settling on shared objectives and pursuing them jointly. Drew Scheberle, senior vice president of education and talent development for the Austin Chamber, told us, "We had to have the moment when [Austin Independent School District] knew we were willing to walk away. We gave them a list of non-negotiables [and] said, 'If you want [our support], then you have to do these things. If you don't, we're out.'"

Leverage the unique assets business brings. When business leaders work with state and school district officials on K-12 schooling, they need to keep in mind that they are negotiating not as claimants but as valued partners. Jay Steele, associate superintendent of high schools for Metro Nashville Public Schools, told us, "[Businesses] are organizing their lobbyists around things we have asked. They can get a lot of things done as business people that I can't."

Get in for the long haul. Businesses often have other priorities besides K-12 education, so it is vital to structure a role that allows business to sustain its involvement and not permit the effort to be an enthusiasm that comes and goes. Alan Macdonald, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, told us, "There's a tendency of business folks to say, 'Didn't we already do that?' The fact that MBAE would bring us all together and keep us focused is very important."

Learn the issues and hire an expert point person. Effective engagement requires that business leaders invest time and energy to become acquainted with the issues and the local stakeholders. They should hire an expert who knows the ins and outs of education policy and can leverage the strengths of business to drive improvement. Mark Williams, Austin Independent School District (ISD) school board chair and former Dell executive, told us, "Sometimes chambers sit on the side and [occasionally] jump in. When it comes to school districts, you have to have a relationship. You can't weigh in [periodically]."

Don't shy away from policy and politics. Business leaders have a natural inclination to stay out of heated education debates. But school systems are public agencies spending public dollars to serve the public's children. Serious reform requires changing policy, and that means political debate. Ralph Schultz, president of the Nashville Chamber, told us, "[The Nashville Chamber's school board PAC] is a lightning rod, no question about it. But the business community is adamant about the need to be in this game. It gets nasty sometimes."

The actors in question shared a wealth of smart insights. So, if this seems interesting or useful, check out the whole thing yourself.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:54 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I just finished the recently-released second edition of What If All the Kids Are White? Anti-Bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families. It reminded me how politicized and stifling edu-world notions of diversity can be.

Authors Louise Derman-Sparks and Patricia Ramsey begin by noting that participants in their workshops often exhibit "a narrow definition of diversity [while] ignoring the many kinds of differences that exist even within racially homogeneous groups." It seems obvious that a room full of white children might have different opinions, ideologies, values, experiences, interests, strengths, weaknesses, family situations, moral upbringings, religious orientations, and such. Why might anyone need a workshop to remind them of this? Oh, right. Maybe it's because an industry of ideologues has crusaded, with much success, to make race an organizing principle for teacher training, edu-policy, and educational delivery.

Think "organizing principle" is too strong? Just a bit later, in making their case for "anti-bias/multicultural (AB/MC) education," Derman-Sparks and Ramsey dismiss out-of-hand those naifs and closet racists who might suggest we're entering a post-racial society. They argue that "people in all groups, including White persons" need to "join the long-term struggle," and that "many activists and theorists engaged in the movement for social justice" think it's "necessary to identify the specific dynamics of 'Whiteness' and the role of White people in challenging racism."

Now, I'm just speculating, but could this grand enthusiasm for treating "White" people as a monolith with "specific dynamics" encourage educators to forget that any room of kids, regardless of race, can be pretty diverse in other, more important ways? And isn't it a little peculiar to decry "ignoring the many kinds of differences that exist even within racially homogenous groups" while seeking "the specific dynamics of 'Whiteness'"?

I've a larger point I want to make about the politicization of this stuff, so I'm not going to review the book. But here's a thumbnail. The first half focuses on "the construction of Whiteness," "White identity," and how to help white kids find a new identity. The second half offers a "short history" of white resistance to racism, a primer on how children learn about racism and "anti-racism," and tips on how teachers can foster children's (and families') "caring and activism."

Derman-Sparks and Ramsey explain the urgency of all this by enthusiastically demonstrating the entrenched nature of American racism. They cite "hate groups and armed anti-government militia groups" (with ominous-sounding "Patriot" groups up 244% from 2008 to 2009), "violence" (with "racial hatred, along with tactics of violence, now appear[ing] in mainstream political discourse and behavior"), "racial bigotry directed at President Obama," and "individual acts of racial bigotry." I was unsurprised to find that their examples frequently implied that conservative criticism of President Obama reflects nothing more than garden-variety racism--with caricatures and heated opposition to health care reform constituting evidence of racist sentiment.

My friends in schools of education and progressive circles sometimes ask me how any reasonable person could have a problem with efforts to combat racism and promote "diversity." I always tell them that I'd be more receptive to such efforts if they didn't so often seem to regard conservative views as little more than the product of ignorance or veiled racism. It would help, too, if the gurus of diversity seemed as interested in heterogeneity of ideas or values as they are in racial categories.

This is sometimes difficult for me to explain clearly. So let me offer an example. During the George Bush presidency, vicious verbal attacks on him were commonplace. (These didn't bother me, though, of course, I was no great fan of Bush.) These criticisms included calls for his assassination and his arrest as a war criminal, as well as hateful caricatures of the President and his family. Such criticisms were celebrated by intellectuals who reminded us that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism." They had a point. After all, hard-hitting critiques of our elected leaders, including hysterical and over-the-top attacks, are a centuries-old American tradition.

Yet, when Derman-Sparks and Ramsey see these same kinds of hurtful attacks mounted against President Obama, they argue, "Aside from whether we agree with President Obama's agenda, we need to ask ourselves what happens when young children see racist images and messages about President Obama." Given that the authors make it plenty clear that they regard Tea Party groups as ipso facto racist and that all but the most genteel criticism of Obama risks being deemed racist, the clear implication is that much opposition to Obama's agenda ought to be understood as illegitimate because it risks poisoning our children's impressionable minds. This starts to feel a lot more like Big Brother than like anti-bias education.

Tellingly, in Appendix B, Derman-Sparks and Ramsey list 31 organizations that teachers should look to for instructional materials, speakers, support, and professional development. As best as I can tell, every single one is a politically active group pushing elements of a relatively expansive liberal agenda. That's fine, of course, it's a free country and all that. Just don't pretend to be shocked when a skeptic views "anti-racist education" as a cloak for a political agenda. So long as that's the way this game is played, it's hard to imagine a self-respecting conservative regarding "anti-racist education" as anything more than an ideological, political exercise. And I hope school board members, university trustees, and legislators keep that in mind when assessing programs and spending.

Posted by Rick Hess at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Jack Dale has served as superintendent of schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, since 2004. While leading perhaps the nation's largest high-performing system, he's pushed to get serious about teacher leadership and the oft-watery notion of teacher "collaboration." This week, Dale has penned a piece that becomes a must-read contribution to the debates about teacher evaluation and compensation. In "Dangerous Mind Games: Are We Ready to Overhaul the Teaching Profession?" (published as an Education Outlook by my shop at AEI), Dale hits today's teacher quality debates for romanticizing the hunt for great individual teachers while shortchanging the need to use evaluation and pay to promote the tools, rhythms, and routines that yield great teams.

Dale argues that teaching should be understood as a team effort. He argues, "Twenty-first-century teaching is about the collective work of effective teams of educators focused on the success of individual students." If we take that seriously, and not merely as lip service, he writes, it should shape our approach to evaluation and pay. He cautions that incentivizing individual teachers via pay can easily miss the mark, if one accepts the team premise. Similarly, he observes, "while principals tend to be the instructional leaders in schools, a truly effective school has multiple instructional leaders working with the principal to orchestrate and facilitate exceptional teams of teachers."

In place of the naive cash-for-scores merit pay plans that have been tried in places like Nashville and New York, Dale draws on his efforts in Fairfax to sketch a vision of differentiated pay which emphasizes the creation of "teacher-leaders," who would take on new duties outside the confines of the traditional school day and year, and would receive a corresponding 10 to 15 percent increase in pay. Roles would include providing additional student learning time, collaborating within and across schools, and mentoring colleagues. Dale argues, "Teaching is no longer a ten-month job; teaching is a full-time, twelve-month job. We must recognize these expectations...[and] completely change our image and rethink the teaching profession."

Dale highlights some of the early successes of this approach in Fairfax, where 24 public schools were chosen for a teacher-leader pilot program starting in the 2005-2006 school year for a four-year program. A third of the 24 schools were studied, showing substantial improvement in student achievement, AP participation, and school climate. If one finds this course appealing, Dale flags several of the key challenges that loom. One is ensuring that schools embrace a "purposeful" vision, in which clear expectations, duties, and functions yield concrete job descriptions, and not just vague notions that teacher-leaders will do more stuff. A second is how to create, support, and monitor teachers moving from traditional roles into new, twelve-month, teacher-leader functions. And a third is, especially in today's fiscal environment, finding ways to realize savings as twelve-month contracts replace the stipends, per-diem pay, p.d., and assorted detritus of the conventional model.

My take? I don't agree with everything Jack has to say. I think that there's need for more differentiation of roles than he contemplates here, and I think there's plenty of room for smart use of individual evaluation and pay within a team-oriented framework. But, I think he gets the big picture right, shares an invaluable take from the perspective of an accomplished district leader, and offers a terrifically sensible start for so many districts that are still seeking a way to take their first step beyond the widget-based teacher model. So, I think he has offered an enormously useful step forward, especially given that--unlike so many "reform" visions--it benefits from a practitioner's imprimatur and sensibility.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Recent back-and-forth over the Common Core has focused on the federal role. Receiving less attention is the question of just how big a shift the Common Core standards represent. On that question, UPenn Ed School dean Andy Porter and a trio of grad students have made a signal contribution. In an article in the April Educational Researcher, and then in an exchange in the May issue, they report that the Common Core standards are, for better or worse, pretty dramatically different from what states have in place.

Porter et al. analyze the content of the Common Core using a process called the Survey of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) that Porter created a while back. It entails using a two-dimensional framework to compare how similar or different the Common Core's topics and cognitive demands are to those of existing state standards. Porter and his team identify 217 topics in math and 163 in English language arts and reading, and five levels of cognitive demands, yielding 1,085 distinct types of content for math and 815 for English language arts. The question is how closely Common Core recommended content and grade-level progressions align with those in place today.

Porter et al. were able to draw on CCSSO analyses of the Common Core standards and of math standards for 27 states and English language arts standards for 24. The findings? Porter et al. observe, "The Common Core standards represent considerable change from what states currently call for in their standards and in what they assess." Moreover, "[They] are also different from the standards of countries with higher student achievement, and they are different from what U.S. teachers report they are currently teaching."

The alignment between the Common Core and state standards was 0.25 in math (where 1.0 would be perfect alignment and 0.0 would be no alignment) and 0.30 in reading. Because those low correlations could be due to the fact that the Common Core is just addressing material in a different grade than in a given state, the researchers then aggregated across grades 3-6 and 3-8. That boosted alignment slightly, to 0.35 in math and to 0.38 in reading.

The stark differences between state standards and the Common Core are partly due to differences in topics addressed, but also to the fact that the Common Core emphasizes somewhat different cognitive skills: devoting less time to memorization and performing procedures, and more to demonstrating understanding and analyzing written material.

Turning to existing state assessments, Porter et al. find the average alignment to the Common Core math standards is just 0.19 and 0.17 for reading. They repeated that analysis for the NAEP assessments, finding that the alignment for math is 0.20 in both fourth and eighth grade and for reading is 0.28 in fourth grade and 0.21 in eighth grade. In other words, the SEC analysis finds that the Common Core standards are real different from what's on state and NAEP tests today.

Porter and his team devoted special attention to benchmarking the Common Core against the Massachusetts content standards--given that Massachusetts is the nation's top-performing state on NAEP. The only grade level at which they had Mass data common across math and ELA standards was the seventh grade, so they focused there. The seventh grade math alignment between the Mass standards and the Common Core was 0.19. It was 0.13 for ELA. They report, when it comes to math, "The Common Core puts considerably more emphasis on operations, less on basic algebra and geometric concepts, and more on probability." In English language arts, the Common Core places "substantially" less emphasis on memorization and "somewhat" less on performing procedures, less on reading and language study, and more on writing processes, writing applications, and oral communication. As Porter et al. note, "Whether these differences between Common Core and Massachusetts mean that Common Core represents a better curriculum is difficult to judge, although at least at grade 7 in [English language arts], there is a shift in the Common Core standards toward greater emphasis on higher cognitive demand."

Finally, Porter et al. take a look at international comparisons, comparing Common Core math standards to the eighth grade standards for Finland, Japan, and Singapore. The alignments are 0.21, 0.17, and 0.13, respectively. The starkest difference in each case is that these countries place much more emphasis on "perform procedures" than do the Common Core standards. On language arts and reading, comparison with standards from Ontario, Finland, Sweden, and New Zealand yielded alignments between 0.09 and 0.37.

So, does this mean that the Common Core's standards are better than what's in place, or is this worrisome news? Porter and his colleagues make it clear that it's hard to know for sure. The Common Core seems to represent "a change for the better" when it comes to "higher order cognitive demand" but the "answer is less clear" when it comes to topics. Ultimately, they make clear that, for good or ill, the Common Core represents not a modest technical exercise, but a serious overhaul of how states approach math and reading instruction. Whether that shift is a promising one is just the sort of thing that deserves an energetic public debate (like the one unfolding today), and that was scarcely evident when states were rushing to sign off on the Common Core in the heat of the Race to the Top steeplechase.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend