I wish it were easier to find the guidebook for teachers about D.C.s new “Impact Plus” pay-for-performance initiative. That’s because while there will be the predictable hysterics, the booklet makes clear what a groundbreaking initiative this is in terms of structure and the amounts teachers can earn.

Also, on the pay-for-performance issue, keep an eye out next week for an evaluation of the initiative in Nashville.

Two new reports from Jobs for the Future plus a cool interactive web feature are all worth your time.   One looks at six elements of dropout prevention (pdf).  Includes a lot of great stuff, but I would have liked to see more on state early-warning system that actually start really early.  States are still missing big opportunities to put all their data (and not just education data) to high-leverage use, and not just at the high school level.  Also, as new accountability rules for dropouts start to come online in some states, keep an eye out for backsliding.

Second report is about making alternative education a better alternative (pdf).   This is an enormous issue and a place where some amazing leaders like David Domenici, Cami Anderson, and others are breaking their picks today.   Interesting and important sector that largely flies below the radar.

New Education Northwest pub offers a buyers guide for turnaround services.

At TIME.com here’s my take on lobsters the transformative promise of common standards – a common denominator – and why most of the hype overstates the case. What didn’t I get into was the issue of innovation and how this can also be a powerful lever there.

Assuming quality and comparability are maintained, the new standards offer a common denominator in public education to help think about student performance and productivity. Sounds wonky, but it’s hard to overstate the importance of this to the national effort to improve schools across 50 states and thousands of communities. Right now anything goes in this $650 billion industry. A common benchmark for quality would help change that.

A common baseline will also empower teachers to meaningfully compare their work with peers from other states. It will force publishers and other education vendors to compete using actual results that are common across states rather than based on relationships, politics and claims that are often impossible to judge. Commonality will also make it harder for politicians and various stakeholders to hide behind their own data and claim their states as educational capitals when they’re not.

Update: Former MA state board of ed member Sandra Stotsky is not so impressed!

Two unrelated things on my mind today:

First, Waiting for Superman is obviously going to be an influential film, if for no other reason than the anticipation.   I’ve actually heard two people – not attached to the film – with visibility into the industry speculate about an Oscar nod.  The AFT is doing preventative media work.   And PR firms are amped-up on all sides.   Besides, anything by Elizabeth Shue’s husband is worth watching and his last education documentary was great, just ill-timed.  I saw an early uncut version and will write more after seeing the final.

But, The Lottery is a terrific and powerful film that hopefully won’t be completely swamped by the coming Superman wave.  If you haven’t seen it, well worth checking out.

Also, was looking at some forthcoming work today keyed to some findings coming out of state data systems.   I’m a big proponent of more use of data to inform policy and practice, and think the Data Quality Campaign is a quiet hero of the last decade in terms of high-impact organizations (I hope the new Digital Learning Council becomes analogous).  But, the data being put into so many of these systems is messy and often unreliable because of questionable coding and definition practices.  That’s below the radar but it’s a real issue because these data systems are only as good as their fuel and a few high-profile problems will spark a crisis of confidence and embolden critics.

Smart take on some social entrepreneurial opportunities in education today.  And via The Atlantic a good round-up of recent takes on education in D.C. and the election. I would dispute, however, that education is the center of the election, it’s an issue, yes, but there are a number of issues in play – of both style and substance.   The AFT funded ads, for instance, accuse Fenty of being a ‘part time’ mayor.

New York Mag takes a long and must-read look at Waiting for Superman and the larger issues surrounding it.

In the Wash Post Outlook my take on the Achilles heel of mayoral control and the unavoidable  trade-off between rapid reform and controversy – and what it means in D.C.

Jim Ryan’s new book, Five Miles Away, is now out .   It’s a good read and great analytic perspective.  But, rather than promoting it Jim is instead worried about correcting misperceptions about his fish handling skills!  He brought his own fish porn when he guestblogged here last month, but strongly objects to this characterization of his other fish as dead and sends this picture of a caught, and released, striper or ’stripah’ to correct the record.

Enjoy the holiday weekend!

Surprised there wasn’t more attention to yesterday’s assessment competition results? Me, too.  Our “insider” survey overwhelmingly predicted this outcome, both coalitions getting funded, but that was easy.   More interesting, policy insiders are pretty bearish on the likely rigor of the “smarter balanced” approach.  Most saw the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers as more likely to genuinely improve student learning.  More on all that later in the month when we release the full results.

And I’m not talking about flannel or the Fleet Foxes.  Per this post the other day, the new teachers’ contract was approved in Seattle.   And the teachers’ union there is griping about Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson’s style.  Wow. It’s the same thing they say about Michelle Rhee!  Yet Goodloe-Johnson, who is an Aspen Institute Fellows classmate of mine,  is basically the anti-Rhee in terms of her style.   So it kind of makes you again wonder if this isn’t more about resistance to change in general than a question of style?   As Woodrow Wilson said, “if you want to make enemies, try to change something.”

Politifact’s truth-o-meter gives generous score of ‘half true’ to AFT President Randi Weingarten’s claim about teachers unions and achievement on This Week.  Some background on the issue here. In Slate Jack Shafer provides the hardest-hitting case on behalf of the LA Times on value-added yet. Harder than the LAT itself!  And in the RTD Kris Amundson turns in her summer homework and challenges the commonwealth’s educational stance.

Wendy Kopp reflects on 20 years of TFA and the state of play on education reform in the WSJ. Anna Kimsey writes-up an important federal grant program to improve college going you may never have heard of but that is coming to a state near you.  And the value-add debate has turned into a bar fight here.

Rick Hess responds here to this post from the other day. Worth reading because he makes many good points that I agree with relative to the competition.   But he clouds a fundamental difference in our views on this.  Criticizing public officials for bad decisions or bad judgment either proactively or retroactively relative to their public duties and asking tough questions is completely fair game – and in fact a vital part of the process in our system.  Accusing, suggesting, insinuating, or otherwise hinting at bad faith and violations of the trust of a public office is fair game only to the extent it’s coupled with actual evidence rather than suppositions.  Otherwise, it crosses a line and I think that line was crossed by some of Race to the Top critics, including Rick, especially because of the extent to which key officials were recusing themselves to avoid even the perception of any conflict of interest.  An extent that I’ve argued (and Rick does) actually hurt the competition.  More generally, as with Reading First, the public interest is ill-served by this sort of stuff.

This matters because we may be about to see some back and forth with regard to the outcome of the assessment competition today.

Looks like a new labor agreement on the way in Seattle.  Details here and a planned vote Thursday.

If you read one thing on the value-add debate today, this forthcoming NYT Magazine piece is your best bet.

Update: So much for education being the most interesting thing in The Times Magazine this weekend!

New Digital Learning Council is getting some buzz.

Here’s my take on why I agreed to do it and what’s up on the issue.

Sherman Dorn asks a good question though!

Rick Hess didn’t like the This Week segment on education last Sunday.   I didn’t either, but kept it to <140.

Important Sawchuk post on this week’s back and forth on value-added. Agree or disagree with them, it’s hard to miss that the EPI’ers are positionally on the margin of the debate right now.

Quick announcement: Starting in September I’m going to write a weekly column on education issues for Time.com and occasionally for the magazine.  Obviously, I’m excited about this great opportunity but as with most new things it means some changes, too.

Most notably, I will not be contributing to US News and World Report anymore.  I first collaborated with them on their high school rankings, an outgrowth of this paper (pdf) showing that the Newsweek rankings favored many schools that were shortchanging kids.  While not perfect I continue to think that the USN high school rankings are the best ones out there if you care about equity within schools, achievement gaps, and advanced course-taking.   That work led to a contributor relationship for several years.  For that I  want to thank Robert Schlesinger, a thoughtful and overworked opinions editor.  And I especially want to thank Brian Kelly, USN’s editor, for the opportunities he gave me, support, and friendship.  It is not a secret that these are tough times for the news and publishing business but Brian illustrates why that’s largely situational and not a reflection of the quality of people working in that field.

So you can look for the Time.com column in September and I’ll still be blogging here.

The town vandals now what to know what’s up with all these broken windows?

Over at the AEI blog my friend Rick Hess, who like a few others spent much of the spring in a effort to undermine trust and confidence around ‘Race to the Top’ (in Rick’s case while earnestly bleating that competitive grant programs need trust to work), wants those of us asking questions now to vindicate him for his earlier comments.  But he overlooks a key distinction:  Hess wasn’t just arguing that the initiative might have programmatic issues of the kind many are now discussing (and discussed after Round 1.)  Rather, he was also implying the strong possibility of conflicts of interest and self-dealing.  Sure, he went out of the way to say he wasn’t impugning Joanne Weiss or Jim Shelton or anyone else, but would then follow that with lines like this:

“will [they] be in a position to reassure even skeptical observers that the process has been fair and meritocratic…. whether the program is sufficiently insulated from political machinations that even mean-spirited skeptics would have trouble finding cause to wonder about manipulation and private agendas.”

It’s the classic, ‘of course I’m not saying that’….but I’ll write about that a lot anyway, because that is important, and we have to pay attention to that, and did I mention that some people, but most definitely not me, think they’re up to that?’  At the same time, Hess was also making noise about questions about reviewers being picked for political reasons and other issues that didn’t come to pass.

So it’s worth pointing out that for its problems, and in addition to the policy changes it’s produced so far, Race to the Top has set a standard for transparency in a grant competition by releasing pretty much everything associated with the competition.*  It’s one reason people can go over the reviews in such detail.  Meanwhile, if anything it was the desire to bend over backwards to appease this sort of concern that is likely the root of the RTT scoring problems.  The political appointees Hess worries about were in such a box they couldn’t influence the program – even when the public interest arguably would have been better served had they done so – and couldn’t pick a field of reviewers uniformly deep in the work because they would have been attacked for conflicts of interest.  In other words, this throw up whatever and see what sticks style of advocacy (and in fairness the Department of Education pays too much attention to it) is no small part of the problem here.

*While we’re on this, Hess has never resolved the inherent contradiction in arguing that the program should be free from influence while also calling for real-time ways for outsiders to influence the process.   In retrospect, despite the scoring problems, allowing for a play-by-play view into the process would have been a disaster.  The grant process needs some changes but not that one.

I mentioned the passing of Robert Sexton on Friday.  Here’s a thorough obituary well worth reading.

Just when you thought there was nothing new and/or useful to say on RTT outcomes Sara Mead comes through with a smart take.

Value-add measures for teachers are complicated.  Two takes fresh out today. Shorter versions:

From the teachers’ union-funded EPI (pdf):  We don’t want to say don’t use value-add, but use it only a very wee little bit!    We’re more bullish on peer review, but ignore the evidence there please!

From U of W’s Dan Goldhaber: Use it responsibility and beware of the limitations.  Why on earth is the LAT doing what it’s doing?

Goldhaber’s take is sensible.  EPI is right that the fetishising of 51 percent of evaluation from value-add isn’t wise (and it’s also not practical as a comprehensive tool).  And they sensibly call for a federal push to innovate with various evaluation models.  But isn’t that what’s happening under Race to the Top and related initiatives?* And since we really don’t know what works here yet there is nothing wrong with states innovating with heavy value-add models (meaning weighted at 50 percent or more), too, is there?  Besides, it’s worth nothing that models that use value-add for much less than 50 get attacked, too.

In fact, I’d argue the underlying issue is less the specifications of any value-add model, or any evaluation system that uses value-add, and more the underlying issue of outcome-based evaluation.  Most of the debate today is camouflage for that.

*Take for instance the DC IMPACT model, which is a pretty good tool.

Races with big education implications, like Michael Bennet’s U.S. Senate race or the upcoming DC mayoral primary are pretty well known.  But there are some other races with big potential education implications just a little below the radar.  Here are three, who else?

Stairway to Beaven – In Florida Heather Beaven is running for Congress.  She’s CEO of The Florida Endowment Foundation for Florida’s Graduates, helping at-risk students there.  She’s a D.

Jeanne out of the bottle? – In Maryland veteran education advocate and agitator Jeanne Allen is running for state legislature.  She’s the founder of the Center for Education Reform in Washington.  She’s an R.

Bill is due – In another Maryland statehouse race Bill Ferguson is challenging a longtime incumbent for a state senate seat.   Education (primarily slow progress on improvement and the need for more ambitious steps) is central to the race.  He’s former TFA and has worked on education in several other roles in Baltimore.  He’s a D.

Suddenly a big news day.

In New Jersey state ed chief Brett Schundler has been fired by the governor over this budget issue with Race to the Top.  Wow.  Given how Governor Christie has treated Schundler throughout this process good luck finding someone strong for that position.   And, given that Schundler was a favorite of the school choice crowd, what’s the fallout there?

Sad news from Kentucky, Robert Sexton has died. He headed the Prichard Committee, arguably the prototypical state education advocacy organization.  As a result he was instrumental in key education policy battles around standards and finance among other issues.

A lot of jaws dropped over this story in The Washington Post today.  Legitimate issue but the Post came down hard one way and didn’t caveat things.  Were they just mimicking The Times and their stories on the gaps there?  In any event,  at TNR Jon Chait cuts to the chase. Save yourself some time and read that.

TNTP continues to hit the cover off the ball. And it’s a scandal that the citizens of D.C. don’t have a better public university. The new rankings of dropout factories also, again, illustrate that profit – non-profit is not an especially useful quality delineation in our field right now.

Word is that John Deasy is really amping up in Los Angeles, a lot of excitement and buzz around him out there.   Meanwhile, word is that there are some hiccups coming around I3 match funding, some real complications with the process.  Plus sounds like total pension craziness breaking out in IL.

If you’re voting in Pepsi Refresh then please consider voting for Horizon Learning Center’s residential wellness program idea. (Disc- I worked there during and after college, great people and empowering outdoors-based programs)

ETS is making a big hire if you’re into teacher assessment and evaluation. Very cool opportunity.  And New York State needs people to help implement the state’s Race to the Top plan. Obviously, the successful candidate will be cocksure.  Bonus:  You get to work closely with the great John King, making this a prime opportunity.

Stand For Children, an organization BW works with, is hiring for a number of roles including a policy director and executive director in MA and an executive director in TN.

Update: Great research job in Chicago, too.

As the dust settles on the Race to the Top selections a general consensus has emerged that again (pdf) there were problems with the scoring.   Not the sensational political tampering claims that some people are trying to allege, there is no evidence of that, but rather problems with the process.   Those problems are at once more mundane and a lot more far-reaching.  The Race to the Top is over for now but the problems have broader implications for federal grant competitions, especially because the Administration would like to shift toward using more competitive grants for some programs.

The rationale for moving to more competitive grants is that they involve more planning, more substantial amounts of money to make real changes, and that the competition pays dividends as competitors (even those that ultimately lose) vie to get ready to win.  The Race to the Top certainly illustrated this as did I3 and several of the other competitions running this year, including smaller below-the-radar ones.  And as long as the priorities of the competitions are well-constructed there is no reason that competitive grants can’t also serve the equity goals.  You wouldn’t want to allocate all aid this way, but on some big programs, such as Title II teacher quality funds (pdf), it makes a lot of sense.

However moving in this direction means that the competitive grant process must be reliable.  For example, scores should align to program goals and reviewers should be able to separate rhetoric from actionable proposals.  And there absolutely must be consistency among reviewers so it’s not a game of bingo for applicants.  In the case of Race to the Top, while it wasn’t a disaster there were enough problems that some people favorably inclined toward using more competitive grants are now asking if the federal government, with all the political and substantive constraints upon it, can really run a reliable high-stakes competition. (The back and forth around the social innovation fund isn’t helping either).

Meanwhile, you’re already hearing a lot of concern that because pretty much everyone with deep expertise on assessments was conflicted because of work with various states and vendors that the review pool is there is sub-optimal.  That was certainly the case on Race to the Top.   Watching some of the video interviews is discomforting as were some of the questions reviewers had on relatively basic issues.  Surely there is a better way to mitigate conflicts of interest but also engage people with deep knowledge of the work.  For my part I helped several state teams prep for their RTT live interviews and the feedback after their actual presentations was that the prep teams were much harder on them around the guts of the applications and the connective tissue that really makes plans like this rise or fall.  I heard the same from other prep projects.  That’s not encouraging.  Especially with hundreds of millions of  public dollars on the line.  Likewise, the actual reviewer comments and scoring variances in Round 1 and Round 2 don’t always inspire confidence, to put it gently.

It would be easy to say the problem was people at the Department of Education and a different team would have avoided these problems.  I don’t think that’s the case.  Rather, the competitions are thoughtfully designed but constrained by a flawed process (and of course a tortuous ‘gotcha’ politics).

That’s why Secretary Duncan must move quickly to head these problems off at the pass.   The best way for him to do so would be to convene a commission or Secretary’s technical working group to study and report on what can be learned from the federal competitions so far and, more importantly, what can be learned from other high-stakes competitions in the public and non-governmental sectors.  There are other fields, for instance, where a small subset of experts have to at once make decisions and manage conflicts of interest.  What are best practices there?  What are best practices for ensuring reliability among and between reviewers?  What aspects of current federal grant making policy (which was really not designed for high-stakes competitions like these) should be changed?  Is more training needed, and if so what kind?  What else has to change if substantial amounts of federal aid are to be allocated this way?

Granted (ha ha) commissions are generally considered the place to go when you don’t want much to happen or want to punt an issue.  But Secretary Duncan has proven clever at leveraging issues in creative ways and just by putting his brand on it and sanctioning a candid review and study he could make such a process meaningful.  Substantive benefits aside, such a project would also help the Secretary make the case for moving in this direction.

Bottom line:  The fallout here extends beyond states like CO, IL, and LA and it behooves the Secretary to get in front of it.  Not in a way that invites pointless recriminations, but rather in a forward looking way that improves future initiatives.

Standing Disc: Bellwether personnel, including me, were involved in advising a number of states, winners and losers, about policy and strategy but had no direct interest in a specific outcome for the states mentioned here.

Interesting paper from Bridgespan on next generation learning initiatives. Tom Friedman hearts Waiting for Superman.  And an op-ed from the President of Strayer lays out the contours of the debate over for-profit higher education and accountability.  If nothing else that debate is going to finance the college tuition of a lot of lobbyists’ children.

Plus Gallup/PDK poll v. Ed Next poll (pdf) again this year.   Release event for Gallup/PDK today, it’s improving a lot to their credit and has the Gallup brand but Ed Next still has the mojo.

Update: More on the polls.  First, while Gallup/PDK find low-approval for President Obama on education and a drop in support it does not seem keyed to his policies.  Why?  When Gallup/PDK or Ed Next digs down on a host of those you find bipartisan support.  Rather, the education approval numbers seem to be referred pain from his overall low-approval numbers. If you only look at the (in my view badly worded) question on turnarounds of course it will look different.  Update: Unfair to only pick on Ed Week, others bit on this, too.

Second, although the number has remained roughly consistent over time, about 4 in 10 public school parents say they’d change schools if they could.  From a pure loyalty and market share perspective that should be a troubling number for the public school establishment but instead they take comfort from the 60 percent.

Third, my friends in the charter world are gaga over the record high support for charters in the PDK/Gallup poll.   But I wouldn’t pop the champagne just yet, that support seems fragile.  Indeed, check out Ed Next’s poll and some other polls that are out there.  The public may like charters but it’s unclear they have any idea what one is!  In Ed Next even 1 in 4 teachers said charters charge tuition.