Be sure to check out the recently launched CO-Fund. It’s a P to P donor platform with a “pay it forward” pledge to help students with college financing.

I’m going to take a blogging break for the next two weeks.  But some good things lined up in the interim.  Next week a bunch of great folks are going to drop by to guestblog, including fly fishing pinup idol Paul Herdman, D.C. Deputy Mayor Victor Reinoso, the Piscalnator, Sarah Usdin from New Schools for New Orleans, The Commodore, Tim Daly of TNTP, Terry Ryan from Fordham Foundation and some others.

The week following that, Jim Ryan, from the University of Virgina’s law school and an expert on education law is coming.   He has a new book on educational opportunity coming out soon.  Very interesting guy.

Enjoy.

One of those quirks of meeting planning is that sometimes it is the most high-end places that give the biggest discounts for groups.  This was especially true at the bottom of the downturn when higher-priced places were especially slow. It unfortunately creates the optical problem of non-profits meeting in nice hotels but makes sense in terms of saving money for NGOs.

This month there was just a meeting on school turnarounds in D.C., where educators from Texas came to work with the University of Virginia’s turnaround initiative.*   The meeting was hosted at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, and the hotel deserves a mention for good corporate citizenship: On top of  room rates far below the DC mean, they threw in a 10 percent donation to DC Boys Town.

*Though not on the event mentioned here, an organization BW does work with.

August beach reading for you: In a new paper from ES Chad Aldeman and I take a look at the teacher pension issue (pdf).    Punchlines:  Big fiscal problems with a few culprits (and you can’t just lay this one at the feet of the unions), the current system out of alignment with the emerging workforce and efforts to improve human capital in education, but all the reform options have trade-offs as well.  Complicated.  Political.  Interesting.

But this is a looming fiscal crisis in more than a few states, some are basically already there, and it’s an issue that demands attention.

RiShawn Biddle takes a look behind the scenes on this week’s education agenda rollout.

First graf’s a killer…

Update: Ruth Marcus has more.

Here’s Paul Herdman, sage of Delaware, past fish porn feature, thoughtful commenter, idol of beauty pageant contestants, Outward Bound guru, and all around good guy with a plump rainbow trout he caught recently in Colorado.    He didn’t used to fly fish…but then the light went on.   Past fish porn via this link.

…the data genie, it is.  Here’s an analysis of school performance in RTT Round 1 winner Tennessee.

A lot of elections for governor this year, but here’s a list of gubernatorial seats widely considered to be in-play right now.   The ones that are Race to the Top finalist states are in bold.  Some big implications and questions around RTT implementation and durability if those states emerge as winners.

CA, CO, FL, HI, ME, MD, MN, OH, OR, RI, WI

A reader writes to note that Green Dot’s Marco Petruzzi (pictured here) does look a lot like James Spader in his pre-TV series days.

Short version of some takeaways from today’s Ed Insider on ESEA are in this tweet.

Two big takeaways are the substantial misalignment on the issues between reformers, the admin, and Congress on some key issues.   But data for pro-and anti-reform types to take comfort in.  Systemic reform more likely to have support than some of the leading-edge reforms.  In other words, one plausible reason No Child Left Behind is still in place is because it’s pretty widely credited among those in positions of influence.  Specifically:

• Insiders believe we may not see a final ESEA bill until the end of 2011, but more than 40% believe it could be 2012 or later.
• There is less support in Congress for advancing charter schools, Common Core Standards, and other reforms in ESEA then many advocates have assumed.
• Insiders believe there is more support in Congress for Supplemental Education Services and online learning then what the conventional wisdom has suggested.
• More than 90% of the Insiders believe that the Recovery Act funds actually slowed the pace for reauthorization.
• More than 80% of Insiders approve of the Obama Administration’s handling of education issues.

There is a webinar at 2pm today to discuss the complete results and analysis about what they mean going forward.

Since January ’09 Leafy Mike has been the go-to guy for sky-is-falling takes on the Obama – Duncan education policies.

Yet so far the sky hasn’t fallen?

Update: Chicken Little defends himself, ‘Aaah! Now they’re coming for the private schools!’

You should read the new “opportunity to learn” report and not just dismiss it as a rerun of ideas debated 15 years ago. If, as looks increasingly likely, there are fewer moderates in Congress after the midterm elections, these ideas will have more traction and resonance among national elected Democrats.

But, this agenda is organized and bankrolled by millions from foundations and the NEA and touted by the same folks who can’t stop yammering about Gates, Broad, and other foundations.  I don’t really care, all NGOs need money to operate and I like a vigorous debate.  But in terms of the rhetoric,  what, exactly, is the difference here?  I assume it’s deeper than viewpoint discrimination or good for me but not for thee?

Standing disc: BMGF supports Bellwether. Additional disc: Bellwether works with the NEA Foundation and I work with TBF.

Department of Ed shifting its stance on ARRA funding and jobs says Title I Monitor.

From today’s NPC event and speech: Here’s text of Duncan’s remarks, and here is video.

As rumored, behemoth AIR is taking on Learning Point Associates.  Interesting signal about their continued ambitions to impact policy more.  Gina Burkhardt to AIR.  Look for more activity like this in the next 12 – 24 mos.

If you want to work at one of the mom and pops that are still standing, Education Northwest needs an REL director. Portland’s a pretty sweet place to live and work and some good folks at Education Northwest.

Only a few surprises in the RTT finalists announcement, here they all are:  AZ, CA, CO, DC, FL, GA, HI, IL, KY, LA, MD, MA, NJ, NY, NC, OH, PA, RI, & SC.

Takeaways:  Tough math, money won’t go so far with this group, you can see some patterns around Round 1 scores, and some open gubernatorial seats and contested elections could make implementation interesting.

Ed Week’s McNeil digs down deeper into the NYT turnaround story from last week. Punchline:  It’s worse than you thought!

Sara Mead with a succinct and pretty spot-on take on the scarcity of gifted slots in New York City. Also tied up in this are the inequities in gifted education and the under-identification of minority students (the flip side of the over-identification of minority students for special ed).

In our space one of the big obstacles to low-priced tech for every student has been durability.   Edison’s laptop initiative resulted in a lot of destroyed machines, so have others.  Kids are hard on the boxes, use them as folders and crack screens, etc…it’s one reason there is skepticism about whether Kindles are up to the task in their present boxes.   Are Indian kids easier on tech or is this going to be a problem for the vaunted $35 machines?

I mentioned some sloppiness around the the recent report about Teach for America (TFA) that Michael Winerip featured in his column from a few weeks ago in an effort to make the point that the research on TFA is mixed.   Since we seem to be repeating history now seems a good time to revisit that and the larger issues it raises. The report conveniently highlights two problems:  Our field’s pathetic and weaponized approach to research and the problem of “study laundering.”

Pile ‘em up: The two big takeaways of this report from the Great Lakes Center is that retention of TFA teachers is bad and the program’s results are, at best, mixed.  There are substantial problems with both findings.

On the retention issue the researchers seem to be focusing on whether Teach For America Teachers leave their schools after two years, not whether they leave teaching. Unfortunately, this is a common mistake in research on teacher attrition especially when the goal is to illustrate bigger numbers (for instance all the research about how the attrition of new teachers is so far out of line with other fields).

The Great Lakes Center report states that “(M)ore than 50 percent of TFA teachers leave after two years, and more than 80 percent leave after three years…”  The report reaches this figure by consolidating findings from previous studies that in one way or another conflated leaving a school with leaving teaching.

In fact, in a study that delineated the leaving issue more effectively, a 2008 study by Harvard’s Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, found that 61 percent of Teach For America corps members stay in teaching beyond the two-year commitment.  Teach For America surveys its alumni regularly and the most recent survey found that 65 percent of Teacher For America’s 20,000 alumni remain in education, with 32 percent continuing as teachers.    And remember, that’s a survey of alums going back almost two decades now so that one in three figure should be viewed in that context as well as the larger context of TFA’s mission.

On the question of aggregate TFA performance the report also falls short.   There are research methods and they’re not equal in terms of analytic leverage.  All the commentary attempting to present the case of mixed effects for Teach For America teachers succeeds only by piling up all the studies and then saying, huh, two big piles so the studies are mixed.  In fact, if you look at the studies that employ the most rigorous methodology (in other words, apples to apples, enough apples to make a reliable estimate, etc…) it’s pretty unambiguous that, as a group, Teach For America teachers perform as well or better than other teachers, not only emergency certified teachers but traditionally trained ones and veterans.  Considering that on an annual basis Teach For America is now the largest teacher prep program in the country (excluding multi-campus ventures such as the UC system) that overall level of quality is a big deal.

For instance:

A 2004 study from Mathematica Policy Research found Teach For America corps members were as good or better other teachers, including veteran teachers.  This was the only study to earn an A for its methodology in a 2008 Ed Next analysis of research into Teach For America because of its methods.

A 2009 Urban Institute study that found the impact of having a Teach For America teacher was at least twice that of having a teacher with three or more years of experience.

A 2010 study from the University of North Carolina, which concluded that students taught by corps members outperformed their peers in high school science, math, and English. At every grade level and subject studied, Teach For America corps members’ students performed as well as or better than the students of traditionally prepared UNC graduates.  This was a state study to help inform policymaking there.

Other studies here.

This doesn’t mean that TFA teachers are all outstanding.  There is high-variance amongst them, just as there is with other routes into teaching and TFA teachers struggle their first year, just as most teachers do.  But these results do mean that in the aggregate hiring a Teach For America teacher is a pretty safe bet, relative to all the other options on the table.  This is part of a larger body of research on teacher effectiveness that shows that  – outside of emergency credentials with no training at all – routes into teaching matter less than candidates.

And the secondary impact is in no small part fueling today’s reform movement (pdf).  Former corps members are all over the place.

TFA critics continue to cite the David Berliner study on TFA from 2002 as evidence of TFA’s “mixed results.”  Sorry.  Here’s a review of that study by Kosuke Imai (pdf) and here’s a more accessible review by UVA’s Paul Freedman (pdf). As both make clear, the Berliner study wants for rigorous methods: Before you even get to the statistical sleight of hand, which isn’t that complicated to ferret out, the selection problems undermine its methods.  That’s why the 2008 report card gave it a ‘D.’ Punchline:  Not all research is created equal.

Again, to date no study with what would be considered rigorous methods (meaning adequate controls) has shown that Teach for America teachers depress student achievement.   That’s noteworthy but lost in the noise. On some issues (eg charter schools) the research is mixed.  That’s really not the case with Teach For America right now.

Study laundering: I know it’s impolitic to forthrightly point this out, but here’s the deal:  In terms of mainstream media, only Winerip and, of course, Mikey bit on this study despite that it had been shopped around for some time.

That’s in part because the board of the center is made up of people with a track record of trashing Teach For America and NEA affiliates fighting to keep TFA out of various states.  That’s all fine, I’m a big fan of the five freedoms.  But, most reporters would (and did) then take a critical eye to the findings.  Perhaps ask some disinterested researchers to have a quick look at the studies being aggregated?  Yet not here.  Rather: Hook, line, sinker.   If  Winerip and Mikey covered tobacco research, we’d all still be taking cigarette breaks during the workday.

So what happens is that the Great Lakes Center puts out the study, no one serious bites.  But then it ultimately does get picked up, for whatever reason, and – voila! -  it’s clean money! In other words, suddenly it seems more legit because it earns the moniker  ‘as reported in the Washington Post’ or ‘this work was featured in the New York Times.’  This happens will all kinds of studies, pro-and anti-reform, by the way, and it’s a big problem that confuses rather than clarifies things for the casual observer or the policymaker trying to make heads or tails of an issue. In other words, the problem of the easily fooled or the agenda-driven becomes everyone’s problem because it further clouds already complicated issues.

Update: Professor Berliner responds below. He throws up some misdirection (it was peer reviewed!), attacks the reviews, but admits the criticisms have merit, and then unfortunately fails cite any specifics or say which ones.  That’s a problem because the criticisms undermine the premise of the study.   To quote from Paul Freedman’s* analysis (pdf), again the more accessible of the two reviews and only a few pages and worth reading, the three issues are:

· problems of selection and inadequate matching fundamentally undermine the validity of the study;

· the authors overstate the substantive importance of their estimates;

· the statistical approach employed is not well suited to the research question.

Rather, Professor Berliner argues that, ” But the study we did with very careful matching procedures met some of the standards of quality that the profession had for conducting non-causal designs.”  Given the growing body of research about Teach For America that meets more than “some” of the standards, and in fact allows for causal inferences, that statement is an excellent summation of the problem here.

By the way, here’s a bit on Freedman, who doesn’t even have a dog in this fight.

What happened in DC this week is significant both for the city and nationally, but three aspects of the DC teacher firings that don’t seem to be getting a lot of attention are:

(a) Look behind the numbers.  About a third of the 241 teachers let go were dismissed for credentialing/license problems, not performance;

(b) If it bleeds it leads.  More teachers performed in the highest tier under the new evaluation system than were dismissed so while the firings obviously get the ink let’s not overlook the great teachers in the D.C. system; and

(c) The bill is due.  Weren’t we all told by national union leaders- in public venues – that everyone is for accountability and when this came to pass the union wouldn’t fight it?  Let’s hope the pushback is just theater.

Update: Sensible WaPo editorial makes important points on this and a  NYT story with the fault lines. Also, as the chatter starts that teachers are being fired based on test scores alone, check out how ‘IMPACT,’ the evaluation system in DC actually works. And, from the theater, this AFT statement does seem like more smoke than fire, even the number of firings is inflated.

Interesting Ron Brownstein article from NJ about generational and racial demographics and fiscal burdens and the attendant politics. Big implications for education finance.  Some early and preliminary evidence that older citizens are less likely to support school finance issues on the ballot in mixed race districts, for instance.  Past “Geezer War” items here.

There are still a few Eduwonk coupon codes left for Education Insider. The code “Eduwonk” gets 20 percent off an annual subscription.  The first month’s issue comes out later this week and includes some analysis running counter to the conventional wisdom on what’s next for ESEA.

A former teachers, principal, and foundation official Van Schoales was until recently a leader in the Denver school reform scene.   Now he’s the leader of Education Reform Now.  He can also fish.  Here he sends along the following two pictures from a recent Mexico trip.  Previous fish porn via this link.

Mahi:

Sailfish:

Save yourself some time and read Sara Mead’s take on the Brookings report.  While you’re there she also has the results of the Social Innovation Fund competition.

Even if you only follow the issue casually, you shouldn’t miss the Fordham Foundation analysis of state standards and common core standards. But, before everyone goes gaga about the rate of adoption, as impressive as it is all things considered,  bear in mind that the real action on this is going to be around what it ultimately means to participate. In other words, questions around assessments, cut scores on those assessments, governance and so forth.

We’re still at the point where this is mostly akin to joining a gym. We are not yet at the point where the workouts are defined.

The Hechinger Institute has quietly expanded its blog roster, a lot of content there now worth checking out.

If you have been wondering what Education Pioneers is all about, Thursday the 29th in DC is your chance to find out.   Great event with the current class of fellows that evening.

In the WSJ they laud the pro-charter money being raised in New York.   But this can be deceiving, the money teachers’ unions throw into political races really isn’t that significant right now (although that could change with the new rules).  The power comes from the ability to knock on doors, phone bank, etc…that’s the big deal.

RiShawn Biddle says reformers need to wake up to that and get more in the organizing game. He’s right and this is one place philanthropy could do a lot more.  There are some great groups in the space now nationally and in the states (Bellwether works with one, Stand for Children).

SEED Foundation (umbrella for SEED schools) needs a performance and evaluation manager. Great organization doing great work.

Three jobs at NACSA:  Authorizer Development, Manager of Authorizer Development, and Policy Manager.

Two senior spots at the New Jersey Department of Education. You’d be working directly with the great (and recent new dad) Andy Smarick.  Applicants who want to work on RTT should bring their own rug…others pulled out.

Turning around low performing articles…

I woke up today and thought it was 2004, when this blog first launched.  There in The New York Times was a Michael Winerip story that, well, left a few things out. Read the story but the basic take is that federal turnaround policy is forcing a great principal out of a good school.

Russo grabs three pieces of low-hanging fruit: Is a really excellent principal representative of the overall landscape of persistently under-performing schools?  The last line of the story indicates the principal isn’t actually being fired but is rather taking over the district’s school improvement work. Seems fishy?  But most obvious: Federal law doesn’t hold schools accountable for the performance of students they haven’t had a least a year to teach. This is no small thing, the article states otherwise conflating taking a test with the scores being used for accountability.

But there is more than that.   As the article mentions,  the district did not have to even apply for this money, it was a competitive grant opportunity*.  But what readers are not told is that there are other school improvement funds and other funds overall that can be purposed for school improvement and do not require personnel changes.  Why not use those?  But if the leaders of the district truly believe the requirements to be adverse then it’s essentially malpractice to take the funds.  They fired a great principal for money?  Really?

In addition, readers might want to know that test scores at the school are actually moving the wrong way and although Winerip focuses on the immigrant students mentioning overall rates only in passing, scores are no great shakes for white regular education students or really for any students in the school at all.** One in five students at grade level in reading (less in math) and low pass rates across the board.   That all complicates the idea put forward in the article that just changing the student body will be the solution.   There is also a discrepancy between Winerip’s claim that half of the students are foreign-born and the actual data on the school’s population that is especially hard to square with the idea that it is becoming more integrated.

If I sound suspicious about the article’s fact base, it’s from experience.  Unfortunately, this is the tried and true Winerip method, especially the part about focusing on special education or minority students in schools that overall aren’t doing very well (see for instance previous coverage of New York City or his NCLB coverage).   Plus more here.  Punchline:  These stories that seem too neat and tidy usually are.  This is a messy business.

What’s frustrating is that there is a real issue here demanding attention. The trade-off between flexibility and prescriptiveness in federal school turnaround policy is a complicated one without a lot of good answers.  Too much flexibility and districts and states take the easy way out and do nothing meaningful for students stuck in lousy schools. Too prescriptive and you get meaningless box-checking (as we may be seeing overall with the current dollop of school improvement funds), perverse consequences, or you stifle innovative approaches that might work if educators could try them.  That’s a two-decade long story now and given all the attention to turnarounds now one that ought to be told in richer analytic depth.   One day it will be, but today is not that day.

*See here and here for slide decks about this program.

**For the school to be in this situation in the first place the problems have to be longstanding, another reason the blame the new immigrants/change the kids but not the teaching bit falls short.