New paper from Bellwether tomorrow looking at ARRA funds and education.  Ed Week with a preview here.

Last week my School of Thought at TIME.com was off eating turkey.  This week’s column is early, today rather than Thursday, because of today’s dropout report from America’s Promise, Civic Enterprises and Johns Hopkins. SOT looks at the Grad Nation report and the dropout issue more generally:

High school graduation rates are one of education’s perennial bad-news stories. How bad? In 2008, there were 1,746 “dropout factories,” high schools that graduate fewer than 60% of their students. But according to a new report released Tuesday, there is finally some good news to talk about. First, the national graduation rate has inched up from 72% in 2001 to 75% in 2008. There were 261 fewer dropout factories in 2008 than in 2002. And during that six-year period, 29 states improved their graduation rates with two of them — Wisconsin and Vermont — reaching almost a 90% graduation rate.

But don’t call in the cast of Glee just yet. According to the report, by Johns Hopkins University along with two education-oriented groups, America’s Promise Alliance and Civic Enterprises, eight states had graduation rates below 70% in 2008, and 2.2 million students still attend dropout factories. An achievement gap also persists…

Read the entire thing here.

There are some edujobs working on Race to the Top in Hawaii…

That’s not just a handy #educationmovielines.  Rick Hess offers the fastest summation of the Cathie Black situation around.  Via the NYT:

City Hall gathered some business executives to sign a letter of support, but has hardly put on a full-court press, prompting questions even from friendly quarters.

Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a research group, has argued for years that school systems do not need to be run by career educators. But of all the leaders in the world, he wonders, why Ms. Black?

“The Bloomberg argument on her behalf is minimal — it’s that she’s a C.E.O.,” Mr. Hess said. “The notion that all C.E.O.’s are interchangeable, that all C.E.O.’s have the skills to lead this large organization, is just as naïve as asserting that only someone who’s an educator can lead the system.”

My take on the larger issues the whole Black debate pointed up here via TIME.

Looks like a deal has been struck in Gotham and Albany on the Cathie Black waiver.

It’s come to my attention that at least one commenter on the blog, and possibly others, are using the names of different commenters to post.  It’s happened a few times and with the names/handles of more than one frequent commenter.

I can’t see disallowing anonymous comments or comments that use a derivative name, eg “the anti-Chris.”  Readers can make their own judgments about the merits of various comments.  Commenting under someone else’s name, however, is a different issue and has to stop.  The comment policy here is pretty light touch and since I added comments in ‘07  I’ve had to delete less than handful that were not appropriate and have only closed comments on a few posts that attracted too much spam.

I’d like to be able to continue in that vein but cannot do that if the space is abused.   I respect the ability of all viewpoints to comment here, whether I agree with them or not, and would ask that you do the same by observing some basic norms.

Thanks.

This idea of pairing possible NYC schools chancellor Cathie Black with someone steeped in education as a condition of granting her a waiver to serve strikes me as a phenomenally bad idea.   Not a bad idea because she shouldn’t surround herself with such people, she obviously should.  Rather, if you are the state commissioner of education and you don’t think she has the sense to do exactly that then why would you even consider giving her a waiver to run a $21 billion school system with more than a million kids in it? Let’s hope this is just a political fig leaf not a management philosophy.

The Wireless Generation* sale to News Corp is interesting on a few levels, including what’s next for suddenly growing education player News Corp.  Intrepid Washington Post education reporter Valerie Strauss manages to find the one angle that isn’t interesting, basically complaining that this must be shady because it’s for-profit (I think Steven Pearlstein’s job is safe for now…).  In fact, the problem is not the existence of Wireless Gen, it’s that we don’t have a dozen companies like it.

If we’re serious about supporting teachers in their work then performance tools like the kind Wireless develops are critical.  Giving teachers the ability to access and use data in meaningful ways has broad implications for instruction as well as productivity and cost-control.  Wireless is also on the leading edge of work around quasi-open source textbooks, data systems, and reading tools and School of One is an interesting model with a bunch of implications, too.   Many of these kind of innovations are unlikely to come from the public sector because of how little money is spent on R & D in education but also how it’s spent – and is likely to be for the foreseeable future.  And the bad incentives and politically-driven marketplace in education hardly helps.

But, while it’s great that Wireless succeeded and will continue to, the sale also signals a structural issue in the field.  Midsized companies in K-12 education are pretty consistently acquired by large companies.   Is that really a good thing?  Today the K-12 education market (a $650 billion one) is dominated by a handful of big players and then thousands of really small ones (with mixed results and little accountability or meaningful cues about quality).  There is a mostly missing middle.  That matters for innovation, or the lack thereof, as well as  the flow of investment.  And it’s a reason why we don’t have a dozen Wireless Gens and dozens of other ventures pushing the envelope, too.

*I’ve consulted for Wireless Generation but had no stake or involvement in the sale.

The advisory panel appointed to consider a waiver for Cathie Black to become Chancellor of the New York City schools voted against granting it.  I assume all the people last seen decrying the appointees to the panel as shills for the mayor will now demand another vote to ensure integrity in the process…

Anyway, despite their media backgrounds you have to wonder if Mayor Bloomberg or Cathie Black could have handled this rollout any worse?  My take on the larger issues the whole waiver process raises here.

I was puzzled by this article by Washington Post national education reporter Valerie Strauss. She relays an account from a Baltimore teacher (that came via Diane Ravitch) about how he/she was almost squeezed out of a job because the city was hiring all these Teach For America teachers and teachers from The Baltimore City Teacher Residency.   Sounded too good to be true.  Or from Strauss’ point of view, too good to check as they say.  In fact, the email touched all the right talking anti-TFA talking points and sounded like a thinly veiled attack on the two reform-oriented prep programs operating in the city – the residency is an initiative of The New Teacher Project.

And in fact, well, it is.  When you look at data on hiring in Baltimore it looks like while Teach For America provided 160 teachers in Baltimore in ‘09 and ‘10, the city hired 584 new teachers in ‘09 and 477 this year (with 37 vacancies still open as of August so presumably some of those have been filled, too).  Meanwhile, here’s a New York Times story on Baltimore hiring teachers from overseas because they can’t find enough… For its part the Baltimore City Teacher Residency, which launched in the early part of the decade, seems to provide about 20 percent of the district’s teachers.

As a function of their size big city districts hire a lot of teachers from multiple sources each year, which is why you should always be skeptical when any particular pipeline is singled out as representative of anything.  In Baltimore, given those numbers, it seems ridiculous to blame these two routes for making it really difficult to find a job.  Hundreds apparently didn’t have that problem…And again, the research is quite clear that teachers entering teaching through these routes do as well or better than others.  The variance is within the different routes not between routes.

Strauss can’t be bothered to explain any of this context.   Nor any context or analysis on a host of other claims in the email, which is reprinted verbatim and anonymously. In The Washington Post. Really.

Pretty good look at the advantages and limitations to various strategies of measuring charter school outcomes from the WSJ.

Mike Petrilli on differentiated instruction in Ed Next is well worth checking out. If you’re trying to figure out fit with your choice of schools – and hopefully you have one – they’re now giving the “Picky Parents Guide” away for free online. Incredible resource.

Bill Gates is going to be making some education news the next few days, he’s on the productivity bandwagon, too.

I don’t yet have an Ipad to kill time, so I’d like to launch a silly contest on good education movie lines.

CALDER lays out the research behind aspects of Waiting for Superman. From New York, more on charter restructuring from SUNY, background is here. And here’s a great interview with Common Good’s Phillip Howard from The Daily Show.

TAP System (BW has worked with their parent org) hosted a discussion on performance-based pay, you can watch here.

From Motown, some bad news.  Turns out the revolutionary teachers contract wasn’t really so revolutionary after all.  Who would have thunk it at the time? Oh right, nevermind. The good news, some cool opportunities to be part of change there via Michigan Future Schools.

SIIA wants to get personal. And Checker Finn gives a quick overview on yesterday’s NAEP release.

Really interesting opportunity at Tutor.com, Military Client Services Manager.

Lively debate about whether Cathie Black can/will make a good school chancellor in New York City.  I’d say the answer to ‘can’ is certainly yes, the answer to ‘will’ is who knows?  But that’s not uncommon in high-stakes leadership roles.  I look at that issue and the broader implications of the debate over Cathie Black in this week’s School of Thought column at TIME.

…It’s understandable why some teachers and education advocates are objecting so vociferously to an outsider coming in to run such a massive system (though it should be noted that if the new chancellor pledged to undo the current reform efforts, many of these same people wouldn’t care if Bloomberg had just hired Carrot Top as his new schools chief). If you’ve never worked in a school before, critics wonder, how can you oversee so many of them? But precisely because the New York district is so gargantuan, its chancellor needs a skill set far different from your average principal or teacher; the school system’s annual budget of more than $21 billion exceeds the gross domestic product of nearly half the world’s countries. Let me be clear, however, on two things: at this point, there’s no way to tell if Black will be an effective leader of New York’s mega-district. But what is lost in all the speculation about her is how outmoded — and counterproductive — American education’s approach to credentials is in the first place.

Read the entire thing here.

Important, measured, and sensible report on value-added methodology from Brookings.  There has been way too much craziness on the blogs and interest group-driven misinformation about what value-added can or can’t do.  This issue is complicated (more so than the rhetoric allows), there is promise but also a lot of reason for caution in how this tool is employed.   The Brookings paper lays all that out clearly and via a group of respected and middle of the road analysts and lays out the contextual issues – perfection is not the standard.

My short take on value-added and evaluations more generally here via TIME.

Yesterday’s rollout of the new NCATE report occasioned a mostly predictable reaction.   Skeptics were skeptical, ed schools mostly silent, and Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss focused laser-like on the key accountability language in the entire report – and said that was bad news!  Notable exception and smart take from Fordham’s Daniela Fairchild.

Please.  Let’s be honest.  We spend billions on teacher preparation in this country when you total it all up and the results are, overall, horrendous.  The result of an enormous preparation, regulatory, and advocacy structure is that overall teachers going through the full-service programs don’t perform appreciably differently than those coming through non-traditional and more efficient routes.  The only folks who systematically under-perform are those coming through routes for emergency credentials with absolutely no training.  This is less of an indictment of the idea of teacher training per se than it is a poor reflection on how it’s done today.  Still, “the data show we’re better than warm bodies” really isn’t much of a rallying cry.  The data are clear on this across multiple geographies and the only people still fighting about it are the advocates.  From a qualitiative standpoint I can tell you that as a former state board of education member the process of oversight for teacher preparation is a bad joke that borders on racketeering.  And, sadly, only a few states look at actual outcomes, meaning how well the people these programs prepare actually do in the classroom.

So that’s why NCATE’s move yesterday was important, they want to substantially change how it’s done today.  They called for ambitious change, tethered their credibility to it, and while the report includes a lot of the buzzwords that drive ed school critics bonkers, it has some important ideas in it.  In particular the idea that new teachers need more hands-on training, one-size doesn’t fit all, and that wherever possible outcomes should inform program accountability and approval.  That’s a big deal.  Whether they can pull it off remains to be seen.  This is a change-averse and often evidence-impervious community and, as I alluded to above, the regulatory capture is simply beyond belief.  But they deserve credit for pushing the issue.

If I were Rick Hess here’s where I’d insert a half-dozen fawning adjectives to describe NCATE’s president, Jim Cilbulka.  I’ll just say he’s chosen a harder path than he had to and we should wish him success.   That’s why I agreed to serve on the panel he convened to develop the report.  Something has to change, Cibulka gets that and has decided to lean into it.

New CMO, led by Matt Candler (yes, he of “sucks less” fame as well as fish porn fame), called 4.0 schools.   Unique mission and geographic focus (Southeast US) and interesting operating plan.  You can learn more about opportunities there as well as read the business plan here. And they’re on YouTube, too!

If you want to cut through the hype this new report from GFE about trends in education grantmaking (pdf) rolls up what’s going on.

No, of course not. That would be ridiculous.  But, based on what we hear from the usual suspects about charter schools whenever there is a financial issue that’s the logical reaction to this NYT story on alleged corruption in San Francisco.

Earmarks are only a small part of the deficit problem and the problem with them is more their abuse than their existence/use.  Nonetheless, Senator McConnell’s abrupt about-face on an earmark ban is a signal about where some newly empowered leaders in Washington want to take things — and that’s a place where compromises on big picture items like education and No Child Left Behind seem pretty challenging.

Also, smart Alyson Klein piece on prospects for regulatory action on No Child Left Behind. One aspect she doesn’t get into, however, is the behind the scenes politics and perception.  Insiders in Washington – of both parties – don’t see these NCLB problems the same way the groups seeking regulatory relief do.  It’s a big gap and one reason for the inaction so far.

Education Pioneers is an outstanding organization attracting talent into education, growing promising professionals, and helping them get established in the field. I’m on the board for the DC-area program but EP operates in multiple sites around the country including New York, Houston, Chicago, Boston, LA, and the Bay Area and places people in operational as well as policy roles.

On December 6th Education Pioneers is hosting an event in Washington featuring Katherine Bradley, Victor Reinoso, Raj Vinnakota, and Charlie Barone to discuss the issue of recruiting, training, and supporting a new generation of education leaders.    I’ll moderate the discussion, which will be held at the Advisory Board Company and followed by a reception.

RSVP is required, you can do so via this link. Also, as the year wraps-up if you’re thinking about charitable contributions please consider EP, especially the D.C. program! This is the kind of low-flash but high-impact work that will ultimately turn the ship and as with all social change work, funding is a key element.

This week I lost a bet with my editor at TIME about whether I could make the looming teacher pensions crisis into a sexy issue.  Even in the eduworld, Joel Klein = sexy, pensions not so much.  But, you should read this week’s School of Thought column anyway because pensions are a huge problem facing states and cities and a two-pronged one. There are fiscal problems (I use the T word) and also a mismatch between how traditional pensions work and the workforce today.

Read it here.

Please honor veterans today, past and present.  In that vein, always worth reading this from the RTD and, of course, this poem.

Joe Williams with a smart op-ed in the NY Post about what’s next in Gotham.

Alyson Klein pulls some nuggets from this month’s Education Insider survey and report. Alyson notes, and I’ve been meaning to blog, that many insiders see D.C vouchers reemerging as an issue. I do, too.  The votes are obviously there in the House and it does look like they’re there in the Senate as well.  Tough issue for the administration.   Keep an eye on that.  Something we didn’t ask about this month in depth was the tutoring provisions in No Child Left Behind.  But in Florida T. Willard Fair has something to say about that program.

Also at Ed Week, must-read Sawchuk on professional development, part of a larger package.

Not too much more to say than this about Joel Klein’s tenure in New York City.  When you cut through the rhetoric you’re hard pressed to find anyone with a serious argument that the schools are not better today in New York than a decade ago.

Cathie Black is a forceful leader with an interesting career behind her, buckle up!

Update:  He brought sexy back? In the NY Times Joe Williams says Klein made education sexy again. Seems like a throwaway line but actually there is a lot to that sentiment.  Klein has an influential network in a variety of fields including politics, government, the law, and business.  So, when he was attacked and called all these crazy things and accused of this and that it rebounded against the very people launching the salvos.  Klein’s network knew Klein and knew that the various accusations just didn’t ring right and it changed how they looked at things.  So while it may have been politically complicated in terms of the ins and outs of New York politics, Joel leading the New York City schools changed how a lot of influential people in this country thought about education issues.  Absent Joel you would not have seen the same rapid pace in the shift in coverage and emphasis that you have or some of the informal signaling around the issue.

Per this post from the other day, Maryland provides a handy example of what ‘less of X’ might look like.   Everyone is for teacher evaluation, just not the exact one the state committed to in its Race to the Top application…’we’re still doing X’!

Polymath Kevin Huffman just launched a new blog, check it out.

Spent part of the day at The Equity Project charter school in New York City.  They’re the school that is paying teachers $125,000 and trying to restructure how a school operates to make the model work because they want to do this entirely on the standard per-pupil funding in NYC.

Two thoughts.  First, the margins they’re operating on are really tight, and they’re not alone.  Look for an analysis from Bellwether about that issue soon.   On average charters are getting about 20 percent less (pdf) than traditional public schools nationwide – that’s a challenge.   You simply cannot look at charter finance and growth without accounting for this problem.   You don’t hear this discussed much by the critics but cut traditional public school funding by 20 percent and see what happens…

Second, while this school is innovative (really at the ragged edge of work on productivity improvements), most charters are not.   That’s OK from where I sit, innovation is in the eye of the beholder and I consider organizations that are at last providing a lot of good educational options in places like New York, Newark, Washington, Los Angeles, and elsewhere to be pretty innovative given the status quo.   But if you define innovation as doing things radically differently rather than just doing them well, right now many of the best charters are triumphs of execution rather than innovation.  So room for schools like The Equity Project and other ventures in the same vein is vital.

Update: Two good questions from the comments section.   Their scores are not great, but it’s the first year for a school with almost 90 percent free/reduced price lunch students and they give priority admissions to students who are under-performing  (more skimming!) so give it a year or two (and by the way I’ll save the nutters the time, I said the same thing about the UFT charter school after its first year).  Lost in the CREDO hoopla was the data that students improve the longer their in charters.  A couple of teachers have left or not been asked back but attrition is not a big problem.  How they do it is by cutting out a lot of administrative functions and genuinely treating teachers as professionals in terms of expectations, norms, and responsibilities.  That aspect of the school is the most promising part from where I sit.  How their model plays out over time is an open question because most successful high-poverty schools end up wrapping a lot of support services around kids and that’s going to complicate their lean model.   So my prediction is that this will end up being a good school, the school leader is very solid, but the model will look somewhat different than it does now.

A lot of speculation about what last week’s political changes mean. But an overlooked aspect is what happened at the state level.  If the national elections were a wave, then the states are where the real tsunami hit.  The changes are still being tallied but it looks like at least 675 legislative seats changed from D to R (and likely more) flipping more than a dozen state chambers (turns out Gillespie was wrong – on the low side).  This NSCL map gives a sense of the landscape now. Punchline:  Red.

A lot of folks now think that with regard to Common Core, Race to the Top, and other federal initiatives this won’t be such a big deal.  That’s likely wrong for two reasons.

First, around initiatives like Race to the Top the idea that the result will be states veering wildly off-course is the wrong way to look at this.   We’re less likely to see a state that committed to doing X, suddenly announce it’s doing Y.  Instead, what will happen is that states will do less of X than they said, or just a weak version of X.  This is a problem because on education even when states say X and do Y the federal government has a lousy track record of holding them accountable.   And because these are always political situations arguing that they’re not really doing X because they’re doing less X or weak X is a hard political case for any administration to make, especially one in a political hole.  This means – compounding the unevenness of the states that won Race to the Top – you could see even more variance in implementation quality.   Absent a few states that really knock the cover off the ball that’s going to be a problem in a few years when the serious evaluations start.

Second, as often happens in big wave elections, a lot of people without a great deal of political and policy experience just swept into office.  As a result they’ll find out before too long that many of the decisions they’re facing are more complicated than the rhetoric.  By way of two national examples, all the incoming anti-No Child Left Behind Democrats the past few cycles got a wake-up call when they arrived in Washington and found that liberals like Democratic Rep. George Miller (CA) supported the law.  Similarly, Republican Rep. John Kline (R-MN), incoming chair of the House Education and Labor Committee is already tamping down enthusiasm to abolish the Department of Education among his new members.

So, when these state representatives discover that some of their big plans would involve hard choices like cutting state services that voters actually like, furloughing prisoners, and so forth, items that allow for them to make their point without a big price tag suddenly become political gold.  That’s where initiatives like Common Core face some risk over the next couple of years.  Attacking it is an issue without a large fiscal cost in most places and there are plenty of ways to get political traction (assessments, differing curricular experts, federal overreach).   In fact, when we asked the “insiders” we survey for “Education Insider” for their views on Common Core adoption numbers when all the dust settled more than a third thought that 30 states or less would ultimately adopt and one five thought that figure would be twenty or less.  Obviously that’s fewer than have committed to today.  In addition, 68 percent thought the elections would hurt momentum for Common Core (these are September 2010 numbers).  And remember, these are the most plugged-in people in education policy and many have state policymaking experience.

Stay tuned.

Jonah Edelman goes Huffie and rolls up Stand For Children’s* take on the elections and education.

Dana Goldstein thinks merit pay could emerge as the big bipartisan issue in Congress.  Principal preparation will certainly be an issue for schools, and there is an event in D.C. 11/10 to discuss it and a new Rainwater report/website. Turnarounds will be, too, new FSG report about that issue.

The new issue of Education Finance Policy the journal of the American Education Finance Association looks at teacher pensions.   Very big problem, still mostly overlooked (pdf). So this is well-worth checking out and through a special (and admirable) deal with MIT press they make it easy to do so – the articles are out from behind the usual firewall so you can read for free.

On the edujob front, Building Excellent Schools is hiring.

*BW works with SFC.