Kevin Huffman turns in a great column on Race to the Top.  He’s right to single out Louisiana.  Their application* (and a few others) combine ambitious ideas, real plans for implementation, and an integrated strategy.

Also in theWaPo today, Kevin alludes to the “controversy” over Secretary Duncan’s remarks about New Orleans schools and Katrina.  But to have a controversy don’t you have to have some credible people really upset?   In this case everyone the Wash Post talked to (or at least cited) supported Duncan’s take, which isn’t surprising since it’s a pretty common sentiment in the city.   Duncan isn’t offering any sort of cost-benefit argument, you’re hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t appreciate the horror of the storm and its aftermath.   The point is that one outcome is an intense focus on improving the city’s previously catastrophically bad schools. 

*Disc-Like Kevin I worked as a  thought partner with a number of states, including Louisiana, to help them prepare their applications but have no stake in any particular outcome.

AFT President Randi Weingarten had a lively apparence on MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning.  I think she lost Carl Berstein!

So have we repealed parts of the Constitution, in particular Article I lately?  Otherwise it’s a little unclear how this proposed $1 billion incentive fund for ESEA reauthorization works since Congress, you know, controls the purse strings?  They call it a budget “request” for a reason.   Ed Week’s Klein has more on the pending budget request with some Charlie Barone insights on the politics of this ESEA carrot.

Per Rick Hess’ latest jihad poking sticks at the Obama Administration over this “secret” reviewers issue around Race to the Top, aren’t there a lot of consequential government processes and decisions where the accountability is look-back rather than contemporaneous?  The issue here isn’t whether there should be complete transparency, merely when the information should be released to maintain the integrity of the process.

I’m not saying I agree with the Administration on this issue.  In fact, I can see both sides on this one but tend to think the lousy politics and corresponding risk to what is a promising initiative outweigh the benefits.   And Petrilli isn’t wrong about the political cover immediate transparency would provide.   I’m just saying that they do have a case and reasonable people can disagree.   As I said earlier below, it’s precisely the  opportunities for influencing the process that Hess seeks that bolster the administration’s case.   What’s debatable is whether any of that is outweighed by the potential for blowback that political operatives are now trying hard to create.

Read this entire Bill Turque blog post from The Washington Post.  And then say…wow.

Update:  The blog post is gone, airbrushed away Kremlin style!  Did Larry King complain?  Stay tuned!

Update II:   I looked and couldn’t find it anywhere online but commenter Phillip Marlowe got his hands on one.

Update III:  An edited version is now back up via the original link.   Lesson…Don’t mess with Larry King!

Three new reports that are all worth your time.

The National Charter School Research Project (I’m on the advisory board but wasn’t involved in this except as a reviewer)  just released “Hopes, Fears, and Reality 2009.” (pdf).  Important data and analytics on charter schools.  Learning Point Associates just released an interesting report on the views of teachers about various reforms and the extent to which they converge or diverge from the research base (pdf). 

And this Eric Hanushek* analysis of the ecnomic impact of improving PISA outcomes is going to be released tomorrow at Davos (pdf).  *His wife chairs ES’ board.

The WaPo has a fresh exclusive: Obama to propose consolidating federal education programs in his budget.   That’s a significant move (and a smart one on the policy) albeit one likely to encounter a lot of resistance.  Plus, the budget has a carrot:  If Congress passes an ESEA reauthorization they get…one…billion…dollars!   But is that enough?

And some big budget numbers for education…right after the “freeze.”   Sort of a mixed message on SOTU day or is education spending still enough of a valence issue that it doesn’t matter?  Not sure how this helps the administration quell the vocal discontent on the left about the freeze though.  It’s domestic spending, yes, but they hate education reform…In any event, the ESEA sweepstakes are on again.

Albemarle County Public Schools (VA) superintendent Pam Moran gets a nice write-up for her leadership on technology.   She’s also a leader on charter schools in VA — and that’s bucking the trend.

AEI’s Rick Hess is outraged about the lack of immediate transparency around Race to the Top. Secretary Duncan has committed to a transparent competition but the reviewing and judging is happening in secret with the details to be released later.   And like nouveau-populists everywhere Hess is fed up with this Washington double-speak and is not going to take it anymore!   Ed Week’s McNeil is bummed, too.  

First, here’s a prediction:  If the idea that the Obama Administration is giving away billions of dollars through a secret process becomes a theme on talk radio and some of TV’s yell shows then the administration will have to change course on this.  Remember, it was just a few months ago that the President of the United States had to pre-release a speech to schoolchildren because people were worried about indoctrination.    

On the issue, I’m not sure what the Department of Education’s argument for secrecy is, but here’s a good one I see: 

In practice  ”transparent” is not synonymous with contemporaneous.  In other words, a process can be transparent while it is going on or it can be transparent after the fact.  Or it can, of course, also be neither.  The Administration is obviously aiming for post facto transparency here.   And substantively if they release the reviewers’ actual notes, details of the process and any trainings, and obviously the reviewers names, then that’s enough for any congressional oversight and public accountability after the awards are announced.

Hess notes that learning all this after the winners are announced is too late to make a difference on the process.  And he’s right.  But it’s the very idea that there could/should be some public influence if various actors, stakeholders, or interest groups don’t like some aspect of the process that bolsters the administration’s case here.  No one will be happy with this process in its entirety.  Considering the high stakes of the Race to the Top, the oversight and political accountability that exists, and the clear opportunity for transparency after the judging, it’s hard to argue that if there is self-dealing (by the administration or readers) there won’t be consequences.  So this is the best way to insulate the process while it is going on.  Afterwards, let the chips fall where they may.

The counterargument:

This is politically tone-deaf.   It takes one of the administration’s few green shoots right now, education, and turns it into a liability.  It’s pretty easy to take shots at this, as the Hess blog posts show.   Besides it is hard to keep something like this secret anyway so it’s entirely possible that the political hit for not disclosing will be for naught anyway in practice.   

On the substance, we’re talking about $4 billion, doesn’t the public have a right to some visibility into the deliberations about how that money is spent just as they do with congressional appropriations?   Notes and after the fact information is fine but there is no substitute for real-time information about what is being considered and discussed.    There is also the possibility that the transparency will surface conflicts or issues that might not otherwise have been noticed.  Finally, what really is the downside?  Are people really going to lobby the readers or is this just about avoiding headaches?

You make the call…

It’s not just movies…

First John Legend wrote a strong Huffie piece earlier this month about education reform calling it the civil rights issue of our time.  Now he and Deborah Kenny take their message to Morning Joe on MSNBC.

Update:  Daily Riff has more Legend.

President Obama’s just announced non-defense discretionary “freeze” proposal doesn’t make ESEA reauthorization any easier…

Update:  Commenter Doug correctly notes that education may be spared some – as last week’s RTT announcement illustrated — and the administration is leaving itself wiggle room in this proposal overall.  But that’s not the point.  This is still bad news for ESEA for two reasons.

First, traditionally it takes big dollops of resources to buy reform in education.   For instance, don’t believe the rhetoric, in the first few years President Bush put billions of new dollars into No Child Left Behind, increasing federal spending on K-12 by almost 40 percent.  That was the political grease for reform.  Second, the Obama “freeze” proposal is not receiving bouquets from the left.   So it doesn’t help with already strained intraparty Democratic politics further complicating a successful ESEA reauthorization.

Update II:   Petrilli thinks the Republicans will like this and perhaps want to work with Obama now.  Even better, he says, the education groups will be satisfied with all the stimulus money already spent!  Petrilli is apparently easily fooled.   The groups were looking for more funding after the stimulus last year so it’s inconceivable they will not want more this year.  Besides, when has the education system ever said it had enough money and was ready for some good ‘ol reform?  For the Republicans’ part, it’s more likely they will just up the ante in the fiscal restraint game.   The President says $250 billion in savings over the next three fiscal years and they say good, but not good enough, let’s do $350.  There is an arms race quality to these gambits.   And even after the Brown win there are still not enough Republicans to tilt this issue anyway so ESEA reauthorization will require a pretty united Democratic caucus in the Senate.   But most to the point, did Petrilli not get the memo that the Republican game plan this year is to deny Obama victories not enable them?

Ed reform going big screen?  A few years ago I thought that maybe Coach Carter was the first post-NCLB education reform film.  That was premature, the wave is breaking now.  A lot of excitement that  “Waiting for Superman,” Davis Guggenheim’s (he also did Inconvenient Truth) film was such a hit at Sundance and landed a big distribution deal.   Now there is “The Lottery” about a charter school lottery coming later this spring.  That’s sure to be heartbreaking, if you’ve ever seen one of these lotteries it’s brutal.    And I understand there is at least one more in this vein in the works…

Urban Teacher Residency United is launching a new cohort in its residency for residencies.  Here’s an interesting edujob:   Executive Director of DC School Reform now (pdf).    Update:   More DC-area edujobs. SEED is hiring.

And you don’t want to miss this smart testimony from Wireless Gen’s Larry Berger on rethinking Tprocurement for the RTT assessment competition (pdf).

New DLC* report says the issue isn’t whether we’re heading into a “lost decade,” it’s that we just had one (pdf). *disc-where I’m a senior fellow.

It was great to see Revolution Foods profiled in The Times over the weekend.  The company, which provides healthy school lunches, has popped up on this blog from time to time, they’re outstanding and doing interesting and important work.

Sawchuk turns in an important, yes, must-read, story on common assessments…

Charlie Barone has been pointing out for a while that based on the estimated allocation amounts in the final Race to the Top regulations it’s mathematically impossible for every state to get a grant absent a major political failure.   He’s right, but there is also a number between say a dozen and 50 that if we get past it will mean the potential impact of the money is being diluted.   

On the other hand, Rick Hess thinks that advocating for a Race to the Top outcome whereby only a small number of states are winners in Round One establishes a fungible standard so that victory can be declared under a variety of outcomes.   But it’s less complicated than that.  For Round One there is a number between zero and somewhere in the low-single digits that will indicate seriousness in terms of the number of states that win.  And Rick overlooks that a lot of people have read and been involved in various applications and have a lot of visibility into the state plans, so it’ll be hard to fool or get away with much here.

On all this, Andy Smarick turns in a piece that’s well worth reading in Ed Next.  If you want to read one long analysis on all this it’s hard to do better.

Around the states there is a lot of chatter in the wake of the Round One deadline.   Geoffery Canada takes his state, NY, to task.  In CO they passed some last-minute legislation but not everything the state needed so the governor just established a council to look at some of the knotty issues around teacher effectiveness.   Finally, some of the small states are worried that size may work against them and you hear some buzz that small states are too small to make a difference.   But places like Washington DC, Rhode Island, or Delaware offer the chance for some interesting work, at scale, if they can pull it off.

Everyone is abuzz about what the Scott Brown victory in the MA special election might mean for education.   The answer is not much.   The politics of education in the Senate are complicated enough that it’s unlikely to be a one or two vote issue.    To the extent the outcome in MA further bolsters Republican strategists who believe that a strategy of “saving” the country from President Obama’s proposals is a political winner, then it’s that much less likely anything happens.  Worth nothing, after the very untimely death of his chief of staff who was an education veteran, House Republican Leader Boehner brought on one of the architects of the Contract for America in her place. Hard to see something big happening on education if Boehner doesn’t want to seriously play ball as he did in 2001.

But the bigger news that has largely flown under the eduradar is that yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling in the Citizens United v. FCC  (pdf) case has some big eduimplications as teachers’ unions were among the winners in terms of having more latitude to spend and influence political races than they already do.  That’s a far-reaching decision. 

Petrilli thinks a big flexibility bargain is in the works and the Administration is trial ballooning the idea, but absent real accountability hard to see that being a winner either.  And considering how under-used the existing flexibility the law allows now is, it’s unclear if that’s the real problem here at all.

A lot of press coverage today about what various states are up to on Race to the Top.  But let’s handicap the race.  Who do you think should win, and why?  And, aside from non-participants like Texas, who do you think shouldn’t be a round one winner?

The conventional wisdom on the Weingarten “glacial curtain” speech was that it was a big win for AFT and in the zero-sum nature of these things a loss for the National Education Association, which seems behind the times on these issues.   Everyone is emailing around this weekend’s NYT editorial saying as much and challenging Weingarten to deliver on this.

But that CW may well turn out to be wrong.   Obviously far too soon to tell but it’s possible that by by staying quiet the NEA may have chosen the wiser strategy.    This situation around teacher evaluation in Houston shows how difficult it’s going to be for Weingarten to really deliver on this in a meaningful way given the politics she has to manage.    It’s true that nothing ventured, nothing gained.  But it’s also true in public affairs that sometimes nothing ventured is nothing lost.

Today is Race to the Top day.   The first round applications are due and the President is using that occasion to announce a budgetary expansion of the program.  But unless the new money is tied in a meaningful way to requirements for reform — and integrated more generally into ESEA — this is likely to evolve into a state slush fund.   Goals 2000 was hardly a failure, by the way, it laid the groundwork for states to get where they are on standards.  Rather, today the feds have a chance to be even more ambitious about the foundational pieces they require from states.

There is some speculation that part of Google’s play with regard to China was that the company wasn’t doing well there in terms of market penetration anyway.  So turn a problem into a big optical win.

Which makes you wonder on the eve of Race to the Top applications, why aren’t more states pulling a Texas like stunt and getting in front of the parade rather than cleaning up elephant droppings afterwards because they were not positioned to win in the first place?

He was referring to his position on the war in Vietnam, but certainly applicable to where we are in school improvement efforts today:

“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. to the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace, 1967.

Regarding this debate over whether what Houston ISD is doing on teacher evaluation aligns or not with the Weingarten proposals from last Tuesday, three fresh links for you:

First, at HuffPo Diane Ravitch says HISD’s policy is not what Weingarten said.  Second, here’s the proposal itself in pdf (starts on page 103 of the board agenda).   In fact, it looks like it’s in-line with what Weingarten was talking about.  Despite all the rhetoric test scores are not the sole criteria, the tests are not snap-shots but rather value-added, and support is in place for teachers.  

Perhaps one could argue that Texas doesn’t have outstanding standards and tests but (a)  the teachers’ union there would be on firmer ground to make that case if they hadn’t just stood shoulder to shoulder with Texas’ secessionist-talking governor and rejected any effort to compete for federal “Race to the Top” funds, which among other things are tied to better standards and tests…and (b) what’s in place in Texas now, while far from ideal, works for this policy.

Also, here’s a chat from the Houston Chron with a pro-con view.  Backstory on all this  here and here.

Per the below, if you can’t get enough value-add action then here’s an interesting paper from Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen on using value-add around pre-tenure decisions for teachers (pdf).

KIPP wants a managing director for teaching and learning in New York.   Great job for someone who really wants to focus on instruction, data, and curriculum.   NCATE wants a vice president for accreditation.  Given the directions the leadership there wants to go could be fun job as things evolve.

A lot of back and forth in Rhode Island over Race To The Top.   The teachers’ union there is not down with the Obama Administration’s requirements around teacher effectiveness.   But they apparently also can’t live with the idea that after three years of an unacceptable evaluation a teacher would lose their license.   The standard they want is, seriously, five years of poor evaluations.  Given what we know about the effects of under-performing teachers – especially on low-income youngsters — this stance is literally pick jaw up off floor time…

Meanwhile, the new school superintendent in Houston liked AFT President Randi Weingarten’s speech the other day but this is praise Weingarten does not want.  The Houston Chronicle has the story and the exchange of press releases between the sup’t and Weingarten.     The sup’t, Terry Grier, sent a letter saying that the district wanted to use value-added test scores as part (and explicitly not as the sole criteria) of teacher evaluation, as Weingarten had said was OK the other day.  Weingarten counters the sup’t is distorting her position.   It’s hard to glean that from the sup’ts letter or the proposal though. 

So, what’s probably going on here is that the local union, painted into a corner by the Weingarten speech and the sup’ts invoking of it, demanded help and said that Weingarten’s speech was being used to justify the firing of teachers (albeit low-performers).   As a national union president that puts Weingarten in a bind and illustrates the local needs/national imperatives tension she has to balance.  But it’s exactly the bind that makes a lot of observers wonder if she can deliver her membership on the issues she’s promising nationally.

Whitmire did GMA today to discuss his new book on boys and education.

One outcome of the November gubernatorial races in VA and NJ is that it looks like the choice debate will again be front and center and in some interesting ways.

A few years ago Sara Mead and I wrote a paper (pdf) criticizing the “Challenge Index” that The Washington Post and Newsweek use to rate high schools.   We debated the issue with the index’s creator, Jay Mathews, but in the end his position boiled down to, ‘if you don’t like this system, build a better one.’   So along with US News and S&P that’s what we did.   Methods here (pdf).

Edweek’s flagship Quality Counts, just released yesterday, could be on a similar trajectory.  As Macke Raymond (who among other roles chairs ES’ board) points out the metrics used by Education Week paint a distorted picture of school quality (I’d also quibble with other aspects like how EW accounts for accountability).    Raymond’s not the first to make that point but she is the first to start to slice the data in different ways in another publication:  Ed Next.  We could be seeing another rankings competition starting? 

With high schools our concern was that some really lousy high schools that did well by a few kids and badly by most were able to hit the board in the Challenge Index.   Here the problem is somewhat different.  But the outcome with Quality Counts in some ways matters even more because it drives politics and policy.   In states that get really good grades because of the “chance for success” index it  has a chilling effect on reform.   ‘Why should we fix our schools’, people argue, ‘Ed Week says they’re great!’  Reform is contentious enough without creating that false sense of security.