Not surprisingly given his pedigree as a school superintendent US Senator Michael Bennet is planning to do some education work in the Senate.   But the idea that an off-committee senator putting together an education bill is really novel isn’t quite accurate.  Check out Elizabeth DeBray’s book and Patrick McGuinn’s book for some backstory on the last reauthorization.   Non-committee senators ended up on the conference committee during that go round.  Isn’t the real story why freshmen Dems in both chambers were not clamoring to be on the education committees?

Over at NPR Claudio Sanchez looks at education 100 days in to the new administration.  But Claudio may be the only one who cares?  If there was an education question at the presser last night I missed it… Also from NPR, guess it’s going to be easier to get upgrades on flights to all these edumeetings over the next few months…

And I don’t like to start rumors, but per the great debate, which is tonight, a source says she saw Leo Casey taping a roll of dimes into Randi Weingarten’s fist about an hour ago…

I have not really followed Chuck Norris’ forays into public policy, apparently if Texas does secede he plans to run for president there.   But, if this article on education policy is any indication, that’s actually one of his saner ideas:

The reason that government is cracking down on private instruction has more to do with suppressing alternative education than assuring educational standards. The rationale is quite simple, though rarely if ever stated: control future generations and you control the future….

…Is it merely coincidental that the private choice of home schooling was outlawed by the Soviet state in 1919, by Hitler and Nazi Germany in 1938, and by Communist China in 1949?

Is America next?

Today’s new NAEP data is mixed news with enough kernels for people to argue that current policies are/are not helping improve achievement especially for traditionally under-served kids, are/are not hurting advanced kids, some encouraging results for early grades but not for high school etc…it’s a stimulus program for education partisans!  Short answer, we need to do a lot better but all is not lost.   But, you don’t need a weatherman…Sam Dillon predictably finds the clouds for you.  

From The Times a new land speed record for hot button terms:

“We saw stronger gains and more progress in narrowing achievement gaps before No Child took effect,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at Berkeley. “The punch that centralized accountability packs seems to be weakening. We’re lifting the basic skills of young kids but this policy is not lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy.”

 If only he’d said we need a paradigm shift it would have been the perfect quote…

Update:  The Dallas Morning News and Sandy Kress take on Dillon’s dour take.

Sure, it’s not Weingarten – Moskowitz…but MA time entrepreneur and enthusiast Chris Gabrielli and professional killjoy Rick Hess debate the time issue over at USN.  ES’ Elena Silva’s third way take on time here (pdf).

It’s the school reform match-up that has everyone talking….it’s been a decade in the making…two education heavyweights…the time has come…

Weingarten – Moskowitz! 

Live from New York City! 

One night only!

Yes, it should be on pay-per-view.  Instead, unfortunately, you may not be able to watch it if you’re not in the NYC media market.  Hopefully someone will put it online.  The producers of this show apparently have no idea of the gold mine they’ve walked into…at a minimum you could raise thousands for charity here…

The WaPo ed board picks up on this blog post about the SCOTUS Forest Grove School District v. TA case in an editorial today.  My point in the post was basically two-fold.   First, there is more involvement between public funds and private schools than you’d know from all the rhetoric in the voucher debate.   Second, in terms of this specific court case, this is one of those instances where lousy behavior by a public agency shouldn’t lead to a counterproductive policy outcome.   School districts can be bad actors on special education due process but a unilateral right for parents to place students in private schools at public expense is an extremely problematic (and likely costly) policy.

On the first point, Sherman Dorn disagreed at the time.   I don’t buy his objection though.  When you consider the sum public sector – private sector financial involvement (for instance equitable service provisions for federal education programs, various kinds of state support, several voucher programs around the country, a SCOTUS ruling in Zelman embracing a non-preferential stance toward religion and education by saying that public vouchers for parochial schools are constitutional as long as parents have a choice, a lot of support for private tuition in the wake of Katrina…) you see a lot of involvement.  The term “entanglement” is a bit loaded because it carries a specific connotation in this context stemming from a landmark church – state case and perhaps I should have used a different term.   Nonetheless, the lines here are increasingly blurry.

In fact, one could argue that events of the last four decades, and especially events since the early 1990s have rendered the child benefit theory obsolete.   Perhaps it’s time for a more contemporaneous definition that openly acknowledges there is a school benefit here but allows for greater accountability and transparency to follow public dollars and creates new delineations between school types.   Fordham Foundation has one idea  — a sliding scale — on that. 

Shouldn’t Cynthia Nixon know better?  But, Joel Klein has Julia Stiles in his corner…

Not a lot to say about this sad situation in New York last Friday where a teacher barricaded himself in a school for several hours saying he had a bomb after learning he was facing some disciplinary action for allegedly striking a student.  But, this quote toward the end of the Times story is Onion-worthy:

“It’s blown out of proportion; he was just trying to make a stand for himself.”   — The president of the school’s Parents Association, Doris Escalera…

OK…

The McKinsey report that Tom Friedman references in his Times column this morning seems likely to cause quite a stir.   Big estimates for GDP gains through educational improvements…over half a trillion annually by closing the achievement gap say the McKinsey analysts…

Update:   Embargo is lifted, you can read the entire report here (pdf).  Several readers want to know what the big deal is since there isn’t a lot in the way of new data in here.   I’d say it’s the symbolism issue, those GDP numbers, albeit estimates, are compelling and will hopefully call some attention to this problem.  Lazy secondhand reax from readers:  Complaints about a lack of specificity on solutions but Arne Duncan gets good reviews for his remarks at the release event today from several attendees.  

When I wrote recently that the education reform movement hadn’t been strategic about using symbols and symbolism, well a gordita or chicken soft taco wasn’t really what I had in mind…but hey, whatever it takes!  The graduation rate issue is a huge national problem still not recognized by our politics.

ES’  Chad Aldeman takes a look at teacher salary schedules.   Ed Week’s Stephen Sawchuk looks at the debate over teacher pensions.

By and large catholic schools are great.  Seriously they are.  They’ve been the subject of interesting books and when you see them in action it’s hard, even for a non-Catholic, not to see the great value especially considering many of the communities they serve.  That’s why it’s great to hear that Stephanie Saroki and Scott Hamilton are launching a project to try to help Catholic schools, which are under pressure for a variety of reasons.   But, while I’d rather see Catholic schools get a bailout than some of the other entities getting them lately and despite Checker Finn and Andy Smarick’s passionate case in the Washington Post today, I remain unpersuaded on the need for a public bailout of Catholic schools absent a lot of reciprocal accountability and transparency.    There is an obvious difference between propping up demonstrably failing schools and helping good schools that are struggling and some quite reasonable policy reasons to help Catholic schools.  Still, hard to miss that folks who profess a lot of faith in the invisible hand are now protesting its results when not to their liking.

Ross Wiener doesn’t like the National School Board Association’s junk food policy.

President Obama will sign the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act tomorrow afternoon at the SEED School of Washington D.C.

In Time Walter Isaacson turns-in the most straightforward and sensible argument for national education standards that you’re likely to read.  He doesn’t argue for standards as a cure-all but does point out that they’d rationalize the system in some powerful ways that can help with real improvement.

Tom Vander Ark has an interesting new paper out on the role of private capital in education reform (pdf).   And Mario Morino has a broad essay on innovation.   Both are must-reads as they share the theme that public, private, and philanthropic cooperation is required to solve the big challenges the country faces today in education, energy, health care, and the environment.

Also, in the DMN Sandy Kress points out that the data on teacher satisfaction belies some of the doom and gloom you hear.  There is a new NGA policy brief on charter schools (pdf).  Very good stuff, implicitly shows how far behind the curve some states are. 

Well, here’s a transparent stress test for our corner of the world.  It’s hardly surprising to hear that the Administration’s proposals to sensibly reform student loan policy are hitting a rough spot.  And they haven’t even turned loose Papale yet…But, this is a good one for the admin to make a stand on because the evidence is pretty clear and convincing.

In Time, Maia Szalavitz takes a look at the school in the upcoming Forest Grove School District v. TA SCOTUS case and the larger issues.  John Roberts can continue moonlighting as a special education analyst because this is the third or fourth spec ed case since he joined the court…indicative of the nature of special ed law.    It’s too bad the school involved is somewhat sensational because that’s going to distract from the complicated underlying issue — whether parents should have to enroll a child with special needs in public school before being able to attend private school at public expense because the public schools are unable to provide an appropriate education.  

While the small D.C. voucher program has been getting a lot of Beltway attention, most people are unaware that federal, state, and local government spend billions of dollars annually on private placements for students.  It’s one part of what is a lot of public money that flows to private schools for books, technology, teacher training, Title I services and so forth.   In other words, don’t believe the hype:  Public funds and private schools are plenty entangled now and the idea of bright lines is a rhetorical fiction.  

In terms of special education, overall it’s a worthy effort.  Some students have special needs so acute that the public schools can’t be expected to serve them well.   Unfortunately, there is also abuse of the provisions that enable students with exceptional needs to go to school in a setting that works best for them.  Washington, D.C. is illustrative of that.   The city spends $200 million a year on private placements for special education, an amount that equals roughly $2800 per public school and public charter school student in the city.  There is a thriving industry in gaming the system. 

Still, the abuse shouldn’t overshadow the overall economics here or the need for provisions like this as part of special education.  In terms of this case, the concern of the school districts is not unreasonable at all, though they sure don’t help themselves or their case by the way some special education parents get treated.  Regardless, creating what would amount to a unilateral right to enroll your child in private school at public expense would be a costly decision and one likely to lead to a lot of gaming.   Special education due process may be, as one wag once put it, “nasty, brutish…. and often not very short,” and policymakers should endeavor to address that as much as possible within the context of what is a fundamentally adversarial law, yet some sort of public process is necessary here for decision-making.  The circuits are split though so this case will be interesting to watch.

By the way, there is an obvious school choice angle here.  But as I’ve written before, special education policy is a lousy venue to fight out choice questions.

A lot of releases and other news posted over at the Eduwonk Facebook page. 

ES Board Chair Alan Bersin will become President Obama’s Border Czar to help address the problems along the U.S. Mexico border.  It’s familiar turf for Bersin who did similar work for President Clinton and was U.S. Attorney in San Diego.  After that Bersin became superintendent of the troubled San Diego schools and Secretary of Education for California among other education roles.   He’ll be missed in this field, as he was one of the people who could break bread with all sides of the various disputes.  And he’ll be very much missed at ES where his leadership was invaluable as the organization grew.    Bersin on education and his experiences in his own words here.

In today’s Times Sam Dillon writes:

Representatives David R. Obey of Wisconsin and George Miller of California, the Democratic chairmen of the House appropriations and education committees, immediately saw the importance of extracting reform promises from the states, said a Democratic House staff member who attended the meeting but is barred from speaking on the record about committee business.

Rachel Racusen, a spokeswoman for the House education committee, said, “Chairman Miller said this couldn’t just be free money, that we had to get something in return.”

Wait a minute…something doesn’t add up here.  Anyone with an ounce of sense saw the need to extract something from the states in exchange for the greatest windfall of federal education dollars in history.   But, if Miller wanted reform, Obey wanted reform, and the Administration wanted reform, why then are there not actual requirements for reform in the law for reform rather than “assurances” and “promises” of intent to reform?   Did the Senate do it, in the parlor with the candlestick?  I can’t believe those dastardly moderates would have wanted less reform rather than more…Racusen’s comment is conspicuously non-plural…C’mon Sam, dig!  Diane Ravitch won’t just reveal the answer on her blog…

Update:  Another clue?  “During a visit home Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned his home state of Illinois is at risk of losing its shot at a new pot of federal money if it fails to show the political will to fundamentally shake up the way schools are funded and operated.”

It’s official, Kurt Schmoke, former Baltimore Mayor and legal scholar is going to try to mediate a resolution to the contract dispute in Washington, D.C. under a voluntary arrangement agreed to by both parties. 

Today’s Washington Post editorial pretty much nails it:

This could be a promising development, but only if the mediator sees his role as deciding what best addresses the educational needs of public school students — and not, as is often the case in education policy, coming up with a consensus to mollify adult adversaries at the expense of progress.

Often in education getting everyone to get along is considered a big victory.   The kids?  Well c’mon, they’re just passing through.  The adults have to get along, after all, they’ve got to work there…get elected…etc…

Overall, in terms of where things are, I think what Richard Whitmire and I wrote in TNR still stands up, not much has changed.

Per all this, Flypaper actually read the cue cards and has the meat on the latest…

Charlie Barone sees a big upside in $5 on $600.  Let’s hope he’s right.

The Washington Post editorial board has been all over the D.C. voucher program’s impending termination, but beyond that it hasn’t been getting a lot of national attention since the omnibus spending bill passed and the program was more or less killed.  Perhaps that is going to change with today’s pretty charged WaPo op-ed from former D.C. mayor Anthony Williams and former councilman Kevin Chavous who go Malcolm X in defense of the program?  

Of course, even though parents are abandoning the city’s traditional public schools in droves for public charter schools and private options ”many DCPS schools now feature a range of exciting programs and special classes….” (pdf).   Who knew?  

A while back in this debate I noted that it increasingly seemed small pilot voucher programs were becoming less toxic, which was both good and bad for voucher proponents.   Maybe todays op-ed will wake people up, but for now that still seems mostly the case.   It’s a strange time.  Outside the usual suspects there is not a lot of excitement to save the program even as you’re really hard pressed to find anyone who thinks it’s doing any harm — except politically because it carries the message…  In other words, this episode would seem to have all the makings (race, power, politics) of a powerful moment, except it’s basically a non-moment so far…there isn’t even much of an underdog effect…

Like Iraq, the debate now, if any, seems to be over the timetable for withdrawal…

It would be too naive to say that education is the key to the piracy problem, but fixing the economy in Somalia seems pretty instrumental to solving the piracy problem.  Over at MPR, Mike Petrilli and I discuss where education reform is today.    Michelle Rhee sits down again with National Journal.  Great WaPo article on a program for adjudicated youth.  Jed Wallace talks charter schools in the LA Daily News.  He’s very good on the quality issue so it’s too bad there were not more words for that in the op-ed formula.

GMA takes a look at View Park Prep (ICEF)* and The Piscalnator.   And Michelle Rhee, George Miller, and Senator Durbin visit Shaw Middle School in Washington.  *Originally said Park View.

I was going to post on this WaPo article outlining how embarrassingly bad charter school laws in MD and VA are, but instead can hand it off to Erin Dillon who rounds it up for you.

The Times editorial board starts to worry about whether the stimulus dollars are going to buy any education reform.  The awkward tension around saving jobs and reforming schools — at the same time — is starting to surface.   In fact, you can’t help but think that if South Carolina Governor Sanford had actually put forward a sensible alternative proposal for spending his state’s share of the education money, instead of just a political gimmick, he might have been able to create an issue that someone other than Republican primary voters would have cared about.

Related, saw some data the other day indicating that based on current revenue estimates if states spend 70 percent of their stimulus money by June of 2010 almost half of them will actually be increasing education spending, about 20 of them by 4 percent or more and five in double digits.   Some will still be hurting and I don’t think these estimates account for structural problems like pensions.  Still, while The Ed Trust is planning to monitor how the dollars are spent shouldn’t someone do a specific study to see whether states with surpluses in the wake of this actually reform more than states with deficits?  Or maybe we don’t want to know…

You can see The Commodore hold forth on all this here.

Remember back when the Bush Administration was accused of sitting on a study on charter school data?  It was good copy but not how the process works.   Now, roles reversed, it’s the Obama Administration being accused of tanking the recent study on DC vouchers.   In both cases the firewall between IES and the political team in the Department seems to have worked.  That’s a good news story.  But don’t take my word for it, Bush IES director Russ Whitehurst defends Secretary Duncan here.

ES’ Bill Tucker takes a look at the Florida Virtual School in the new Ed Next.  It’s a great piece looking at the program’s evolution.   And now apparently the program is under legislative assault, so it’s timely.   I can’t help but think, though, that although the program’s quality and publicly controlled nature helped matters, this graf offers the key to why the politics here were a little different than usual:

For the first time, this action also put [Florida Virtual School] FLVS in competition for funding with traditional school systems. “We would have preferred that it would have been funded outside the FEFP [Florida Education Finance Program],” said Ruth H. Melton, the director of legislative relations for the Florida School Boards Association, in a June 2003 Education Week article reporting on the legislation. Despite this opposition, FLVS was only a minor irritation among a number of controversial education reform programs. Melton concluded, “school boards are less concerned about losing funding to the virtual school than to the various voucher programs.” Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, reflecting on the legislative action, echoed Melton’s sentiment: “[At the time] we were doing so many different things that were provocative, this didn’t seem as radical.”

That’s why  a lot of analysts see the publicly controlled and inherently political nature of education as more powerful, at least in the short term, than the disruptive effects of technology.   Terry Moe, however, has a new book coming soon that puts forward an argument about how technology can scramble education politics.   I remain skeptical.