Over at Brookings Darrell West has an interesting new analysis of the treatment of corporations in law school and b-school curricula. Basically, he finds that the idea of shareholder profit maximization as the most important corporate good is the dominant idea students are exposed to.  There’s more though so read the report.  A lot of implications for how corporations treat and are treated in American life, but two education ones worth mentioning.

First, I expect that in education benefit corporations or B-corporations will start to play a bigger role in the coming years.  It not only makes sense given the dynamics of much of the education industry (high barriers to entry, low-margins, etc…) but is just a better fit with what a lot of education businesses and innovators are about.

Second, for all the rhetoric about corporations and their influence in American education (and you’re sure to hear a lot of that this weekend) the impact is actually pretty modest.  Outside of infrastructure, publishing, and some service provision there is still relatively little for-profit activity.  Education still isn’t even a big focus of venture capitalists. The reasons for that are pretty obvious.  In fact, despite the rhetoric when you get below the big issues like standards or accountability I’d argue that one could level the exact opposite critique about business involvement in education – in no small part because of what West identifies.

At the state level there are some great business coalitions pushing for reform (CO, CA, and MA are three good examples) and obviously some current and former business leaders investing their own money in education reform, but in general businesses have a lot of items before state legislators and state government – various tax and fee issues, regulatory issues, etc… – and are strongly disinclined to antagonize state officials over schools at the expense of any of these other issues. In other words, business leaders are there for the top-line issues but when you get to the tough and more granular issues that really drive things – changing funding formulas to create more equity for low-income students, shutting low-performing schools, changing teacher evaluations etc…those issues are less of a priority relative to more immediate corporate concerns.   In an environment where corporations don’t see the special place they occupy in American law as anything special in terms of broader societal benefit that’s not surprising but also not a great state of affairs.  Unfortunately, in all the kill the corporations rhetoric in education today these issues get scant attention.

WSJ’s Barbara Martinez is onto something that’s happening in multiple places as a result of the federal school improvement grants.

Sara’s gone and I’m back but a big thanks to Sara Mead for holding things down while I was away from the blog.  A bunch of great posts (and good titles) below you should check out if you haven’t already.

Ed Week writes up the new Bellwether analysis on i3.

Harvard Graduate School of Education has a new and poignant “It Gets Better Video.” Also from Boston a great one from the Red Sox. 3B Kevin Youkilis is especially good.

The PLE school turnaround initiative at the University of Virginia is seeking a Chief Support Officer. Great opportunity, great place to live.  And Students for Education Reform is ramping-up and needs a state program director and a national program director.

Also a host of positions at the new Relay School of Education.

I’m wrapping up my week guest-blogging at Eduwonk. I’ll be resuming blogging at my Education Week blog this week, so please visit me there! Thanks to Andy for the opportunity to guest blog this week, and to Lucinda Williams and Patti Scialfa for the titles.

–Sara Mead

The so-called Save Our Schools march scheduled for this weekend is getting a fair amount of traffic on my twitter feed, so I clicked on a link that brought me to this list of “Guiding Principles” from the events organizers. And all I could think was:

….and a pony!

To put it more directly: This is not an agenda for accomplishing anything. It’s just a wish list. Half of it is a wishlist of things the organizers don’t want (performance-based pay, school closures). Half of it is a wishlist for things someone might want, without any clear theory of how to operationalize them or what that might actually look like in practice in the real world. (I, too, would like to see “Well-rounded education that develops every student’s intellectual, creative, and physical potential”–but in the absence of clear prescriptions and mechanisms about how to make that a reality, well, you might as well wish for a pony, too.) The really weird thing is that a lot of the “wishlist” items aren’t even outcomes for educators or students, but process items, like “Educator and civic community leadership in drafting new ESEA legislation.” I don’t know how you’d intend to operationalize that or what the desired ends would be!

But beyond picking on the Save our Schools marchers, I think there’s a point here that often gets overlooked in education policy debates. Most people (but especially parents and educators) when they think about schools and what they want out of schools, they think about the day-to-day experiences that they want kids and educators to have and the concrete things they want to see happening in schools. That’s why policy initiatives like “small class size” have been politically successful despite the weak evidence on their effectiveness improving student learning–because they link up easily to something tangible that parents can understand why they’d want for their kids.

But articulating the kind of experiences we want children to have in schools is not policy. Policy is about going a step further and asking, “Given the types of experiences and outcomes we want schools to produce for kids, what are the structural and systemic arrangements we can put in place that maximize the likelihood that adults and school systems will deliver those experiences and results for kids?” And to a large extent those systemic and structural arrangements may not map obviously or intuitively to the experiences we want for kids. If anything, our experience seems to indicate that piling on mandates that schools do “good things” for kids leads to a kind of organizational incoherence and churn that reduces, rather than increases, our schools’ and educators’ ability to actually deliver the kind of experiences and results we all want.

For a long time, education debates in this country ignored the systemic and structural questions, which didn’t matter all that much because education was sort of a backwater policy issue anyway. More recently, education reform issues have risen in policy prominence and reformers have been surprisingly successful in engaging public debate around wonkier topics like accountability, teacher evaluation and incentives, and the role of market mechanisms in public education.

So it’s not surprising that many educators and some parents are feeling a disconnect now with our education reform conversation. The types of conversations that are dominating our educational policy debate today do often feel disconnected from the reality of what parents and teachers want for children and for themselves. And that’s why people like Diane Ravitch and the Save our Schools organizers can seize on that disconnect and spin a vision of an alternative world they suggest would come into play if we just got rid of those pernicious education reform initiatives. But anyone paying attention here knows that this idealized (and I use that word carefully–there’s lots of elements of this particular vision I’d dispute even if there were a clear path to accomplish them) world has never actually existed and that the people spinning a vision of it have no clear explanation of how–absent a magic wand–they’d actually get to the world they prescribe once they slay the reform dragon. Ok–I get it that you want to get rid of high-stakes testing and accountability and return control of curriculum and assessment decisions completely to the control of individual teachers. But we used to have an education system that did pretty much that. And it was really crappy, especially for low-income and minority kids. And if you think educational decisions of all ilk were free of “political and corporate control” before the current generation of reformers came on the scene–Well, when I get through laughing I’ll tell you you’d better put down Diane Ravitch’s most recent book and pick up some of her earlier ones (which are excellent, btw!).

This is a real challenge for reformers–both education reformers in the sense the term has come to take on in our contemporary debates, and individuals offering alternative prescriptions for reform. How do we keep the ball moving forward on reshaping our education systems to increase the likelihood they deliver good results for kids–with all the wonkiness that entails–while also developing a language that bridges the gap between systemic changes we seek and the emotional realities of what parents want in the most concrete of terms everyday for their children?

-Sara Mead

Important development in the NY NAACP/UFT school closure and charter co-location lawsuit.

NCTQ takes an unprecedented–and important–look at student teaching in the United States.

Great stuff from Neerav Kingsland on scaling success in education. Love the taxonomy of 3 types of scaling (Providers, Strategies, Markets); the proposal for a new federal market-scaling initiative is interesting, too.

Kevin Carey has an intriguing take on recent cheating scandals in education.

–Sara Mead

It’s interesting to watch the news on Race to the Top  winner states backpeddling on their promises unfold at the same time as the new Early Learning Challenge RTT competition is rolling out. The original Race to the Top was based on a mishmash of rewarding states for things they’d actually done or put in place, and for things they hadn’t yet done, but planned to do. To the extent that Race to the Top’s rewards for things states had actually done pressed states to move quickly to enact legislative and policy changes, it seems to have been pretty successful in doing that. It’s no so clear we’ll have as much to show from the things states promised to do. At the time RTT came out, some critics said the criteria and scoring leaned too much in the direction of rewarding states for plans, rather than completed actions. Recent news seems to be bearing some of that criticism out.

That’s particularly concerning looking at the Early Learning Challenge RTT competition, because if anything, Early Learning Challenge falls even more on the side of rewarding states for things they say they plan to do–as opposed to things they’ve already done–than the original RTT did. That’s probably inevitable, given that a.) most state’s don’t have all the core elements of the ELC criteria in place; b.) this competition won’t be able to drive much in the way of new legislation because of the grant timelines don’t line up well with legislative sessions; and c.) This ELC program smooshes together two separate programs–one for states that already had infrastructure in place, and one for those working to create it–that were laid out in the original ELC legislation that was included, but then jettisoned, from last year’s student aid reform legislation. But don’t be surprised if a year or so from now we’re reading stories about states pushing back timelines for kindergarten entry assessments or statewide QRIS roll-outs (actually, maybe, be a little surprised, but only because the press generally doesn’t pay as much attention to early childhood as they do to K-12 education, and this program has largely flown under the radar in that way.)

–Sara Mead

Earlier I said that I thought states with vision could use Early Learning Challenge to drive real improvements in early childhood outcomes, but that I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion. So what do I think those smart states should do?

First, seize on comprehensive assessment systems as a way to drive improvements in the quality of instruction in early childhood programs. The criteria ask states to support comprehensive early childhood assessment systems, which are defined as including screening measures, formative assessments (of children’s learning), measures of environmental quality, and measures of the quality of adult-child interactions. So states should work with providers to implement formative assessments that are linked to solid curricula and to provide really strong supports to teachers to use those assessments to improve the instruction they’re providing to children. The most effective pre-k and early childhood education programs are constantly using informal and formative assessments constantly to monitor children’s learning, choose learning activities, scaffold instruction, group children for small group and individual activities, and enable teachers to reflect on and improve their teaching. States should align assessments and PD provided under Early Learning Challenge to bring more programs to that standard.

Second, and related, states should not design Quality Rating and Improvement Systems to look only at early care and education programs’ input and environmental quality–as most existing QRIS do. In order to receive the highest tier fo QRIS ratings, programs should also be required to demonstrate a high level of instructional quality, as indicated through research-based curriculum and content that predicts school readiness, teachers’ use of specific instructional strategies that support young children’s learning, monitoring of children’s learning progress, and high-quality of interactions between teachers and children.

I’ve got some more ideas rattling around in my head here, but those are the ones I’ll give away for free.

–Sara Mead

There’s a debate about “neoliberalism” going on in the progressive blogosphere that is sort of tedious and not the kind of thing I’d normally flag [and to be clear, I have no dog in this larger fight, just quoting the various sides below]–Except that it has some pretty striking parallels with debates going on around education reform today.

Basically, the argument is that market-oriented and technocratic strategies favored by “neoliberal” policy wonks to address economic and social challenges are inherently inadequate because they fail to adequately “increase the power of labor relative to capital,” or in other words to address broader economic and political power inequalities that are the real causes of social and economic problems.

In a now much-quoted graf, political scientist and blogger Henry Farrell sums it up thus:

Neo-liberals tend to favor a combination of market mechanisms and technocratic solutions to solve social problems. But these kinds of solutions tend to discount politics – and in particular political collective action, which requires strong collective actors such as trade unions. This means that vaguely-leftish versions of neo-liberalism often have weak theories of politics, and in particular of the politics of collective action. I see Doug and others as arguing that successful political change requires large scale organized collective action, and that this in turn requires the correction of major power imbalances (e.g. between labor and capital). They’re also arguing that neo-liberal policies at best tend not to help correct these imbalances, and they seem to me to have a pretty good case.

Matt Yglesias, whose recent articles calling for looser monetary policy as a means to stimulate the economy (apparently too neoliberal a view) seem to have touched this debate off, calls bullshit:

So I really, strongly, profoundly agree with this [the idea that advancing a liberal reform agenda requires building a political infrastructure to support populist economic policies]. The moment someone comes up with aworkable idea on this front, please sign me up. But if there’s no idea to debate, then there’s no idea to debate. Debating the desirability of devising some hypothetical future good idea seems kind of pointless to me.

This all sounds to me a lot like contemporary education policy debates: Education reformers put forward a series of–yes, let’s be honest–largely technocratic and market-minded strategies to try to make our public education system work better to serve the needs of students, and to increase the supply of higher-performing schools and teachers. Critics counter that these policies can’t possibly fix the problems they’re purported to solve–mediocre overall performance and glaring student achievement gaps–because they don’t address the underlying causes of economic inequality, poverty, inadequate health care, broken families, etc. (It’s worth noting that “neoliberal” is frequently a term of derision directed at the education reform movement by its foes.) No one, to my knowledge honestly disputes that those issues are real problems that do impact the outcomes of educational systems. The problem is that critics of education reform also don’t put forward any compelling and remotely viable proposals to solve the problems they argue must be solved before we can improve school performance [even if we embarked on a massive campaign of economic redistribution--assuming that's possible and designed in a way that doesn't create other problems--does anyone think that fix mental health issues or ensure that all kids have "good" parents?]. Nor do they offer any alternative strategy for, in the absence of such sweeping and improbable solutions, getting the best we can out of our public schools given current realities. Essentially, they’re offering an argument for throwing up our hands and saying “tough cookies, kids,” to the tens of millions of low-income American schoolchildren who have only an 8% chance of ever earning a college diploma.

–Sara Mead

The new Early Learning Challenge is being referred to in some quarters as “Race to the Top for early childhood education.” That’s quite literally true, in the sense that the Early Learning Challenge is being funded out of a pool of funds appropriated this year specifically for Race to the Top (with Congressional language indicating an intention to use some of these funds for early childhood). But folks in the early childhood community were actually analogizing the early learning challenge grant to Race to the Top before that–when the program was initially proposed as a component of the SAFRA student aid reform legislation (from which it was jettisoned at the last minute due to rising Pell grant costs–just one example of why we should worry that Pell, without changes to current policy, will ultimately cannibalize other education funding).

Early Learning Challenge is, in fact, designed on the same basic principles as RTT: The feds articulate a series of system priorities they’d like to see state policies address, and award funds on a competitive basis to states that have the best plan for and have made the most progress on addressing those priorities.

Moreover, Early Learning Challenges priorities and focus are actually quite similar to those of RTT. The “4 assurances” of RTT I were:

• College- and career-ready standards and high-quality assessments (addressed in Section B of the RTT grant criteria)
• Data systems that track progress and foster continuous improvement (addressed in Section C of the RTT criteria)
• Teacher effectiveness (Section D of the criteria)
• Turning around low-performing schools (Section E of the criteria)

Early Learning Challenge came into being because Congress, in the 2011 appropriations, created a “sixth assurance” in Race to the Top focused on early childhood, but the proposed Early Learning Challenge Criteria actually line up very closely with the original 4 RTT assurances:

• Standards and assessments (Section B of the proposed criteria asks states to put in place statewide early learning and development systems, kindergarten entry assessments, and to support the use of comprehensive assessment systems to improve early childhood quality)
• Data systems (Section A of the proposed criteria asks states to have in place high-quality data systems that collect a wide range of data on early childhood programs, participating children, and staff, and to link that data with the state’s K-12 and postsecondary data systems)
• Great Early Childhood Educators (Section D of the proposed criteria focuses on improving the skills of the early childhood workforce)

The biggest difference here is that Early Learning Challenge does not exactly include RTT’s emphasis on identifying and closing low-performing schools, but instead asks states to create Quality Rating and Improvement Systems designed to improve quality across the full spectrum of early childhood settings.

But there are two deeper ways in which the Early Learning Challenge and RTT are similar:

First, both programs are primarily about building state-level systems and policies. In contrast to programs like the Clinton-era signature class size reduction, ELC and RTT do not translate directly into specific things we might want to see kids experience in schools and classrooms. Rather they seek to drive state infrastructure and policy environment that incent and supports local-level progress to improve children’s educational outcomes. That’s a strategy that recognizes the real limitations of federal and state power to drive educational improvement. But it can also make these programs seem a little confusing–and even counter-intuitive to some observers, particularly on the ground educators. (That’s why, for example, you see comments asking things like “Where is play in this proposal?”) One challenge for the ed reform field generally is to better communicate to parents, educators, and the public how system-level efforts like this are supposed to translate into more concrete changes on the ground that people care most about.

Second, and related, both Race to the Top and Early Learning Challenge are betting big on system-level strategies that are actually somewhat risky. At the end of the day, Race to the Top’s signature policy initiative, what it will stand or fall on, is the creation of new systems of teacher evaluation based substantially on teachers’  student achievement impacts. Early Learning Challenge’s signature initiative will be state Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS), designed to improve quality across the spectrum of early childhood settings by rating them against clearly defined levels of quality, providing transparent quality information to parents and the public, and creating incentives for programs to move up the levels of quality.

Both of these strategies–Teacher Evaluation and QRIS–are based on robust evidence about what matters in education and/or child care quality. Both also have a logical sense: If educational systems do a better job of identifying quality/effectiveness, rewarding  the most effective teachers/providers, and creating incentives for teachers/programs to get better, then those changes to make the system more quality-sensitive should ultimately lead to better outcomes. All that said, it’s important to understand that we don’t have a clear base of evidence yet that either of these strategies “works” in the sense of documented improvements in student/child outcomes linked to that strategy. As my fellow Ed Week blogger Rick Hess has written, that’s not entirely the right frame in which to think about these types of system strategies. But it’s also important for proponents of either improved teacher evaluations or QRIS to have a degree of humility around what we do and don’t know about the impacts of these particular strategies in practice. And to also recognize that both teacher evaluation and QRIS are complex systems to implement–that we don’t necessarily know the “right” answers to all the complex implementation questions involved, and that the process of putting these systems in place will be inherently messy and iterative, and will involve some false steps and mistakes.

For more analytic discussion of the similarities/differences between ELC and RTT, check out this from my former colleagues at the New America Foundation.

–Sara Mead

States were a little slow to get moving on Early Learning Challenge after the program was announced in May, but things seem to be heating up: officials in New York and Georgia have announced that they will be competing for the grant, and Kentucky has created an Early Learning Advisory Council to try to boost their competitiveness (although they seem to be running behind on this one). And a group of major early childhood funders announced they’re creating an Early Learning Challenge consortium to help states develop their applications and also to support implementation once grants are awarded. Guess that answers this question.

UPDATE: Ed Week reports that 36 states and D.C. have submitted letters of intent to apply for Early Learning Challenge Race to the Top.

–Sara Mead

Thanks to Andy for the introduction and opportunity to blog on Eduwonk this week. As Andy mentioned, a lot of my work focuses on early childhood education, and I’m going to spend some time the next few days talking about the Early Learning Challege Race to the Top competition. RTT ELC is a $500 million state competition, created with FY2011 RTT funds, that will make competitive grants to states based on their plans to build comprehensive and integrated statewide early childhood care and education systems for children 0-5, and to expand the number of high-need children served in high-quality early childhood programs. What the heck does that mean? I’ll explain more later this week.

For starters, though, check out the administration’s announcement of the new Early Learning Challenge program, the draft competition criteria released June 31, and the blog on which the administration in taking comments from the public. My former colleagues at the New America Foundation have also been providing some great, must-read analysis and commentary on the ELC program.

–Sara Mead

I’m taking next week for family but Sara Mead will be here to inform and amuse.  In addition to being a leading analyst on pre-k policy, Mead is also an appointed member of the District of Columbia Public Charter Schools Board and an expert on charter school policy (and she and I have worked on the innovation issue).  She was also instrumental in the launching of Ed Sector and BW as well as much of the work of the 21st Century Schools Project at PPI.  So she brings a few lenses to her work and I’m glad she’s able to take a break from her regular blog and spend a week over here.

Regular School of Thought columns at TIME will resume week of August 1.  I’m unlikely to be on Twitter @arotherham but you never know.

And I have enough fish porn piled up to fill the entire page, will try get all your pics posted in August. Sorry to all who have sent stuff to be so far behind on that.

Going inside:  Will be interesting to watch Doug Ross in this role.

Going outside: Ron Tomalis cracking down on cheating in PA. Subtle political angle here, power shifting away from Philly in Harrisburg.

Going down: WTF? I hope someone does an analysis of what went wrong here because this article seems more about personalities than whatever big lessons can/should be drawn.

Michele McNeil has an important RTT post up.

Summer edubooks are the topic of my School of Thought column at TIME this week. I look at seven new ones – some you’ve heard of and perhaps some you haven’t.  Steve Brill’s new one, the compilation of the NEA’s status of the American teacher data, a new look at environmental education, a great look at substitute teaching, Naomi Riley on higher ed, Terry Moe on teachers unions, and of course Rick Hess – he writes a new book every weekend.

Books are one of the last kinds of content you’re apparently expected to pay for, but my column is available for free at TIME.com so read the entire thing by clicking here.

This new report on time and extended learning time from the National Center on Time and Learning and ECS (pdf) is well worth checking out if you follow the issue.  Reading it and the media accounts do you sort of feel like you’re being held for ransom though? Seems to be a lot of this out there: Give us more money or we’ll do less and the kids will get it!  Shouldn’t we be thinking more about productivity?

A few people have emailed The Times story about the United Auto Workers – GM collaboration on the Sonic car. While it remains to be seen if the car is a commercial success in a country that loves big cars, the collaboration is certainly noteworthy.  But what readers want to know is why can’t this happen in education?  Actually, I think it can and there are some examples – Pittsburgh being one recent one.  But, the answer to why it’s not more widespread may also be found in a comment by the U.A.W. president:

“We are committed to the success of the company,” [U.A.W President] Mr. King said recently. “We had to talk about a business model that makes sense.”

I don’t want to imply that teachers’ union leaders are not committed to the success of public education.  But, what “success” looks like is different in the public sector and private sector.  Or more specifically – the incentives around success are different because private firms can go out of business while public sector ones generally do not (especially public education, which is an essential service).  So while I wasn’t a fan of what went down in Wisconsin, you don’t have to be to see that there are real differences between public sector and private sector unions and their various incentives and that we had better pay attention to them in our industry and think about how to navigate the various challenges public education faces with that in mind.

Many thanks to the CRPE team for a great and lively week on the blog.  Definitely value-add.

And speaking of which, this is a solid article and good journalism from the LAT that’s worth your time.

Our week of guest blogging has come to an end. Thanks to Andy for trusting us to not trash the place, to Rachael for making it look good, and especially to all of you who read and shared and commented. To see CRPE’s recent work and where we’re focusing our next efforts, check out our new Annual Report. (You can also join our News List and follow us on Twitter.)

- Paul Hill, Robin Lake, and Team CRPE

Although the district-compact grants from the Gates Foundation don’t hurt, the 100K grants alone are probably not driving the charter-district détente. My view is that the wall dividing charter and district schools on the basis of their label alone is very much like the false divide between the people of Western and Eastern Europe toward the end of the Cold War. It has simply become all too obviously ridiculous and at odds with mutual interest. Smart district leaders know that high-performing charter schools can help them serve kids now stuck in chronically failing schools and attract entrepreneurial leaders. Smart charters know they need access to facilities and other district resources to stabilize their finances and to better support their sometimes young and inexperienced teaching staffs. Both know they need to challenge themselves constantly and seek ways to innovate and improve. As I wrote earlier this week, it remains to be seen whether district leaders entering into these deals can survive politically, but if they do, many more will likely follow. In a bizarre coincidence, the Dallas hotel where the second round of compact participants stayed displayed two slabs from the Berlin Wall.

-Robin Lake

Denver Public Schools’ groundbreaking portfolio district reform program will face a fierce political test this November. Over the past four years, first under the leadership of then superintendent and now Senator Michael Bennet, and currently under Superintendent Tom Boasberg, Denver’s Board of Education has directed one of the country’s most ambitious efforts to transform a school district from a monopoly provider to a manager of a portfolio of public schools of choice.

The Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA) has accused the school board of union busting for approving “innovation” status for more Denver schools, even though teachers are voting for the chance to teach in a more regulation-free environment. Already the DCTA is supporting candidates in hopes of controlling the seven-member board.

Reformers hold a 4-3 board majority and are organizing support for pro-reform candidates. Denver voters consistently have favored reform initiatives. In June they elected a new mayor, Michael Hancock, who is a staunch pro-reform official. But with three seats on the ballot this November, the Denver Plan could be in jeopardy.

At the moment, though, the brewing showdown seems remote. Last week, the BOE unanimously approved nine new schools.

-Sam Sperry

In the midst of the NEA war on TFA, here’s a thoughtful post from PPI.

-RJL

Defenders of the status quo are not alone in having problems with value-added measures of teacher performance. Innovators also have reason to worry: it is difficult to assess value-added when teachers work in teams or in mixed-age, ungraded, or individually paced classrooms. Teacher value-added assessment will be difficult in schools that combine online and teacher-directed instruction (think Rocketship, Carpe Diem, School of One).

As much as we need new teacher evaluation systems that incorporate students’ performance, we can’t afford to discourage innovation. If we are thoughtful and creative about our evaluation policy, there will be no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

For example, in blended-model schools, students work with a team of educators: online tutors, non-certificated support teachers, and certificated lead teachers. In this case it makes sense to assess the value-added of the team.

Also in blended models, students set their own pace. Some students fly ahead in one subject area but stay on a more typical pace in others. Assessments with developmental scales would allow us to compare growth for students at a variety of levels. Computerized assessment would allow students to take assessments at their current academic level instead of just their grade level.

Other adjustments will probably need to be made but if the early excitement around these models translates into success for students, it will be worth the effort.

-Betheny Gross and Mike Dearmond

Everyone suffers when policy debate focuses on the extremes. We can’t get far when one side claims that schools are entirely to blame for the achievement gap, and the other side claims that the achievement gap is entirely caused by factors beyond the schools’ control. A more constructive debate would start from a more balanced premise, i.e., that school improvement is possible and can get good results, but that extra-school factors are also important. That would leave plenty of room for argument, and it would be about options and evidence.

Sometimes I fear that Monty Python set the pattern for arguments about education policy.

-Paul Hill

Earlier today, Parker posted an important chart showing test scores from Ingraham High School in Seattle where white kids do fairly well and minority students don’t. Schools like this are not the focus of “turnaround” efforts and though they may get in trouble for failing to meet AYP, there is little public will to fire the principal or to close the school. Yet schools like Ingraham obviously have work to do, whether it’s making sure the neediest students get the best teachers, employing technology or other innovations to reach struggling students, or making sure the culture of the schools means that no student will be left behind, whatever it takes. Often these “hidden gap” schools are in suburban or middle class neighborhoods where minority presence is growing quickly without a plan in place for how to create equity within each school. No Child Left Behind exposed some of these schools by requiring schools report test scores by subgroups like race, but the required intervention, money for tutoring, was a superficial answer. As Bryan Hassel of Public Impact recently told me, there’s little research or guidance available to help these schools so right now all we can do is speculate about what might work best. This is an issue that needs foundation investment in research and more policy attention at the local, state, and federal levels.

- Robin Lake

Recent debate over racial segregation in charter schools has generated a lot more heat than light. Two excellent but very different charter schools in Denver exemplify why more nuance and thoughtfulness is sorely needed.

West Denver Prep (WDP) operates four open-enrollment charter middle schools and was recently approved to open two more middle schools and a high school in 2013. WDP’s first two schools are ranked first and second among Denver’s public schools. Each school is over 90 percent low income, 90 percent Latino, and 35 percent English Language Learners and is posting median growth scores in 80 percent in reading and writing, and above 90 in math. West Denver Prep’s student attrition rate is below 5 percent.

The Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) operates two open enrollment, 6-12 STEM charter schools and has been approved to open three more. DSST’s first campus is the city’s highest-performing high school and the second highest-performing middle school. Less than half of DSST’s students are from low-income families. Over 65 percent are minority. Of the school’s 2010 graduating class, 50 percent is first-generation college bound. 100 percent of graduating seniors are accepted into a four-year college. DSST’s student attrition rate is below 10 percent.

West Denver Prep and DSST are very different models and both are achieving great results with their students. DSST is among several charter schools in Denver that are deliberately focused on creating diverse student populations in a city with significant economic and racial isolation in its housing patterns and in its traditional public schools. DSST and other public schools of choice like them face a conundrum. How do you create a diverse and integrated school and still ensure that admission is open to all students?

By contrast, West Denver Prep’s schools face a different challenge. Even though their student populations mirror the demographics of their nearby traditional public schools almost exactly, and even though their schools are helping students achieve previously unheard of results, they are attacked for somehow re-segregating an already segregated public school system.

So what is a school to do?

-Parker Baxter