A lot of us in the reform-minded edufield are excited about the Obama-Duncan plan to fix the 5000 lowest performing schools. But if you are like us, you might find yourself see-sawing between that anticipatory excitement and the emerging reality that improving learning dramatically for very disadvantaged kids is difficult at scale in any school context, no matter how hard we try. It can seem there are no simple fixes, and that’s true.

But here’s a mind bender: In fact, we can double to quadruple the number of failing schools fixed within five years without getting any better at fixing failing schools. How? Merely by shortening the number of years that pass before districts, states and CMOs recognize failed school-fix attempts and retry major change. This goes for both modes of radical school fixes, starting fresh with charters (etc.) and turnarounds-from-within.  See more here: Try, Try Again. 

It’s education lore that major change efforts take five years to work.  In other sectors, people don’t get five years to pull businesses (or governments, for that matter) out of bankruptcy or show start-up results to funders. Why? Because most turnarounds and start-ups fail, and savvy investors know it. Indeed, only about 20 – 30% of start-ups and major change efforts outside of education succeed. But  investors still earn high overall returns on risky investments by engaging in “rapid retry.”  When an effort is not on track, they do not wait. They reinvest rapidly in another venture or introduce a new leader with a strong change mandate.  

What could this mean for fix efforts in failing schools? It’s all in the math. For example: If a school district fixes 30% of its failed schools the first time out (high rate by cross-sector standards), shortening the “identify failure and retry” rate from five to two years would nearly double the total % of schools fixed within five years from 30% to 58%.  Shortening it to one year would drive the five year fix rate up to 83%.  If the initial success rate is more dismal, say 10%, shortening the retry cycle from five years to one year quadruples the number of schools fixed within five years.

 Here’s how state, district, and CMO leaders can make “rapid retry” a reality: 

• Commit to faster retry rates in failing school fixes, one or two years not five.
• Identify the “leading indicators” of success/failure that show up in years one and two of fix efforts.  We can get much better at spotting signs of trouble early, rather than waiting for years of inadequate performance before realizing that something needs to change.
• Create a “spigot” of leaders and school operators ready to step in when needed, since so many attempts will fail the first time.  Many of the adults in failed efforts will (and should) get a second chance, but the kids will not. So we must not waiver or wait, and we must have a ready supply of talent to retry in the efforts that fail at first.

Without rapid retry rates, success is unlikely in the effort to fix the 5,000 worst schools. Fortunately, Try, Try Again is not just a good idea, it’s also an emerging federal requirement.  The recently released draft guidance on federal school improvement funds (also known as 1003(g) funds) requires states to set annual goals on a three-year trajectory for rapid improvement of failing schools and to measure “leading indicators” along the way to predict which efforts are on track. The Department’s request for comments specifically seeks advice to define “accountability” using these indicators, a signal that the next round will fill out this aspect of the requirements.  With this strong federal leadership, we find our see-saw tipping and sticking on the “excited anticipation” side!

–Guestbloggers Bryan and Emily Hassel of Public Impact

Here’s another lazy TFA’er looking for a handout via Facebook!   Still, help this guy get some books for his school:

I am writing to ask you to donate books because I have gone from teaching English to about 87 eighth graders last year to having a total of 198 7th and 8th graders this year. That means that I have an average of just under 40 students in each of my five periods. Given this reality, I know that I am going to need far more books than I currently have in order to cultivate a culture of reading within my classroom and a love of books within my students. I won’t go into details about my students’ reading levels, but suffice it to say that there are many among them who need a lot of help in order get to the point where they are reading on grade level. Having a wide variety of engaging, reading-level appropriate books at their immediate disposal would be an invaluable tool in raising their levels of literacy and igniting within them a passion for reading. Literacy is freedom, and I know that any book that you might be able to give would have an impact on my students’ development.

Uh oh…is Ford’s Theater going to come out against No Child Left Behind, too?

Dan Willingham looks at the knowledge base problem as it relates to reading and the draft national standards. This issue — the capacity of the field to deliver a powerful enough curriculum to make these standards real — is an important one.

Apropos of the news today, my only interaction with William Safire, who passed away this weekend, was a mention in his “On Language” column about an op-ed I’d penned for The Times.  I remember a friend called and said, “you’re in Safire’s New York Times column.”  My immediate reaction was, naturally, a heart-stopping ‘oh shit, this can’t be good news’ one.  But then I realized it was “On Language” rather than any political column and it remains one of my favorite cites of anything I’ve written.

Just a suggestion:  Per Secretary Duncan’s speech the other day referencing MLK, everyone urging well-timed reforms (most recently see LFA here for instance) might want to read the Birmingham City Jail letter again.  No one is arguing for haste for haste’s sake or rash decisions but King was making a pretty important point about urgency and timing…and the idea that we don’t know some things that need to happen now, absent any new ideas or innovation, is ludicrous.

What have they gotten into up there on 8th Avenue?  It’s like catnip for school reformers.  The Times’ editorial page again comes out hard on Race to the Top.    Meanwhile the magazine takes a look at the SEED school, has a really smart package on “remaking education,” and Todd Farley discusses test-grading on the op-ed page. 

What do toilet water and test scoring have in common?  The Farley piece has implications around technology where, somewhat counterintuitively, the reliability problems are actually less.  But no one wants to believe that because it challenges a deeply held belief.   Likewise, although the technology exists to turn toilet water into clean drinking water – a big deal in places with water shortages — it’s a hard sell because it challenges a deeply held belief system as well.

E.J. Dionne gives social entrepreneur and Senate candidate from MA Alan Khazei and his big citizenship message a shout-out in today’s column descibing the dynamics of that race.

Don Fisher passed away yesterday after a long fight with cancer.   In the business world he’s being remembered for his role in retail, see for instance this obit from The Boston Globe.   He was the founder of  The Gap clothing store.

But to the extent that KIPP schools are changing the conversation about urban education, how people perceive America’s urban education problem, and what can be done about it (which I would say is to a large extent) his more lasting legacy may be a reshaping of the education world.  See page 35 here (pdf) for a description of his engagement with education and the serendipity that helped bring it about.

An interesting (and fun) education film is hitting theaters today: The Providence Effect.

The story chronicles the experience of Providence St. Mel’s a Catholic school that on the verge of closing becomes an independent school and subsequently achieves phenomenal results for its students. You know the general storyline because it’s not unique to this school or this film: School struggles, school succeeds. They rarely make movies about schools that go the other way.

Still, a couple of things make The Providence Effect worth watching. For starters it’s just a well done film that tells a great story in an engaging way. Think “Dangerous Minds” with substance and about an entire school not a classroom.  It’s also another film you can place in the post-NCLB genre in terms of changing ways of thinking about education.  And, the school’s principal, Paul Adams, has great charisma and a personal story to match it.  That alone makes the film.

The Providence Effect is also a good reminder that the idea of ‘whatever it takes’ schools didn’t originate with the current crop of outstanding urban schools that garner headlines today. But, those schools are starting to take the idea to scale and impact the dialogue about public education today in powerful ways. For its part Providence St. Mel’s has spun off a charter school in Chicago.

In that way the film is also a sad reminder of the dysfunction of our field. You’d think that public school advocates would be pointing to the high performing charters as evidence that public schools can produce the same results – and again now at some scale – as schools like Providence St. Mel’s. Yet instead too many advocates tirelessly work to tear them down. It’s a destructive pathology.

On the heels of a speech where the Secretary of Education invoked MLK’s seminal Letter from Birmingham City Jail, The Providence Effect is a potent reminder of the urgency of the urban education challenge  but more importantly the hope for what can be done about it.

We’ve had return acts on Friday Fish Porn.   Jane Hannaway has appeared not just once fly fishing but twice.   And the Eduwife has turned in a couple of keepers (here, here, here, and here for instance).  

But never, until today, have we had a week-after-week appearance.  Last week we highlighted the big catfish (Big Catty) that James Wilcox’s mom caught.   James is CEO at Aspire Public Schools in California.   She’d previously been featured after catching and then subsequently mounting Big Red, an enormous redfish.   Today she’s back with Big Black, a huge black drum (that’s a meter stick!) just caught in the Gulf.   Mrs. Wilcox may not be so into catch and release but she can apparently find her way onto some big fish…

Check out Terry Ryan on 21st Century Skills in Ohio with a picture that does speak a thousand words on this…but he also points out that buried in Ohio’s policy is this gem:

g) Personal management skills such as self-direction, time management, work ethic, enthusiasm, and the desire to produce a high quality product.

Where are education’s anti-business crazies when you need them?  “A high quality product?”   That’s at once unsettling and revealing even if it’s being used in broad sense…

Vander Ark is spot-on here, if Race to the Top is only one-round (that presumably would include a lot of states) it’ll be a fiasco and mortgage the only high-leverage piece of the education stimulus money…

Provocative Ted Kolderie speech on dramatic change in the public sector.

There is a lot of symbolism in Arne Duncan going all Birmingham City Jail in his No Child Left Behind speech today…he’s read the speech, he knows what he’s saying and alluding to in terms of urgency, timing, complacency, and resistance to disruption…

Toppo here at USAT with what I can only assume are some unintentionally ill-considered quotes given the context…

Update:   You can see the countours of the whole thing in this great WaPo story by Nick Anderson.

This Barbara Hollingsworth column about VA’s Fairfax County is occasioning a lot of buzz but the various ways accountability systems get gamed.   But it’s a much broader problem.  A few years ago ES put out a primer on how No Child Left Behind’s accountability rules work (pdf).  Now it’s been updated and re-released to reflect policy changes(pdf).  Useful if you want to understand how this all actually works…and why for instance when a state or school tells you that a school missed the mark for “adequate yearly progress” by just one student they’re not telling you nearly the whole truth…

Spent part of Wednesday at a gathering of folks who are into open content and open source.   You could even say it’s the folks who have a monopoly on open right now…Anyway, really interesting conversations and learned a lot more than I new about the issue.  I’m left with a couple of questions though.  

First, in the wake of the rescue of the NY Times reporter in Afghanistan and the resulting death of a British soldier and a translator, Atlantic editor James Bennet observed that if information so wants to be free then why does it cost so much?  It’s a serious point on a few levels with some macro implications.   At one level, if open source displaces newspapers and traditional media outlets here it could inhibit rather than help the flow of information.   All the tweets from Tehran were nice but the actual reporting ultimately told the story.  So while I’m excited about what open-source can bring we should also be pretty careful about what’s getting torn down in the process.  There is a parallel in K-12 publishing although I don’t think the big publishers are at any risk of going the way some newspapers are.

The risk here is quality.   There is something to be said for a formal editorial process in news-reporting and in education publishing and media.   I’m not one of those who thinks that all things open-source are unreliable, but open media and education applications seem particularly prone to content quality problems.   It’s easy to think of examples of free content in our space now that is more than a little unreliable on issues that it takes a trained eye to discern.  Given the absence of a common core in education around which to focus and validate work and the lack of expertise in many places, that problem seems all the more acute.

Before we even get to that point, however, there seems to be a clash brewing between traditional vested content (publisher) interests in education and the ethos and process of open-source.  At one level, that’s a problem for all the obvious reasons.  But at another it’s an opportunity because the hybrid model here of more professionally developed cores with wraparound open-source generated content seems the most promising.   That’s what Wireless Generation pulled off in Florida.  Doesn’t mean there is not going to be some turf realignment, only that it’s nowhere near zero sum.

That also raises the issue of economics, which is related to quality, because it’s unclear what the sustainable model is here that ensures quality and access.  The big costs in textbook development, at least initially, are development rather than distribution.  There is a reason for that.

Finally, until you really delve into it it’s still hard to understand what a lot of the open movement is talking about and a lot of the thinking around it and that’s going to be a barrier, especially given how fundamentally conservative and risk-averse K-12 education is.  To lay ears a lot of this will sound risky and that doesn’t help the politics of the open-sourcers at all — especially in the coming state debates about this.

All that said, there is obviously a lot of promise here.  More dynamic content, more tailored applications for teachers, and more access to high-quality content are all powerful levers.   Be open to open but be realistic, too.

More from Goldstein on an aspect of this here.

Update: Send more Kool-Aid, stat! ES’ Bill Tucker adds his thoughts here and NASBE’s (and fish porn veteran) Doug Levin does below.  Bill thinks the charter school example might assuage my concerns.  If that’s the model then I’m even more worried!  They both argue that open is a way past the dysfunction of the textbook process and market today. You’ll find few who don’t agree that the current approach to textbooks (and adoption/procurement of them) is a disaster in a variety of respects.  But that’s obvious and it’s a long way from there to a workable model for quality and sustainability. At this point we’re largely being asked to take on the faith that this will certainly be better and sustainable. I think we’re all saying mostly the same thing in terms of the hybrid model that’s likely to come out the other side of this but I’ll stand on my last point even though it apparently lacked sufficient enthusiasm: “There is obviously a lot of promise here. More dynamic content, more tailored applications for teachers, and more access to high-quality content are all powerful levers. Be open to open but be realistic, too.”

…are you following me?

This new doctoral program in education leadership that Harvard is offering is a big deal.*   It’s a signal for the field and should help multiply some talent that is out there and the composition of coursework is novel and a signal as well.  The HGSE Dean, Kathleen McCartney, deserves an awful lot of credit for pulling this one off.   Boston Globe here, AP here. *Disc – I’m on the visiting committee for the ed school there and helped on this so not just a bystander.

The new (updated really from a few years ago) study on charter schools in New York City (pdf) has everyone chattering this week.    The method is clever even if the finding is somewhat unsurprising.   What’s amazing though is is how much of the debate about the study and charters overall right now is still tactical (charters good, charters bad, anecdotes tossed around) rather than strategic (knowing what we know about charters, good and bad, what are the implications if we’re serious about really trying to move outcomes in part through a new school development strategy?). 

It’s another example of how we can’t get to the serious work around education reform because we’re still consumed fighting over stuff like this.

here’s another one:  Spare The Lousy Teachers!  How did the DC teachers’ union let things get to this point?

This new study on FAFSA out today is important.  It shows the kind of unsexy fixes that can help increase college-going even all else equal.  In the early part of this decade PPI and Brookings undertook a collaboration on higher education issues.  This idea — simplifying the federal student aid process through cross-government linkages — made sense then when we looked at it, and as this study shows makes sense now.

Yes, it’s fashionable for politicos to cite “The Art of War” and argue for sometimes attacking an opponent where they don’t expect it.  But it’s not always smart.  To wit, in the New York Mayor’s race attacking Bloomberg on education elicits this response, which will likely have the same effect it did four years ago:

“The issue for voters really is clear,” Mr. Bloomberg said after a ceremony marking the opening of the new Museum of Chinese in America. “If you think the schools are better today than they were under my opponent’s leadership, then you should vote for me. And if you think that they were better when he ran the Board of Education, then you should vote for him.”

Ouch.

Some serious dissension inside the teachers’ union in Los Angeles:

During your presidency, Duffy, you’ve screamed for smaller class sizes, better working conditions, and higher salaries for your teachers, yet derided those public charters that offer all three. You’ve cited national statistics of poor charters to bury local statistics of excellent charters. You’ve labeled charters non-public and /or private, when in fact they’re neither. And while you never missed a chance to blast LAUSD’s wieldy, costly bureaucracy, you never seized one to commend Charter Management Organizations’ (CMOs) stream-lined, cost-efficient ones. In short, in your attempts to defend UTLA from a perceived attack on public education, you simultaneously contributed to that attack. Unfortunately, such hypocrisy in the leadership of a teachers’ union was untenable and doomed to fall of its own weight, as it most surely and resoundingly did on August 25.

Read the entire thing, ramifications beyond LA…

Here’s a fun talk by New Schools’ Jonathan Schorr.

A must-read McClatchy story on the reform debate in CA and larger implications:

Alice Huffman, the NAACP’s president since 1999, helped lead fights against school vouchers and merit pay when she worked as an organizer for the CTA for 13 years. Her thinking has definitely changed, which is why she was standing next to a Republican governor last month.

“The only place the NAACP can be is with this governor,” Huffman said. “If the teacher unions put a better proposal on the table, we would stand with them.”

For Huffman, the battle is personal. She said too many inner-city minority children are stuck in failing schools and that immediate and revolutionary changes are needed.

“I have watched this for 20 years,” Huffman said. “And I have nieces and nephews that have come out of the public schools that can’t read, can’t write, will never be employable. This is happening right here. … Something profound has to happen. We can’t wait another decade and another decade while people tweak with it.”

Per this conflict of interest issue on Race to the Top a senior admin official wants to make two things clear. 

First, this is unprecedented and the potential for conflicts of interest is high so they want more people to apply to ensure a good pool to draw from for the process.  So if you’re thinking about it now is the time. 

Second, don’t try this at home.  In other words, if in doubt don’t conflict yourself out!  They’re going to look very carefully at those issues, obviously, but if you’re interested they say to go ahead and apply and let the process run its course rather than self-selecting out.

Much more information here on the process and how to apply or nominate.

I let the summer fish pictures and fish porn pile up so today we’re going to clean out the cupboard before the weather gets cold.   No coldwater fish though, didn’t anyone catch trout this summer?

To start, here’s John Merrow’s granddaughter Valentina.  Seriously, take a kid fishing when you get the chance. 

And James Wilcox’s mom is back!    James is CEO at CA’s Aspire Public Schools.  Who can forget Big Red (before pic here and after pic here) caught by his mom?  Now, please meet Big Catty.  

And here’s  James’  daughter Simone.  Most states have a take a kid fishing day or weekend.  Do it.

Education consultant Todd Lamb caught this 4lb plus largemouth bass on the fly within the legal limits of Washington, D.C.  You’ll get no more geographic information than that:

 His dad’s is even bigger:

And finally it was a good summer here, too.  Here’s the Eduwife with a striped bass:

This smart and concise book review by Greg Cizek (pdf) makes some salient points that extend beyond the book in question.

Dan Willingham looks at learning styles at WaPo (and it’s his first post of a gig there).  He goes a little tactile on DCPS…