Kevin Carey takes a look at what they might have in common.

Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag raised some eyebrows by blogging from his CBO perch, he’s continuing the tradition at OMB.  But now you can also read Ed Secretary Arne Duncan’s blog or hear what President Obama’s Teleprompter has to say on its blog.  

Over at the Columbia Journalism Review Daniel Luzer takes on Dana Goldstein’s recent TAP story on Randi Weingarten.   Goldstein responds here.  Luzer’s a little too harsh on Goldstein’s article, but he does point up a real risk for reformers:  Namely that all this happy talk about how everyone is on board with reform now could lead to a superficial sense that things are changing or even some cosmetic changes when, in fact, not much actually changes for students in schools.  That, it seems, is a huge risk given both the history of this issue and the politics today, where there is a growing confluence of interests around appearing to reform without actually goring any oxen.

If Lynne Munson’s take on the 21st Century Skills meeting this week is accurate then it’s no surprise why there is a lot of skepticism and concern and it’s no wonder they didn’t invite the press.   The type of rhetoric she cites rigthly sets of alarm bells with a lot of people.  Update:  See this related response and this post.  Update II:  A conceptual breakthrough?  Reading the response of P21’s Paige Kuni to Munson’s post you can see the opportunity for possible common ground here.   Kuni writes:

I believe that by creating schools that adopt the approaches P21 supports, students will be able to make connections of how a changing form makes butterflies more successful in the ecosystem. That they can think critically about how life cycles connect to evolution. And that they could extrapolate to other topics such as how product lifecycles in business are the same or different from butterfly lifecycles in making companies successful. When they are 25 if they cannot recall the name of one-step in the lifecycle- it isn’t important as long as they possess the learning skills that allow them to access that information when they need it (search- cut- paste).

It’s easy to dismiss this as being against content, but in fact it’s how most of we mortals access content outside of the primary areas we work in or engage with on a regular basis.   So, for instance, today I couldn’t write out the periodic table, or likely even a single column of it, if my life depended on it but I do know the basic elements of it – pun intended – and the basic principles and can access more specific information should I need it.  In other words I have the basic conceptual understanding to get the specifics as needed.  To use a more recent example, to understand some of the debate about the AIG bonuses one needed to understand that the Constitution does have some language about bills of attainder and ex-post facto laws.   Did someone need to know that the relevant passage was Article I, Section 9, the third item?  No, probably not.  Do they need to understand conceptually why the founders would have included such language and what it means?  Yes.  But, only experts needed to deeply understand the case law about how courts have interpreted that language in analogous situations and how and how much it applies to criminal rather than civil proceedings.    

But in both these examples, the periodic table and AIG, some level of content depth is needed to be able to have a conceptual understanding and do the things that Kuni describes.  And, and this is key, you have to acquire that depth at some point and it doesn’t happen for most people — especially low-income students — by accident.  That’s the content piece.  Unfortunately, the P21 adherents, who tend to be big technology boosters in the first place, tend to jump to the search and cut angle of what makes the era we’re living in so allegedly revolutionary before they really discuss basic the content/conceptual understanding issue that underpins it.   They’re hardly the first people in education to do that.   So if they’d get a lot more specific around the content piece and all the issues attendant to that (curriculum, human capital, professional development, etc..) it could help ease some of the skepticism that is really becoming pervasive today.

Turns out that the AFT/UFT Edwize blog didn’t tell quite the whole story about the online Q & A that President Obama held yesterday and glossed right over the most interesting edupart.   But thankfully The Washington Post is on the case:

Arguably the most animated and substantial exchange was between the president and a longtime teacher from Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia who was seated a few feet behind him. The teacher asked Obama for his definition of “a charter school” and “an effective teacher.” While Obama quickly dispensed with the first part of the question, he could not get the teacher to answer when he asked whether in her 15 years on the job she has encountered colleagues who she would not want to teach her own children.

You can read the whole transcript here, the rest of the education answers are interesting, but things The President has said before.

There is a fascinating little dust-up going on in the school choice world yesterday and today.   Not the new Fordham report, which basically did signal to the more hard core elements of the school choice crowd that they need to get with the program around quality and accountability, but rather some seemingly innocuous and quite reasonable things that school choice advocate Howard Fuller said about proposals to increase accountability within the Milwaukee school voucher program.  He made a similar point albeit more obliquely in the WSJ yesterday($).  Ideas like requiring schools that are accepting public funds to have teachers who have B.A.s or instituting some open records requirements for schools that receive public money hardly seem to strike at the heart of school choice.   And slippery slope arguments, while not invalid on their face, are an ironic posture for school choice advocates to take since the bulk of the arguments against school choice are rooted in the idea that it’s a slippery slope.  Besides, in politics and policy almost everything is a slippery slope to somewhere.  In other words, school choice advocates would do well to listen to Fuller.

I suspect this little contretemps may have as much to do with politics within the voucher crowd about influence, who gets to speak on what, and messaging as it does with substance.  And throughout his colorful career Fuller has never shied from speaking his mind so good luck controlling him!  But there is a real substantive issue here and a genuine divide about what sort of accountability is reasonable (pdf) and whether choice should trump all other values and equities in education or be one value among several that policies should respect.   That divide is what separates a lot of charter school folks from the more hard core voucher supporters. 

And here’s the frustrating thing if you actually want to see progress around expanding choices and options for parents and don’t have a compulsive love of the theater:  When it comes to issues like public accountability, people like Fuller and Stanford’s Terry Moe have been saying sensible things about regulations for years (and cautioning against ideas like tax-credits as a way to  help low-income families).  But you’d never know that listening to all the rhetoric because unfortunately all that gets lost in the din of the back and forth between the most strident advocates on both sides of the choice issue and the conversation about choice and accountability consistently comes up lame.  Education politics, not known for their nuance…

PS – Speaking of slippery slopes, seems even more likely that in the end the Milwaukee voucher program will end up being a stalking horse for public charter schools, not the other way around…that’s of course why a lot of folks are upset with Fuller but his thing was never just vouchers anyway…

Education policy and advocacy groups are like neckties, don’t toss out the ones that go out of style because they’ll come back at some point and you can wear them again.   For instance, there is a forum on assessment and accountability in D.C. on May 7-8.  That’s hardly unusual, seems to be one of these about every week right now.  Yet this one stands out for two reasons.  First, it’s co-sponsored by the NEA and FairTest.  Publicly, at least, FairTest has tried to demonstrate independence from the NEA and the NEA has tried to minimize its public involvement with FairTest to keep alive the fiction that they’re really serious about accountability.  That’s getting harder all the time, which is perhaps why this love can now speak its name.   Second, as interesting, and presumably just in keeping with his open door policy, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is apparently planning to speak.   More than one Eduwonk reader wants to know if they’re going to make time to discuss this recent FairTest report on Chicago’s education efforts (pdf)? 

Sadly, might be hard to find out because it doesn’t appear the event is open to “lazy, stupid, and vain” journos… 

Interesting new Fordham report on school vouchers and regulation (pdf).  They gathered a group with varying views, including Eduwonk, and posed some questions.  My take tended to be toward the regulatory side – overall I think that public regulations and public accountability should follow public dollars, which is one reason I’m skeptical of some voucher plans.  But as the report shows there are interesting and thorny questions there and it’s not a simple issue.   In the end the analysts at Fordham recommend a sliding scale with regulations proportionate to the amount of public funding.   That’s one option to resolve some of the differences.  

But here’s a more radical idea:  Vouchers are tied up in a debate about money following children into non-public settings based on the theory that such funding benefits the child not the institution.  That theory has been broadened through a string of court cases around Title I dollars, textbooks, and computers for low-income youngsters in private schools as well as the Supreme Court case upholding the constitutionality of vouchers.  Today in fact, though you wouldn’t know it from the rhetoric around vouchers, a lot of public money goes into private schools through Title I, the federal special education ”IDEA” law, and other federal and state programs.  So much money actually that perhaps it’s time to jettison this idea of a child benefit theory and instead think about accountability from a school perspective and move toward deliniations and regulatory policies based on whether or not a school recieves public funding rather than increasingly blurry distinctions of public and private?

The UFT responds to the latest in the back and forth with KIPP.  One quick reax:  If this whole thing becomes a debate about KIPP schools being able to dismiss teachers the union will most likely lose that one…

Last week Richard Whitmire and I pointed out the National Education Association’s ideas deficit on improving schools.  That was enough, of course, to get us labeled “anti-union.”  But here’s Dana Goldstein in the hardly anti-union American Prospect:

The NEA, with 3.2 million members, is the larger of the national teachers’ unions but is widely seen as insufficiently committed to closing the achievement gap between middle-class white kids and low-income children of color. The AFT is smaller, with 1.4 million members, but unlike the NEA, it has long been known for its interest in raising student achievement.

Get her to a reeducation camp!  And per her article, add this to the list of things on Randi Weingarten’s plate…

Russ Whitehurst turns in an interesting essay on innovation in education that’s well worth your time (pdf).   It gets at the innovate or induldge issue and the different kinds of innovation and ways to think about it. 

NRC’s Michael Feuer takes a look at Charles Murray’s recent book:

One wonders what motivates someone supposedly trained as a social scientist to so willfully ignore large quantities of evidence and to declare categorically that the dream of uplifting children from impoverished intellectual and economic environments is just a lot of romantic nonsense. I leave that question to psychologists better equipped to address it. Meanwhile, I expect that Murray’s book will spur debate and cause people to focus on real research, for which I suppose we should be grateful. It’s the minimum we should demand for enduring Murray’s mean-spirited rhetoric and faulty science.

Don’t worry, he also tells you what he really thinks about the book…

Update:  Mike Petrilli is easily convinced…

Someone could publish one!  In the last week Richard Whitmire and I wrote in TNR about the challenge Weingarten faces, Nicholas Kristof looked at Weingarten nemisis Michelle Rhee in The Times over the weekend, and today Dana Goldstein takes a long and must-read look at Weingarten and her challenge in TAP.

The New York Times is cranking out a lot of interesting education pieces.  Over the weekend Sam Dillon sorta looked at Title I formulas, Nicholas Kristof looked at Michelle Rhee, and today E.D. Hirsch takes a smart look at test quality.

The Kristof column is generating a lot of buzz.  It seems anything with the words “Michelle Rhee” does these days.  But while it’s terrific that someone with a platform like Kristof is paying attention to education, I didn’t flip for the column like some others have.   He cites Michelle’s big weakness as “bedside manner”  And sure, part of Rhee’s challenge (and her strength, it should be noted) is her aggressive style.  But, does anyone seriously believe that if she had the light touch of Tony Bennett and the political skills of Jack Kennedy we still wouldn’t be having this big fight in D.C. about her actual proposals?  Of course not.  That debate, and others like it, are about changing the rules of the game and taking away privileges that some organized groups have long enjoyed.   That is…how do they call it…contentious!   In other words, her more serious problem is intense organized opposition to what she’s trying to do.  It seems that Kristof either missed that dynamic or assumes a lot of background information on the part of the reader.   So unless you know the situation pretty well the dots don’t get connected that this isn’t Michelle Rhee v. rank and file teachers (most of whom unfortunately don’t’ vote in teachers’ union elections anyway), it’s Rhee v. a powerful local and national machine driven by activist teachers on these issues.   So of course she’s made mistakes along the way, we all do in complicated situations.  But the underlying dynamic here is a more basic one than that.   Education reform is like a bad marriage, we argue about everything except the real issues at hand Arguing about Michelle’s style is like arguing about who should be taking out the trash.

Don Hirsch’s piece on testing is quite important.  The idea that fill in the bubble tests inherently mean low-quality tests has become fashionable but is wrong.  That’s not to say we shouldn’t move to better assessments, but rather that until the field internalizes the core points Hirsch is making about content and curriculum we run both the risk replicating today’s problems in new assessments or of faddishness.

The Dillon article is important but this is a debate that’s been going on for a while and hasn’t received enough attention.   No Child Left Behind helped get more money to poor kids than previous versions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, but there is still a lot more work to do there.  Formula debates, however, are generally not partisan.  Rather, they’re regional and given the need to have 218 votes to move a bill off the floor of the House of Representatives it’s hard to design formulas that at once send money to 218 congressional districts (and by default a lot more than that) and also concentrate it on poor students.   Unfortunately, more than focus on those issues, which really matter given the inequitable reality of state school finance schemes, the article ends up rehashing various views about whether or not districts can use this much money this quickly in a responsible fashion.   That’s surely a good question but separate from the formula issue.

Aside from the obvious, there is a lot of weird in this Times story about the alleged staged student fights at a Dallas school.

[The principal], 56, is a former Dallas police officer who once lied about being kidnapped and robbed at gunpoint to get out of work, for which he was placed on administrative leave. 

 OK.

The district uncovered the cage-fight accusations while investigating a scandal that forced South Oak Cliff to relinquish its 2005 and 2006 state boys basketball championship titles.

Of course.

A school-based fight club runs counter to the last decade or more of research into school discipline, said Dr. Russ Skiba, who directed the Safe and Responsive Schools Project at Indiana University.   “We’ve found over time that those types of strategies just don’t work,” Dr. Skiba said. “They are more likely to encourage aggression than to solve it.”

Good to know we spent a decade or more figuring that out…

The KIPP-union situation in New York City moved fast this week, especially today.    First there are all sorts of rumors flying about what is or is not happening at KIPP AMP, the high performing charter school the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) is seeking to organize.   Then today teachers at two other KIPP schools in New York City that are currently affiliated with the UFT in different ways moved to formally sever that relationship.   That’s a big deal and a big black eye for the UFT.  The actual press release, especially the part about union initiated grievances that teachers at the school had no say in, clearly will ratchet the pressure up around KIPP AMP.  TAP’s Dana Goldstein has more.    AFT/UFT President Randi Weingarten has a lot on her plate right now.

This whole process carried at least as much risk for the teachers’ union as it did for KIPP and that’s becoming apparent.  I’d put the odds at one in three now that the UFT comes out of this with any KIPP schools in the city as part of their portfolio.  More generally, while the UFT/AFT hoped this would highlight how hard KIPP teachers work and sustainability questions about  that, instead this episode now seems likely bring into stark relief some of the very real tensions between industrial-style unionism and professional work.   That’s actually a healthy debate for the field and one that is too often about soundbites.  But in New York City it looks like it’s now going to be total war around these schools and this issue for a while.   That’s too bad.

There is one other school here that has basically been beneath the radar around all this:  Amber Charter School.  They started with an eight page contract with the UFT in 2002.  It was subsequently expanded to 15 pages in 2005.   That’s still a good example of the portfolio approach and relevant here.

Winners!  Please stop emailing about winners in the NCLB naming contest, they’ve been announced.

Charters!  This new study from RAND on charter schools is important (pdf).  Good analysis on several key questions across multiple states.   Has some implications around the paper Sara Mead and I did on state laws and characteristics (pdf) but the data there are still limited.

Clinton and charters!  Here’s a President Clinton speech from the other day (pdf). Interesting stuff on President Obama’s education speech, charter schools, and national standards.

Beating back the Breastapo!  In The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin takes on the breastfeeding question.  Larger parallels from her article to the “everybody knows” problem in the education debate.

New Ideas!  Got an eduidea you want to incubate?  Then consider a fellowship from the Mind Trust.  It’ll support you to support school improvement.

Old Idea:  Brett Pawlowski points out the dour forecast for ed finance (pdf).

I can’t help but think that if this new GAO report (pdf) had found more evidence of curriculum narrowing affecting the arts - instead of basically the opposite story - it would be getting, you know, wider attention than it is…At least they tried with the headline, but the key finding is: 

Most elementary school teachers-about 90 percent-reported that instruction time for arts education remained the same between school years 2004-2005 and 2006-2007. The percentage of teachers that reported that instruction time had stayed the same was similarly high across a range of school characteristics, irrespective of the schools’ percentage of low income or minority students or of students with limited English proficiency, or the schools’ improvement under NCLBA. Moreover, about 4 percent of teachers reported an increase. However, about 7 percent reported a decrease…

Read the whole thing to learn more about the seven percent, that does matter.   Also, buried in the GAO analysis in the text and a footnote is some direct evidence that skepticism of the Center on Education Policy data on curriculum narrowing was quite warranted…

In any event, “everyone knows” that arts are being cut, there is a race to the bottom, NCLB is killing field trips, etc..etc..etc…

In TNR Richard Whitmire and I look at the Washington D.C. contract situation and the larger challenge facing AFT leader Randi Weingarten.  Update: The feedback on this article has been fascinating.  Weingarten critics are again furious that she be given any quarter, it should be a bear-baiting!  Weingarten fans are furious that Richard and I would even consider D.C. an important test case because of the villainous Rhee!   And some people, especially non-edu types think that this is what it appears:  A really interesting and important situation to watch.

On education reform there has been a lot to like from this Administration so far.   The President’s speech the other day was spot-on in its themes, and Arne Duncan’s $5 billion “race to the top” and innovation fund is certainly a welcome reform lever as is the emphasis on the teacher incentive fund and grants for data capacity.  And Duncan’s straightforward emphasis on the seriousness of reform when talking with the public is exactly how a Democrat should approach the issue.   So why then are some in the ed reform community increasingly nervous about the ability of the stimulus package to actually leverage the reform that is being promised?  

Well for starters governors are already looking for various ways to direct the money to their favored projects, which may or may not have much to do with education reform.    At one level, the economic stimulus level, this doesn’t matter.  From an economic standpoint the goal is to get federal dollars out there and it’s somewhat irrelevant exactly how they flow.   But with more than $100 billion nominally directed at education, there is real pressure to show some serious results.  That’s why the Vice President recently begged educators not to squander the opportunity.  And we do have an enormous education problem that the country must address.  It’s not the cause of the jam we’re in now but is a longer term issue and an affront to any idea of equal opportunity. 

In addition, the construction of the law means that as Brownstein and Edwards report at Thompson’s School Grants 2009 it’s entirely possible that the money can be used on activities that don’t have a lot to do with reform (pdf).  This is a big deal.  To be sure, some of those activities have merit.  For instance, school construction is a real need and that’s obviously a stimulative use of federal dollars.  But the bill was sold one way to the public (and to leaders in Congress as well, curtailing school construction spending was a key to getting a deal to ensure its passage in the first place) and there will be some accountability as well as political fallout there.

The bottom line is that actual school reform in exchange for what’s almost surely the biggest dollop of education spending during this administration’s tenure is really riding on two things:  The ability of the Secretary to incentivize reform in an approximately $600 billion industry with $5 billion dollars (or less than one percent) and his willingness and ability to hold the line on guidance, waivers, regulations, and other enforcement mechanisms across a range of programs and against what is already shaping up to be intense pressure to water things down (and after two-thirds of the funding is already out the door).  In terms of reform, outside the $5 billion “race to the top” fund, the legislation is built around assurances that states are doing things not requirements that they do so (lightning and lightning bugs in terms of state behavior and enforcement) so incentives and regulatory leverage is where all the action is and all the hard choices are really still ahead.  That makes this one tall order for the Secretary and unless he’s really willing to make some people in Washington and around the country unhappy, 5 on 600 and a largely incentive-based reform strategy translates into a really high leverage play and some long odds.

There is still plenty of upside and at this early point any administration (and especially one in the challenging economic situation we’re in) faces more hard choices ahead than clear victories in the rear-view mirror, but in terms of school improvement there is an awful lot riding on this piece and some big challenges looming.

By the way, if you’re looking for a great website on all things education stimulus, it’s hard to beat Learning Point Associates recovery site.  Resources, regs, links, ideas, etc…

Willingham takes a look at the issue of dismissing low-performing teachers and urges teachers’ unions to take a firmer hand.   He notes that natural tendency to focus on the negative outliers at the expense of the positive stories hurts the unions in the court of public opinion.

True enough, but there are a two problems with his analysis.   First, right now the teachers’ unions are in a purgatory of their own creation.   They don’t want to use data to evaluate teachers and they don’t want to use managerial discretion.   I guess that leaves the Magic 8-Ball?  In practice, a combination of data and managerial discretion is how most professional fields operate and the most promising avenue for education.  But the unions structural inability (they are not designed to lead on issues like this but to protect) to embrace really meaningful reform here leaves them unable to truly propose breakthrough ideas.   The most far-reaching idea they have, peer review, is a great start and helps address the problem of observably bad teachers but does not get the field anywhere near where it needs to be in terms of performance-oriented management and growth of human capital.  The numbers in the places where it has been tried speak to that.  This gets at the larger tension between industrial-style unionization and how to organize a profession.  Forward looking teachers’ union leaders are trying to sort that out.

Second, he states that,

“The issue of firing teachers has been poorly framed. It’s usually described as an issue of getting poor teachers out of the classroom in order to improve overall quality of instruction. That’s important, of course. But how big a difference is this really going to make to American education as a whole? If you had a perfect diagnostic to evaluate teachers, how many would you dismiss tomorrow? One percent? As many as three percent? If you had a perfect diagnostic and dismissed incompetent teachers the students in their classrooms (and their colleagues down the hall) would be glad. But the impact on the overall national quality of instruction would be minimal. Such dismissals could, however, make a dramatic difference in the public’s perception of the profession.”

I’m not sure what Dan’s basing this on?  That figure would certainly vary by locale.  But teachers themselves and school administrators in lower-performing school districts say it’s higher, in many cases substantially so.   One has to be wary of the downstream effects of any teacher policies in terms of impact on recruitment and so forth, but if schools were to address some significant percentage of low-performing teachers, say 5, 10, or even 15 percent, the impact on student learning could be quite powerful – especially if schools and the work of teachers was organized differently and more professionally.    The field has always taken a quantity approach to teachers rather than a quality approach.   The evidence on class size reduction, teacher effects, and other alleged predictors of performance suggest that this approach may be profoundly misguided.  

I’m not arguing here for some mass termination policy, only that we shouldn’t casually dismiss the potential impact of such an approach.  Getting highly ineffective teachers out from in front of kids is no small thing in terms of outcomes.

In related news, Charlotte, N.C. says performance will matter in any layoffs.

Some reads if you’re not too consumed with the exciting conclusion to the NCLB naming contest:

Two on teacher quality.  Annenberg’s Robert Rothman walks through the value-added debate around teacher quality.  It’s not technical and a great overview.  Meanwhile, don’t forget the big NCTQ meeting in D.C., now Michelle Rhee is speaking, too.  Could be some news there.

School turnarounds.  Chicago Public Radio takes a look at a turnaround school there and a dimension that doesn’t always get a lot of attention.

Student turnarounds.  The Times reports on an interesting program for dropouts, MDRC has the early eval here.  I’ve worked with at-risk kids in alternative settings, there is a lot to be said for these approaches and they’re too often patchwork and resource starved.    Obviously creating the kind of schools that kids don’t want to dropout of is the most effective strategy but some safety net/second chance system will always be necessary.  

State finance.   Rockefeller Institute takes a look at fourth quarter revenue from 2008 (pdf).   Obvious eduimplications.

Animating. “How The Test Was Won,” The Simpsons do No Child Left Behind.

The judges have weighed-in!  After more than 780 entries through this post and this post, we have a winner in the Eduwonk NCLB naming contest.  I asked some educators, Hill staffers, and other assorted friends of the blog to nominate their favorites and I read every entry (that’s why this took a while).  Everyone was free to use their own criteria.   A lot of great stuff came in, funny, angry, hopeful and a lot of really clever stuff, and of course some even too tasteless for the blog (I’m talking to you Turnkey!), and some great pop culture references (but cribbing from Zoolander, while funny, doesn’t get you a book).   So, it was hard to choose but here are your winners:

Honorable mentions, who win some edubooks from Jossey-Bass, including, the Education Week Guide to K-12 Terminology, Tools for Teaching by Barbara Gross Davis, The Academic Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Documenting Teaching, Research, and Service by Peter Seldin and J. Elizabeth Miller, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems by Derek Bruff, Mega-Fun Math Games and Puzzles for the Elementary Grades, Hands on Math Projects with Real-Life Applications, Grades 3-5, Differentiated Instruction for the Middle School Language Arts Teacher, Developing Learner-Centered Teaching: A Practical Guide for Facultyby Phyullis Blumberg.  They are:

Joe Williams for suggesting Caitlin, because everyone is naming things Caitlin these days.  The entries  “Mind the gap” and  “Mental Asset Recovery Plan (MARP)” as well as ”Peter” for two different entries that the judges understandably loved:  “We’re Coming For You, Japan (WCFYJ)” and the “Keep Our Daughters Off the Pole Act of 2009 (KODOPA)”, and finally the Hey, Teacher, Leave Those Kids Behind Act also earns a book.

The runner-up, who gets one of those coveted “Obama Loves Charter Schools” buttons that are circulating:

Peter, again, for, These Colors Don’t Run (from Calculus) or TCDRC.

 And the grand prize winner, who gets the highly sought-after signed picture of Justin Cohen in a tacky frame:

The Elementary and Secondary Educational Excellence Act.   If you’re going to add an ‘e’ it’s hard to beat excellence.

All prize winners should email me to arrange for their prize(s) to be mailed to them.  Thanks to everyone who sent entries and otherwise participated.

I keep hearing how everyone is down with performance-pay or whatever you want to call it and there is no friction there, but it just doesn’t seem like that’s the case…

Here’s a proposed bill in Maine:

“A salary of a teacher may not be based upon the measurable performance or productivity of the teacher or a student of the teacher.”

Gosh, why would anyone be reticent about investing a lot of public money in a system like that?   Now I don’t know anyone who thinks a teacher’s entire salary should be based on outcomes, but some how about some component?  A little?  A tiny bit? None?  Seriously?

PS – Is it me or are there a lot more bills like this popping up all over the place?  It’s almost like it’s an organized effort or something…nah…couldn’t be…

Update:  Via an earlier post, apparently warmed by a recent link, a Title I teacher weighs-in:

I am a teacher in a Title I school, and I am all for merit pay for individuals. I work hard because that is what I was hired to do, and because I operate under the belief that the work I am doing is very important. I am not worried about my student’s test scores, because when one teaches in a well-planned, reflective, and intentional way, with a consistent and robust program, the test scores take care of themselves. I am weary of watching some colleagues who work less than I do (and have students with overall lower scores), make more money than I do…

In The Times, David Brooks picks up on the President’s speech the other day.  It’s a must-read…

In case you had any doubt, the actual socialists aren’t much for President Obama’s ideas on education…

A few more takes on the President’s education speech yesterday.  At NPR, Diane Rehm had a few guests on to discuss it including DPC head Melody Barnes, CCCR’s Diane Piche, NEA’s Lily Eskelson, and AEI’s Rick Hess.   Over at Politico it’s being debated.  My take - broader than what is below – here.  I don’t share the concern that there are not federal policy hooks for these ideas, there are.  My concern is how these ideas get from the speech to the goal line intact. 

Update:  At Slate Bruce Reed goes deep:  “Obama showed a path out of gridlock that could work as well in solving other entrenched problems.” 

Jay Greene finds paradise by the blogboard light with a somewhat slippery post wondering again how anyone could possibly think that charter schools are OK but vouchers are not for anything other than nakedly political reasons.   The answer, I’d argue, isn’t that complicated and lies in the imprecision of words like “vouchers.”  At their core vouchers are just a method for funding schools.   As Jay notes, various requirements can and cannot be attached to that funding and therein lies the debate among people who are open to more intentional choice in public education than exists today and those who never met a choice plan they didn’t like.  That’s a vital debate because it’s about doing choice right and so the insinuations that anyone who is skeptical of some of these proposals and ideas is merely acting politically are hardly helpful.  Here’s a blast from the past considering some of those issues in relation to the D.C. voucher program when it was first enacted.

After Monday’s stem cell policy shift, science is back!  The President issued a memorandum to agency heads about scientific integrity, evidence and policy debates.  It’s important.  Evidence should matter.

But, as we think about our little educorner of the world it’s worth considering what this would mean for our field on a couple of levels.  For instance, right now fewer than half the states (21) match student achievement data with a unique teacher identifier.   And in some of those it’s still messy.  If we really wanted to take a more scientific approach why wouldn’t we make adopting data elements like this a condition or requirement for receiving federal education aid to help policymakers have more evidence to make policy decisions?  The stimulus Recovery Act, for example, only requires that states offer assurances (pdf) that they’re moving in this direction and “assurances” and requirements are like lightning and lightning bugs when it comes to enforcement.  Across education there are examples of where lip service is paid to evidence and science but make decisions based on ideology or stakeholder position.  Teacher credentialing leaps to mind…

It’s also worth thinking about where and when values and ideology should play a role and also how to adjudicate issues where the evidence doesn’t point overwhelming toward one policy remedy or another or where there are genuinely conflicting value judgements.  In our sector school choice is probably the best example.   Reasonable people can read the evidence and still come down in different places about the acceptable range of publicly financed choice in education.  That’s because the debate is fundamentally about competing views on the relationship of individual and state rather than the effect sizes that various studies find.   The social science research around school choice is important and helps us understand the world better but empiricism can only take us so far on some questions.

Historically, the progressive movement in this country and progressive education has found its way to trouble with an unbridled enthusiasm for the ability of science to show us the “true” path.   That’s ironic given the political fault lines in education today and that it’s frequently “reformers” who ascribe the most power to science in our contemporaneous education debates (although the ed tech and 21st Century Skills crowd certianly has its fair share of boosterism around the transformative potential of technology in teaching and learning).   Science and what it can offer is a powerful tool and a key foundational touchstone in our society but there are other values that are foundational, too, and deserve respect.

Photo via About.com

The U.S. Senate voted yesterday to effectively begin the end of the federally funded D.C. school voucher program.  Ed Secretary Duncan has publicly disagreed with the timetable for withdrawal but that apparently had little effect as the vote wasn’t even close (58-39), although there were a few interesting votes here and there.  It’s part of a pattern, the Hill doesn’t really seem to much care what the administration thinks about the omnibus spending bill and the administration is basically saying that it’ll be their process next year so just wait.   So far the Hill seems to have the stronger hand.  In terms of the voucher program specifically, in better economic times you’d expect some private money to come in and at least allow students to stay at their current schools until they age out, if not continue the program because it’s a touchstone in the school voucher community.  But these are not normal times.  Whatever one thinks of school vouchers, the spectacle of forcing the kids to leave their schools before they age out is pretty cold-hearted.  But when elephants fight…as they say…Going forward there will be some theater before this is all over and perhaps some compromise on currently enrolled students in a future bill (though the specific language in the legislation makes that challenging) so how this played out was a pretty clear signal.

The voucher funding was part of a “three sector” solution  involving funds for the city’s public schools, public charter schools, and the voucher program.   Keep an eye on that.