Two reasonable standards, it seems to me, for anything in the current economic recovery bill moving through Congress is that items should be either job creating or sustaining or should be reformist in nature, in other words improving on some status quo.   Many items can be both, but President Obama is basically channeling Keynes when he points out that the idea here is getting money out to support the economy during tough times.

That’s where school construction comes in.    It’s stimulative* and it’s better than just digging ditches and filling them up again because it’s work that is needed.   So it was surprising to see school construction on the block in the Senate compromise, as several accounts indicate it is, and a bad sign of how political this whole thing has become.  In the short term, school construction is actually one of the more stimulative (job creating) things you can do with education dollars.   The idea that improving schools is essential to the economy is really a long term proposition.   Ideally school construction should be approached with a longer view in terms of education infrastructure needs and the needs of a diverse range of public schools**, but, regardless, it’s a peculiar target if you accept the jobs and/or reform criteria. 

*One caveat here is that some states are obviously trimming budgets in anticipation of this legislation and that’s going to mute the stimulative effect to some extent.   That’s a problem and so although some discretion, especially for states, will be needed to avoid just spreading the money too thin to make a difference, policymakers will have to pay attention to this dynamic.

**Also, although I would like to see a more robust federal role in school construction through infrastructure banks or similar ideas, you’d think that the construction spending in the bill would hold some appeal for those concerned about the deficit because it’s not long-term and will consequently not be built into the budget baseline as some of the other increases will.

There is a lot of new content over on the Eduwonk Facebook page.  Jump in.

Lots happening on the stimulus bill.  Senators are split on some provisions including education and behind the scenes this is where a lot of the anti-No Child advocacy is starting to boomerang.  Turns out that “it sucks, fund it” isn’t such a great message after all.  Who knew?  Anyway, Senator Ben Nelson (NB) has emerged as the Dem lever on this but aren’t two Dem senators whose views – given their backgrounds – really deserve some weight on the education pieces Mark Warner (VA) and Michael Bennet (CO)?  It also appears that given the dynamics when it comes to schools there is a non-trivial chance that this could end with the most reformist pieces of the bill on the cutting room floor and the least reformist skating through.  

There is also some back and forth about various pieces of language on different issues.  One hot one is the language on teacher quality where there are differences between the House bill, the Senate bill, and what various interest groups want.   Guestbloggers David Coleman, Jason Zimba, and Doug Staiger weigh-in on that controversy with the guest post below:

Based on our backgrounds in education research and policy, we were surprised to see the New York Times’s recent endorsement of teacher qualifications over teacher effectiveness. Commenting on the House and Senate stimulus language, the New York Times editorial page wrote on Wednesday:

“The Bush administration failed to enforce a crucial provision of No Child Left Behind that requires states to finally give poor and minority schools a fair share of experienced, qualified teachers. The House version of the stimulus bill requires states that get the new money to comply with the law. If the Senate fails to embrace this provision, it would be selling out impoverished children.”

This has the ring of civil rights and common sense. But it is actually the Senate language, not the House language, that focuses on what matters most to outcomes for poor children: the presence of an effective teacher. The House language insists, along the lines of NCLB, that poor children receive an experienced, qualified teacher. The Senate language instead says that states should use the funds to “increase the number, and improve the distribution of effective teachers.”

So the question is: which matters more for poor kids – the experience and qualifications of teachers or their demonstrated effectiveness in the classroom. On this matter, the research is overwhelming. The observed impact of an effective teacher is at least 5-10 times greater than the impact of qualifications or experience. Based on research from the past 30 years, there is no more urgent cause in education than increasing the concentration of effective teachers teaching poor children.

Ironically, while the House bill neglects demonstrated performance in distributing teacher talent, it also provides states with funding for data systems that will help us better gauge teacher effectiveness. The Senate bill, on the other hand, rightly highlights effectiveness, but does not fund the data systems required for such a measure.

Closing the achievement gap will require a new paradigm. We need to focus on demonstrated effectiveness in the classroom if we are going to transform the trajectories of poor children.

When the bills do go to conference we hope that Congress uses the Senate language on effectiveness and funds the requisite data systems to monitor student learning and growth (using the House language).

Guestbloggers David Coleman and Jason Zimba are the founders of Student Achievement Partners. Doug Staiger is John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and Zimba is a faculty member at the Center for Public Action at Bennington College.

Why even take time going to events when the Fordham Fellows helpfully repackage them for you?  One note on AEI food:  They may be really conservative but it’s the only think tank in town that regularly serves grape soda…that’s worth something even if I did overhear a prominent national reporter grumbling about the lack of cookies…Although the real lunch, if you were there, was Rick and Mike…not a friendly panel (that’s to their credit, most people do not invite in actual critics).

Wow, wonder what he has planned for his next education speech?

Per this earlier discussion of AP in Montgomery County, MD, there is a new slice at the data out today.   Punchline:  Still work to do but Montgomery County is the locomotive pulling the state of Maryland along in AP participation.  Update:  National overview from The Times.

Commodore Marguerite Roza turns in a primer on  teacher layoffs during economic times like these (pdf).

Dana Goldstein writes-up the dynamics around the just released WTU/AFT counterproposal to Michelle Rhee’s proposal.  She notes that, “by the look of the public one-page summary document, it will remain difficult to reach common ground,” and from the looks of it that’s pretty spot-on.   Update:  More here from WaPo.

The debate over mayoral control in New York City is getting more concrete with actual proposals being floated for legislators in Albany to consider.  

The other day I was with a group of superintendents from large, mostly suburban, school districts.   Among other issues that came up was health care and benefits costs as well as how money from the forthcoming stimulus will be spent.   The superintendents were concerned that, even with the amounts under consideration, the stimulus money would end up being too diffuse to leverage real reform by the time it hit school districts.  They likewise discussed how it’s not marginal dollars but big cost drivers like health care and benefits that are constraining school district budgets.

Those concerns are obviously related.   While the fights around the margins get the headlines, it’s the big cost-drivers that are really squeezing budgets.  And many of those, health care, retirement, and salary escalate almost automatically.    And, it’s big dollops of money that tend to drive reform not small amounts spread out all over the place.  In the end I think the stimulus will end up having enough flexibility and enough money that reform-oriented leaders at the state and district level can do clever things with it.  But there is a bigger issue here that extends far beyond the current economic crisis.

In a recent Forbes column Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli worry that the economic situation, now and going forward, means school reform is dead.   I don’t know about that, the politics are starting to change, but it does seem likely to be harder since traditionally reformers do “buy reform” by linking new funding with changes.   So, while today’s constraints are unlikely to lead to improvements in and of themselves, coupled with attention to the longer-term public finance picture for schools and an acknowledgment that we’re in a jam on both quality and finance this could be the beginning of an important conversation about the P-word and serving kids better within resource constraints. 

Ultimately, though, that conversation will only be as useful as stakeholders are willing to engage with the basic fact that you’ve gotta go where the money is.  That means looking at what drives costs in education and what can be done about it, reforming archaic school finance schemes – especially at the state level, and thinking differently about resources overall.   For an overview of just one debate, it’s hard to do better than Stephen Sawchuk’s Ed Week look at teacher pay and the debate over shifts there.

President Obama’s Executive Order on lobbying and government service has not attracted too much notice or debate in the think tank community.   A very likely unintended consequence is that evasion of lobbying rules will increase as people seek to avoid registering.   In other words, people will do the things that lobbyists do but not officially register as a lobbyist so as to keep their employment opportunities open down the road.  That’s a general problem in terms of efforts to use transparency to regulate lobbying and increase sunlight in government, but also a risk for the think tank world in terms of its brand.    In the past, some of the darker corners and less transparent locales of the think tank world, broadly defined, have been home to some of this sort of stuff anyway.  It, unfortunately, wouldn’t be surprising to see an increase.

Over at USN Mort Zuckerman sees an emerging education consensus, Richard Whitmire sees some hard work ahead.

Seriously.  Why else would he take this on?

Update:   The word “seriously” seems to have thrown a few folks.   Seriously, the post was in jest.  Panic has more.

I posted a link last week from the book discussion that ES hosted on Jay Mathews’ new book about KIPP.  You can listen yourself.  The thing that jumps out at me from the discussion, and the discussion of KIPP more generally, is that both poles of this debate are missing what going on here.   In the case of the most enthusiastic KIPP proponents,  they underestimate just how difficult this work is and the enormity of the challenges of achieving KIPP-like results at scale.  Richard Barth’s comments at the event were a sober reminder of that.  KIPP’s doing an amazing job, but the work is intense and ongoing.  In the case of KIPP detractors, they’re missing all the things that KIPP does that the broader system could learn from — really intentional training, a results-focused culture, etc…when they dismiss KIPP as sui generis, or worse as some sort of scam.