Also in the WaPo another column* about how Michelle Rhee might not be the consummate people person.  Sure, she’s not and she could do better.  But, I’ll ask again the more basic question:  Would things really be any different in DC if she had the political skills of say, Bill Clinton? 

I doubt it for two reasons.  First, some of what she wants to do and what the teachers’ unions want are simply incompatible so someone will have to give.   That’s the basic calculus here and why it’s been so hard to get to a deal in DC on the teachers’ contract.  If anything though, Rhee might be in a worse positionif the differences had not become so stark and obvious over the past few years.  I’m not sure a bunch of niceties would have attracted the notice of the Nick Kristofs and Steven Brills of the world and started to really change the context of this debate.   Second, around this country there are plenty of superintendents, traditional and non-traditional, who are far better politicians than Rhee is.  And, it’s easy to forget that you can even include some of her predecessors in DC in that category (there were a bunch over the past decade…).  They do all the right things in terms of managing relationships and do them well.  But you know what?  They haven’ t accomplished dramatic change.   Rhee hasn’t yet, either, but she’s on far better path toward that goal than most if people can suck-up a little disruption, lack of stroking, and, yes, some tension in the interest of serving kids better. 

The title of the column today is “Schools Pay When Rhee Snubs Donors.”  OK, but another column could be, “Kids Pay When Rhee Focuses Too Much On Keeping Adults Happy.”

Some good NAEP news in DC and the Wash Post ed board weighs-in on the same. 

That said, as I’ve written before, people celebrate too much when NAEP is up, bemoan things too much when it’s flat, and otherwise use NAEP to argue various cases  well beyond the explanatory leverage of NAEP.   It’s a very useful set of data, a real national treasure in our field, but it gets abused in public affairs.

More NAEP coverage than you could possibly read here. 

Kristof in The Times on the same issue Whitmire and I looked at in the WSJ the other day.

You can insert your own ‘who lost Kristof’ joke [here].

…this is what’s gonna have tongues wagging today:  New Michelle Rhee profile (by veteran journo June Kronholz) in Ed Next.   And no swords to plowshares here…rather brooms to swords! And you also don’t want to miss Richard Whitmire’s look at Rhee in WaPo.

While lots of people are screaming Bush III about the Obama education policy (Clinton IV or Bush V would be more accurate) EPI analyst Richard Rothstein lays out all the reasons Ed Sec. Arne Duncan is really poised to radically change the direction of federal education policy and throw-out the No Child Left Behind policy.  Then he acknowledges that, well, Duncan’s major policy calls to date have mostly been at odds with that sentiment…

Still, Richard can actually read minds so at some level this take on Duncan should be worrisome to reformers!

Sara Mead jumps into the school cuisine debate.

So there is a state in this country with north of 400 high schools, and south of 100 teachers certified to teach physics.  This situation is not anomalous, by the way.   But a big goal today is getting many more kids to take physics in high school.    So how do we get there?  Recruitment?  Alternative certification?  Technology?  Dual enrollment?  Or is this the wrong goal?

Let’s hear your ideas:

Don’t waste money buying Joe Williams dinner!  It turns out some of my colleagues are really cheap dates.     There was a  lot of swooning over the AFT’s new innovation fund last week.  Perhaps the best example is this gushing Newsweek piece but there was plenty of other press.  

Let’s be clear, this is a big deal in terms of a signal that the teachers’ unions leadership gets that they’re out of step and need some substantive changes.  But let’s also be clear that none of the edgy grantees everyone is excited about have, you know, actually done any of this yet.   And education reformers and social entrepreneurs should start to wise up to the Charlie Brown problem and exercise some healthy skepticism.   In other words, the proof will be in the actual design and execution of these ideas and that’s when the praise should flow liberally.  

Very much related, keep an eye on New Haven, Connecticut, some action there that is good news, is close to being real today, and is obviously AFT blessed.  Praise ‘em for that!

A few months ago  Macke Raymond (ES board vice-chair) released a study on charter schools (pdf)  that got quite a bit of attention.  In late August Stanford economist Carline Hoxby launched a blast at the report (pdf) on methodological grounds. Now Raymond and her colleagues have responded (pdf).

At the time I had some concerns about the Raymond study (namely that it didn’t clearly delineate by institution type and didn’t fully present the results for students after several years in charter schools) and how the data were presented, but while the Hoxby – Raymond debate is good theater it doesn’t seem that the Hoxby critique has a material effect on the main gist of the Raymond findings.

But, Eric Hanushek takes the debate as an opportunity to weigh-in with a post on the Ed Next blog that’s well-worth reading and has some very useful perspective on all of this.

Eduheadhunting:  A great non-profit in New Orleans needs a high-level operations person who wants to be involved in leading edge efforts to improve the quality of schooling in that city.   Ops experience and a strong and unwavering commitment to educational equity are the key prerequisites.  This is a great opportunity for someone in the education sector or someone who would like to transition in.   Email me your resume/CV for more.

The District of Columbia office of State Superintendent of Education is looking for a Director of Assessment and Accountability.   You can find more via this link.  Search under accountability.  

NGA’s Center for Best Practices has two analyst slots open.  Great opportunities.

A hearty thank you to the blogging Hassels for some outstanding guestblogging while I was away. 

Be sure to check out some of these goings-on around the education space that accumulated while I was out of pocket:

At Penn State they’re documenting the experience of returning veterans who are furthering their education.  Delaware today just named Rodel Foundation’s Paul Herdman one of 14 to watch for leadership in the state (pdf).  Here’s an update on some of the education reform work in Delaware (pdf).

CRPE takes a look at the portfolio approach in action (pdf).

In LA the Inner City Education Foundation continues to expand its footprint.     Meanwhile, Bill Cosby and Don Cheadle are cutting PSA’s for ICEF (you can listen through the links).  A new film and resource site on teen depression– an important and under-reported issue.  Jumpstart’s “Read for the Record” just happened for 2009, check it out and put a tickler in your calender for next year.

Former Indy Mayor Bart Peterson takes a must-read look at entreprenurialism and education reform (pdf) – through his own experience and work in Indy.  

In Boston they’re still trying to skewer TFA, or use TFA to skewer the district.  All this over less than 20 TFA teachers?  Speaks volumes.

The Department of Education seems to be trying to reform ed schools by giving lots of money to ed schools.  OK, but what about all the non-profits that are showing some new ways to do this?

And here’s some Mercedes Sosa.

Thanks to Eduwonk for the chance to guestblog over the past week.  And thanks to the many commenters on the posts: you’re keeping us on our toes. 

Since you’re all so smart, let’s hear what you have to say about this big story near where we live.  Today’s school board election in Wake County (Raleigh) has shaped up as a referendum on the district’s nationally known policy of integrating all of its schools based on socio-economic status.  Some candidates want to keep the system; others want to scrap it in favor of neighborhood schools.

We both went to public elementary schools in southern cities still in the heat of integration battles (Emily-Charlotte, Bryan-Nashville).  It’s hard to exaggerate the moral weight the integration issue carried, and still carries, for us and others in our generation.  But now, almost 40 years later, what’s best?  What’s best in particular for low-income kids who, despite some progress, still face yawning achievement gaps in our schools, integrated or not?  We’re not sure either side in the Wake school board fight has the answer.  We’re hoping you do!

—Guestbloggers Bryan and Emily Hassel

The early childhood eduventure Jumpstart has teamed up with the Pearson Foundation to try and break the world record for adults reading the same book to children on the same day, October 8.  You may not be named in the Guinness Book if you participate, but you’ll contribute to Jumpstart’s effort to donate 250,000 books, raise $2.5 million to support early literacy, and lift awareness about the significant long-term payoff for kids of early reading.  Plus, you’ll learn what an ice-cream cone, a pickle, and a slice of salami have in common. Learn more here.

–Guestbloggers Bryan and Emily Hassel

Here’s a story you’ve probably heard before, more than a few times. First, a researcher releases a study comparing the performance of charter and non-charter public schools (in this case, Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby and her colleagues’ report showing substantially higher gains for students who won charter slots in NYC’s lotteries vs. those lotteried out.)  Then, charter proponents and critics square off on the op-ed pages about the results (in this case, see Albany charter school ringleader Tom Carroll vs. NYU education historian Diane Ravitch.)

If all of this seems a little unsatisfying, here’s why.  Say you set out to improve your mother’s beloved spaghetti sauce recipe (treading on even more sacred ground than public education!)  You try ten different variations.  Despite your best efforts, three are worse than the original.  Five are no better, but two are markedly superior.  On average, the new batches are a little worse than your mom’s. But—would you say your experiment was a failure, or a success?

It really depends on what you do next.  It’s a failure if, the next ten times you make spaghetti, you cook the same 10 trial recipes.  But what if instead you avoid the eight bad and OK recipes, make more of the two good ones, and try more new recipes that build on the ones that pleased your palate?  Your average experiment in round 1 was a “failure,” but your average meal going forward is going to be pretty tasty.

You can debate (and we’re sure you will!) whether charter schools match the 3-5-2 distribution in the spaghetti story—we’re not claiming those are the right numbers.  But whatever the exact spread, the basic pattern applies—and so success or failure of chartering depends on what policymakers and sector leaders do next.  Will we vigorously scale-up and replicate schools that work?  Launch a new round of experiments that learn from the lessons so far?  Close or “Try, Try Again” with the ones that haven’t measured up?  Bon appétit.

—Guestbloggers Bryan and Emily Hassel

We can take a joke, so we had a good chuckle at Andy Smarick’s response over at Flypaper to our Try, Try Again post here on Eduwonk.  But the thing is, we think he may be serious, so we better respond!  In Try, Try Again, we argue that even if turnarounds (or new schools, for that matter) succeed only 10-30% of the time, if we rapidly retry when they don’t work, we can achieve 40-80% cumulative success rates over time.

The essence of Smarick’s response is that the chances of success for turnarounds are much much lower than 10-30%— more along the lines of lottery odds (one in millions) or the chance that a monkey hitting random keys would type the full text of Hamlet (one in some incredibly large number).  But this is silly.  In sectors other than education, where real turnaround attempts are much more common, the odds of success aren’t, as Smarick suggests, “infinitesimal.” Some change gurus say major change efforts in companies succeed 30% of the time.  But even if we could hit 10-20% in K–12, if we also retried rapidly, we could turn around half of all failing schools in several years, helping millions of kids.

Andy doesn’t say so in this post, but from prior debates we know that instead of turnarounds, Andy advocates new school creation.  We’re strong backers of that strategy as well, both to replace failing schools and to create wholly new options.  But what Andy doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge is that failure rates are very high for new start-ups as well.  According to a Harvard study, even proven entrepreneurs who launch new businesses only succeed 34% of the time.  Since the scale-up pace of proven new school operators isn’t nearly fast enough to meet the urgent need we have here, with millions of kids trapped in thousands of failing schools, we’ll need new entrants too, who in the Harvard study succeed 22% of the time.  So let’s stop monkeying around and place serious bets on both turnarounds and new school creation—both of which will require rapid retries a la “try, try again” to help a lot of kids fast.

—Guestbloggers Bryan and Emily Hassel

One of the big reasons many high-flying charter operators are wary of taking over failed district schools is that they like to start their schools small, with just a grade or two, and then grow a grade at a time.  District leaders, by contrast, want operators to take on all the grades in a school at once.  That’s why the four “transformation schools” starting up in New Orleans are worth watching.  In each of these previously struggling schools, a charter operator is running just the lower grades as a charter school, while the upper grades continue to run separately. Each year the charters will add a grade until the entire school is a charter school.

The idea raises lots of interesting issues such as, in the words of Louisiana state board of education member, “concerns about what is happening for the children in the upper grades.”  Since the upper part of the school has no future, is there any hope of attracting a strong leader and effective teachers, and getting everyone to do the hard work needed for the students to succeed?

Maybe so, but only if we get creative.  Here’s one idea from Public Impact analyst Jacob Rosch: what if we reconceive the role of the team running the upper grades?  Unlike a traditional school staff or a charter operator, their job is not to build an institution that we expect to be around 20 years from now. Instead, they have a high-pressure short-term assignment to move the remaining kids as far and as fast as possible in the time they have left at the school. If they succeed, they move on to another phasing-out school and do the same.  Intriguing idea – but just one of many possible configurations….To fix 5,000 failing schools, maybe we need to think outside of all the boxes, including the one that says every “school” is a stable institution that must be maintained over the long-haul.

–Guestbloggers Bryan and Emily Hassel

…the guestbloggers can recommend other blogs.  If you haven’t yet, take a peek at the new one from Education Next.  Lots of great material by and for edu-brainiacs who like to explore policy issues in depth. And all of your favorite topics – as we’re writing this, three of the most recent posts tackle vouchers, teacher pensions, and “the decline of ed schools”….

–Guestbloggers Bryan and Emily Hassel

Back again.  In the WSJ’s taste section Richard Whitmire and I take a look at how the political and media environment has changed and put the teachers’ unions out of position.   That said, they’re powerful interest groups so I surely wouldn’t count them out in terms of influence on policy development in DC and especially in the states and they clearly realize that they need to change their public game.  But, the issue environment and tone of the coverage has changed on them and it’s bringing a lot more scrutiny.

Now, back to the blogging Hassels.

The comments readers have submitted on our Try, Try Again post echo something we hear a lot: that efforts to fix failing schools can’t work. On one hand, skepticism is justified. Most chronically struggling schools haven’t improved much despite lots of pressure, grant funding, and outside help. Pollyannaism when it comes to chronically low-performing schools is clearly out of line. On the other hand, success stories do exist. Our colleagues documented five in this brief from the Center on Innovation and Improvement earlier this year; Mastery Charter Schools is making a name for itself by achieving strong results with fresh starts in Philadelphia; the Academy of Urban School Leadership has some promising results operating turnaround schools in Chicago, and just received nearly $3 million in federal funding for the teacher residency program that powers its classrooms. The Dept. of Ed. is making other grants like this one to turn up more examples of dramatic improvement in failing schools and learn what’s working.

So it turns out that neither utter skeptics nor Pollyannas are on the mark here. Just like in other sectors, efforts to fix chronic failures won’t usually work, but they will work sometimes. If we don’t try at all to fix failing schools, our success rate will be 0%. If we try once in each school and then let the efforts drag on for years regardless of results, we’ll see 20-30% success rates (if we’re lucky). If we want to reach the 60-80% range, there’s only one way, and that’s spotting failure early and rapidly retrying.

—Guestbloggers Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

As you see from the post below, Bryan and Emily Hassel of Public Impact are doing to do some guestblogging while I’m mostly out of pocket with some meetings for the next few days.   When they blog they kick it old school so I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

Couple of quick things:   Fun event next week at AEI on the new Jonathan Zimmerman book.   What looks like a really great discussion in the Bay Area on accountability in mid-October.  And on November 9-10 there is going to be a big throwdown  in Houston to discuss differentiated pay.