December 2010 Archives

Alexander Russo asks: "Where are the Best Novels About Education?" and gets some pretty solid answers. I'm surprised, though, that no one mentioned youth classics like These Happy Golden Years, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of Windy Poplars, or Jo's Boys. To be sure, these books are for teenage girls, rather than adults. And they are about education in a very different era (teacher contracts no longer include requirements to haul water or stoke the stove). But the trials, tribulations and occasional triumphs of working as a teacher are central to these books, and some of the heroines' frustrations (fortunately not all of them!) would ring familiar to many first-year teachers today.

Young female teachers actually hold a prominent place in the canon of young adult literature. As a child, I always assumed I'd grow up to be a teacher not just because my father and grandfather were educators, but because Laura Ingalls, Anne Shirley, and Jane Eyre were teachers, too. Hardly surprising, given that the career options open to female heroines were until quite recently limited to wife, teacher, and perhaps nurse or woman of ill-repute (though the latter was hardly suitable for YA fiction until the last couple decades!)! As career options for women have expanded, it's probably not surprising that we see fewer awesome teacher heroines. Although it's troubling to me that teacher heroines have been displaced in YA and chick lit not so much by characters with the types of high-powered careers that we hear have drawn women away from teaching, but by heroines with vapid or simply implausible careers.

Granted: I'm hardly a connoisseur of the chick lit genre, but all the women in them seem to be celebrity/fashion/sex journalists or wanna-be journalists, publicists, or chefs. Nothing against these careers. I know really awesome, successful, lovely people in all of them. I'm just not sure why they've become the go-to aspirational career for contemporary YA and chick lit women. Maybe Richard Whitmire and I should team up to write a best selling chick lit novel about a sexy female engineer struggling with the "marriageable mate dilemma."

But there are a lot more young women working as teachers than there are in these other careers, so why don't we see more new YA and chick lit books about them? (Or chick flicks? Not that I'm sure it would be a good thing to see Katherine Heigl playing a teacher in her next movie. Yeah, scratch that one. Or on TV? Lily on How I Met Your Mother is awesome, but should she and Glee's Mr. Schuster and Sue Sylvester really be carrying the banner for our nation's largest profession?)

Anyhoo......

I'm a sucker for classic children's and young adult fiction, so books like Anne of Avonlea remain dear to my heart. But I also think the very difference between the educational system they depict and the one we have today makes them relevant to contemporary education debates. We tend to act as if the key features of our educational system were carved in stone "just the way things are." Books like these remind us of just how recently "things" weren't at all like this. They also remind us of how far we've come in many respects (it's a good thing that we no longer expect teachers to "board" with their students' parents!), which should be encouraging to anyone who gets discouraged from time to time about the seemingly slow pace of educational improvement.

Posted by Sara Mead at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Speaking of the need to expand the supply of high-performing school options: Mark Schneider and Naomi Rubin DeVeaux have produced a sobering report on the lack of real quality school choices for kids in the District of Columbia. Families in D.C. have choice aplenty--about 70% of DC kids attend a school other than their neighborhood assigned school. But only a minority of those choices are actually good choices. And the highest performing schools, both charters and in DCPS, tend to be oversubscribed, meaning that many families that don't get into those schools wind up choosing instead schools whose performance in poor or unknown.

There are a variety of implications here around the school choice process itself in D.C. (particularly related to the near-impossibility of getting into a good school after the entry grade). But the foremost issue is that D.C. needs to dramatically expand the supply of good schools for children and their families.

Earlier this week I wrote a bit about closing down low-performing schools. As a member of the board that authorizes charter schools in D.C., I know firsthand that we have too many poorly performing charter schools, some of which may ultimately need to get out of the business. The Public Charter School Board closed down 4 such low-performing schools in the past year alone.

But while poor performance by charter schools must not be tolerated, closing low-performing schools ultimately won't make that much difference if we don't also replace those schools with better performers. That's ultimately an even bigger challenge than closing down low-performers.

Posted by Sara Mead at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Cato's Andrew Coulson takes issue with a recent Brookings report's recommendations that data on charter school lotteries be included in state and local student longitudinal data systems. Never mind that Coulson doesn't actually seem to understand what the report is recommending (which is interesting). I'm more interested in his general opposition to requiring any schools to admit students by lottery.

In one respect, I'm sympathetic to Coulson's arguments: To the extent that lottery requirements are an effort to ensure fair distribution of limited slots in desirable public schools, they're clearly inadequate. Much better would be to expand the supply of high-performing schools and eliminate the need for lotteries--although I clearly disagree with Coulson about how best to do that.

But there's another reason, beyond simply allocative fairness, to want to limit the ability of schools to select their students. Education is an industry in which a producer's cost of providing services, as well as the quality and results of those services, is a function not only of the producer's own quality and effectiveness, but also of the population of customers they attract. In such industries, there is a strong incentive for producers to seek to maximize their profits by attracting and/or selecting only the cheapest and easiest to serve customers, rather than delivering the most efficient services. We see examples of this in the higher education sector, where elite schools become elite primary by selecting the already most-distinguished students, as well as in cherry-picking by insurance companies in the health care sector.

Getting good at attracting or selecting for only the cheapest/easiest customers can be very beneficial to producers, but has negative social impacts. That's particularly the case in socially significant sectors like health care or education, where you run the risk that hard-to-serve customers can be left without access to necessary services. But there are social costs regardless of sector. Energies that producers spend improving their ability to attract/select the most desirable customers are energies they're not spending on becoming more efficient or effective at actually providing services or products. And the resulting lost innovation and efficiencies in actual product/service delivery reduce overall social welfare.

That's an important reason to want to ensure that the majority of schools are NOT allowed to selectively admit their students. Avoiding the temptation to focus on selection rather than actually serving kids better is a major argument for lotteries for admission to charter schools, district-operated public schools of choice, and publicly subsidized private schools, too.

Of course, the major shortcoming of libertarianism is the failure to recognize either a.) any such thing as social welfare, or b.) that there are circumstances in which individual producers and consumers acting reasonably to maximize their individual welfare can fail to maximize social welfare, so I'm not surprised that Coulson doesn't recognize this.

Posted by Sara Mead at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Per previous on the rarity of successful school turnarounds: The difficulty of school turnaround is underscored by the news that D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson has revoked the contract of Friends of Bedford, a New York-based nonprofit organization hired to manage and turn around D.C.'s Dunbar High School.

The troubling statistics for Dunbar--which had 22 "serious" security incidents alone, more than any other DCPS high school, and where a recent survey found 45 percent of seniors not on track to graduate--are particularly tragic given the school's illustrious history. Dunbar, founded in 1870, was the first true comprehensive high school for African American students in the United States and for a very long time was also the best--so much so that African American families from around the country sent their children to live with D.C.-located friends and relatives in order to attend the school, whose noteworthy alumni including surgeon Charles Drew, Senator Edward Brooke, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Mayor-elect Vincent Gray.

Many observers familiar with the poor performance of the D.C. Public School system in recent decades just assume the city's schools were always lousy. But in fact, the District of Columbia was once one of--if not the--best place in the country for African American students to get an education. The reasons we've gone from being first to being among the worst in terms of educational outcomes for African American students are extremely complicated, and touch on a host of raw wounds in our nation's and city's history. But Dunbar is both a heartbreaking reminder of how we've failed our kids over the past 50 years in this city and a challenge to do better.

The Post's Bill Turque reported today on plans for a new $100 million Dunbar to replace the school's lousy current physical plant. But restoring Dunbar to its former glory will require a lot more than that, and unfortunately improvements on that scale are rare in public education.

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A sobering report released yesterday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute finds that most of 2,000 schools identified as low-performing in 2002-03 were still low-performing schools 6 years later. Just 1.4% of district-run schools and less than 1% of charter schools identified as low-performing in 2002-03 "turned around" to the extent that they out-performed state averages by 2008-09; another 8% of district schools and 9% of charter schools made "moderate" improvements to the extent that their performance became merely mediocre rather than disastrous. And 11% of low-performing district schools and 19% of low-performing charter schools were closed. That leaves 80% of low-performing district schools and 72% of low-performing charters still open and low-performing six years later.

Key takeaways are pretty obvious: Turnarounds, in either the charter or district sector, do happen, but they are extremely rare and difficult to replicate. Schools in either sector are more likely to be closed than to make significant improvements--but not very likely to do either. Low-performing charter schools are substantially more likely to be closed down than low-performing district schools. But a 1 in 5 closure rate for the very worst schools still doesn't match the rhetoric of charter school advocates that "charter schools are more accountable because they can be shut down if they don't perform."

This may change though, in the future, as authorizers get more sophisticated about accountability and states get more serious about authorizing quality. Fordham identified significant differences among states in the rate at which the worst performing charters are closed down. Low-performing charter schools in Florida and Arizona were more likely to be closed down in other states. These findings should be taken with a grain of salt, though, because the numbers of schools in each state are relatively small and Fordham did not analyze the causes of charter school closures--some schools may have closed due to financial improprieties or non-viability, for example, rather than low-performance. Texas had both a very high percentage of charter schools that are low-performing (30% of Texas charters are low-performing) and a very low rate of closures of these schools (only 11% of the lowest performing Texas charters were closed). This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the situation in Texas, where the state's primary authorizer, the Texas Education Agency, has limited resources relative to the scope of its authorizing role, and chronically low-performing charter schools have contested revocations in court.

Improving charter school performance nationally is going to require authorizers to close down more low-performing schools. There's a perception among some observers that this is simply a matter of authorizer will, but there are other issues that need to be addressed if authorizers are going close down substantial numbers of schools, including strengthening legislation in some states to ensure that authorizers are able to close down low-performers on academic grounds, ensuring that authorizers have the legal resources and support to sustain closures when schools contest their charters' revocations in court, and providing resources and capacity for successful dissolution of low-performing schools and placement of their students in new schools.

Fordham argues that the poor track record of successful school turnarounds suggests a need for more emphasis on school closures. But such closures are currently highly disruptive for families and sometimes larger systems that must absorb the students from closed schools, because our system isn't built to support turnover in the supply of schools. Increasing the frequency with which low-performing schools (district or charter) close will require putting in place new supports and structures to ensure successful school dissolution and reallocation of schools' assets, as well as support the transitions of children and families to new schools.

Posted by Sara Mead at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Kevin Carey has a great post on the problems with pre-k panacea-ism that you should read in its entirety, but the short version is that we should be highly skeptical of arguments that posit pre-k as an alternative to K-12 reform, because delivering high-quality pre-k at scale requires grappling with an overcoming the same challenges of building effective systems of public education delivery that are at the heart of K-12 reform debates.

I'd go a step further and argue that this is true when it comes to any of the services or supports that devotees of the "broader, bolder" camp in education policy debates argue we need to provide to children in order to improve education outcomes. I largely agree that American kids need access to adequate health care, healthy food, quality childcare, a child welfare system that isn't a shameful disaster, and good afterschool and youth development programs.

But it ain't like we can magically put these things in place by fiat and it's only an excessive devotion to school reform that's keeping us from doing so.

Delivering quality public services for children, of any sort, at scale is HARD, and getting to quality at scale in some of these services--particularly health care and child welfare services--is probably a lot harder than fixing the K-12 system.

Sure, lack of public resources is a real issue in some of these areas, in a way it isn't necessarily in K-12, and if I had my druthers our society would stop viewing kids as a luxury item that parents shouldn't have if they can't afford them and start viewing the well-being of our most vulnerable citizens and future adults as a common moral obligation worth investing in. But I sadly don't have a magic fairy wand to make that change in people's views, and given current state and federal fiscal conditions and political climates, massive new investments in children are about as likely as me getting that fairy want.

And even if we did have adequate public funding to serve kids well in all these areas, we'd still have to build effective systems for delivering those services, build the supply of high-quality talent to work with kids in these areas, etc--which more money alone wouldn't guarantee, as numerous examples in the K-12 system offer abundant evidence.

If anything, if you believe we need to deliver much higher quality public services to kids in a wide range of areas, you should start by wanting to make the public education system as effective as possible because it's the one area where we already do have a broad public consensus on shared societal obligation to kids, where there's an acceptance that public services agencies will daily touch the lives of most kids and families in a way they do nowhere else, and where there are significant resources in place. If we can't get that system will all those features working well first, how the devil does anyone expect us to be able to do so in the other areas that make up the broader, bolder agenda?

In fairness, and getting back to the arguments in Kevin's post, I think there are ways in which building effective delivery systems for high-quality publicly funded pre-k is both harder and easier than in K-12. As I wrote last week, pre-k doesn't have some of the established and dysfunctional (or simply mismatched to current needs) systems and structures in place that currently impede improvement and greater productivity in K-12. And because a lot of pre-k systems would need to be built from the ground up, it may in fact be easier to build them right from the start than to reform an entrenched K-12 system with its associated interests. On the flip side, though, building pre-k systems is going to require convincing the public and policymakers to direct significant new resources to "other people's kids," which is really hard--although the pre-k movement has made some noteworthy progress here. And it's not like there are no entrenched interests or systems that stand in the way of greater productivity in any of these sectors: there's the Head Start system in pre-k; there are coalitions of mom- and pop- and community-based childcare providers including many of dubious quality; there are health care interests; and so forth.

Delivering public services kids need is hard no matter what sector you do it in and shifting focus from education to health, welfare, or childcare doesn't change hte core questions or challenges and if anything makes the task harder rather than easier.

Posted by Sara Mead at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

So everyone today wants to talk about Students First, the new venture that former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee launched today (on Oprah!) to organize parents and others as voices for children and a counter the the established adult interests that dominate education policy and politics.

I'm just glad to see some of the leading lights of the education reform movement finally coming around to what I argued 3 years ago they needed to be doing.

Seriously, though, there is a real need for more grassroots organizing work in the education reform space. Politics is not the only thing preventing our schools from being much better than they are, but stupid policies and entrenched political opposition remain a major obstacle to doing things that would improve our schools, and the only way to change that is by organizing and empowering parents, families, and communities to leverage their untapped political power as voices for children.

That said, I do have some concerns. First, while it's great to have someone with Rhee's national profile bringing new energy and $$ to this work, it would be very unfortunate if her high profile overshadowed the very important work that existing organizations have already been doing to organize parents and communities around education reform. Stand for Children, for example, is doing very nitty gritty on the ground work organizing families and other concerned individuals for education reform in six states and has notched up some pretty impressive victories at the state and local level (disc: they're also a client of my employer, Bellwether Education Partners). ConnCAN is doing impressive work to organize parents and citizens for policy advocacy in Connecticut, with plans to take the model national. EdVoice, in California, and the members of the PIENetwork are also doing important work. And Democrats for Education Reform (disc: on whose board I serve) and its affiliated Education Reform Now! advocacy have increasingly been getting into the grassroots organizing game, with field organizers on the ground in New York city and state. And obviously, Steve Barr's parent organizing work in Los Angeles has been well-documented. So, as my friend Dana Goldstein wrote today, no one should think Rhee is the first person to get it into her head to step into this space.

Beyond that: I deeply believe in the need for organizing of parents, families, communities, citizens, and even older students as advocates for the interests of students and children more broadly. And I believe there is evidence that the messages and policy goals of education reformers have real appeal to a diverse range of parents and community members. But we shouldn't elide some of the tensions here, either. The best and most effective organizing is driven from the self-identified needs, concerns, and values of the people being organized. In many cases the needs and concerns that parents and citizens identify are congruent with those of education reformers, but in other cases they aren't. Sure, parent and community member education is a critical part of any school reform organizing agenda, but I'm skeptical about the long-term sustainability of an organizing strategy that comes with a pre-baked education reform agenda based on the priorities of external reformers, and expects parents and communities to get in line with that agenda. If we really want to build a long-term, sustainable base of parents and citizen advocates for school reform, we need to be open to working for goals and needs of theirs that may not fit with the established school reform agenda (some of which may also be really valuable things for kids!), while also investing in long-term public education around goals that are not necessarily the most intuitive to the lay public. Humility and responsiveness to the needs of the folks we want to organize are critical to this work.

Ultimately, what I'd really like to see are powerful grassroots organizations organizing parents and concerned citizens to advocate on behalf of children holistically--not just for education reform (although that's probably at the forefront of what any meaningful advocacy for kids must do), but also on the full range of issues--health, childcare, environmental issues--that affect children's well-being and parents' ability to raise their kids successfully in an increasingly crummy world. The emerging grassroots advocacy efforts in education reform have tremendous potential--but they only focus on one of the the issues that parents and adults who care about kids care about. There are advocacy organizations seeking to organize parents around other child well-being issues, but in many cases they are simply front-groups for established interests and agendas and are not great partners for education reform advocates to make common cause with. I'm optimistic about the potential of the emerging portfolio of education reform grassroots advocates. But I'd be even more excited if I saw grassroots organizing and advocacy capable of moving beyond the silos in which we policy and reform types tend to see kids to really advocate for children holistically in the way parents see them.

Posted by Sara Mead at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A new report out today from Bellwether Education Partners looks at the impact of stimulus funds on education reform. The report, by myself, Anand Vaishnav, Bill Porter, and Andrew Rotherham, finds that a combination of mixed messages and unclear guidance from state and national leaders, state and local funding cuts, and inertia and existing processes meant that many districts used stimulus funds simply to maintain the status quo rather than drive significant reforms. We also find, though, that some districts were able to use ARRA funds to make significant reforms, thanks to a combination of strong local leadership and access to outside capacity and technical assistance. And in contrast the the bulk of ARRA funds distributed by funding formulas, the relatively small percentage of funding allocated to competitive Race to the Top program did in fact drive significant reform activity at the state level.

These findings, while discouraging to some who hoped ARRA would drive greater reforms, also point the way towards smarter policy approaches in the future--particularly how to be smarter about using federal funds to drive state- and local-level reform.

Those implications are particularly important because the budget pressures that states and local districts currently face aren't going anywhere soon. Rather, these pressures are both greater than initially expected and represent a long-term structural problem, rather than a temporary shortfall as a result of the Great Recession--and this is a reality that federal, state, and local policymakers must acknowledge and address in order to avoid serious negative impacts on schools and children.

Check out the whole report on the Bellwether Education Partners website, here.

Posted by Sara Mead at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a forum on Rick Hess's new book, The Same Thing Over and Over, which argues that current iterations of school reform are doomed to fall short because they fail to challenge fundamental premises of our current educational system that are ill-suited for contemporary realities and what we need our educational system to do. Rick, as always, makes a provocative argument, and the rock star panel of Tony Bennett, Paul Pastorek, and Stefanie Sanford was also in top form. (You can watch the whole thing here).

But something bothered me: I spend a lot of my professional time working in and studying a part of the education space--early childhood education--that does not have a lot of the established systems that Rick identifies as obstacles in K-12 (Rick quips that current education reform battles are a debate between ideas of the 19th and early 20th century--parts of early childhood, which still relies heavily on home-based and charitable provision, could be said to be in the 18th century). And the early childhood sector does have some of the features--increased parent choice and competition, diverse delivery, lots of families using arrangements cobbled together from a variety of sources--that Rick and his fellow panelists have argued are needed in K-12.

But very few informed observers would argue that our current early childhood non-system is delivering the results we need for young children. Young children enter our public schools with tremendous learning gaps that leave poor and minority children far short of the skills and knowledge they need for school readiness. Educational quality is poor, even in publicly funded programs. And some childcare providers are of such low quality they may even be harming children's development and threatening their safety.

Unfortunately, some early childhood and pre-k advocates seem to think that the way to solve these problems is by replicating in the early childhood space some of the very features--particularly teacher credentialing systems--that Rick and his co-panelists bemoan in K-12. While there are clearly features of the K-12 sector that would be good to bring to ECE, it's unlikely that simply extending the current flawed K-12 system down to 3- and 4-year-olds will produce the results we want.

The challenge, then, is to think about how to build new systems for educating our youngest children that combine the best feature of the current early childhood system--including parent choice and diverse provision--with the best of the K-12 space--including universal access and reasonable funding levels--all while avoiding replicating the most dysfunctional features of the K-12 system in the ECE space.

Unfortunately, we rarely talk or think this way about early childhood or systemic reform. Most conversations about universal pre-k focus on programs rather than a system. Many K-12 school reformers have seemed largely uninterested in pre-k--seeing it as at best a nice thing to do but not their bailiwick and, at worst, an excuse and distraction from the core issues of K-12 reform--and as a result are unaware of many promising innovations in that space--such as the Classroom Assessment Scoring System and Texas Early Education Model--that could provide valuable lessons, models, and cases-in-point for K-12 reform. At the same time, pre-k advocates seem largely uninformed by the critiques Rick and others have made of the current K-12 system. And the two groups almost never talk to one another.

That's dumb and it's a huge missed opportunity for both sectors. K-12 reformers, as Rick notes, fight tooth and nail for marginal improvements in an entrenched K-12 system. They could potentially accomplish a lot more, faster, by working to build the system right from the ground up in the ECE space, and then using that system as a model and leverage for transforming elements of K-12. And pre-k advocates will accomplish more over the long run if they think in terms of systems rather than programs and to avoid extending the shortcoming of the current K-12 system down to pre-k.

One of the purposes of this blog is to work to bridge the gulf that currently exists between the early childhood world and K-12 reformers, to make folks in both spaces aware of cool things that are being done and important arguments that are being made in the other.

Posted by Sara Mead at 7:26 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend