Charlie Barone takes a look at some of the trade-offs, choices, and risks inherent with growth models in a new ES paper. 

The President’s speech today includes a lot of interesting tidbits, a shout-out for performance pay, a call to lift charter school caps, and even a very pro-Broad Prize signal embedded in the data section.  I’ve been lukewarm on some of the stimulus, more on that later, but this is an important speech.   They’re scrambling on 16th Street…

Update:  It’s on? AP’s Libby Quaid breaks some news on the lines that are being drawn:

[National Education Association President Dennis] Van Roekel insisted that Obama’s call for teacher performance pay does not necessarily mean raises or bonuses would be tied to student test scores. It could mean more pay for board-certified teachers or for those who work in high-poverty, hard-to-staff schools, he said.

However, administration officials said later they do mean higher pay based on student achievement, among other things.

Hmmm…doesn’t seem like they both can be right…

Among others the Fordhammites are nervous about Obama’s call for tests that measure “21st Century Skills.” But it looks like he was just giving voice to issues around test quality rather than buying into the whole 21st Century Skills construct or sending some signal there.  It’s a catchphrase, there was a 21st Century conceit to the speech, and that issue has been on the table long before the 21st Century Skills idea came into vogue.  It is worth noting, though, that there is language in ESEA about assessments and higher order thinking and money in the stimulus for test quality so there’s an opportunity for the President to step up the pressure on assessment quality through executive action if he wants to.

Update II:  Sawchuk has more on the teacher issues.

Update III:   The perplexing “merit pay” – “performance pay” distinction seems to be emerging again.   If the cover story to get anything done here is that it’s not “merit pay” so it’s a victory for the NEA, then fine.   Otherwise, the distinction between the two eludes me.   And a professional occupation that can’t talk about “merit” has some issues…

There is a lot to recommend in this commentary by Pedro Noguera, but right at the end he tosses out one of today’s most popular and misleading lines:

“…we must also acknowledge that if unions were the problem, the South would have the best schools.”

It must be fashionable to say this because you hear it all the time from a variety of people.  Problem is, it doesn’t make much sense.  For starters, you’d think people who are quick to point out that out-of-school factors and school finance matter to student outcomes would be quicker to appreciate some aspects of schooling in the South.   But even more to the point, public schools in the South operate a lot like public schools elsewhere and there is more homogeny across geographies than one might think.  That’s in part because many of the rules and regulations that are commonly assumed to exist in teachers’ contracts actually exist in state policy (pdf).  Politically, state teachers’ associations in the South operate much like their Northern counterparts and there are elections in the South, too.  And it’s also because culture is powerful in education and there are pretty strong cultural norms around how schools and school districts are organized, regardless of geography.   In other words, whether or not there is collective bargaining in a state is not an especially strong variable in terms of student achievement.  Someone should do a book…oh wait…

To be sure, while they have some culpability for today’s educational problems, teachers’ unions do get blamed for a variety of ills that are not their fault and pretty much everything gets dumped at their feet in the public back and forth about schools.   But, this business about how education in the South proves something about unionism is not their strongest talking point in that debate. 

In response to all the various criticisms and debates the 21st Century skills advocates have released a video…It has a sort of “P21jahideen” vibe to it.  Apparently Mike Petrilli has now pledged to pursue Ken Kay to the gates of hell…

Meanwhile, Common Core has posted a video of the  21st Century Skills debate the other day.  But if media literacy is indeed a 21st Century Skill, they’re lacking in it.  The video is hard to find and really small.  But, if you look down to the right you can dig it out and expand the screen to larger than a thumbnail.

My kids have been into Dan Zanes’ music for a while and it’s something we happily encourage as it is some of the very best childrens’ music out there.  It makes you resent the dinosaur that much more because it’s great roots oriented stuff that you genuinely want to hear and don’t get sick of.  Plus, I get a touch of the good kind of nostalgia because I was into Zanes’ old band, The Del Fuegos, back when they were still playing. 

Yet despite constantly favorable reviews from friends and the popularity of the music in our house, until this past weekend we hadn’t seen Zanes’ live show.  Saturday he was in Richmond, Virginia, with his band and we got a line to check out the show.  So the eduwife and I packed up the eduspawn and headed over.  But while ostensibly a concert, it basically turns into a general admission show or, dance party as Zanes put it, for little kids.  And, yes, they do get to run wild.  It makes an impression. One of my daughters, not worn out after constantly moving for more than an hour down under the stage, didn’t stop saying “let’s do another concert” for 45 minutes afterwards.  And, if you listen carefully, at times you can hear a few of those hooks that made the Del Fuegos so contagious.   Bonus:  Even though he was part of the Disney empire (but Kay Hanley is, too, these days so who knows) for a while on TV, Zanes’ live show is refreshingly non-commercial and non-product linked. CDs were $12, for instance.   So no serious point here except this is good fun for kids of all ages.

So actress Julia Stiles starts a blog and promptly begins gushing about Joel Klein.  Either she has good taste in school reformers or she’s preparing for some role where she needs to understand what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a lot of angry emails from implacable activists.  Method acting?  In any event, Eduwonk approves! 

In The Times, Elissa Gootman delivers her Klein profile.  Turns out Joel Klein is impatient and can even be abrasive!  Don’t tell Julia! 

Couple of quick points.   First, there are more than a million students in the New York City public schools so change comes slowly but for my money there has been a lot of progress in the past eight years. Too often the debate is various data points rather than an overall look at what’s changed.   That said, things are not nearly where they need to be but the criticisms need to be put in some context and they too frequently are not. 

Second, that a lot of legislators and public officials feel neglected by Klein is a problem but also an inherent tension and symptom of mayoral control.   Gootman discusses that.   There is no school governance model that is perfect but there clearly is a trade off between relentlessness and leverage and giving lots of people ongoing decisionmaking roles in the governance of a large system.  Could Klein have handled it better?  Sure.  But no one should misunderstand the inherent choices with different models of governance.  

Third, is it me or do education stories like this focus a lot more on personality than coverage in many other sectors?  The education world often doesn’t acquit itself well with how personal all this ends up being.   And c’mon, if the critics had someone at the helm who was stiff-arming reforms they don’t favor and advancing ones they do we wouldn’t be hearing so much grumbling about process. 

Finally, what I think gets lost here is a subtle but powerful way Klein has advanced the cause of education reform.   He knows lots of people from different sectors and fields via the interesting life he’s led.   The article, for instance, talks about his foodie friendship with Alan Alda.  The education world tends to be somewhat insular and it’s been interesting to watch how many different people in other walks of life have become acquainted with the education debate through Klein.  He’s like ed reform’s own Kevin Bacon and I don’t think his most strident critics understand how much that is marginalizing them in some venues.

Update:  Elizabeth Green amplifies the story.

After USAT’s Greg Toppo jumps into the quite lively 21st Century Skills debate, Patrick “Eduflack” Riccards and Robert “Panic at the” Pondiscio debate the 21st Century Skills problem.  Riccards had better watch himself, apparently Pondiscio is into the longbow…

Riccards: If anything, 21CS is guilty of bad messaging and bad PR. In a time when everyone is concerned about both academic quality and relevance to the economy, many 21CS advocates remain focused on the need for soft skills, believing they have discovered some long, lost map to student success. In reality, they are calling for a reinforcement of the relevance of core instruction. Their message has been off, and as a result, they’ve painted a nice, large target on the back of a well-meaning concept.

Panic: I’m not sure P21’s ”message” is off.  They’ve articulated worthwhile goals, but have loopy ideas on how to achieve them, and now they’ve been called on it.  That’s not a message problem–it’s a product problem. 

Is there really a better way to read Todd Oppenheimer’s education technology book other than on your Kindle?

Apparently everyone thinks national standards are just around the corner, especially since a David Hoff headline said as much the other day.   I don’t think Robert “Panic at the” Pondiscio has sobered-up since reading that!

Good thing the national standards bubble has never popped before…So before you rush to start investing in all this Checker Finn’s caution on Hoffblog is well-worth heeding:

If you scratch “a millimeter below the surface” on national standards, significant differences emerge on who should set the standards, what should be in them, and other hot-button issues.

I’d add that some of the rush to national standards from appointed and elected state level officials has less to do with enthusiasm for the idea than a desire to play defense because they see it as inevitable.  In other words they’re not all happy warriors and as soon as the veneer of inevitability starts to fade you may see some feet dragging.  Not saying national standards won’t happen at some point, I suspect they will in at least core subjects, only that it’s further off than many enthusiasts assume.  That, of course, has some more immediate policy implications.

Update:   Finn, who has seen this issue unfold for a while, elaborates and lays out seven sins he sees in the offing on all this.

With the debate over the future of the D.C. school voucher program in full swing on the Hill, Secretary of Ed Arne Duncan puts himself squarely in the crossfire courtesy of the AP.   Andy Smarick thinks there is less to this than it appears and he’s right (and besides, what Duncan said is hardly unreasonable).  But, as soon as the debate shifts from the binary yes/no posture on the program to some nuance like this the politics could shift, too, because it gets more complicated, the questions trickier, and the lines more fuzzy.   For instance, if it’s OK to keep kids in these schools then why not send others as well?

The strategy of the program’s opponents, who see a real chance to kill the initiative off, was clearly “damn the editorial pages, full speed ahead!”  But between Michelle Rhee’s comments and this it could get harder…especially if the next few days are relatively slow news cycles…

Update:  It’s D & D time…as Durbin (D-IL) and Duncan are not on the same page.   Usually Reliable Robelen has more.  Kaus sees a boomerang.  Petrilli breaks out his new toy.

Tom Edsall’s article the other day about Michelle Rhee is getting a lot of attention and it cited this short ES report that Margaret Sullivan and I did about teacher demographics in D.C.  But while I suspect the trends the report identified are still largely relevant, per a few emails and blog posts from the calender-challenged and tin foil hat crowd who see a screen play for Rhee it’s worth noting that Margaret and I did the work in September of 2006 and Rhee became Chancellor in June of 2007…if I had anticipatory powers like that I’d be at the track.

It’s pretty apparent that Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth are not stimulated.  But the debate about whether students can be stimulated by rewards goes on. The Times takes a look at all that and  Roland Fryer makes the case for getting beyond bias as we think about it.

Matt Ladner Jay Greene* finds me insufficently enthused about school vouchers because of this post the other day.  Fair enough, I am.  But Jay raises three points that are worth fleshing out.  First, I’ve made the point that the spread of school vouchers over the past two decades is pretty intresting and remarkable given both the organized opposition and what Terry Moe has called a “public school ideology.”   But lumping various tax-credits and voucher plans together as Jay and other school choice advocates often do creates a false sense of scale for intentional choice plans.  That matters here because my point was that it’s because vouchers have been limited to a few places and had a limited impact one way or the other that’s led to a subtle but significant shift in the attitude of some elites towards these programs.    Second, Jay finds the systemic effects more robust than I do.   Reasonable people can review the cumulative literature about choice plans and disagree on how substantively significant or transformative these effects are (or could be at scale) and what that means for vouchers as a policy.  My take is that the political impact outstrips the substantive impact on how schools and school districts operate.  For a smart take on this check out Revolution at the Margins by Rick Hess if you haven’t yet ( a review here). Third, Jay makes the point that the threat of vouchers has helped spread charter schools.   That’s right, especially in the early days of charter schools.   Bryan Hassel wrote a good book that looked at this and it’s a pretty widely acknowledged point by charter school advocates and various analysts.    But, at some point charter schools will reach sufficient mass so that their diffusion will happen based on other factors than the threat vouchers.    Over a million students in more than 4,000 charter schools is substantial and charter caps, for instance, have been raised absent a voucher threat and state financing for charter facilities has been expanded absent the voucher threat.   It’s possible that Jay is right and that once they’ve dispatched vouchers school choice opponents will turn their guns on charters, but it’s also possible that in the end vouchers will end up being the stalking horse for charters rather than the other way around…

*Corrected version.  The perils of group blogging.  Matt changed to Jay throughout the graf. 

Update:  Jay, and it really is Jay, responds.  He wonders how someone can be supportive of charter schools but not of vouchers.  I don’t see that as such a puzzle if one is supportive of more intentional choice and customization for students and parents than exists today but leery of severing the connection between avenues of democratic input into public schooling decisions and those decisions.   In other words, for some people the issue isn’t choice, rather it’s accountability in a broad sense.    That’s not at odds with a lot of choice schemes but is certainly at odds with some.  It’s a political position, yes, but not in the partisan sense but rather to the extent that all of our various beliefs about state and society are.   Jay also objects to my objection to lumping tax-credits and vouchers together.  It’s a weird argument to have since I’ve elsewhere written about the rapid spread of school choice and why that’s interesting.  My original point here is that because voucher pilots like the one in D.C. have ended up being somewhat innocuous it’s causing a shift in how they’re perceived.  A few days after I wrote that the Democratic Secretary of Education broke ranks with many Democrats on the hill — and with Dem orthodoxy — over the D.C. voucher program.   That voucher proponents are in such a tizzy to show that there is still great momentum is perhaps a sign of some insecurity about where things stand overall.   In fact, I don’t recall using the word “stalled” at all but that’s somehow become the debate.  Beyond that I think Jay and I have a disagreement over the substantive significance of various choice programs and their transformative potential, that’s a good debate.

Today through Thursday ES is hosting an online discussion about Bill Tucker’s Beyond the Bubble paper and the ideas in it.  You can read and participate via this link.

Per the great 21st Century Skills debate, Ed Week’s Sawchuk jumps into the fray with a must-read overview.*

The other day Vice President Biden went to Delaware to plead with the education establishment not to screw this windfall up.  There’s been a lot of that the past few weeks.  If teacher policy is your thing, you want to be in D.C. on March 26th for this event.  Likewise, if teacher quality is your thing you can welcome Jay Mathews into the fold.  The class size crowd is none too happy with him today!   And on March 10 the Data Quality Campaign is having a big throwdown, with $250 million on the table you don’t want to miss this.  A reader wanted to know what I thought of President Obama’s budget.  Should have just cross-posted this quick take on the blog.

Finally, Boston’s public television station is taking a look at the dropout issue.   Here’s a question: There are data indicating that Americans think the national high school completion rate is a lot higher than it actually is.   As much as 90 percent rather than the real figure of closer to 70 percent, for instance, and much better for minorities than it in fact is.   Would the climate for addressing that problem be different if more people understood the problem or are the politics of tackling it elsewhere?

*Are 21st Century Skills, at least at their superficial level, education’s Madoff?  If so, who has exposure?

Why else would he do the NCLB version of saying there is no Santa Claus?

The education debate seems to be capturing the attention of more journos.  Tom Edsall takes a look at Michelle Rhee and what’s happening in D.C.

It’s a shame that studies like this new one by UVA’s Megan Stuhlman and Robert Pianta get lost in journals rather than read by policymakers.  You can read highlights here.

Regardless of your own faith, it’s hard to understand a lot of things in this world without discussing the role of religion.   Yet as Panic points out, via Ed Week’s Zehr, we continue to try to do that in our schools.

From The Times, more attention paid to the percolating D.C. voucher debate, which is looking more interesting all the time.  A liberal Virginia blogger wrestles with the question here. 

Once upon a time (more precisely the mid-to-late 1960s) many on the left were into vouchers as an equity tool.  Then, for a couple of reasons, the politics hardened for about two decades until coalitions of urban Democrats and Republicans worked together to pass choice plans in a few places and the highly influential Chubb and Moe book started to change how people viewed choice.  

But those limited successes may have actually sown the seeds of failure for vouchers.   Now, paradoxically, the school choice experience since the early 1990s has lessened the allure of vouchers as a scalable education reform but at the same time made these smaller “pilot” type initiatives like the one in D.C. seem less toxic and more harmless among an increasing number of players.   Opponents don’t even really have a slippery slope to point to in any of the early adopter sites for vouchers.  There’s not one in D.C.  There it’s the public charters not the vouchers that are taking over and not in the other cities/states, even Milwaukee, where vouchers have been tried and the effects have been modest.  In other words, vouchers are not destroying the public schools.  Rather, systemically, they’re not really doing much of anything at all. 

And that’s a problem for school voucher proponents who are left arguing the counterfactual that these pilots aren’t “real” choice programs and more robust programs would have worked better.   Meanwhile the small programs become accepted and the proposals for big ones seem more and more marginal to the mainstream education debate.   

Voucher opponents may be losing by winning…or winning by losing…