March 2012 Archives

Hi folks. So I'm about to take one of my blog breaks as I start to approach crunch time on my upcoming book on cage-busting leadership. (For a quick intro to what the book holds, see my blog post on it here.) Fortunately, I'm once again psyched to offer up a stellar array of contributors to step in for the next four weeks.

First up, next week, is Jonathan Plucker. Jonathan is a professor of educational psychology and cognitive science at Indiana University as well as the director of IU's massive Center for Evaluation and Education Policy. He's an expert on gifted education, has looked closely at China's educational system, and received the National Association of Gifted Children's 2007 E. Paul Torrance Award for creativity research. His books include Essentials of Creativity Assessment and Critical Issues and Practices in Gifted Education. He's got much to say on research, gifted education, and evaluation, and I think you'll find him as thoughtful as I do.

Next up, the week of April 9, is Chapman Snowden. I first met Chap through 4.0 Schools, Matt Candler's enterprise designed to nurture new school models and education businesses in the southeastern U.S. Chap is an innovator in training at 4.0 and the founder of Kinobi Corporation, a web-based coaching service that helps prepare teachers to effectively manage disruptive student behavior. A UVA alum who previously worked as a program manager at Mass Insight's school turnaround group and as a portfolio analyst at New Profit, I think you'll find Chap has loads to say on ed tech and the challenges of being an education start-up.

The week of April 16 we'll have my pal Robin Lake. The newly appointed director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington, Robin is the heir to Paul Hill's throne. Robin has worked at CRPE for years as associate director and research associate and directs CPRE's National Charter School Research Project. She's a national leader on a number of key issues, including charter schooling, portfolio school districts, school turnarounds, and performance-based accountability systems. She's the author of Unique Schools Serving Unique Students: Charter Schools and Children with Special Needs.

Finally, the week of April 23, we turn to my ridiculously gifted colleague Andrew Kelly. Andrew is a research fellow here at AEI where he focuses primarily on higher education issues. He's one of the most creative writers in higher education (see here and here), as well as a UC-Berkeley trained political scientist with a deep understanding of polling, elections, and legislative behavior. He was my coeditor on the new book Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit and also the coeditor of Reinventing Higher Education. He's whip-smart and perhaps just a touch cantankerous. I'm comfortable predicting that it'll make for fun-filled reading.

Enjoy! And I'll see you in May.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

[Note: I coauthored this post with Francesca Pickett. Pickett is the nom de plume of a U.S. Department of Education employee who, for obvious reasons, wishes to remain anonymous.]

A little over a year ago, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan responded to the explosive news that even first-timer Shanghai outpaced the U.S. on international assessments by terming the news a "wake-up call" and a "Sputnik moment." Sixteen short months after that impassioned charge, the nation's education researchers will soon trek to their annual confab to share the analyses and findings that can help address this daunting challenge.

Under the banner of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), roughly 20,000 researchers will convene in Vancouver to report on research that can help fuel student learning and improve schools. Eager to discover what advances this year's edupalooza has in store, we waded through the thousands of papers and panels touted in the electronic conference program. We can't claim to have flagged them all, but we did highlight a number of must-read papers and must-attend sessions.

This year's conference, guided by the theme "To Know Is Not Enough," invited the nation's educational researchers to ask, "What actions should be taken...to ensure that research knowledge is used to improve education and actually serve the public good?" (The "actually" suggests that AERA is surprised that ed researchers might be able to serve the public good.)

We quickly found the kind of papers that promise to fulfill that bold charge and make a real difference...papers like Can the Very Thought of Education Break Bricks? O-kay.

Hmm, on second thought, it's not even clear everyone is on board with this year's theme. One paper daringly suggests that knowing just might be enough, in To Know I Can Might Be Enough: Women's Self-Efficacy and Their Identified Leadership Values. (Though, some might worry that the treatise suffers from the soft bigotry of low expectations.) Another pair of authors is more on board with AERA's theme, in Seeds of Genius in the Early Lives of Two Eminent Creative Brothers: To Know Is Not Enough. To sort it all out, attendees can head to the featured Presidential session "To Know That We Know What We Know, and To Know That We Do Not Know What We Do Not Know, That Is True Knowledge."

For those thinking that this may sound tedious, relief awaits at what promises to be a titillating session on "Boredom in Academic Settings." We can see the typology now: regular boredom, severe boredom, super-duper boredom, "I'm playing Angry Birds under the table" boredom, and "my freaking iPhone is out of juice and I can't believe I can't play Angry Birds to get me through this" boredom. We don't like to prejudge, but we think you may want to be sure your iPhone is fully charged before the session on "Foucault and Contemporary Theory in Education," featuring papers like (Re)imagining Foucault: New Directions in Foucauldian Scholarship, Educational Reform and the Problem of Subjectification: Deglobalizing the Global and Technologies of Subjectification: Foucault and the Production of Self.

For those seeking something less boring, we recommend hitting sessions tackling those four subjects so crucial to improving education: Paulo Freire, games, nonhumans, and cartoons.

No AERA experience is complete without a visit to sessions based on the musings of the late communist revolutionary Paulo Freire. In fact, with nine presentations, the special sessions on "Freire, Critical Pedagogy, and Emancipation" outnumber those on more mundane research topics like "Longitudinal Studies," "Test Validity Research and Evaluation," and research featuring the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Some of the most intriguing Freire-themed papers include, Codifications of Reality as Educational Tools for Critical Consciousness: Retheorizing Freire Through Praxis; Teaching for Outrage and Empathy: Challenging Preservice Teachers' Hegemonic Perspectives and Practices; and Student Empowerment, Eco-Pedagogy, Popular Culture, and Love. Imagine that, everything from "codifications of reality" to "preservice teachers' hegemonic perspectives"--and you still get a little bit of love. This is why we so love AERA.

But let's not be humancentric. Other realms also have much to offer. In the cyber realm, one don't-miss presentation is Anne Frank Confronts Queen Isabella: Learning Phenomena in Historical, Cultural, and Social Online Simulation Games. This piece poses so many pressing questions, among them: Why is Anne Frank talking with Queen Isabella? And why is it so darn confrontational? Indeed, both Anne Frank and Queen Isabella just might learn something about getting along in cyberspace from "We Put Our Swag All Over It": Negotiating Local and Global Identity Online and Offline. Another effort to address the thoughtless pro-human bias in education research is Thinking Across/Through the Species Divide: Nonhuman Animals in Educational Theory and Research.

And don't forget the papers rich with allusions to our animated friends. The Flintstones-themed Getting to Bedrock: Diverse Perspectives on Emergence, Nonlinearity, and Relationality in Education promises a jolly good time. Meanwhile, friendly Casper is brought to mind by Crazy, Depressive White Ghosts in the Closet: Someone Help Me Say the "N" Word. The thing is, Casper is such a friendly ghost that we're a little unclear why he'd feel a need to say the "N" word. But, if he's set on it, he should check out the punny "Something Doesn't Feel White": Racial Affect, White Dissonance, and the Possibility for Challenging Whiteness in Education.

There are other papers that intrigue us, well, just 'cuz. One such is A Theoretical Toolbox: Using Theories of Gender and Sexuality to Uncover New Histories of Education. We frequently think of history as old, but "new histories" sound much cooler and shinier. There's the astonishingly opaque (Re)producing and Dismantling Heteronormative Spaces in Schools--we're tempted to check this out, if only because one of us will be renovating a basement soon and learning how to dismantle around heteronormative spaces just may save a trip to Home Depot.

Then there's Reorienting Deconstruction: Researching the Iterability of the Pedagogical Mark and T'aała'i Diidleeł (We Become One): Toward a Collective and Ceremonial Praxis of Indigenous Decolonizing Scholarship. Honestly, with five graduate degrees between us, we're curious to learn whether phrases like "the iterability of the pedagogical mark" or "ceremonial praxis of indigenous decolonizing scholarship" mean something... or whether it's all just bored professors having a laugh after they forgot to charge their iPhones.

Shanghai may have had a good run. But with us getting our Sputnik on and all, we're sure our kids will be blowing doors in no time at all.

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

Funny story. A few weeks back, I was out in DC after one of my AEI working groups. It got late and just a few of us were left, including ed tech gurus Jonathan Harber, Larry Berger, and Mick Hewitt. Anyway, walking out of Panache after too many cocktails, we stumbled upon a DeLorean. One thing led to another. Long story short: they built a time machine and I test-drove it. Where'd I go? I hopped forward a decade to 2022, skipped the chance to meet my future self or check out the iPad 13.0, and instead avidly downloaded the most intriguing edu-titles I could find (sad, but what can you do?).

Anyway, wanted to share one title that's uber-relevant today. It's Great Promise Thwarted: The Humbling History of the Common Core, 2008-2018. It'll be written by my good friend, eminent NYU edu-historian Jonathan Zimmerman, and e-published by Harvard University Press, in 2022.

It's worth quoting a long excerpt from the book's conclusion:

For a brief time, during 2010-2012, the success of the Common Core seemed assured. Proponents had compelling arguments. Existing state standards were generally awful. The No Child Left Behind accountability system designed to accommodate variation in state standards and assessments was problematic. Conservative supporters argued that the Core would make it possible to do away with intrusive federal regulations governing accountability and easier to provide transparency and accountability with a light touch. Moreover, the Core would make it possible to credibly compare student and school performance across the nation, while allowing mobile students or those learning online to move across schools or programs with minimal disruption.

Proponents argued that the Core would reduce the barriers that hindered virtual schools, online instruction, and the emergence of "21st century" assessments and instructional tools. Observers generally characterized the standards as a substantial improvement on those in place in most states. And Core proponents enjoyed enormous political muscle. A push that would have been laughable in 2006 seemed a fait accompli by 2010, with forty-plus states on board. The effort enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of the Gates Foundation (what we today would call Gates-ECB; this was before the Foundation absorbed the European Central Bank following the third Greek default), the Obama administration, nearly the whole of the education "reform" community, and Republican leaders including both members of the 2016 GOP presidential ticket. Major publishers and test-developers were quiescent or supportive, while education technology entrepreneurs were enthusiastic.

So, what went wrong? Why is it that today just eleven states use a Common Core assessment, less than a third of the states are judged to have made any effort to adhere to the Core, and the phrase "Common Core" remains polarizing and generally unpopular with Republicans, parents, and teachers? How did such a promising effort run aground?

In hindsight, four factors were responsible. Notably, none turned on technical debates over the merits and rigor of the standards. All were the product, to varying degrees, of the "we're-in-a-hurry" hubris that has so often humbled would-be social reformers. Indeed, as one of the Core's great champions, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation president Chester E. Finn, Jr., prophetically wrote in early 2012, "It will, of course, be ironic as well as unfortunate if the Common Core ends up in the dustbin of history as a result of actions and comments by its supporters."

First, an effort that began as a bipartisan, state-driven enterprise, spearheaded by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, started to look to skeptics like a federally-inspired, politicized project. The Department of Education's decision to link federal funding to the Core in its Race to the Top program, its NCLB waiver effort, and its "ESEA blueprint," and the provision of $350 million in federal funds for Core-related tests, all alienated anti-Washington conservatives who would have remained neutral if the question had merely concerned states collaborating to set standards in math and English language arts. By the time nationally influential conservative pundit George Will questioned in 2012 whether the federal government had exceeded its legal authority, the challenge for proponents was clear. Indeed, "Tea Party" conservatives came to regard the Common Core as part and parcel of Obama administration efforts to extend the federal role in domestic policy, an extension of contemporaneous fights over health care, spending, clean energy, the auto industry, housing, and financial regulation. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan demonstrated an unfortunate knack for making it appear that the Core was a pet Obama project--initially, when he excoriated South Carolina in 2012 for expressing second thoughts, but most famously when he futilely blasted the dozen states that announced their "implementation hiatus" in 2014. All of this served to make the Core a partisan question viewed with suspicion by conservatives, undermining the bipartisan support needed to sustain implementation in many "red" and "purple" states.

Second, the Common Core advocates were tripped up by their own impatience. After nearly all states adopted the Common Core in an early rush, proponents exhibited little interest in making the case for its merits, responding to critics, or explaining what was in store. Outside of the occasional op-ed, little sustained attention was devoted to explaining the changes or building broad-based support. For instance, hardly anyone other than Core enthusiasts realized that the comfortable, familiar high school math curriculum of math, algebra and geometry was to be eliminated and replaced with the antiseptically titled Integrated Math I, II, and III. When the magnitude of the shift became clear in 2014, confused parents and irate math teachers bombarded legislators and state board members with calls to delay implementation or alter course. Enthusiasts concentrated on designing instructional materials, consulting with states and districts, and training leaders and teachers, seemingly presuming that the public knew what they were up to and supported their effort. In the event, this turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. The early success of the Common Core was remarkable, but proponents failed to recognize that this quick success meant few voters or legislators really understood what was involved or that real success would depend crucially on the breadth and depth of support.

Third, Core advocates never did a good job of explaining how their efforts intersected with other reform priorities. Observers asked about whether the math assessment would strangle the abilities of charter schools or specialty district schools to use nonstandard math curricula. Core proponents never really answered such questions in public, tending instead to favor quiet, technical fixes (in this case abandoning mandatory "through-course" assessment) that didn't address broader concerns. Skeptics wondered whether the testing "windows" needed to assess all children with the new computer-assisted tests would be so wide as to undermine the viability of sophisticated value-added evaluation systems that states were eagerly building. The Washington Post's Jay Mathews pointed out, in 2012, that the new assessments would "delay, if not stop altogether, the national move toward rating teachers by student score improvements" and that radical change would force systems "to wait years to work out the kinks in the tests" before they could resume those efforts. In hindsight, the backlash produced by the chaos over teacher evaluation and school accountability systems during 2014 and 2015 was predictable and preventable.

Finally, insufficient public attention to practical questions of cost, technology, and practice ultimately proved crippling. Despite frenzied efforts to support new assessments, instructional materials, and implementation during 2011-2014, interviews from that era with state legislators, district officials, educators, and parents showed remarkably little awareness of the costs and practical difficulties that lay ahead. When the 2012 technology scan showed that most districts had the requisite technology platform, few realized that the minimum specs had been dumbed-down or that this meant the new tests would sacrifice most of the hoped-for features--turning them into little more than traditional paper-and-pencil tests taken on a computer. At the same time, lousy records and a desire to avoid embarrassment meant that many districts had overstated their capacity in the tech census; they were suddenly faced with millions or even hundreds of millions in unanticipated new expenses, even as they dealt with the practical headaches of inadequate technology. And when the price tag for the full cost of new technology, training, leadership, teacher preparation, and all the rest became clear in 2014 and 2015, just as states emerging from the Great Recession were restoring cuts to state agencies and hoping to trim taxes, it was no surprise that a slew of states decided they'd keep the Core standards but also their old assessments, instructional materials, training, and teacher preparation.

The Core is still with us, of course, but it remains a shadow of what its more optimistic proponents envisioned a decade ago.

As I perused Zimmerman's account, I could only feel for my many friends working so hard to make the Common Core a success. But then I thought, "Wait a minute. The future hasn't happened yet. It's like Marty McFly using his knowledge of the future to change the future. They can still alter course." Will they? I suppose that's up to them.

(Oh, and by the way, my favorite paper from the 2022 AERA conference? "When All Your Hurtful Yesterdays Become All My Gendered Tomorrows": Transgressive Ontologies Disrupting the Heteronormative Praxis Posed by a Post-Foulcauldian, Neo-Ravitchian Autoethnography of the Lived Lives of Three Indigenous Culture-walkers in a Neo-liberal Dystopia.)

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I've long thought we have a big problem in how we select, train, and induct educational leaders (see, for instance, my 2003 piece A License to Lead?). We start with folks who started as classroom teachers and have never worked outside K-12, run them through ed admin programs where they interact only with other career educators and ed faculty, have them read lots of Leithwood and Fullan and Sergiovanni and Deal and little from outside K-12, and tell them school leadership is unique and unlike leadership in any other sector. We're then frustrated by the results and berate these same principals and supes for being heavy-handed, lousy team-builders; for being slow to challenge established dogma; for not "thinking outside the box;" and for not leveraging new tools and management practices.

To me, this suggests the need for recruiting a deeper, richer, more diverse pool of leadership talent, from inside and outside of schools, and then deliberately training them in a fashion that permits them to learn from peers outside of K-12, exposes them to leadership and management thinking from outside K-12, and integrates thinking on entrepreneurship and unbundling (see Education Unbound for more context) into the very fabric of their preparation. There are a handful of current efforts seeking to do just this.

For my money, one of the more interesting of those efforts is Rice University's Education Entrepreneurship Program (REEP). Launched in 2008 and housed in Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business, REEP is designed to prepare select Houston-area educators (from districts and charters) to become transformative school leaders. (Full disclosure: I was recruited in 2008 by my friends Mike Feinberg and Leo Linbeck to help design REEP and continue to serve as the lead education faculty member.)

How does REEP actually work? Practically and legally, how does one prepare certified edu-leaders in a school of business? How did REEP get started, and what are the lessons for those enamored by the model? How does REEP training differ from that offered in traditional ed admin programs? My crack colleague Daniel Lautzenheiser and I examined these questions in "Educational Leadership for a New Era:The Rice University Education Entrepreneurship Program," just published this week by REEP. Here are a few key takeaways; if you're interested, check out the full piece.

REEP's basic premise is that key leadership and management skills are universal, regardless of one's field of endeavor, and that aspiring K-12 leaders can actually become more adept at these skills by learning with and from peers and faculty who have diverse expertise and experiences. In holding that "school leadership" is not as unique as generations of ed leadership experts have suggested, REEP offers a sharp and significant break with traditional practice. At a practical level, Rice is the first institution in the nation allowed to issue would-be administrators a state principal certification through a business school. The REEP model makes it possible for full-time teachers and administrators to pursue either a two-year MBA (via Rice's MBA for Professionals track) or a one-year fellowship via the Jones School's Executive Education training program.

Daniel and I conclude the piece by flagging key lessons evident in Rice's early experience. I'll highlight six of those here:

Advantages
• Fresh opportunity to build an innovative program. Unlike most ed school-business school partnerships, which inevitably draw upon the faculty and programs already in place, Rice was able to build a unique education leadership training program from scratch. This opportunity to start fresh meant that REEP could use the expertise of the Jones School without worrying about stepping on the toes of an ed school or having to use education faculty.
• A chance to cultivate the local talent pool. Unlike education leadership programs with a more national focus, REEP was designed to cultivate the talent pool in one community. REEP's design is intended to offer an alluring new path to potential leaders, to keep those talented leaders in the local ecosystem, to forge new ties across districts and across the district and charter sectors, and to infuse local leadership with thinking and networks that stretch beyond the narrow world of K-12.

Challenges
• Squeezing a different approach into a self-assured field. A key tension for programs like REEP is the attempt to pioneer a new direction in leadership training while having to comply with state-level guidelines that presuppose a particular approach to training school leaders. These "correct" approaches to K-12 leadership imply certainty on questions that most non-K-12 authorities in management and leadership regard as uncertain.
• Can leaders use what they're learning? Business schools often operate under the assumption that leaders have a substantial ability to reallocate time, staff, and dollars and to remake routines. However, in K-12, leaders often operate in highly constrained environments.

Lessons Learned
• Influentials committed to the effort. Inside and outside of Rice, REEP enjoyed advocates who helped it clear logistical hurdles, secure funds, develop local relationships, and recruit students and a national faculty. Equally critical was support from the Jones School. On the outside, REEP's advisory board included key contacts in leadership roles in local school districts, in high-profile charter management organizations, and at Teach For America. This helped with visibility, coordination, and recruitment.
• Doubts about whether REEP could be launched at an institution with an education school. Those involved in launching REEP repeatedly expressed skepticism that they could have built it at Rice if an education school had been in place. Those who had dealt with other local schools of education spoke of the frustrations of having to negotiate ways to ensure that new programs didn't step on the toes of established programs or faculty members. Rethinking the assumptions of how to train school leaders was thought to be possible only when working on a fresh slate.

Posted by Rick Hess at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'll offer a bit of free advice today for educational entrepreneurs and those who would be. Generally, good entrepreneurs (e.g. the ones who aren't peddling snake oil) focus on developing a terrific product or service, and on "making a difference." This mindset is pretty much innate in the entrepreneur's DNA.

As a consequence, the usual aim is to stay under the radar and deliver. All sensible enough. At the most prosaic level, entrepreneurs who have good stuff usually beat those who don't. Usually, but not always. Evidence that what you're providing is valuable can only help, but it's hard to know for sure whether many providers are adding value--and skeptics can readily argue that even those with outcome results are falling short on unmeasured dimensions, working with a select population, or mishandling funds. Meanwhile, school and system leaders who might be intrigued by what you offer are also very aware that their decisions are being judged by voters and elected officials--so they will often look favorably at providers that enjoy public acclaim, whatever their bottom-line.

K-12 is an unusual space. It's a public space, shaped by public policies, fueled with public dollars, and designed to serve the public's children. Succeeding in it is not just about effect sizes and customer satisfaction, it's also about learning to operate in the public space, where you need to be aware of policymakers, funders, and advocates and how they can make it harder or easier for good providers to succeed.

Fortunately, you can influence what this policy community thinks and how it acts. You can do so by working to become a thought leader; by writing, speaking, and informing the public conversation. This does not mean that you're simply shooting your mouth off--it means that you're offering expertise, experience-driven insights, and tough-minded truths that are specific to your efforts and that emerge from your work. Doing so frequently seems like a distraction or an unnecessary headache, but it confers five big advantages:

First, it creates credibility with policymakers, advocates, and key decision-makers so that they're reaching out to you for expertise. This allows you to share thoughts and insights as an expert, rather than a supplicant, and puts you in a position to help decision-makers think through the implications of laws, rules, or policies.

Second, it puts you in a position where you can help states and districts think about practical challenges and how to meet them. This means that you're in rooms talking with them, not as a salesman, but because they want you there.

Third, it makes you a spokesperson, generating free media and attention. This makes you more likely to get invited to sit on panels or deliver remarks to conferences and officials, opening doors and creating awareness. This can help create a virtuous cycle, in which the mystique helps in attracting talent, resources, and the rest--yielding business opportunities and more visibility. Think Apple.

Fourth, this kind of visibility makes it easier to attract the eye of talented funders, evaluators, and potential partners, making it easier to tap new resources and expertise at a big discount. That kind of evaluation, in particular, can help deliver the kinds of demonstrated results that help boost credibility and further accelerate the virtuous cycle.

Fifth, thought leadership helps put you in a position where community groups, advocates, and the like are more inclined to actually help you get into markets. When really successful at this, you get to the place where you've got districts competing for your attentions.

Now, doing this cost-effectively, strategically, and wisely is a complicated story. It's one that requires a lot of attention to the policy space, the impact of research, context, nuance, market specifics, and the rest. In truth, this is a place where edu-entrepreneurs can often use a little help. But, a quick look at some of the folks who've gotten this right in the past decade, like The New Teacher Project or Wireless Generation, shows that it's well worth the effort.

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

Educators and "reformers" have a knack for sympathy. They feel for the kids, decry achievement gaps, and remind us that we need to do better. Champions of reform are intent on building cultures that "put kids first" and that remind everyone "it's about the kids." As one impassioned twenty-something district official told me, "We're doing the right thing and we're doing it for the right reasons--so what the hell is the hold-up?"

Another kind of sympathy, one that would-be reformers often radiate, is: "I know those poor teachers are scared of change, but X is the right thing to do." This crocodile-tear sympathy does nothing to clarify whether the concerns of "those" teachers are legitimate or addressable. It presumes they lack the reformer's virtue and that any doubts represent the triumph of their petty fears over their concern for kids. This stance may feel great, but it makes it hard to win converts or to identify and address problems with the proposals in question.

The problem is that by approaching this as a question of sympathy it's all about how the speaker thinks the world should work, and the speaker's frustration that the world's not working that way. The emotion is understandable, but something vital is missing.

What's missing is any appreciation for the world around you. It's fine to say that everyone should do "the right thing for the kids." The thing is, people can honestly disagree about what that thing is--or whether your actions are helping. In fact, sympathy, and the righteous anger that ensues, often undercuts the ability to understand how or why the world is working as it is (because the sympathizer already knows how and why--it's because their opponents don't care enough about doing the right thing).

Consider the reformer crusading to do away with step-and-lane compensation or seniority-based school assignment. (For the record, I agree with the reformer on both points.) As one state chief said to me, "We know the unions will fight to the death on this, but what I don't get is why the members let them. This stuff makes it harder for teachers to avoid colleagues who aren't doing the job and chews up dollars we could use to pay new or high-needs teachers." The problem is that he skipped over the fact that veteran teachers (e.g. typically those most engaged in the union) entered schooling ten or twenty years ago under an implicit bargain, played by those rules (waiting their turn and earning their masters), and feel like the "reformers" are now trying to renege on their end of the deal.

Right or wrong, the teachers who adopt that stance are hardly being unreasonable. It's not clear why impassioned slogans or speeches will change their minds. In fact, it's natural for those teachers to argue (and believe) that these "problematic" norms are the backbone of a professional culture which is good for kids. While it may seem nonsensical to would-be reformers, many veteran teachers honestly believe that abolishing these rhythms will undermine the profession, hurting their students. Cage-busting leaders need to start not by focusing on what they think these teachers should want, but by recognizing this reality, getting concrete about the problems to be solved, and focusing on solving them. If they can't, it's time to get into the politics of changing policy.

Say you're in charge of your district's virtual school. You make it possible for students to take advanced courses and specialized offerings. Yet, you find that principals aren't as supportive as you'd expect. As one district tech coordinator told me, "For some reason our principals don't seem to understand how good this is for the kids." Well, let's empathize with the principals for a moment.

In your district, online courses require students to have to have a full-time, certified teacher in the classroom. That's an expense the principal must cover, meaning a high school with students taking online classes each period throughout the day is effectively losing one entire full-time teaching position. Unless whole classes of kids are taking online offerings together, in lieu of school offerings (e.g. 28 tenth-graders are taking world language at the same time), the school still has to offer the same complement of classes it would have. And if only a half-dozen students are taking online classes during a given period, class sizes school wide will increase. Moreover, in some states, a portion of the student funding stream flows to the online school. Whether or not it's good for the individual kid, the principal might reasonably regard virtual course-taking as a bad deal for most of her students--it threatens to boost class size and redirect resources from the school's brick-and-mortar classrooms.

Note, I'm not saying the veteran teachers or the recalcitrant principal are "right." I'm saying that they're not being unreasonable. If sympathy has you so worked up that you don't recognize this, you risk turning every honest disagreement into a self-righteous throwdown; one where you're rolling the boulder and the objects of your disdain are trying to push it back down the mountain. Empathy allows us to ask: Are there ways to solve this problem that also work for those who see things differently? Can we alter teacher pay and assignment so as to address legitimate concerns about how the new system will work? Can we alter rules around virtual school staffing or tweak funding models to make these things work for and not against a principal's school-level efforts? Can we discuss reforms in ways that respect the possibility of good-faith disagreement?

Empathy helps us see the challenge from different perspectives. It lets us consider why those who oppose our noble efforts might see things differently, better understand their concerns, and perhaps identify opportunities to solve problems together. By abandoning sweeping proclamations for specific queries, it allows us to isolate opportunities for agreement and the more limited number of places where we'll need to have the knock-down, drag-out fights. Empathy is ultimately the difference between cage-busters who implode amidst endless battles and those who, studying their Sun-Tzu, operate with determination and deliberation.

Posted by Rick Hess at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Before I blogged, people who knew my writing generally knew it from my books or essays. Nowadays, though, many seem to know me primarily through RHSU. That's cool, but it means readers sometimes sidle up at conferences or speeches to ask, "How the heck can you be both for X and against Y?" After all, blog columns don't provide a lot of context or nuance.

I try to explain how I can be for rewarding excellence and against simple test-based merit pay; or why I believe in the potential of online learning but am skeptical about the impact of the Khan Academy; or why competition is a powerful tool for school improvement, but one which school choice today doesn't actually harness. Sometimes I get blank looks. Other times, someone will ask what they could read if they want to see how this all supposedly knits together.

Anyway, I thought I'd take a moment to answer that for any of you who might be curious. I usually point to five books I've penned (none very long) that collectively distill my thinking. I've tried to list them in order of import:

1] Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling (ASCD, 2010). Ed Unbound explores what it means to approach education as a "greenfield" endeavor. Examines the barriers; what's possible when it comes to using talent, tools, technology, and capital; and the challenges of quality control.

2] The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas (Harvard University Press, 2010). Same Thing tries to put today's reform efforts in historical context. Explains why those who oppose "reform" are defending not idyllic public schooling but anachronistic compromises...and why so many popular reforms--from merit pay to mayoral control--fail to cut deep enough, meaning that would-be reformers get stuck tweaking dysfunction. Kind of a prologue to Education Unbound.

3] Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Common Sense made the "reform" case that structural reform isn't "more important" than improving instruction, but that getting incentives and structures right is essential for sustained improvement. Addressed competition, performance accountability, teacher quality, leadership, governance, and the transformative potential of technology.

4] Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform (Brookings Institution Press, 1998). Spinning Wheels sought to explain why urban school systems reform so much to so little effect. Examined 57 urban districts during mid-1990s, finding that the typical district launched more than a dozen major reforms in a three-year window. The need to show that something was being done trumped any concern for implementation or execution.

5] Revolution at the Margins: The Impact of Competition on Urban School Systems (Brookings Institution Press, 2002). Revolution made the case that school choice advocates had too readily assumed that "choice" alone would produce dynamic educational competition. Studied heralded voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Edgewood, Texas, finding that incentives, institutions, and context conspired to dampen any competitive impact. Controversial at the time among choice advocates; much less so today.

If you do happen to pick these up, would welcome the chance to hear your thoughts, reactions, and criticisms.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last week, I questioned the American Educational Research Association's (of which I am a member) decision to adopt a partisan stance in charged debates over immigration policy and high school classes that promote racial pride. In a public response, the AERA, which bills itself as "the nation's leading scientific and scholarly association...devoted to advancing knowledge about education," doubled down, declaring (in an extended RHSU comment) it stands by its decision to boycott Georgia over the state's immigration policies and to denounce as "educationally indefensible" Arizona's move to limit K-12 ethnic studies offerings.

Unable (or unwilling) to distinguish between a political agenda and promoting public debate, AERA insisted it has a responsibility "to disseminate... research findings in order to facilitate an informed public policy decision-making process." Okay. If AERA wants to host debates where researchers debate policies or flag relevant research, that's cool. However, how boycotts or angrily upbraiding legislators serve to promote "informed public policy" is beyond me.

AERA justified its boycott, explaining, "Some members have indicated that they would not attend a meeting in Atlanta where they or other participants from Mexico, Haiti, and other countries could be racially profiled and harassed." I trust a research association like AERA has evidence on this score, and isn't merely allowing members to indulge in lazy, offensive stereotypes about the citizens of Georgia or the law enforcement community. When AERA produces the research documenting that conference attendees in Atlanta have been harassed due to the state's immigration policies, we'll have something to discuss. Right now, though, AERA is savaging the people of Georgia and taking sides in a charged debate based on nothing more than a claim that it's received reports of vague, unsupported concerns from anonymous AERA members. Am I the only one who's got a problem with that?

Meanwhile, AERA reiterated its bizarre claim that "a substantial body of research has shown that ethnic studies courses advance important state and national interests"--missing an opportunity to concede that the research is, at best, decidedly mixed. Indeed, questions like "should we teach racially-themed high school classes" ultimately can and should turn more on values and democratic debate than evidentiary claims by social science. As Columbia's Jeff Henig and I argued several years ago in "'Scientific Research' and Policymaking: A Tool, Not a Crutch,"

"Generally absent from debates over methodologically complex and technical work...is an appreciation of what the 'scientific method' can and cannot deliver. In many of these debates, research is unlikely to provide the definitive judgments [we might wish]...Scholarship's greatest value is not the ability to end policy disputes, but to encourage more thoughtful, disciplined, and tempered debate...Research as a collective enterprise--the clash of competing scholars attacking questions from different perspectives, with varied assumptions and methodologies--can leave us wiser and better equipped to make good choices. Ultimately, though, sifting through the accumulated evidence can only inform decisions; it cannot relieve us of them."

AERA's stance here fails miserably on all these counts. This is especially weird, because AERA is usually quick to explain that the complex, uncertain nature of education is why it's vital to support "mixed methods" research (e.g. stuff like ethnographic accounts). Indeed, given that AERA has historically cautioned against putting too much faith in the power or results of experimental research, one could be forgiven for thinking it's basing its stance on politics rather than principle.

Meanwhile, even the AERA's ardent defenders aren't helping its cause. Paul Thomas, a frequent commenter on RHSU, defended AERA by explaining that "ALL human behavior is political." Over at School Matters, Thomas elaborated, "The fact [is that] teaching [is] always political." If even AERA's defenders concede it's pursuing a political agenda, that's saying something. My friend Sara Mead weighed in to defend the AERA, but first felt compelled to concede, "There's a fair amount worth mocking where education research is concerned, and...[the] hypocrisy, sanctimony, narrow-mindedness posing as open-mindedness, and soft-headed thinking in the field."

Before we get to the key takeaway, three things to keep in mind. One, I've no problem with individual scholars choosing to denounce policies or take political stands. But I have a huge problem when they hijack a scholarly organization to which I belong and then speak in its name. Two, I've no problem with AERA sponsoring debates, convening commissions, or flagging studies relevant to important public questions. However, boycotting or denouncing specific states is a helluva lot different from informing the debate. Three, as I noted last week, AERA is remarkably inconsistent when deciding what to boycott or denounce--and its record bespeaks a starkly partisan agenda.

Bottom line: Faculty, researchers, students, and administrators at public universities and colleges (and the occasional public K-12 system) use public monies to participate in AERA. They use institutional travel funds to attend AERA gatherings. University libraries use public funds to subscribe to AERA journals. Researchers at private and public institutions may use public research funds from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, or IES to pay for travel to AERA or to fund expenses associated with publishing in its journals. Since AERA refuses to distinguish between operating as a scholarly and a political organization, public officials would do well to inquire whether tax dollars are underwriting AERA and whether this is an appropriate use of public funds.

I'd especially encourage those officials who don't subscribe to the AERA's agenda--including legislators; SHEEO members; university trustees; and those active in the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, American Legislative Exchange Council, or the State Policy Network--to take a hard look at how scarce public funds are being spent. So long as AERA seems determined to hew to a politicized agenda, it seems reasonable to ask that members pay out of their own pockets to attend its gatherings or receive its publications.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Recently, Education Week's "Living in Dialogue" blog featured a number of provocative posts on Teach For America. Phil Kovacs, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, penned a guest post that offered a sharp critique of TFA and the research supporting its efforts. There was also an impassioned back-and-forth between two TFA corps members on TFA's "locus of control" concept. Given high interest in TFA, the relevance of research on TFA to the broader teacher quality agenda, and my own long, complicated history with TFA as a critical friend, I thought it worth sitting down with TFA's VP for Research Heather Harding to get her take. (Full disclosure: I recently hosted a working group for TFA which pulled together TFA leaders and a number of outside researchers to discuss "next generation" research possibilities. Veteran readers will also recognize Heather as a former RHSU guest blogger.)

Rick Hess: Heather, what's your role with TFA?
Heather Harding: I am a vice president of research at Teach For America. Our focus is to initiate and help facilitate external partners doing research on the impact of Teach For America. I'm essentially a matchmaker or a conductor for all the folks internally who are working on programs and continuous improvement and the larger research community.

RH: At this point, TFA has been with us for a touch over 20 years. What do we know about TFA at this point? If there are three or four key findings, what are they?
HH: We know that Teach For America is good at identifying the folks who are going to be leaders in a variety of sectors and redirecting their energy towards the education sector. That includes classroom teaching but it also speaks to education leadership, policy, and those sorts of things, with entrepreneurship being a key piece of that. The other thing we know is that Teach For America corps members tend to outperform their peer teachers, both beginning and more experienced, in math and science. And people can quibble because some of those effect sizes are small, but if you look through the trend line over time, even in the early studies, you see this pronounced effect in math and science teaching.

And the third thing that we know is that Teach For America programmatically has made dramatic changes in training and ongoing support that seem to have allowed us to maintain quality as we grow to scale. The difference between training and supporting 500 teachers in the 1990s and 4,000 teachers, 6,000 teachers in the new millennium is [huge]. It's something that we've had to think about; about how to maintain quality over time, in selecting them, training them, and then offering this development program. And we haven't seen a downward trend in the results on student achievement, so I think you have to believe that we're maintaining quality and paying attention to continuously improving the model.

RH: Recently, there's been criticism of TFA's research record. Philip Kovacs, a professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, suggests that we don't really have much sense of how effective TFA teachers are, that we're not doing a very good job of understanding their impact, and that we're paying insufficient attention to the effects of TFA-induced turnover. What are your thoughts on this score?
HH: In the last five years, we've been relatively fortunate that, one, there's been a number of studies mainly coming out of the states with stronger data. So New York has strong data sets [as do] North Carolina, Louisiana, [and] Tennessee. Policy folks and economists interested in teacher quality and teacher effectiveness have [been able to] conduct studies that we've been happy to participate in that compare teachers from various sources.

The Kovacs debate is largely one that relies on the peer review process. [Ed. Note: one of Kovacs' criticisms surrounding a study by George Noell and Kristin Gansle of Louisiana State University and hosted by the National Council on Teacher Quality on TFA in Louisiana was that the study was not peer-reviewed.] We think that's important, but we also think that if you look at the evidence, both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed [but featuring] a standard methodological rigor, that we see that there's clearly a pattern that Teach For America corps members achieve academic gains that are equal to or larger to those of other new teachers and, in some instances, more experienced teachers. It's a small relative advantage, but it does seem relatively clear in math and science and high school...[and] we see that other areas like middle school, English, language arts are slowly catching up. So we feel encouraged.

Many of these studies come out initially in a pilot form or are self-published and then they go through the peer review process. So we see that as important, but academic processes are long and we're a program that changes our model and tries to make improvements every year. So we want to grab whatever evidence we can. And we also hope that as data systems become stronger, we can have these kinds of studies in every state. We've got ones going on right now that we're collaborating with or participating in Missouri. We're trying to get one up in Florida. It looks like there's going to be one in Arizona. We really welcome a lot of activity on this front.

RH: This doesn't necessarily address the concern that much of this work has not appeared in academic journals or undergone peer review. How do you respond to that concern?
HH: I think that the methodology across [the studies] is very similar. While all of them haven't been through peer review, I don't think that they have huge methodological challenges. As you know, there are all kinds of philosophical wars about methodology and, frankly, the relevance of standardized test scores. We think that's one vehicle to consider our impact. We'd love more studies on different metrics.

One of the things that we don't necessarily have a lot of control over is what a researcher decides to do with the study that they write. We are supportive of people going through the peer review process...[but] we're partnering with folks who are going to do research probably with or without us.

RH: Now, how about the critique that the research focuses fairly narrowly on value-added reading and math scores? Kovacs suggests that TFA places a premium on driving those scores, and therefore, while it's not a surprise that TFA teachers seem to do okay by that metric, it's unclear whether the students are benefiting to the degree that value-added might imply.
HH: I think we want to know more about how to better study those other things. We're very interested in that. And in our internal system, we actually use our "teaching as leadership" rubric to test for those things that aren't necessarily going to show up on a test score. I think where you have a great test you're going to have good teaching and learning. When you have a not so great test, you might be concerned. So, while we think the tests are telling us something important, we don't think they're the only metric out there.

However, the currency of policy research [today] is the test score. That's really the legacy of NCLB that we all have to live with. It's not telling us nothing, right? So it's not a useless exercise to look at the student learning that's reflected in a test score. I look to the lessons that Louisiana has provided. The state department took the initiative and looked at their teacher prep programs comparatively and used value-added to do that, and then used that information to push back on programs where they were falling down. That's how we use this information.

That being said, we also look at observational data on teachers. We're...looking to add some student surveys. We're interested in all of it. The fact that we have work focused on student test score data doesn't mean that we are exclusively interested in that. We're interested in that, no doubt, but we also think you need to get as much information as you can. Test scores don't really predict [a student's] destiny and their educational opportunities.

RH: Speaking of which, there was a recent debate between two TFA corps members about the whole "locus of control" question and whether TFA's commitment to having its corps members drive student learning means that TFA can seem dismissive or unaware of the other challenges in children's lives. How do you think about this challenge when evaluating teacher performance?
HH: Our rubric is more expansive than just measuring students' learning through test scores. If folks look at our rubric they'll see that we're looking at things more holistically...Just in the last year we've begun to look at creating a richer portfolio of data that we can collect from teachers about their impact in the classroom. It includes formative assessments, both off the shelf as well as developed by teachers. It includes observational data. In the last year, we've incorporated a real shift in language that talks about transformational teaching...that makes a difference on any growth measure that you might select, but that it's also important for the work we're trying to do that teachers consider what would put kids on a different life trajectory and what that's going to mean. So you might imagine that it's good for kids to know their multiplication tables, but it's also important for them to understand if they want to be an astronaut or a medical doctor, what would the course sequence look like and can they see themselves filling those roles?

RH: What are a couple current research relationships that TFA is involved with?
HH: We're in an ongoing relationship with Ed Labs, Roland Fryer's outfit at Harvard. He has continued to have an interest in how programs can further engage young leaders in education reform. We did two studies that came out over the summer focused on our selection model and on our alumni's perceptions and their continuation and work in the education sector.

We're going to continue to look again at selection and, in particular, we're going to look at how to better screen candidates...We're also going to do some testing around professional development interventions that seem to make a difference for impact on value-added. We have an ongoing relationship with Monica Higgins, who is looking at our alumni impact, thinking about whether and how our folks become interested in social entrepreneurship and what kinds of things we do or what kind of experiences they have [that prepare them for] those challenges.

We want to know a little bit more about Teach For America's alumni long-term and their retention in the sector. We have another project that's looking at the relationship between Teach For America corps members in a school community and the rate at which students in that school apply to more selective colleges. And this work is being done by a young scholar named Jonathan Meer, who is at Texas A&M, along with Caroline Hoxby. It's not a causal relationship, but the correlation that if you bring in folks who have a higher-profile college experience, that might encourage young people to apply to a wider variety of schools.

RH: If you had to name a couple key research priorities for TFA going forward, what are they?
HH: We want to continue to understand the value added by our teachers in every market. We're a national program and we have studies that look at the impact on student achievement in about six states. We're in 30-plus states, so we need these studies all over because our hunch is that the teacher market is different. We want to continue to do that work and find good partners.

We know that a big part of our mission is focused on what alumni do. We have a long way to go to figure out what we mean by leadership in the education sector, so we need to do some internal work, but we also want to keep tracking what our grads do and what our alums do. We're interested in their role in school leadership and understanding the barriers for them moving forward. I think the Fryer and Higgins studies are really cutting-edge and we want to continue that momentum.

Finally, I would say that we need to start thinking about the macro impact at Teach For America. So what has it meant given that we're 20 years old? What has it meant for Teach For America to be in the ed reform sector, what's been the impact on policy, on how we think about what investments to make, and on Teach For America's impact in communities where we've been for 20 years?

RH: There are voices in the education research community who have felt that TFA is not that interested in the traditional education research space. I'm curious whether you think TFA has contributed to that impression and whether you're interested in working with researchers who are not already partnering with you?
HH: I think that for a long time Teach For America was small enough that helping somebody gather data for a relatively small impact study was not very interesting or didn't seem like it would be a worthwhile pursuit. I think that we are operating at scale now and there are a lot of opportunities to partner with us and get access to some of the data that we have. We have a robust network of universities that partner with us so that our folks can get certified and get masters degrees. Faculty on those campuses have some advantage in terms of having access to programs. But my team at Teach For America fields all kinds of requests to do research with us and we also go out looking for people to do that kind of work with.

We don't fund a lot of those activities but we do partner with people to go out and identify funding. I think that's sometimes been the challenge. We've been criticized for not being open, but in my four-year tenure, I think we've only said "no" to a couple of proposals that have been presented to us.

RH: If somebody wanted to reach out to you guys, who is the appropriate person to reach out to and what's the best way to get a hold of them?
HH: On our webpage, on the research section, we have an email address that goes right into our request system. Or people can reach out directly to me: heather.harding@teachforamerica.com.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:37 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Today's debates over teacher evaluation mostly just leave me tired. On the one side, we've got "reformers" who've accurately identified real problems, suggested sensible principles (like we should work to identify teachers who are better and worse at their jobs)... and then rushed to champion crude, inflexible policies that turn good ideas into caricatures.

On the other side, we've got teachers and "public school defenders" who aren't content to challenge simple-minded solutions, but who argue that we can't really distinguish good educators from bad ones...and ought to instead spend lots of time worrying about whether teachers are happy.

I've no use for either camp. I don't want to split the difference, find a "middle course," or any of that. I think that both camps just get it flat wrong. It's good to identify problems and to respond. But it's a mistake to imagine that those responses can always be translated into policy solutions.

On Wednesday, in a terrific piece, the Washington Post's Bill Turque penned a page one story on Sarah Wysocki, a former DC Public Schools teacher who was terminated under DC's IMPACT teacher evaluation system because of low value-added scores. Wysocki may or may not be a good teacher. She sounds good in the account, and had promising evaluation scores. But there are certainly reasonable concerns about whether her value-added scores were compromised by cheating that may have inflated fourteen students' prior year scores--as well as all the usual questions about how much weight we want to put in these numbers, and how fully we think they reflect a teacher's performance.

Especially intriguing is that Wysocki was quickly snatched up by neighboring Fairfax County, one of the nation's highest-performing school systems. Fairfax superintendent Jack Dale told me on Wednesday that he questioned how much faith to put into Wysocki's value-added scores, and added that Fairfax is focused on more than just a teacher's reading and math scores. Dale said that Fairfax parents probably regard instruction reading and math as no more than "twenty to twenty-five percent" of what they expect from their schools and that, "More and more parents are saying we test too much, so they're not really looking at those test scores that much... I see less and less emphasis on test scores now than even a couple years ago."

I grew up in Fairfax and know the system fairly well. It's fair to say that Fairfax families generally chose the system's schools because they desire a broad emphasis on science, world languages, gifted programs, music, and an array of aptitudes that those assessments don't capture. DCPS's laser focus on reading and math gains, and the assumption that these scores are a good proxy for a teacher's general performance, doesn't make sense in the Fairfax context.

At the same time, that doesn't mean they're wrong-headed for DC. The DCPS leadership is trying to turn around a historically low-performing system that has long failed at even its most basic responsibilities, and where vast numbers of students lack rudimentary skills in reading and math. Thus, it's certainly reasonable for DCPS to build a teacher evaluation system that seeks to base 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation on reading and math value-added.

In other words, neither Fairfax nor DCPS are necessarily right (or wrong). Rather, they're confronting different challenges and needs, and trying to make reasonable choices about how to proceed. The world is a complex place and adopting mechanistic, one-size-fits-all solutions, like so many of the statewide teacher evaluation and pay systems being championed today, make it likely that thousands of schools and millions of teachers and students will be snared by systems that are a poor match for their needs.

Also on Wednesday, MetLife released the 28th annual Survey of the American Teacher, which reported that 44 percent of the nation's teachers are "very satisfied" with their jobs. This was the lowest reading since 1989. The decline in satisfaction occasioned the usual hand-wringing and angst. (At the same time, 77 percent of teachers said they're treated as professionals by the community, suggesting that those who claim teachers feel under assault may be exaggerating just a wee bit.)

I don't get the angst. Why? This is just another face of the one-size-fits-all problem. I don't care that teacher morale is down in the aggregate. I would care if we knew that morale is lousy among teachers who are doing a good job and working hard. I want those teachers to feel valued, energized, enthusiastic, and all that. On the other hand, if a teacher is lousy or doing lousy work, they should have lousy morale. Hopefully it'll encourage them to leave sooner. And we've got plenty of reason to worry about teacher quality in the aggregate. For instance, 29 percent of teachers say they are likely to leave the teaching profession within the next five years--up from 17 percent in 2009. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think the right answer is: neither. Getting it just right, Regis Shields, director of Education Resource Strategies, told Ed Week's Liana Heitin, "We need more information on who the 29 percent" are. Shields said, "If these aren't effective teachers and this increases the effectiveness of the teaching force, that's great. If they're high-quality teachers, then we have some concerns."

And that's about as smart a response to one-size-fits-all thinking as I can muster.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The American Educational Research Association (of which I am a member) modestly labels itself "the nation's leading scientific and scholarly association...devoted to advancing knowledge about education." Readers may assume that AERA does its best to avoid gratuitous partisan political fights.

Ha!! Hah-hah! Silly readers. Indeed, it often seems that ed research is an excuse for AERA's leaders to dress up partisan political leanings in something more impressive than fevered ideology. That said, I don't mind the partisanship and ideology so much as I mind the hypocrisy, misuse of research, and attempt to hijack scholarly institutions.

What's up? I recently opened the most recent "AERA News Highlights" to see tedious updates on NCES, AERA's new logo, and the federal budget--all topped by enthusiastic announcements that AERA had denounced Arizona policymakers and decided to boycott Georgia for adopting laws intended to discourage illegal immigration.

With regard to Arizona, AERA decried the "elimination of the Mexican American studies program in the Tucson schools. AERA Council urged the Governing Board to design and reintroduce such courses and urged the State Legislature to repeal HB2281." AERA went so far as to declare the Arizona law "educationally indefensible." Why would a national research organization wade into a state's course offerings? AERA explained that the legislature is "infringe[ing] on local school board autonomy," "threaten[ing] the academic freedom of those who teach in and design courses for local school boards," and that a "substantial body of research has shown that ethnic studies courses advance important state and national interests."

First, let's note that the AERA hasn't seemed unduly troubled when local autonomy is compromised by state or federal prescriptions surrounding special education or anti-bullying. Second, it really ought to be denouncing state standards, the Common Core, and graduation requirements if local teachers deserve untrammeled freedom to teach or design courses. Third, the evidentiary claim is nothing short of ludicrous. It's one thing to claim that some research may suggest that some ethnic studies have some benefits for some students at some times. But it's a laughable misrepresentation of what research can "prove" for AERA to claim dispositive empirical evidence demonstrating the value of ethnic studies courses.

With regard to Georgia, in May of last year, Georgia enacted HB87, an aggressive law intended to discourage illegal immigration by restricting employment and stepping up enforcement of existing immigration laws. This is a controversial topic on which reasonable people can disagree. However, AERA summarily dismissed the law as violating AERA's "code of ethics" and "democratic" values. AERA vaguely asserts that the law means that some AERA members will not feel "welcome" and that "some members have indicated that they...could be racially profiled and harassed" (the basis for this claim is not made clear). More broadly, and confusingly, AERA says, "AERA is giving priority attention to promoting consideration of the substantial base of science and scholarship that can address the topic of immigration and education and the assets for all of welcoming and inclusive educational environments."

First, it's peculiar that AERA has never expressed any concern about holding conferences in venues like San Francisco, where state laws or city ordinances may make some members from Christian colleges feel "unwelcome" or "harassed." Second, illegal immigration implies costs and benefits for both children in this country illegally and for legal residents. It's hard to understand how scholars can claim to be even-handed while boycotting a locale based upon its policies. For instance, AERA's claim to be an independent voice would be more credible if it was boycotting not only Georgia (and, earlier, Arizona) but also "sanctuary cities," which decline to enforce the nation's immigration laws. Third, the casual and banal embrace of "welcoming and inclusive" schools, absent any acknowledgment of the costs or impact upon citizens, implies a decidedly one-sided take on the issue.

Rather than take sides in complex, emotional debates, AERA might have focused on helping examine how the disruptions caused by this kind of legislation affect children who are illegal immigrants and their peers. It might have asked scholars to cost out how much money is diverted from children who are legal residents of Georgia to those who are not. It might encourage scholars to ask how much illegal immigration burdens educators or how an influx of low-income, non-English speaking students may distort our view of school performance.

AERA suggests that the research "proves" that the policies in question are bad. That's just sophomoric. Research can no more prove such a thing than it can "prove" the right process for determining citizenship or what should be the "right" population makeup of Georgia. These are all contested questions that involve weighing competing interests and considerations. (For a much long exploration of all this, see my book When Research Matters).

Unlike the self-assured leadership of AERA, I see the issues here as complex ones on which people of goodwill can disagree. I don't begrudge AERA's leaders their right to think these are misguided policies. If they, as individuals, wish to berate state legislators, more power to them. It's that whole free speech thing. But, as an AERA member, I wonder why they feel obliged (or authorized) to critique these policies in my name and that of the research community.

I'd like to think I could belong to the nation's largest association of educational researchers without having to fear that personal political agendas are being pursued in my name. It's a mystery to me why AERA doesn't understand that this undermines the profession's credibility and reduces confidence that education scholars can distinguish between their personal politics and their scholarship.

Two choices. AERA can clean up its act and start behaving like a scholarly, rather than a political, organization. Or, if AREA continues to engage in partisan advocacy, it seems appropriate for state legislators and university trustees to start asking whether researchers at public institutions ought to be using public funds to pay for membership, travel to its conferences, or conduct AERA-related business.

Posted by Rick Hess at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I recently had the chance to sit down and chat with Liz Fagen, superintendent of Douglas County School District in Colorado. Liz is intriguing. She's a superintendent of a fair-sized (60,000 students), suburban, high-performing system who is pushing aggressively forward on controversial efforts around school vouchers and teacher quality. We pay a lot of attention to urban school districts, but much less to high-performing suburbs--where there's typically less interest in much of the current "reform" agenda. All of that makes Liz and Douglas County kind of unique. I thought it worth chatting with Liz a bit about what they're up to.

Rick Hess: Many readers may not be familiar with Douglas County. Can you say a bit why some observers think the district is such an interesting place?
Liz Fagen: There are a few things that the school district has taken on in a systematic fashion. Probably the most noteworthy is the board voted in what we call the choice scholarship program. Other people call it a voucher, [but] I think it's slightly different than just the pure voucher. The idea is to allow students to select [a partner] school. The child can attend a private school with a portion of the revenue we receive from the state. That's one of the big things.

[Another is] we have discovered that while there are a lot of assessments out there, there are really no assessments that measure what we--and our parents--find to be the most important outcomes for our students. So what we're working to do is develop our own assessment system. Which has turned out to be, really, quite a project, because we haven't been able to find the third-party support we thought we might.

So we're working with our own teachers and our own assessment department, developing assessments for our students' most important outcomes. [This includes] some of the more interesting 21st-century skills [around] creativity, collaboration, and communications.... [We want] a higher quality assessment, and then to collect the data that we get from those assessments and use that to identify some of the best teachers in our school district.

RH: You're pushing forward on teacher evaluation, too, with a bit of a twist. Can you say a bit about what you're doing?
LF: We have three different areas where we measure teacher performance. One is through a new evaluation instrument; the second is through the balanced assessment system, which I just referred to; and the third is in areas that we call world class education targets. Basically, they're things that we believe we need to see in every classroom going forward. And if the teacher does well in all three areas, then we have put forward a framework that provides them with an additional amount of pay for hitting the rigorous targets...We're moving away from the step-and-lane salary schedule toward what we hope is paying teachers based on market value for what they can teach their students. And [we're] then overlaying that with pay-for-performance systems where they can make additional money based on how good they are.

RH: The assessment piece obviously entails a ton of work on your part. What are you looking for in assessments that you are having trouble finding?
LF: What we're finding is really low-level kind of stuff that's out there. What we call the "floor."... What we want from our students is a lot more than that for them to be college and career ready...where students actually perform something and then the teacher loads the data about their performance into the system. Or even performance tasks that are more electronic in nature. Our dream is the Microsoft Light Table, where you have kindergartners doing work on a computer screen and the information is being captured about their progress and the teacher can assess that information.

I use the example of the Tag Reader pen. Leap Frog has this little pen and when my daughter uses it in a Tag Reader book the pen actually learns what my daughter can do. And if I plug the pen into my computer it...will actually show me how she's doing on the various components of the learning progression. The pen is measuring what my daughter is doing as she's doing it. But it's not an additional assessment. I'm from Iowa and I joke with my teachers that if the pig doesn't get fatter stop weighing it. So we don't want to spend a whole lot of time assessing. We want the assessments to be natural, in real time. We don't want our great teachers to have to do extra stuff. Instead we want to capture all that data real time just like that little pen does.

RH: Where are you on the assessment and evaluation pieces, in terms of the time line?
LF: Our assessment department is currently field testing items in math and reading. Our principals are working through the year getting used to the new evaluation system, really getting their feet wet with it. Of course the market-based pay and the components of pay have to go through negotiation process. So we're doing that right now.

RH: Will the assessments have to be revisited when the Common Core is implemented?
LF: I believe that our assessment officer would tell you that because we're using the Common Core to develop the most important outcomes for our students, we're already aligned--we just exceed it.

RH: How do you characterize the Douglas County school system?
LF: Douglas County is just south of Denver. We have approximately 60,000 students, about 80 schools, including 11 charter schools that are district-operated. Our demographic is largely a middle-class school district. We don't have a great deal of minority students [or] low-income students. We do have a few schools that have higher numbers [of those students], so it exists in pockets.

RH: And what's achievement look like?
LF: It's a very high-achieving school district; we're always in the top three districts in the state. And again, we don't feel like that gives us a lot of information. We're really interested in knowing how our students are doing on a more international stage. So this year we are piloting the PISA test in two of our high schools. We want really want to know that our students can compete with any students in the world for whatever they want to do. And so we're trying to push the envelope and think about things well beyond the low-bar state standards.

RH: Can you talk a bit more about this choice scholarship program? What was the thinking behind it and how has it been received?
LF: I wasn't actually here when that started. But in 2009 there were a slate of candidates for the board that ran together. And they ran on a reform platform [saying that Douglas County] is a good school district...but it's time to push it forward. They were all elected at a pretty high margin and they felt like the community had spoken clearly and was saying, "We want reform, we want you to get in there and push the district forward again."...So the board came in and they started out of the gate with some charter school work [and] eventually they started what was called the choice task force.

We took [the task force's recommendations] and we immediately went and met with the Colorado Department of Education. We explained that we have the most amazing schools in Douglas County [and] we do not fear competition from private schools. But we would like the opportunity to make other schools available if our students wanted to go there. So CDE worked together with us, we met with various groups, and we took lots of feedback and input.

And ultimately we designed the program, private schools applied to be our partners, we put them on a list, and we had a pilot of 500 students. The students get to choose from any of these private schools, but they have to get in on their own merit. If they do, we give the parents a check endorsed over to the school for 75 percent of the pupil's tuition... In March the board voted to accept our entire strategic plan including the choice scholarship program. They created the policy and we were off and running. And then we were sued by the ACLU and it was enjoined by a Denver district court judge.

RH: And what's the current court status?
LF: It is now in the Colorado court of appeals. We've been told that no matter how that goes either side would appeal, so we know that we're heading for the Colorado Supreme Court. We are in such an interesting budget time in our school district, where for the first time, really, budgets are shrinking instead of growing. And we are a growing school district--even during these times we grow around 1,200 to 2,000 students per year. We used to grow as many as 3,000 per year. The board was really committed to saying, "Look, we know that the budgets are shrinking..So we will not pay any litigation. So we're going to privately raise all that money," and that's what we've done.

RH: You've sketched an agenda that most would regard as pretty contentious, especially for a high-performing system. Have you gotten much push back with the board or the community?
LF: The board is great... I think that the community is a fifty- fifty split on the choice scholarship program. Just because there are people that question their tax dollars going to a private entity, and particularly to a religious school.

RH:You're a suburban district, and few suburban districts in the nation have embraced this kind of reform agenda. Why do you think that is?
LF: I think one of the reasons is it is harder in a suburban school district when you have high-performing students. Change is hard if all of your metrics are implying that everything is great.... [But] I think it's incumbent on school districts like Douglas County to lead the way, to try things and to be partners with urban districts in saying, "We're going to pilot this and we'll let you know how it goes. And we'll help you if you want to do it and vice versa."

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:14 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) has proposed an "Education-ARPA," modeled on the famed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Obama administration has included a similar proposal, carving the dollars out of i3. Projected funding seems to hover in the $30 to $70 million range. (The proposals are cost neutral, meaning they'd be paid for by off-setting cuts.)

The idea intrigues me, but I've been as confused as most others about what ARPA-ED would look like or actually do. To try to get a clearer picture of what Sen. Bennet and the Obama administration have in mind, I invited the Senator and some key authorities over on Wednesday morning to explain it all at more length. The conversation included a public event, featuring Bennet; Jim Shelton, chief of ED's Office of Innovation and Improvement; John Easton, Director of the Institute for Education Sciences; and Ken Gabriel, the Deputy Director of DARPA (you can watch it here).

I came away more comfortable with the proposal. It didn't hurt that Gabriel did a terrific job of clearly and bluntly discussing DARPA and its role. Created in 1958 in the aftermath of the Soviet launch of Sputnik, DARPA operates as a nimble operation able to pursue strategically critical R&D.

Gabriel argued that the key word in the agency's title is not "advanced" or "research," but "project." This gives the agency a tightly defined mission--to pursue and create applied, transformative capabilities. This tack obviously requires a willingness to invest in programs with uncertain prospects and which may take a number of years to deliver, if they ever do. One current project is seeking to design a plane than can fly Mach 20 (twenty times the speed of sound). Previous projects have eventually yielded success like unmanned aircraft, stealth technology, and the internet. This patient, applied approach is very different from how R&D typically unfolds in education, where research is far less likely to focus on developing applications and where there is a demand for big answers that can be used right now. DARPA's focus on specific breakthrough capabilities strikes me as analogous to what I've previously described in Education Unbound as creating new "one percent" solutions--where you develop the ability to get profoundly better at solving one small but significant problem. One percent solutions don't "fix" schools; but if you develop one, and then another, and then another, stubborn problems start to become more tractable.

Any reason to think this kind of approach can usefully translate to the world of schooling, higher education, and workforce training, where it's about complex human interactions and not stealth technology? I think so. First, it's not as if the Department of Defense doesn't deal with teams, mentoring, training, and such. More to the point, ARPA-ED would make more sense for some kinds of capabilities than others. It would need to be directed accordingly. I find it much easier to envision a promising program to help students master conversational Mandarin or the principles of calculus in six weeks than one which "turns around" schools or figures out "optimal" pay systems. I could imagine projects that help an ELL student make up three years of English acquisition in three months, an iPad app that can help identify and remediate problems in early reading, or an assessment that can capture cognitive development in more robust, compelling ways.

Gabriel alluded to an intriguing DARPA project that enjoyed enormous success at workforce training. The Institute for Defense Analysis has reported, "In a recent study, DARPA compared students who trained to be Navy Information System Technicians, and found that those who had been trained by a new digital tutor outperformed traditionally-trained students by two standard deviations. In other words, the average student trained by the new digital tutor outperforms around 98 percent of students trained using traditional instruction."

Gabriel was very clear about what enables DARPA to be successful despite its modest size (DARPA spends just $2.8 billion of the Department of Defense's sprawling, $60 billion annual research and development budget). An independent agency of about 220 employees, DARPA's director reports directly to the Secretary of Defense. It's a remarkably flat operation, with just a half-dozen office directors, a deputy director, and a director providing all the management. The agency has freedom from civil service and hiring restrictions, and purposefully recruits outsiders from the worlds of academe, research, science, and technology to generate fresh thinking and ideas. Employees typically stay three to five years, and the work mostly consists at any given moment of different staff pursuing about 100 projects, each costing perhaps $15 or $20 million. The actual work is not done by DARPA, but by research universities, private sector firms, and other contracted parties. Gabriel was excruciatingly clear that DARPA wouldn't work if it was run like a typical federal agency. He remarked that "people are the lifeblood of the agency" and that "ideas are fragile," and therefore that the agency must be free to seek technical expertise; to recruit "with a sense of urgency;" to be small, autonomous, and agile; to have staff serve and then leave; and to be buffered from personal and political agendas on Capitol Hill or in DoD.

For any ARPA-ED proposal to make sense, it has to incorporate the same capabilities as DARPA. And that's an immense challenge. One savvy DC veteran enumerated on Wednesday the things that could go wrong: Congressional micro-management and an insistence on "immediately useful" results; an inability to attract or hire real talent due to hiring rules; an inability to move quickly due to cumbersome agency procedures and procurement rules; the desire of established research outfits, advocacy groups, and regional interests for earmarks and set-asides; and ED's aversion to dealing with for-profits.

There are a bunch of interesting details I won't wade into right now. One is that DARPA can count on DoD to be a giant customer for its best work. An ARPA-ED would have to instead depend on districts, states, and colleges to buy its product. Shelton spoke to this, arguing that the logic of ARPA-ED does depend on the faith that demand will emerge for capabilities which clearly represent a profound improvement. Another issue is that DARPA seeds innovation by being clear that intellectual property is owned not by the government but by those doing the work; that ensures it seeds the marketplace and doesn't stifle it. It's also unclear how ARPA-ED would proceed with funding which would amount to just one or two percent of what DARPA enjoys.

Here's where I come out. I like the idea. I believe there's a vital role for this kind of project-driven federal R&D. This can, as Shelton notes, help equip U.S. firms to thrive in the multi-trillion dollar international education marketplace. But this is only worth doing if it's done right, and that will be enormously difficult. There will be huge temptations to leave the design vague, get the thing launched, and then hope for the best. I think that would be a catastrophic mistake. And, we don't have new money to spend. So, I'm in...if the proposal is cost-neutral and, more importantly, if the legislation carefully and explicitly incorporates and safeguards the features that have fueled DARPA's success.

Posted by Rick Hess at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend