I didn’t find Tom Friedman’s Singapore column as revelatory as many others (probably because I’m skeptical on some of the current international panic).  But I did think these two grafs were the money grafs though:

I was struck because that kind of linkage is so often missing in U.S. politics today. Republicans favor deep cuts in government spending, while so far exempting Medicare, Social Security and the defense budget. Not only is that not realistic, but it basically says that our nation’s priorities should be to fund retirement homes for older people rather than better schools for younger people and that we should build new schools in Afghanistan before Alabama.

President Obama just laid out a smart and compelling vision of where our priorities should be. But he did not spell out how and where we will have to both cut and invest — really intelligently and at a large scale — to deliver on his vision.

The Afghan line is a bit of a throwaway but the general point is right on.  We have spent a lot building schools and on education during the last century but right now demographics mean this country’s fiscal burden is shifting to the elderly and we have no strategy for how to take care of our aging population and improve our schools – not just through spending but also by improving productivity and delivery.  And our political debate, while contentious and loud, is pretty devoid of serious solutions because the politics don’t work right now given where the organized political power is.

Smart and must-read Kevin Huffman column on the Ohio Mom now who was locked up for breaking school boundary laws.

Orthogonal point to Kevin’s argument but he notes that the mom had been taking classes to become a teacher and now likely can’t get a teaching license because she’s a convicted felon.  Even is she’s not pardoned in many states you still can get a license with a waiver from the state board of education based on a variety of factors including the nature of the offense, time since it occurred, whether the person is still on probation, etc…).   And that’s as it should be, some discretion is appropriate depending on the circumstances of individual cases.

This Ohio boundary fraud case is interesting in a few ways. It’s hard to miss the incredibly fortuitous timing with school choice week going on.  And it does highlight two real issues.  Boundary/enrollment issues are real and too many parents are desperate for more and/or better options than they have today.  If my email is any indication, a lot of people, and in particular media people, who don’t generally pay a lot of attention to education did notice this so stay tuned.

The Washington Post ran a story this morning basically about how the No Child Left Behind accountability rules are soooo unfair.  In fairness to the writer, Nick Anderson, it is difficult in even 1,000 or 1,200 words to unpack complicated policy arrangements such as the federal law’s “safe harbor” provisions or the fact that not all students take standardized tests and that many, for instance some special education and limited-English proficient students take alternative assessments.   For a primer on how that all works click here (pdf). So my initial gripe with the story was that it really obscured the reality of the “100 percent” proficient rates that NCLB allegedly requires and I was disappointed that the story uncritically relayed some misleading statements.  Charlie Barone was harsher in his judgment.

But now after day in meetings (and fighting snowbound traffic) I’ve had a chance to look at the performance data for the school Anderson built the story around.  Here’s the math data.  Anderson’s take is that it’s only special education students causing the school to not make “adequate yearly progress” because just 52 percent are proficient and that shows how unwieldy the law is.  In fact, at this school, low-income students are lagging too (only half of them are proficient in math, fewer than in special education) but the law’s safe harbor rules meant that even that performance level was acceptable this year.  In other words, they didn’t make adequate yearly progress either but a safety valve in the law meant that didn’t count against the school.  Meanwhile, only 66 percent of the school’s 38 Hispanic students are proficient in math.  This time, because of the loopholes Maryland exploits 66 percent is good enough as well even though Maryland is requiring a 77 percent pass rate this year.  And I don’t want to be gratuitous but performance for limited-English proficient kids is going down…that didn’t make it in the story either.  Punchline: All that adds up to a different take than Post readers got this morning.  It is worth noting that reading scores at the school are better, but big gaps there, too.

Takeaways:

First, again, things that are too good to be true, usually are and it’s usually a good idea to look at the actual data. Second, as the numbers above show this policy is quite complicated.  But they also show that 100 percent is a strawman and there are a lot of ins and outs and the reality on the ground is different than all the 100 percent rhetoric you hear from people, who let’s be honest do know better.  It’s not asking too much to ask that reporters get that stuff right though.

Finally, all this highlights a coming flash point in the No Child Left Behind reauthorization debate and what will likely be a gut-check moment for the Administration.  Suburban schools do not like policies that call attention to the shortfalls like the ones I just mentioned.  That’s why they’re happy when articles like today’s run because it makes everything sound so unreasonable.  I don’t think asking schools to get more than 6 in 10 kids proficient is all that unreasonable. 8 in 10 either for that matter, which is what Maryland will ask of schools next year.

Fairfax County superintendent Jack Dale’s suggestion in the article that we have an “adequate yearly progress” exemption for schools where 90 percent of the students pass the state tests makes a lot of sense as an interim measure- so long as that’s disaggregated by race, income, and so forth and not just an overall number. But that wouldn’t help many Fairfax County schools that are not making AYP because of the low performance by kids of color or students besides special education students.  And that’s a microcosm for the issue overall. We want to “win the future” but are we going to admit that right now in the present we have an achievement problem for low-income kids and kids of color and then confront it and improve?  Or are we going to continue to shoot various messengers and jump through hoops to obscure the problem.

No Child was hardly perfect as a policy when passed in 2002.  The ongoing stalemate on reauthorization is compounding some issues because the law wasn’t designed to run for 9 years.  But the law, and the kids it’s designed to look out for, got a bum rap from The Washington Post today.

This week’s School of Thought column at TIME is about the sleepy and non-controversial issue of teacher tenure.

Education eyes were on Washington this week to see what President Obama would say about schools in his State of the Union address. But just as in 2010, if you really want to follow the action on education reform this year, it’s better to look to the states. All the new governors (29), state education chiefs (18 new ones elected or appointed since November), and state legislators (nearly 1,600) mean things are more fluid in the states, where teacher tenure is becoming a major flashpoint. Florida and New Jersey are considering pretty much ending tenure altogether. And while these states may be ground zero for tenure battles, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania are also considering significant changes.

Read the entire column here.

The number of RSVP’s for the Teach For America summit in February should put to rest the idea that corps members just do two years and move on…eye popping.

My short take on the speech is up over at The Times. The education passages didn’t have a lot of substance but they did have some interesting signals.  Here’s a bit of backstory on Bruce Randolph, the school Obama singled out.  Fascinating choice…

Update: Sara Mead on SOTU here. And also with more here.

Update II: One other aspect of this I didn’t get to in the NYT reax item is prospects for more Race to the Top funding in the new Congress.  On the one hand, by calling it the most meaningful education reform in a generation the President doesn’t really give Republicans in the House much of an incentive to hand him a victory on it.  On the other, in general if a president really wants something like this they can get it if they’re willing to push and/or trade enough.  The education insiders I survey for Whiteboard generally think that any future funding will be quite modest and it is unclear tonight how last night’s speech changed that.

Update III: More Bruce Randolph via Denver Post. Just a few years out it’s easy to forget how contentious this fight was in the district and in the state legislature over the law allowing schools to do this statewide.  The teachers union fought this one hard in both venues.  Overlooked story angle?  A black swan? How many schools in CO have subsequently done this?

Update IV: BW’s Rachael Brown on the SOTU at The Atlantic.

Update V: John Merrow with his thoughts on the Bruce Randolph angle and NPR takes a deeper look at the school itself.  Also, a round-up of takes from Flypaper. And they’re debating the speech at the NYT.

In the big scheme of things this mix-up in Portland’s database is trivial. But it is illustrative of a bigger issue, the coding on a lot of state databases is far from perfect and input is often sloppy or based on questionable standards (for instance what counts as a transfer and not a dropout).  It’s getting better but this stuff increasingly matters (think about an issue like teacher of record for assigning value-add scores) and these systems are not all confidence inspiring…

Update: Alert reader AB trolls the database and says the health care package would amount to 28 percent of GDP if extrapolated nationwide.

He talks about his views on education in the city.

If you follow Race to the Top, Rhode Island, Deb Gist, or reform more generally don’t miss this open letter to Governor Chafee. Update: Local media here. And you can play along at home here.

Oh yeah, bipartisanship on education is off to a great start! Action on this will be in the Senate though, there will be a lot of pressure on moderates who have supported it in the past…

Education relevant passage from Malcolm Gladwell’s must-read look at the evolving relationship between talent and capital in The New Yorker:

At one of the many meetings that [Marvin] Miller had with each baseball team when he first took over as union boss, a player stood up and hesitantly asked a question: “We know that you have been working for unions for most of your adult life, and we gather from what general managers and club presidents and owners and league presidents and the commissioners office are telling us that they don’t like you.   So what we wan to know is, can you get along with these people or is it going to be perpetual conflict?”

Miller tried to answer as truthfully as he could:  “I said, ‘I think I can get along with most people.  But you have to remember that labor relations in this country are adversarial.  The interest of the owners and your interests are diametrically opposed on many things, and you can’t hold up as a standard whether they like me.’ Then I said, “I’m going to go further.  If at any time during my tenure here you find there’s a pattern of owners and owners’ officials singing my praises, you’d better fire me.  I’m not kidding.’”

Two eduimplications here.  The first is obvious.  All this blather about how everyone’s interest converges on everything is ridiculous.  Sometimes, sure, but not always.  Here’s where a guy like Nathan Saunders, the head of the teachers union in D.C. is refreshing.  Not a lot of window dressing there and that clarifies things.  But the second implication is more subtle.  Sometimes local teachers union leaders do things that could create a pattern of having school administration singing their praises.  If you’re a reformer that’s great, right?  Well, not exactly.  That can create problems with their members and not-infrequently create political space for someone to challenge them for leadership and lead to their being voted out.  It’s happened all over the country.  So part of the labor-management dance these days is enough theater to keep everyone on board.  So on top of a complicated set of policy issues there is a complicated set of politics, too.

Richard Whitmire (whose Michelle Rhee bio hits shelves soon) looks at “Michelle Lite” in the WaPo.

This new arrangement that Kenneth Feinberg is proposing around due process for teachers is not a game-changer.  Pretty weak soup in the context of what’s currently on the books and common practices.

The judge’s ruling in the ACLU case in Los Angeles is a game changer there and per this TIME column has a lot of potential to ricochet around the country.

In this week’s School of Thought column at TIME.com I take a look at international test score data. Should you worry?  Some.  Should you panic?  No.  Our real problem is not in Shanghai it’s in South Central.

Concern about falling behind internationally is one of America’s most popular education anxieties. This week’s visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao — plus all the chatter about Amy Chua’s new book on why Chinese-style “tiger moms” raise more successful children than Americans do — serve as uncomfortable reminders that the kids in Shanghai did astronomically well on a set of international tests released last month, whereas U.S. kids came in 17th.

That makes us sound pretty lame. But the extremists at both ends of the education spectrum — i.e., those telling us international tests are meaningless and those claiming the scores are a sure sign that the sky is falling — are wrong. Here are five reasons why you should ignore the hysterical commentary (followed by a commonsense look at what you should care about instead)…

Read the entire thing here.

New estimates on unfunded pension liability.

U.S. Representative Gabby Gifford’s Aspen fellows class pens an op-ed about moving forward from the shooting.

Thoughtful post on MLK Day from Sara Mead.

NCTQ is launching a new initiative, in partnership with US News, to review and rate the nation’s education schools. This is a big deal because of the transparency it’s going to introduce as well as the leverage this partnership provides.  More info here.

A lot of chatter about Secretary Duncan’s endorsement of D.C. schools chancellor Kaya Henderson to The Washington Post when he was asked about her during a media sit down with them. Lots of debate focused on should he have weighed-in?  And among Rhee/Henderson detractors questions about the content of what he said. But, perhaps a more pertinent question is why he felt compelled to in the first place…

Ben Wallerstein writes-up (and links to) the recent letter from 33 governors seeking regulatory relief on Medicaid. Forget edujobs and the coming fight about the FY2012  budget request and unfinished approps, in terms of state budgets elements like this are where the action is and that’s why the govs are mobilizing.

Mike Petrilli points out the growing attention to using video in education and channels James Q. Wilson’s smart lessons.   But Petrilli doesn’t really differentiate between whether video in schools should be used for accountability, improvement, or both.  And that’s a key question.

If the purpose is merely accountability then there are less expensive ways to achieve that necessary goal. The real promise, it seems to me, is using video (and ideally interactive simulations) to train new teachers and help those on the job improve through coaching based on actual performance.  That requires a set of investments not only in the technology itself but the supports to use it.   But if you look at a variety of endeavors from training fighter pilots to professional athletes and a host of more commonplace professions in between this is not a great unknown, our field is just late to it.  There are some companies in this space right now and expect more interest as the demand for observational tools and better training increases.

This week’s School of Thought looks at states and education. A lot of responsibility being put on them – but they’re not always ready.

States are the toast of Washington again. Tea Partiers and the incoming Republican majority in the House of Representatives idealize them. When Congress read the U.S. Constitution last week, the 10th Amendment — the one reserving power to the states — was an applause line. Of course, celebrating states and localism is nothing new. More than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville declared that it is “the political effects of decentralization that I most admire in America.” More recently, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis hailed states as “laboratories of democracy.” But when it comes to education, we shouldn’t lionize states when they’re too often failing to fix our schools.

Read the entire thing here.

Good news from Education Sector, Richard Colvin joining the team.

It seems to me, too, that it’s high time to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, it’s been almost a decade and the law was never meant to go this long without at least some tweaks.  If that can be done without pulling the accountability net out from under minority and low-income students (especially in the suburbs where the pushback against disaggregation and the results it highlights is strongest) then this year should be the year.

But, before everyone goes gaga over today’s WaPo article about hints of bipartisanship, ‘let’s get ‘er done’ talk, ‘we can rename it’ and all that it’s worth remembering you can pull the clips from the last few years (and Januarys in particular) and hear the same stuff…That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, just means that every time someone goes boo it doesn’t mean it’s imminent.

Oh yeah, this is just like education! And so collaborative and supportive!

WSJ’s Stephanie Banchero writes-up Michelle Rhee’s new policy agenda.

Update: Also check out this Fast Company article by Jeff Chu, who has followed Rhee for a while.

Kevin Huffman has a very good response to this morning’s Samuelson op-ed. The ‘we’re pretty good except for them’ argument is troubling and you hear it a lot.  Disaggregating data to get better visibility into a problem is one thing, implicitly (or explicitly) saying there isn’t a problem because of skewed results is another.

A different aspect of this that I don’t think gets enough attention is all the various non-school factors that determine competitiveness.  America was a great place to do business in the 20th Century because we enjoyed stable government, respect for contracts and property, lots of workers, etc…etc…But the world is changing.  That’s why these retrospective arguments are not that interesting.  The more pertinent question to debate is:  Given the way the world is changing, at least insofar as we can tell, how does this country need to educate its citizens to maintain quality of life and fidelity to our avowed goals – for instance social mobility.

Travel problems leave me with a little extra time on my hands today so…

Why hasn’t the education community reacted more, one way or another, to the appointment of Gene Sperling to lead NEC at The White House?  He’s a strong advocate of education for girls in the developing world – a major economic, civic, and social issue.  In addition, Sperling was instrumental in the creation of Gear-Up, a tireless defender and promoter of the program, and a key reason it became a successful model for how to help get students on track for college (and back before college-going was all the rage).  That speaks to his policy instincts in terms of how government can help address problems.  And, with the ongoing “Gainful Employment” debate likely to heat-up in the new Congress, Sperling’s views on the for-profit higher ed industry (not favorable) will become even more important in the debate.

Joel Klein has the days must-read (at least until Michelle Rhee’s policy agenda hits the streets) about teacher pensions in the WSJ. Bonus clever lede.  Increasing attention to this problem over the past few months.  My take short take here. If this keeps up the unions are going to look back on the good old days when Klein had a job that didn’t give him time to write!

Also, here’s an interesting take on the parent trigger in CA. In general I’m in favor of anything that empowers parents, especially low-income parents, within the public education framework of access and accountability.  But I’m still unclear how, without a lot of support, many of these initiatives don’t repeat the problems of school-based councils and create a lot of chaos.

Forceful Sally Jenkins on big time NCAA sports.

Paul Peterson writes-up the results of the Education Next book poll. One can marvel at the irony of a journal that has done a great job publishing some important empirical work from public and professional opinion surveys to analysis of current reform efforts deciding to do a self-response internet poll with no controls. But before people ascribe too much to the results (eg, “a reality check for those who think school reformers have won the war of ideas”) isn’t the most straightforward explanation the straightforward one? Self  response polls favor the mobilized and organized.  Old story in education.  I happen to think reformers haven’t won the battle of ideas, either, but this survey doesn’t move me on that score.

RiShawn Biddle’s continues the scale discussion here. My response to his earlier post is here. To be clear, my point is not that there isn’t a place for one-offs.  Even though we have to look at scale I’d be opposed to a policy, on for instance charters, that only allowed for replicable models.  That’s why the smart cap idea on charter caps values scalability but creates space for both kinds. And there is, of course, something to the idea that 100 one percent solutions get the job done.  My point merely is that a system of this size is  not going to be turned entirely by one-offs.  So, I take RiShawn’s point about standards and how they can facilitate a system of one-offs, it’s the point I was trying to make in this column about what to expect/not expect from Common Core.  But, in terms of the system overall at a fundamental level size matters, as they say.

We heard your requests for a way to get Eduwonk content by email and after a mere 6+ years the feature is now installed.  On the right side if you click the email tab next to the other social media buttons you can sign up for a daily digest of content posted on the blog. Of course you can still read via Feedburner or whatever feed/reader you like to use as well as the old horse and buggy way:  Just coming here and reading.  An Ipad app will be released shortly and we’ll add a button for that.

Readership has been especially strong the last few months and for that, I thank you.