Important Sawchuk post on this week’s back and forth on value-added. Agree or disagree with them, it’s hard to miss that the EPI’ers are positionally on the margin of the debate right now.

Quick announcement: Starting in September I’m going to write a weekly column on education issues for Time.com and occasionally for the magazine.  Obviously, I’m excited about this great opportunity but as with most new things it means some changes, too.

Most notably, I will not be contributing to US News and World Report anymore.  I first collaborated with them on their high school rankings, an outgrowth of this paper (pdf) showing that the Newsweek rankings favored many schools that were shortchanging kids.  While not perfect I continue to think that the USN high school rankings are the best ones out there if you care about equity within schools, achievement gaps, and advanced course-taking.   That work led to a contributor relationship for several years.  For that I  want to thank Robert Schlesinger, a thoughtful and overworked opinions editor.  And I especially want to thank Brian Kelly, USN’s editor, for the opportunities he gave me, support, and friendship.  It is not a secret that these are tough times for the news and publishing business but Brian illustrates why that’s largely situational and not a reflection of the quality of people working in that field.

So you can look for the Time.com column in September and I’ll still be blogging here.

The town vandals now what to know what’s up with all these broken windows?

Over at the AEI blog my friend Rick Hess, who like a few others spent much of the spring in a effort to undermine trust and confidence around ‘Race to the Top’ (in Rick’s case while earnestly bleating that competitive grant programs need trust to work), wants those of us asking questions now to vindicate him for his earlier comments.  But he overlooks a key distinction:  Hess wasn’t just arguing that the initiative might have programmatic issues of the kind many are now discussing (and discussed after Round 1.)  Rather, he was also implying the strong possibility of conflicts of interest and self-dealing.  Sure, he went out of the way to say he wasn’t impugning Joanne Weiss or Jim Shelton or anyone else, but would then follow that with lines like this:

“will [they] be in a position to reassure even skeptical observers that the process has been fair and meritocratic…. whether the program is sufficiently insulated from political machinations that even mean-spirited skeptics would have trouble finding cause to wonder about manipulation and private agendas.”

It’s the classic, ‘of course I’m not saying that’….but I’ll write about that a lot anyway, because that is important, and we have to pay attention to that, and did I mention that some people, but most definitely not me, think they’re up to that?’  At the same time, Hess was also making noise about questions about reviewers being picked for political reasons and other issues that didn’t come to pass.

So it’s worth pointing out that for its problems, and in addition to the policy changes it’s produced so far, Race to the Top has set a standard for transparency in a grant competition by releasing pretty much everything associated with the competition.*  It’s one reason people can go over the reviews in such detail.  Meanwhile, if anything it was the desire to bend over backwards to appease this sort of concern that is likely the root of the RTT scoring problems.  The political appointees Hess worries about were in such a box they couldn’t influence the program – even when the public interest arguably would have been better served had they done so – and couldn’t pick a field of reviewers uniformly deep in the work because they would have been attacked for conflicts of interest.  In other words, this throw up whatever and see what sticks style of advocacy (and in fairness the Department of Education pays too much attention to it) is no small part of the problem here.

*While we’re on this, Hess has never resolved the inherent contradiction in arguing that the program should be free from influence while also calling for real-time ways for outsiders to influence the process.   In retrospect, despite the scoring problems, allowing for a play-by-play view into the process would have been a disaster.  The grant process needs some changes but not that one.

I mentioned the passing of Robert Sexton on Friday.  Here’s a thorough obituary well worth reading.

Just when you thought there was nothing new and/or useful to say on RTT outcomes Sara Mead comes through with a smart take.

Value-add measures for teachers are complicated.  Two takes fresh out today. Shorter versions:

From the teachers’ union-funded EPI (pdf):  We don’t want to say don’t use value-add, but use it only a very wee little bit!    We’re more bullish on peer review, but ignore the evidence there please!

From U of W’s Dan Goldhaber: Use it responsibility and beware of the limitations.  Why on earth is the LAT doing what it’s doing?

Goldhaber’s take is sensible.  EPI is right that the fetishising of 51 percent of evaluation from value-add isn’t wise (and it’s also not practical as a comprehensive tool).  And they sensibly call for a federal push to innovate with various evaluation models.  But isn’t that what’s happening under Race to the Top and related initiatives?* And since we really don’t know what works here yet there is nothing wrong with states innovating with heavy value-add models (meaning weighted at 50 percent or more), too, is there?  Besides, it’s worth nothing that models that use value-add for much less than 50 get attacked, too.

In fact, I’d argue the underlying issue is less the specifications of any value-add model, or any evaluation system that uses value-add, and more the underlying issue of outcome-based evaluation.  Most of the debate today is camouflage for that.

*Take for instance the DC IMPACT model, which is a pretty good tool.

Races with big education implications, like Michael Bennet’s U.S. Senate race or the upcoming DC mayoral primary are pretty well known.  But there are some other races with big potential education implications just a little below the radar.  Here are three, who else?

Stairway to Beaven – In Florida Heather Beaven is running for Congress.  She’s CEO of The Florida Endowment Foundation for Florida’s Graduates, helping at-risk students there.  She’s a D.

Jeanne out of the bottle? – In Maryland veteran education advocate and agitator Jeanne Allen is running for state legislature.  She’s the founder of the Center for Education Reform in Washington.  She’s an R.

Bill is due – In another Maryland statehouse race Bill Ferguson is challenging a longtime incumbent for a state senate seat.   Education (primarily slow progress on improvement and the need for more ambitious steps) is central to the race.  He’s former TFA and has worked on education in several other roles in Baltimore.  He’s a D.

Suddenly a big news day.

In New Jersey state ed chief Brett Schundler has been fired by the governor over this budget issue with Race to the Top.  Wow.  Given how Governor Christie has treated Schundler throughout this process good luck finding someone strong for that position.   And, given that Schundler was a favorite of the school choice crowd, what’s the fallout there?

Sad news from Kentucky, Robert Sexton has died. He headed the Prichard Committee, arguably the prototypical state education advocacy organization.  As a result he was instrumental in key education policy battles around standards and finance among other issues.

A lot of jaws dropped over this story in The Washington Post today.  Legitimate issue but the Post came down hard one way and didn’t caveat things.  Were they just mimicking The Times and their stories on the gaps there?  In any event,  at TNR Jon Chait cuts to the chase. Save yourself some time and read that.

TNTP continues to hit the cover off the ball. And it’s a scandal that the citizens of D.C. don’t have a better public university. The new rankings of dropout factories also, again, illustrate that profit – non-profit is not an especially useful quality delineation in our field right now.

Word is that John Deasy is really amping up in Los Angeles, a lot of excitement and buzz around him out there.   Meanwhile, word is that there are some hiccups coming around I3 match funding, some real complications with the process.  Plus sounds like total pension craziness breaking out in IL.

If you’re voting in Pepsi Refresh then please consider voting for Horizon Learning Center’s residential wellness program idea. (Disc- I worked there during and after college, great people and empowering outdoors-based programs)

ETS is making a big hire if you’re into teacher assessment and evaluation. Very cool opportunity.  And New York State needs people to help implement the state’s Race to the Top plan. Obviously, the successful candidate will be cocksure.  Bonus:  You get to work closely with the great John King, making this a prime opportunity.

Stand For Children, an organization BW works with, is hiring for a number of roles including a policy director and executive director in MA and an executive director in TN.

Update: Great research job in Chicago, too.

As the dust settles on the Race to the Top selections a general consensus has emerged that again (pdf) there were problems with the scoring.   Not the sensational political tampering claims that some people are trying to allege, there is no evidence of that, but rather problems with the process.   Those problems are at once more mundane and a lot more far-reaching.  The Race to the Top is over for now but the problems have broader implications for federal grant competitions, especially because the Administration would like to shift toward using more competitive grants for some programs.

The rationale for moving to more competitive grants is that they involve more planning, more substantial amounts of money to make real changes, and that the competition pays dividends as competitors (even those that ultimately lose) vie to get ready to win.  The Race to the Top certainly illustrated this as did I3 and several of the other competitions running this year, including smaller below-the-radar ones.  And as long as the priorities of the competitions are well-constructed there is no reason that competitive grants can’t also serve the equity goals.  You wouldn’t want to allocate all aid this way, but on some big programs, such as Title II teacher quality funds (pdf), it makes a lot of sense.

However moving in this direction means that the competitive grant process must be reliable.  For example, scores should align to program goals and reviewers should be able to separate rhetoric from actionable proposals.  And there absolutely must be consistency among reviewers so it’s not a game of bingo for applicants.  In the case of Race to the Top, while it wasn’t a disaster there were enough problems that some people favorably inclined toward using more competitive grants are now asking if the federal government, with all the political and substantive constraints upon it, can really run a reliable high-stakes competition. (The back and forth around the social innovation fund isn’t helping either).

Meanwhile, you’re already hearing a lot of concern that because pretty much everyone with deep expertise on assessments was conflicted because of work with various states and vendors that the review pool is there is sub-optimal.  That was certainly the case on Race to the Top.   Watching some of the video interviews is discomforting as were some of the questions reviewers had on relatively basic issues.  Surely there is a better way to mitigate conflicts of interest but also engage people with deep knowledge of the work.  For my part I helped several state teams prep for their RTT live interviews and the feedback after their actual presentations was that the prep teams were much harder on them around the guts of the applications and the connective tissue that really makes plans like this rise or fall.  I heard the same from other prep projects.  That’s not encouraging.  Especially with hundreds of millions of  public dollars on the line.  Likewise, the actual reviewer comments and scoring variances in Round 1 and Round 2 don’t always inspire confidence, to put it gently.

It would be easy to say the problem was people at the Department of Education and a different team would have avoided these problems.  I don’t think that’s the case.  Rather, the competitions are thoughtfully designed but constrained by a flawed process (and of course a tortuous ‘gotcha’ politics).

That’s why Secretary Duncan must move quickly to head these problems off at the pass.   The best way for him to do so would be to convene a commission or Secretary’s technical working group to study and report on what can be learned from the federal competitions so far and, more importantly, what can be learned from other high-stakes competitions in the public and non-governmental sectors.  There are other fields, for instance, where a small subset of experts have to at once make decisions and manage conflicts of interest.  What are best practices there?  What are best practices for ensuring reliability among and between reviewers?  What aspects of current federal grant making policy (which was really not designed for high-stakes competitions like these) should be changed?  Is more training needed, and if so what kind?  What else has to change if substantial amounts of federal aid are to be allocated this way?

Granted (ha ha) commissions are generally considered the place to go when you don’t want much to happen or want to punt an issue.  But Secretary Duncan has proven clever at leveraging issues in creative ways and just by putting his brand on it and sanctioning a candid review and study he could make such a process meaningful.  Substantive benefits aside, such a project would also help the Secretary make the case for moving in this direction.

Bottom line:  The fallout here extends beyond states like CO, IL, and LA and it behooves the Secretary to get in front of it.  Not in a way that invites pointless recriminations, but rather in a forward looking way that improves future initiatives.

Standing Disc: Bellwether personnel, including me, were involved in advising a number of states, winners and losers, about policy and strategy but had no direct interest in a specific outcome for the states mentioned here.

Interesting paper from Bridgespan on next generation learning initiatives. Tom Friedman hearts Waiting for Superman.  And an op-ed from the President of Strayer lays out the contours of the debate over for-profit higher education and accountability.  If nothing else that debate is going to finance the college tuition of a lot of lobbyists’ children.

Plus Gallup/PDK poll v. Ed Next poll (pdf) again this year.   Release event for Gallup/PDK today, it’s improving a lot to their credit and has the Gallup brand but Ed Next still has the mojo.

Update: More on the polls.  First, while Gallup/PDK find low-approval for President Obama on education and a drop in support it does not seem keyed to his policies.  Why?  When Gallup/PDK or Ed Next digs down on a host of those you find bipartisan support.  Rather, the education approval numbers seem to be referred pain from his overall low-approval numbers. If you only look at the (in my view badly worded) question on turnarounds of course it will look different.  Update: Unfair to only pick on Ed Week, others bit on this, too.

Second, although the number has remained roughly consistent over time, about 4 in 10 public school parents say they’d change schools if they could.  From a pure loyalty and market share perspective that should be a troubling number for the public school establishment but instead they take comfort from the 60 percent.

Third, my friends in the charter world are gaga over the record high support for charters in the PDK/Gallup poll.   But I wouldn’t pop the champagne just yet, that support seems fragile.  Indeed, check out Ed Next’s poll and some other polls that are out there.  The public may like charters but it’s unclear they have any idea what one is!  In Ed Next even 1 in 4 teachers said charters charge tuition.

I had the craziest dream last night, Louisiana, a state that is a leader on all the things that the administration says are priorities didn’t get Race to the Top funding…oh wait…

Anyway, New York never disappoints, the Patterson presser is one for the ages.  ‘Race to the cock?’  What the hell?

Big takeaways beyond the RTT issues below, are that the odds of seeing consistent and deep change across all Race to the Top winners got a lot longer with this round of selections.   But the two fundamental questions basically remain the same and can’t be answered yet:  How durable will the many RTT-inspired policy changes prove to be and will those changes actually improve student learning?

Over at Fordham Mike Petrilli’s doing the full-Chicken Little again, “disastrous” and “complete lack of political courage” he shrieks!  That’s over the top.  You are not hearing outrage across the board, we’re talking about a few states.  But, he does hit important themes in this blog post and admirably acknowledges that he would have criticized the administration anyway, even if they had made the exact decision he’s now urging. In other words, the administration was damned if they did or didn’t here in this environment.  So, even if you’re disappointed about CO and LA and some of the outcomes that ought to be acknowledged – they were in a tight spot.  And don’t miss Checker Finn’s very even-handed take on the outcomes.

A second thing worth noting is that some of the leaders in states that didn’t win now have exposure because of problems with this review process.   For instance state ed chief Paul Pastorek in LA and his team, Dwight Jones and the CO team, and Audrey Soglin, the state teachers union leader from Illinois.  All of them took risks based on the avowed goals and rules of the competition.  But if anything their stature should be higher than it was previously and especially relative to some other states.   You can find plenty of people who didn’t like parts of the applications from states like IL, LA, or CO but you’ll be  hard pressed to find anyone who follows this closely and is familiar with the applications and doesn’t think those states were superior – based on the avowed goals and rules of the competition – to some winners.

Biggest fake RTT trend so far?   Geography. Second place:  Word selection. Most prescient call: The New Teacher Project (pdf).

Standing Disc: Bellwether personnel, including me, were involved in advising a number of states, winners and losers, about policy and strategy but had no direct interest in a specific outcome for the states mentioned here.

Congrats:  Winners list is public now:  DC, FL, GA HI, MD, MA, NY, NC, OH, RI.

Reminder: Round II finalists were:  AZ, CA, CO, DC, FL, GA, HI, IL, KY, LA, MD, MA, NJ, NY, NC, OH, PA, RI, SC

Fallout: This list is causing some raised eyebrows already.   Keep an eye out for questions questions about LA and CO and the relative strengths of their apps (and relative controversy around issues like teacher evaluation and holding schools of ed accountable) and also how New York went from not meeting the basic eligibility for the competition to being a winner.

And keep an eye on DC, FL, GA, HI MD, MA, NY, OH, and RI, which all have governors (mayor in DC) races ongoing right now.   Rothenberg ratings here.  Implementation implications.

Update: To be clear, we have to wait until all the scores are out but it seems that again the problem was not a thumb on the scale but rather a thumb off the scale and reviewers that didn’t reflect the administration’s avowed reform priorities.

Update II: Big winner is TFA?   Obvious way: Teach For America is mentioned in all 12 winning applications from Round 1 and Round 2.   Less obvious way:  TFA has been pushing back on the move to make Title II teacher quality funding more based on competitive grants, they worry about an uneven grant process, going to be harder to argue with them now…

Update III: John Bailey spots some assessment competition implications, too.

Standing Disc: Bellwether personnel, including me, were involved in advising a number of states, winners and losers, about policy and strategy.

Isn’t all this concern about the mixed quality of school turnaround providers somewhat decontextualized?  Is there any issue in education from publishing to professional development to online and tech where there is not a high variance in quality among providers and an inability in many states and school districts to make good quality-based decisions (as well as a chronic lack of tools for doing so)?  In other words, any big dollop of federal money would shine a light on this problem regardless of the specific issue it was targeted to, we just happen to be focused on turnarounds right now.

Related, I’m less concerned about the federal turnaround grants moving too fast or slow (seems like some of both overall) than about what’s actually happening as a result, which so far seems a mixed bag at best.

Update: Justin Cohen on the same issue.

Gadfly is hiring. The successful candidate must be prone to panic and paranoia.

Two Johns have two takes on the LAT value-added imbroglio worth checking out.   John Fensterwald looks at the school district’s positioning, and John Merrow comes out in favor of naming names.

For all the political sniping, hardly anyone noticed that Democrats for Education Reform and the AFT ran a joint ad for Michael Bennet in Colorado.

BW’s Sara Mead does a sit down on Ezra Klein’s blog to discuss early childhood education.

Meanwhile Michelle Rhee gets the Jay Mathews endorsement in the upcoming DC primary. See also this on the mayoral race.  Rhee has better approval ratings than the President!

Don’t miss SEC v. New Jersey on pensions if you follow that issue.

And from Politico’s Obama-teachers story is this:

Nationwide outrage among teachers exploded in March when both Obama and Duncan justified the mass firings of educators at a failing Rhode Island school. (Teachers ultimately kept their jobs in a concession deal.)

“The administration has strong reformist credentials, but this went way too far for many people,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who studies teachers unions. “I think the average American who worries about getting laid off unfairly could relate to the teachers.”

Just to be clear, teachers ultimately kept their jobs in the deal the school district wanted at the beginning before all the teachers were fired. The only difference was the months lost to face-saving rather than planning.   So (a) there was no concession and (b) contra Kahlenberg’s plea for solidarity polls at the time were supportive of the district and Obama.   The average teachers’ union member may have been pissed but that’s not the same thing…except perhaps at Century?

Meanwhile, WaPo’s usually sharp Birnbaum falls for the “dueling” studies cop-out on TFA research.   In his defense, a straightforward look at the research would make the article pretty pointless.  More generally, isn’t it time to flip the script on this and ask what it means for traditional teacher preparation programs when teachers coming through routes like TNTP training programs and TFA do as well at substantially less cost to taxpayers and candidates? That would be an interesting article with some real implications for where policymaking is going on that issue.  (And, disc, I’m on the boards of two ed schools – UVA and Harvard – so I’m not hostile to training and prep).

Journalist and author Richard Whitmire has guestblogged on Eduwonk and been featured in past fish porn posts. And he and I write together from time to time about education issues.

He also has two terrific daughters (one of whom is getting married in a few weeks) and the other who works with Stand for Children in Portland, Oregon.   Bellwether also works with Stand on policy issues.  So, early this summer everything came together for a day of fishing on Washington’s Clackamas River.   Here’s Whitmire with a sea run cutthroat trout.

From last week’s guest fish porn, here’s some bonus triggerfish trivia.

My summer reading picks at NJ: Fires, placekicking, attorneys, horses, plus Merrow and Wilson!

AFT’s Randi Weingarten attempts to strike a middle ground in the LAT teacher value-added debate. Pretty reasonable and admirable she didn’t do the easy wrong thing there and just throw-in with the naysayers.   A lot of analysis based on the 6k teachers in this database would be valuable and a real service by the LAT, but what exactly is the benefit of naming all the teachers?  It would also be great to know in a year, two years, etc…what’s been done about the lowest performers – again, the district has some exposure here- but that, too, can be done absent a show trial.

But at the end of the story there is a headscratcher and yoga-like rhetorical stretch: Weingarten compares a teacher with low-value added, who is nonetheless beloved, to Shirley Sherrod the falsely-maligned former USDA official because both were allegedly victims of partial information.  That’s indisputably true in the Sherrod case, but illustrates the problem in this instance.   Beloved and effective are not axiomatically the same thing.  And Weingarten’s claim that this might be such a good teacher that it doesn’t show up on standardized tests is the sort of faux-wisdom that keeps this field so screwed-up.  I’m not saying the value-add scores indicate anything definitive about this particular teacher one way or the other but I am saying we should be more open to the possibility. And principals with experience with value-add will tell you the exact same thing:  It challenges some preconceptions and they learn from it and sometimes probe deeper.

What worries me about this whole exercise: If the LAT reporters/editors on this story didn’t have the chops to call BS on that one, do you really want them publicly impugning teachers with this data?  I don’t.

…there would be no hunger, apparently….Backstory: Kati Haycock will fill you in.

Important Stateline article on pension reform looking at how bulletproof pension obligations are.  In our recent paper on the pension problem Chad Aldeman and I were skeptical of the legal argument, the political argument, and the ‘right thing to do’ argument here (pdf).

The new Digital Learning Council is rolling out today. I’m participating.  More here.

More problems at the WTU.

A bunch of edujobs below, plus some interesting opportunities in Louisiana.

A reader emails: “I keep checking eduwonk to get your take on the LA dustup (that I think marks a real turning point in teacher accountability), but all I see is a dead fish!”  Indeed.  Just getting back.

Big thanks to Jim Ryan, Sarah Usdin & Neerav Kingsland, Becca Bracey, Hae-Sin Thomas, Tim Daly, Victor Reinoso, Paul Herdman, and Terry Ryan for keeping it interesting.   If you haven’t taken a look check out their stuff below.

If you left a comment that didn’t appear on the blog, more than a few got caught up in the spam filter “awaiting moderation” while I was away, they are all up now.

I, too, think that looks like a trigger fish.

LA Story

While important, I found the LA Times teacher value-added story itself less interesting than the reaction to it — on all sides.   Everyone seemed to rush to position themselves relative to the story (’Yeah, tough love at last! Get ‘em!’ ‘I’m thoughtful and measured so though you’d think I would like this here’s why I don’t!’ ‘The LA Times is in bed with the billionaires, to the barricades!’)  The big takeaway here, it seems to me and as the reader above notes, is that the teacher data genie is out of the bottle and though there will be a lot of debate, contention, and politics, it’s not going back in.

My only disagreement with what the paper did is the part about naming names of specific teachers.  I think that crosses a line and I don’t see how the public interest would be less served by simply describing the teachers in more general but not personally identifiable terms.   The same pressure would be brought to bear on the district to address the issues absent the public humiliation, which I’m not sure serves any point at all.  Otherwise, this is fair game.  Teachers do work in the public sector.  And for their shortcomings value-added is one of the best tools at hand right now in a field starved for performance tools.

But, before everyone puts this all on the union, the district deserves a lot of blame for this situation, too.

More generally, it seems the common trend in our field is that until data are shown in painstaking detail about controversial issues nothing changes.*  That’s a lack of leadership.  Everyone knew that the money flows within school districts to Title I schools were unfair to poor kids.  But there was no movement (and still not enough) until this was consistently shown in great detail.  You’re going to see the same thing on the teacher quality debate.  So, if the teachers’ unions are so concerned about stories like this they could do more to get off the dime on the teacher effectiveness issue more generally rather than waiting to be wrestled to the ground.

On the substance, the article didn’t find a lot that counters the general knowledge base among those who closely follow the issue.   The one finding that caught my eye is the paper’s claim that low-performing teachers are not more concentrated in high-poverty schools in LA.   I hope they unpack that more in future stories because it does run counter to other data.  For instance in an analysis of value-added results in Title I schools by Jane Hannaway and some colleagues found that those schools disproportionately had less effective teachers as measured by value-add results.  Is that a function of something unique to LA and how teachers are assigned there, the geography of the district, the overall composition of the schools?  I hope they tell us!

As for the teachers’ union boycott, this tactic hasn’t worked well for them in the recent past.  The bark is worse than the bite.  Ask Wal-Mart.   Seems ill-considered as a response.  But then again, the LAT isn’t Wal-Mart!  Stay tuned.

A few great edujobs

The Education Equality Project is seeking an executive director. This is a tremendous opportunity if you want to be in the heart of national reform advocacy in a leadership role.   And the Boston Teacher Residency is seeking people for a few roles, in particular a Director of Student Learning. As you might infer, those roles are based in Boston.

And Bellwether’s full-time team of seven is expanding in response to demand and growth.   A few opportunities available. If you’re committed to dramatic educational change on behalf of currently under-served students and thrive in a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment where you’re supported but also encouraged to act independently and grow professionally and personally, please check us out.  And if your life circumstances mean you’re more interested in part-time work we have some need for that, as well.  Email us with your information.

And NACSA, on whose policy advisory board I sit, has some great grant competitions going on for charter school authorizers right now.  Resources to support authorizing work.

*See, for instance, this new CRPE report on math/science teachers and salary in Washington State.

Guest post by Jim Ryan

Finally, what you’ve all been waiting for.

All three fish were caught and released recently in Essex, Mass.  The first is a striped bass (or “stripah,” as they say up here), and the second is a blue fish (or “blue fish,” as they say up here).  (Technical details for those who fish:  9 wt. fly rod using a 2/0 Monomoy Flatwing.  Great fly.)   I have no idea what the third fish is; we found it in our lobster trap.  Any ideas?

If you want to see more, you really need to check out my new book.  Ok, that’s not technically true.  The book jacket has my photo, but you can’t see my hand.  Or any fish.

Thanks to Andy, again, to Sara Mead, and to all of you for letting me invade this blog for a week.  Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Guest post by Jim Ryan

Seems one day there’s a story about a new federal funding program, and the next day a story about another round of budget cuts at the state or local level.  We should be approaching equilibrium at some point, no?

Today and yesterday were about cuts.  There’s a story in today’s NYT about funding for charter schools in Chicago, which is being cut.  The story also reports that many charter schools run at a deficit.

Picking up where yesterday’s post left off, charter school funding seems ripe for litigation.  Most charter schools receive less public money than traditional public schools.  Whether that’s a good idea or a bad, a state court that is inclined to read—or has already read—the state constitution to guarantee roughly equal funding is likely to greet the discrepancy with a good deal of skepticism.  In any event, charter school funding, if nothing else, is interesting because it brings out the hidden egalitarian in some who are otherwise comfortable with unequal funding for regular public schools.

Today’s story about funding cuts to Chicago charter schools comes on the heels of a story from yesterday’s NYT about the impact of budget cuts on the Yonkers school district:  fewer teachers and larger class sizes, including a class size of 36 students for summer school!

No, I’m not talking about the legislation the president signed yesterday. I’m talking about a rare opportunity to become part of the Bellwether Education team!

Bellwether is currently hiring for an Associate Partner to work with our Strategy Consulting team and an Analyst. If you’re a self starter committed to expanding educational opportunity for low-income kids, this could be just the opportunity you’ve been looking for. Love of fish porn is an asset but in no way a requirement for the job.

Guest post by Jim Ryan

Ok, I’m done plugging my book; that’s as much marketing as I can stomach.  Back to some questions that have puzzled me for a while and that might be of some interest to the rest of you.  This is a long post, for which I apologize in advance.

The question for today is what might national standards mean for school finance litigation and vice-versa?  I’m not tackling here whether school finance litigation is a good or a bad thing, or whether more money is the answer for some schools.  Instead, I want to focus on the impact that national standards might have on the litigation and the impact that the litigation might have on the standards.  I’ll leave it to you to judge whether these potential impacts are, in the grand scheme of things, good or bad.

Some quick background:  School finance litigation has been going on, in one form or another, for about fifty years.  All of the action these days is in state courts, where claims are based on state constitutions.  Each state constitution has an education clause, which basically guarantees children the right to attend school and sometimes describes the sort of school system required—“through and efficient” or “free and appropriate,” etc.  School finance attorneys have argued that these clauses guarantee students the state constitutional right either to equal educational opportunity or to an adequate education.  These rights, if plaintiffs succeed, are translated into dollar figures, which represent the amount states need to provide in order to equalize funding or make it adequate.  All but four states have seen their financing systems challenged; plaintiffs have prevailed in about half of the states.

For a while now, a lot of school finance reform advocates have argued that the standards and testing movement can work to the advantage of school finance plaintiffs.  (Those who oppose school finance litigation have feared the same development.)  Standards can be used by courts to define what counts as an “adequate” education, and test scores can be used to show whether students are receiving such an education.  This relieves courts of the onerous and arguably improper task of defining what constitutes an adequate education, and test scores could, in theory, provide excellent evidence of whether students are receiving an adequate education.  Courts would be left the task of determining whether existing resources are sufficient to meet the standards and pass the tests—which is akin to the task of creating opportunity to learn standards—but at least the knotty definitional problem would be solved.

I’ve never bought this argument.  The reason is that relying on standards to define an adequate education will inevitably lead to relying on test scores as evidence of whether the standards are being met.  Test scores, however, as everyone now realizes, don’t prove much about the quality of a particular school.  Faced with the accountability provisions in NCLB, many states have gamed their tests, either making the tests easier, lowering cut scores, or both.  Why, if you are looking to get more money from the state, would it be to your advantage to rely on the low bar most states have established as the definition of what the state constitution requires?  Where standards are high and tests are meaningful, by contrast, school finance litigation risks creating pressure to lower the standards or make the tests easier—much like the accountability provisions in the NCLB create perverse incentives to lower the bar.

Enter national standards, or the “common core” standards as they are being called.  More than half the states have already adopted these standards, which cover reading and math.  As the standards get implemented, two sets of questions arise about the potential relationship between these standards and school finance litigation.

First, will school finance attorneys use these new standards to define an “adequate” education?  The Fordham Foundation reviewed the standards and generally gave them a thumbs up, concluding that they are more rigorous than the standards in most states. School finance attorneys may well be tempted, therefore, to argue that these new standards should be used to define, at least partially, what constitutes an adequate education.

Second, if the standards are used in school finance litigation, what sort of incentives will that create for states?  Andy has rightly mentioned on this blog that standards are only one piece of the picture.  Another, huge piece, are the tests used to determine whether the standards are being met.  Because relying on standards in school finance litigation inevitably leads to relying on test scores, one could imagine states undertaking efforts to game the tests in order to avoid liability in school finance cases.  At the moment, what sort of tests will be used and how much control states will have over them and their scoring, remain to be seen.  But it stands to reason that the more pressure—either financial or political—states will face for poor test scores, the more effort they will make to produce good test scores, even if that means making the tests easy to pass.  Who controls the tests, therefore, will matter a great deal.

All of which raises the more fundamental questions underlying standards, testing and accountability.  Is it possible to hold schools accountable, either through legislation or court decisions, without creating perverse incentives to lower the bar?  If those incentives cannot be avoided, is it realistic to expect the federal government to prevent states from acting on them?  And, just as one last kicker:  Might it be better for the federal government to get out front here and encourage the development of national opportunity to learn standards, rather than leaving this issue to piecemeal litigation in the states?

Guest post by Jim Ryan

Who would you say is the architect of modern education law and policy?

a.) Bill Gates

b.) Horace Mann

c.) Richard Nixon

d.) Andy Rotherham

If you guessed “D,” you’re sycophantic.  If you guessed C,” you’re correct.  Or at least that’s what I argue in a book that officially comes out tomorrow.  (It’s already available at Amazon!)  The book is called Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America (Oxford 2010).  It’s about the law and politics of educational opportunity over the last fifty years.  It tells the story by using two schools in the Richmond area, one in the central city and the other (five miles away) in a neighboring suburb, as extended examples.  It’s not really a case study, nor is it a (completely) dry, abstract, academic book.  It’s something in between, sort of like the duck-billed platypus of books.

Here’s the basic argument.

In March 1972, President Nixon gave an unusual televised address, devoted solely to the topic of school desegregation and busing. A few months earlier, lower federal courts in Detroit and Richmond had ordered suburban school districts to participate in metropolitan-wide desegregation plans.  The courts ordered the participation of the suburbs because there were not many white students left in either city.  These decisions were later overturned on appeal, but at the time of Nixon’s speech—and as hard as it might be to imagine today—the possibility of cross-district, urban-suburban busing seemed very real.

Nixon denounced busing and proposed legislation that would prohibit busing to achieve racial balance in schools, suggesting that this reflected the views of both black and white parents, who preferred neighborhood schools.  He then offered an alternative approach to the problems facing urban schools.  “It is time for us to make a national commitment to see that the schools in central cities are upgraded so that the children who go there will have just as good a chance to get a quality education as do the children who go to school in the suburbs.”

Nixon’s compromise was clear:  poor and minority students would remain in the city and not have access to suburban schools, but efforts would be made to improve city schools.  In other words, save the cities, but spare the suburbs.

To say that this compromise is all one needs to know in order to understand the basic structure of educational opportunity would be overly simplistic.  But only a little.  Nixon’s compromise, slightly broadened to mean that city schools should be helped in ways that don’t threaten the physical, financial, or political independence of suburban schools, has shaped just about every major education reform since.  It is evident not only in legislation but also in court decisions, and it has surfaced in reforms ranging from school desegregation, to school finance litigation, school choice plans, and even the No Child Left Behind Act.  It has curtailed not just liberal reforms, like desegregation and school funding litigation, but also conservative ones, like school vouchers.  Indeed, to a very large extent, providing some type of aid to urban students while maintain the sanctity of suburban schools has been the defining feature of modern education law and policy in the United States.

Or so I say.  At length.  Too much length, frankly.  If you are bored and looking for something to do, having trouble sleeping, or even if you would just like to know more, you might check the book out.  Not literally, though; you should definitely buy a copy.  After trying to prove my thesis, I spend some time looking ahead at the changes, especially in the suburbs, that are disrupting the traditional patterns of educational opportunity and offering both new challenges and new opportunities.

Guest post by Jim Ryan

Two stories of interest in today’s NYT.  First, there is a front-page story about the mad rush by companies to get federal money for helping to turn around failing schools.

As the headline (in the print edition) says, “School Reform Draws Crowd, Not Credentials.”  One company promises to help schools by “facilitating new conversations through story listening, expressing empathy, appreciative inquiry and design thinking.”  I’m sure some of these turnaround companies have great ideas, though I think some might best be called “turnaround and around and around” specialists.

The second story is about a new effort by the New York City Department of Education to track how high school graduates fare in college.  Each high school is getting a report indicating how many of their students who enrolled in the city’s public colleges needed remedial courses.  It’s a small sample and just a start, but it’s an interesting idea. As a bonus, the article has a quadratic equation that you can try to solve.

Guest post by Jim Ryan

I’m a fan of KIPP schools and impressed by their performance, though I appreciate the points made by some critics regarding attrition and selection.  I also admire the goal of KIPP schools to show that demography is not destiny and that all kids can learn.

But I’ve often wondered about KIPP and integration, either racial or socioeconomic.

Here’s the question, which I recognize is a little delicate:  Would KIPP’s methods work in integrated schools?  For example, would the famous SLANT method (sit up straight, listen, ask and answer questions, nod your head, track the speaker), work in schools where a substantial number of kids might not need instruction in how to interact with teachers or other adults?

Does KIPP’s approach, in short, depend on segregation?

Before anyone takes offense, I’m not suggesting, even for a second, that KIPP schools are designed to perpetuate segregation or that they have this effect.  I’m just curious if the methods of the school would work if the schools were more diverse, especially socioeconomically.  If KIPP’s methods are, in part, explicitly designed to teach poorer students what (most? many?) middle-class students learn at home, would KIPP schools have to change if middle-class students attended them?  Or would all kids benefit from the same methods, even if for some it was old news?

In thinking about that question, I wonder if it’s worth considering the experience of urban Catholic schools.  Sure, there is a religious component to those schools, but the emphasis on discipline, high standards, buy in from students and parents, etc., does not seem much different from the KIPP approach.  Catholic schools, for a long time, were attractive to lower- and middle-income white families, including many families who were not Catholic.  Might KIPP be as well?

If so, why are KIPP schools not becoming more diverse more quickly?