In a new CAP paper erstwhile blogging phenom One-L and Robin Chait take a look at state policy and alternative certification programs (pdf).

Seems that in the last 96 hours the zeitgeist about “21st Century Skills” has shifted from lively debate and healthy skepticism to a brawl…was it the debate the other day?

For instance, Panic attacks here, Mike Petrilli unloads the f-bomb here, and The Boston Globe says:

…the burden should be on 21st-century skills proponents to prove that their methods offer a better way to prepare students for college and the workplace. So far, they haven’t done that. And while they say 21st-century skills will only complement the state’s current efforts, it’s not clear that the approach can be implemented without de-emphasizing academic content.

Teachers and parents across the state just don’t know enough about 21st-century skills. The unnerving part is that the proponents don’t seem to know much more.

This is hardly all bad because the push for 21st Century Skills could use some critical thinking of its own.   But I hope that the very serious and legitimate concerns about content do not sidetrack the importance of making sure teachers can teach in ways that engage students and provide higher level opportunities for them to demonstrate what they know.   There are issues of policy and support for teachers bound up in that challenge but it’s an important, even dare I say 21st Century one, for improving outcomes.

If you read E.D. Hirsch’s remarks from the big debate the other day (as well as his larger body of work) and Elena Silva’s recent paper on measuring skills (pdf) I think you can see a way through although we’re not there yet in terms of consensus around a strategy or the capacity to implement one.

Update:  MassInc piles on but amplifies some good points:

Tom Fortmann, a member of the [Massachusetts] Board of Education, says, “My reaction when I first heard about the 21st-century skills movement was that everyone I worked with in the 20th century already had these skills.” The retired MIT-trained electrical engineer says such skills are indeed crucial, but he says many of them are already embedded in the state’s existing curriculum standards. The problem, he says, is they are ”underemphasized in the classrooms.” Fortmann thinks the main focus should not be on changes to the curriculum, standards, or statewide assessments, but on recruiting high-achieving teachers whose own subject-area knowledge and command of 21st-century skills will facilitate their acquisition by students.

Update II:   Willingham wades-in.  Must-reading. Update III:  More from Panic:

If we’re serious about closing the achievement gap and raising the level of performance of American education, we can’t be serious about asking teachers to walk on water and labeling them failures when they drown. Any credible reform has to be reasonable and achievable. 21st Century Skills, as currently conceived, fails dismally on both fronts.

Get those entries in, we’ll close this contest next week.  Between this post and this one there are about 718 entries right now so some good ones to choose from.     But in that crowd Joey72 better start his car with a remote control for a while…

Diane Ravitch says Arne Duncan wants too much testing, likes charters too much, is mean, and is more or less Margaret Spellings with a tie.  I don’t buy it, he’s not mean…Meanwhile, Tom Loveless says too much attention on the wrong testing.   Ed Week on that here and don’t miss Dane Linn’s take at the end if you follow this closely.

What would you do with $5 billion dollars?  

This coming student loan debate is necessary and will be fierce.  But, a good time to take this on given the banking situation more generally.  This is a pretty clear case where a government program is more efficient than the private one and better for students.   Big winner:  Lobbyists.  Almost five years old but this backgrounder is still pretty timely…And the President’s Budget (pdf) has some other smart higher ed proposals, let’s hope this debate doesn’t swamp them.

And, Usually Reliable Robelen takes a look at the charter school quality.  Well-worth checking out although I’d date the quality discussion earlier than he does.  There were meetings, conversation, and work on this in 2001 and 2002.   What took longer, obviously, were solid policy and practice responses, for instance the work that NACSA has done on authorizing.  It’s also worth noting the support from some charter groups for closing down low-performing charters, that’s not something you see on a systemic basis in this field…

Kevin Carey has what you need to know about the 21st Century Skills debate.

President Obama said exactly this about charter schools tonight:

“And we will expand our commitment to charter schools.”

But judging by the various strong reactions over in The Arena at Politco you’d think that was the subject of the speech…or even just the education part…rather than a single sentence.

Ed Week’s Politics blog writes-up the other, mostly predictable, education spending debate…but they bury the lede some: The coming fight over the D.C. voucher program seems destined to be the most interesting debate to date in terms of what education politics are really going to look like in the Obama-era because that issue cuts across a host of political and jurisdictional lines.  A little background here.

Update:  Here ya go, it’s on!

In the WaPo Kalman R. Hettleman (who has a new book in the offing) offers-up five myths about school reform that are worth checking out.  And with a stimulus peg Richard Colvin offers a stage-setter on education politics in Ed Next.

Via NBA forward and former ACC standout Shane Battier (and Michael Lewis) Matt Ladner takes us to white space employees and the opportunities and challenges of rewarding performance in education.

Over at Q & E, using “moral hazards” as an example Kevin Carey notes that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.  In addition to his main point, there is another educational addendum, however, that’s important and relates to this whole “21st Century Skills” debate.  Kevin is right that ideas like moral hazards can be taken to illogical extremes but one of the best ways to avoid that is through teaching people to think critically and systematically about questions they encounter.  David Coleman has characterized this as teaching students to be “little detectives” as they encounter new text and ideas and that’s not a bad way to think about it.   This means teaching students to question assumptions, engage with counter-evidence, and so forth.  For example, most of the more absurd abuses of moral hazard, such as Kevin’s examples, are pretty easily dismissed with a little thought.     These have been valuable skills in any century, of course, and are skills that schools have not been at all intentional about teaching.   They’re also an interelated mix of content and skills but content, especially content that helps students think about the world and how it works, is pretty key.

It’s easy to run a contest when Sam Dillon is your ad man.   Be sure to get your entries for the NCLB naming contest in soon.  That Justin Cohen picture is a hot item.

Per all this national standards debate, well worth revisiting something Jal Mehta wrote at New Vision in 2006.  Meanwhile, James G. Cibulka, the new President of NCATE and a thoughtful guy, has chosen AEI as a place to give a major policy address…he either has some interesting things to say or he’s launching a war?  If you follow testing there are some interesting politics over testing in Pennsylvania.  And Charlie Barone has Fordham Madlibs.

…was in San Francisco?

New Fordham Foundation study out today again (pdf) calls attention to the variance between states in terms of accountability rules under No Child Left Behind.  It’s well worth reading, illustrative, and important, but for the foreseeable future this awkward federal- state marriage is going to be the game so transparency around things like cut scores on tests and state implementation decisions are important elements in the short term.   The stimulus money and the incentives there are one lever for accomplishing some of this.

Update:  Bushie on Bushie Action!  Don’t miss Sandy Kress’ reax below.   And, Ladner piles on Wisconsin!  Kevin Carey previously badgered them on this issue.

What do former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen have in common?  They’re both trying to improve schools in TN… 

The school choice crowd in New York just got an easy pitch to hit…  Via the DFER blog.

Be sure to check out Beyond The Bubble, a new ES report by Bill Tucker about how technology can improve student assessment.   Big long-term implications but also pretty immediate implications around some of this new stimulus money that can be spent on assessment improvement in more or less high-leverage ways.  Podcast about the report here.

..and he celebrates in the Baltimore Sun.

Dan Willingham tells you…

AFT head Randi Weingarten goes all Al Shanker in the WaPo calling for national standards.  She makes a lot of good points and a few cautions that are too infrequently laid out.   So just a few quibbles here. 

Weingarten notes that there is little outrage about the patchwork of standards among the states.  I disagree.   There is loads of outrage about it, from people on all sides of the national standards issue.  There is just a lot of disagreement about how to solve the problem.*   She also points out that countries outperforming the U.S. on national assessments have more uniform curriculum and standards.  True enough.   But so do some countries that do worse.   And countries above and below us do lots of different things in the education and broader social policy space as well.   The point:  On a variety of issues from standards and assessment to choice and teacher quality, international comparisons have become one of the great correlation – causation fallacies in education debates today.  

Finally, I’m hardly against national standards per se, in core subjects they make sense and can help provide some much needed curricular coherence.  But, my concern about much of the national standards push more generally is that it seems a distraction from the core problem the country faces today:  A system of public education that dramatically and dangerously under-serves low-income students and students of color.  And it doesn’t under-serve them by a matter of degree but substantially.   That’s much more a political problem than a substantive one and while better standards and more fine-grained measurement are important, their absence is not why we are where we are today and we should not lose sight of that. 

Also, from Crooked Timber, here’s a related take on all this that’s worth checking out.

*In the near term, and at little cost, we could do a lot more on transparency around various state processes than we do today.

Update:  Panic weighs-in here.  Two quick reax.  First, the above post was not intended to damn with faint praise.  On the contrary I liked the piece but just saying I liked it wouldn’t be a very interesting blog post and there were things worth discussing.  Second, to his argument, I agree that a lack of curriculum is part of the achievement problem, but there are ways to solve that short of national standards.

School construction bonds are back via the stimulus bill.    They are in there in two forms:  QZAB bonds, which have been around for a while, and school modernization bonds.  Both work through tax credits and given where the markets are this may be a good approach right now although a longer-term approach would have been preferable.   Regardless, good a time as any to dust-off Sara Mead’s analysis of the QZABs and the promise and pitfalls there.  

Reading the bill the quick reax has to be that the National Governors Association is the big winner here, with the state education chiefs and the NEA the losers in how this all played out.  Possible implications there around No Child Left Behind reauthorization.  Big urban districts did pretty well, too.   And, looking like the even with the big numbers Dems have in the Senate, it is the fulcrum right now…

Past stimulus action through here.

Take a few minutes out from polishing your resume for Commerce Secretary to:

Get the latest on the KIPP – union situation in New York City from the Mind of Medina in today’s Times .  Background on all that here.

Think of a new name for NCLB.

Learn about another school organizing situation: This one in Scranton with Catholic schools.

Wonder if education politics really are starting to change?

Contemplate how irrational our teacher licensing and credentialing regimes are given what the research keeps showing (pdf).  The issue is not the common complaint that reformers think anyone can teach.  That’s nonsense.  The issue is that we do a really lousy job identifying and training good teachers in this country despite spending billions on it annually.   And we don’t learn from other models.

Consider that we also repeat the same mistakes city after city (pdf) as a new TNTP analysis in San Francisco shows.  

Read new research on the Philly school experiment with for-profit providers. 

Worry because the Commodore says the states are in bad fiscal shape.  

United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has not surprisingly said that he’s open to renaming the “No Child Left Behind Act” something else.   Before President Bush, for instance, the Clinton version of the law was called the “Improving America’s Schools Act.”  The underlying law is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, it’s not going anywhere but a new name is likely in the offing.

Howie Schaffer suggested that the time is now to start naming names.  So let’s have a contest.  The person who offers the best name, decided via a highly arbitrary process involving me and a few friends, wins a signed copy of this picture of DCPS official Justin Cohen in a really tacky frame.  Runners-up get books.

Who knew school construction would emerge as such a pivotal issue?

There has been a lot of commentary about this NYT story about the unionization drive at the KIPP school in New York.  Two quick points, which are both obviously open to debate.

First, I don’t know exactly what is or is not happening at the school.  But, isn’t this one possible counter-hypothesis to the assertions in the story:  This school is populated with a lot of people — on all sides of the issue of whether or not to unionize — who care deeply about kids, care deeply about the school and its mission, and are going through this process for the first time?  In other words, there is an assumption that this is Wal-Mart or some other entity with a track record of and skill set for fighting union drives when in fact it may just be a case of people fumbling through a new and complicated situation.

Second, there seems to be a general assumption that the union has the leverage here.  But doesn’t KIPP actually have it?   Given the dynamics (this is about public relations more than substance since we’re talking about one school) it seems to me that it will be far more damaging for the teachers’ unions if KIPP walks away saying that this won’t work for them than if the union says KIPP won’t agree to their terms.  After all, in the court of public opinion KIPP’s brand is a lot more powerful than the teachers’ union these days.   That’s why at the end of the day I’d bet we see a deal.   But also why regardless of how it turns people will want to ascribe enormous importance to it even if it really is essentially a one-off.    We’ll know a lot more after this does or doesn’t play out at dozens of schools.

Background here.

Update:  Matt Ladner calls me out as a teachers’ union apologist.   Perhaps.  But I think the specter Matt describes isn’t likely here because of this leverage question.   Having looked closely at this issue from a couple of perspectives I’d say that the first generation contracts will not be onerous at all.   It’s the second and third generation effects that are unknown and important for charter schools to think through.   Yet there is risk there for the teachers’ unions, too.  Namely dilution.   The more reformist agreements they sign onto and the more common the portfolio approach to contracts becomes then the harder it gets to defend a lot of the work rules that exist in many places.   And, it’s possible to envision a scenario where they become sort of like AAA.  People sign up for services they like but are largely ignorant of the organization’s public policy positions and advocacy.   There is some of that going on now as it is.  That could mean several things, good and bad, for education politics.

In terms of this situation specifically, one reader also writes to point out that, “The other issue is that the union faces a tremendous risk here. This is a great school. If it is anything less than great over time, the teachers’ union will be blamed in a high-profile way for ruining yet another school.   The point being that there is a public relations incentive for them to offer up a deal that is favorable to the management of a great school.”

Math For America is a social entrepreneurial venture aimed at improving math instruction.  More about them in here, pp. 70-71 (pdf).  They need a Director of Finance.

What do charter schools liquor stores, distilleries, landfills, and sex-toy shops have in common?  Apparently they’re all unwelcome in St. Louis.

That’s the topic of my most recent US News column.

In today’s WaPo.  In the way these things go I suspect this will be seen as the ”new Rhee” but this is basically what she’s been saying for a while.  Standby for a lively debate.

With unemployment trending up the jobs numbers are getting a lot of attention.  But what’s buried in there and getting less notice is the numbers by educational attainment.  The problems are hardly equally distributed and again the returns to education are apparent.  In an increasingly post-industrial economy someone remind me again why post-secondary education or training for all is not a vital national goal?  For instance, as a policy hook, why shouldn’t states make the post-secondary prep or college-prep track the default one in high schools so parents  have to opt their kids out of that rather than into it?   Update:  Sherman Dorn has more.

In The Times a caution on Head Start and the stimulus and from the WaPo some counterintuitive thinking on teacher compensation and teacher recruitment.  I’ve never understood the “run down the profession to save it” strategy either.  Besides, despite the challenges teaching is a lot of fun.