David Figlio has a new report out on the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (link to the pdf study via this blog post). And at Reuters Jenny Sedlis takes a look at the debate over comparisons between two co-located schools in NYC that have been a source of debate since Steven Brill first highlighted them in a magazine article last year.

New Schools Venture Fund* is launching a new series of video interviews with various education entrepreneurs.  Some background (and how you can participate) via their blog.

*BW has a few ties to them, funding, work, and former team members.

Huffie Joy Resmovits turns in a good account of this whole American Federation of Teachers funded attack site on Michelle Rhee fiasco.

Bottom line: C’mon, are we in middle school?  I happen to think Students First should disclose its donors, I like transparency. But the way to push on that is not to set up an anonymous attack site that basically amounts to character assassination.  Rather it’s – obviousness alert – to take a stand on transparency by being transparent and then expecting it of others.  More fundamentally, how did a union that fought for workers rights and against authoritarian regimes around the world and for a variety of unpopular but important issues here at home (including, instrumentally, in our field academic standards long before they were cool) find itself behind an anonymous website with photoshopped pictures of someone?

I’m all for a lively debate and Michelle Rhee’s positions and policy recommendations are certainly fair game for the public debate and even websites designed to argue the other side, but even if AFT President Randi Weingarten was not barnstorming the country calling for move civility in the education debate this particular site would still cross a bunch of lines.  We should all be embarrassed.

Update: Apparently much of the photoshopping is being cleaned-up. Sort of contradicts the official line that the AFT is proud of this…Also, Rhee biographer Richard Whitmire weighs in below.

The New York Times writes-up the Wireless Generation situation in New York. The state’s comptroller declined to approve a contract with Wireless Gen because of the larger issues consuming News Corp. It’s unfortunate that Wireless – a genuinely innovative company – is getting caught up in problems that have absolutely nothing to do with it and also worrisome in terms of the future of the company and the shadow the NewsCorp problems are casting.

But one part of the story jumped out at me as incomplete in an important way:

New York will still work with Wireless Generation indirectly, as part of a consortium of states building a shared data framework known as the Shared Learning Collaborative. Financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the $44 million project, awarded to Wireless Generation in June, is being directed by Stacey Childress, a former board member at Wireless Generation. She stepped down and sold her stock in the firm before taking the position at the Gates Foundation, a Wireless Generation spokeswoman said.

That’s all accurate but it’s not the entire story – and I have a little visibility into this aspect of it. Childress had about 30,000 options on Wireless stock when she left the company’s board because Wireless paid board members in options rather than cash.  Her options were priced at $2.50 and $2.75.  When she went to the Gates Foundation Childress sold them – using a conservative valuation method – for $1.33, roughly half of their book value.  The exact price per-share Childress (and other board members) would have received when Wireless was bought by NewsCorp is not public information but a reasonable estimate of her share’s worth is $300-$400K.

In other words, she left well more than a quarter-million on the table in an effort to avoid conflicts of interest and do the right thing.

What’s more, Childress declined to do cash-for-service consulting for Wireless because she taught a Wireless Gen case in her course at Harvard Business School and didn’t think it was appropriate.

Let’s be clear, Childress will be able to put food on the table while working at the Gates Foundation and in the future but, still, that’s a lot of money to pass on in order to take a job where you think you can have social impact. And it’s a good example of how people have to navigate complicated situations and make tough calls. So the next time you hear someone braying about how everyone is just in education reform to make money, remember this example.  Plenty of people do the wrong thing (in every industry) but in our field plenty more disadvantage themselves and their families in an effort to do the right thing.

Disclosure: Bellwether has worked with Wireless Gen but we were not involved in the News Corp acquisition and don’t hold stock or options.  Bellwether also works with and is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Nancy Connor from Denver Public Schools turns in an interesting essay on No Child Left Behind’s “adequate yearly progress” rules over at the TitleIderland blog.  She makes some good points and is well worth reading but this doozy is worth looking at in more detail:

Take AYP, for example. It has several well-recognized problems. It looks at only one measure of achievement, has impossible expectations, doesn’t give schools credit for how far they have come, and then, worst of all, does not differentiate between broad and limited failure when dishing out consequences. Clearly, AYP was not as-well-thought out as it should have been, even if most people thought that reauthorization would have fixed its problems before they got out of hand.

She’s right that AYP does only look at one measure of achievement although it’s debatable in a how many measures you want in an accountability system like this and how much you want to use other mechanisms such as parental choice.

But the law clearly does give schools credit for progress.  The original law included a growth model (known as “safe harbor) that gave schools credit for improving student performance even if they missed targets.  That provision was subsequently expanded through waivers by Secretary of Education Spellings to allow states to use even broader “growth” models.  The problem is that in some places the achievement of some groups of students is so low that even with these generous allowances schools still fail to reach the targets.  There is now a raging debate about whether the response there is even more generous allowances for some progress, focusing only on the very bottom 5 percent of schools, or saying enough is enough and intervening and if so, how?

Whether NCLB has impossible expectations is a judgement call.  2014 wasn’t really the deadline, it’s more like 2017 because of how the law actually works.  And only about 92 percent of kids in a school are expected to pass the tests and passing is based on state determined passing scores (pdf) – or cut scores in the jargon – on state tests.  Those often are not very demanding.   So, back in 2001, was expecting schools to prepare about 9 in 10 kids to pass not especially demanding tests 16 years in the future a ridiculous national goal?  That’s up to you.  And Connor is certainly right that people figured the law would be fixed by 2007 or 2008, which is one reason the law’s goals worked the way they did. For a variety of reasons that hasn’t happened.

But her “worst of all point” is, well, perhaps worst of all. It’s a serious misunderstanding of what the law requires.  Section 1116 of the law lays out the consequences for schools that do not meet AYP goals.  After two years schools must develop an improvement plan and offer students public school choice.  After three years they must offering free-tutoring (in the through-the-looking glass world of education policy free tutoring for kids is considered a “sanction” by the way).  And in years 4, 5, and subsequently they must take corrective steps.

The provisions in years one and two don’t differentiate.   All schools in those categories are supposed to implement them.  That hasn’t worked well and today because of waivers, non-enforcement, and evasion those provisions are largely meaningless.  And there has been too little regulation of the tutoring industry in most states so the quality ranges from quite good to unacceptably lousy with almost no oversight for outcomes.

However the more serious consequences clearly allow for differentiation.  Here’s the most draconian stuff that could come into play after 7 years of not meeting performance targets:

‘(i) Reopening the school as a public charter school.

‘‘(ii) Replacing all or most of the school staff (which may include the principal) who are relevant to the failure to make adequate yearly progress.

‘‘(iii) Entering into a contract with an entity, suchas a private management company, with a demonstrated record of effectiveness, to operate the public school.

‘‘(iv) Turning the operation of the school over to the State educational agency, if permitted under State law and agreed to by the State.

‘‘(v) Any other major restructuring of the school’s governance arrangement that makes fundamental reforms, such as significant changes in the school’s staffing and governance, to improve student academic achievement in the school and that has substantial promise of enabling the school to make adequate yearly progress as defined in the State plan under section

(Bold added because one of the most common misconceptions is that the law requires everyone in a school to be fired)

You can do a lot under that, especially the last one, if you’re serious about changing things and not just evading responsibility. What’s more, when Secretary Spellings gave the states the ability to apply for waivers to do even more differentiated things do you know what happened?  About nothing.  The plans the states submitted were uncreative and basically status quo in terms of the current law.

So two takeaways.  First, Secretary Duncan recently told me in an interview that there was confusion about the amount of flexibility the law offered among some state officials.  He’s right about that and it’s not a new issue.  The Clinton-era “Ed Flex” initiative showcased this – more than 40 percent of the waiver requests were for things that were already allowable under the law.  The perception of a regulatory straightjacket outpaces the reality.

Second, when it comes to tackling these problems we have a serious failure of creativity, imagination, and of course political will.  That’s not this law’s fault and it’s not going to be solved by any future law. Rather it’s cultural, deep-rooted, and demands real leadership from within the field.

Smart essay by Ama Nyamekeye in Ed Week on using data and testing.

Here’s some art and poetry from students incarcerated at the New Beginnings Youth Development Center outside of Washington.  And here are some audio readings. Some backstory on the program and the larger issues here.

In The Times, Mike Winerip writes-up the new Steven Brill book “Class Warfare.” Here’s Brill’s response (submitted but not yet posted):

I appreciate that Mr. Winerip thinks I have “seen the light” at the end of the book. What he doesn’t realize, though not for lack of my trying to explain it to him, is that I was simply reporting what I found over two years. I was not trying to render, let alone reconcile, a verdict for or against his (anti-reform) point of view.

However, despite his distinguished prior career as an reporter, I am not surprised by the apparent anger in Mr. Winerip’s opinion column, let alone his decision to distort my book by ignoring all in it that describes teachers (and even teachers’ union leaders) in a positive light and strains to explain, and depict from the classroom, how difficult effective teaching is. When he talked with me, it was almost as if he’d been waiting to unload on me for years. He freely cast epithets, some profane, at many of the men and women portrayed in the book, and refused to consider that his reporting about alleged “skimming” of the best students at the Harlem Success charter network might be based on faulty data. (Though he did, I guess in attempt to humor me, chuckle when I tweaked him for ignoring in a prior article that I was the product of Queens, New York elementary and middle public schools, before winning a full scholarship to go to a prep school – whereupon he repeated this revelation in this article.)

After he slammed a phone down on me on Friday when I tried to get him into the weeds of that Harlem Success data, I sent Mr. Winerip an email urging him to reconsider. I never received a reply. Whether my reading of the data on Harlem Success is right or wrong (and I believe it is correct), I think his approach to dealing with the issue, let alone the near-venom of his piece today, speaks for itself.
Update: Winerip responds.

You don’t see a press release like this every day (pdf):

Education Secretary Announces $66 Million Awarded to Reform Pennsylvania’s Lowest-Achieving Schools

Tomalis calls out eligible schools that failed to apply; those with subpar applications

Carolyn Bucior turns in one worth checking out…

Because of space, some stuff couldn’t make it into the Arne Duncan School of Thought interview in TIME, here’s one answer I thought was pretty interesting though:

How should Americans think about the consequences of failing to address our educational problems?

Our ability to provide a great education and to have a strong country and a strong country are inextricably linked. The jobs of the future are going to require some sort of college-level experience whether it’s two-year, four-year, trade or technical but the world has changed. When I was growing up on the south side of Chicago thirty years ago in high school my friends could drop out and still get a decent job in the stockyards and steel mills and own their own homes, support a family, and do OK. Those jobs are a distant memory of a bygone era. The jobs today are going to go to countries that are producing knowledge workers. And many countries are out-educating us.

Second, to have a strong flourishing vibrant democracy you want an educated citizenry who are participatory and knowledgeable. And the only way you get that is great public education. And this is the civil rights issue of our generation. The dividing line in our country today is less around race and class than it is around educational opportunity.

Sara Mead and Kevin Carey have a new Brookings paper with some interesting ideas for training early-child hood educators.  Well worth checking out.

TIME ran an excerpt of my Arne Duncan interview last week – the part about Rick Perry and Texas schools.  Here’s the full interview including the Secretary on waivers, poverty, teachers unions, RTT implementation issues, problems in college sports, education spending (and how he showed Iowa religion on pre-K), and whether the administration’s initiatives are durable enough to survive if the President is not reelected next year.

A couple of items:

How do you respond to critics who say that linking waivers to conditions [such as improving teacher evaluations or data systems] goes beyond the authority you have under the law?

Secretary Spellings had waiver authority and used it. We’re doing the same thing, and we’re absolutely confident in our legal authority. I know not everyone in Congress is thrilled, but I’ve talked to 45 or 46 governors, almost every governor, Republican, Democrat, everyone is saying, “At least someone in Washington is listening to the real world.” Haley Barbour in Mississippi said, “Thank God someone is listening.” There isn’t one governor saying, “I’m not interested” or “Why are you doing this?”

You’re a former college athlete. College sports scandals are in the news lately, Ohio State and now Miami. How big of a problem do we have in college athletics?

You have to have consequences. And not only historically has there been no consequence for bad behavior, there has actually been lots of incentives for bad behavior. If you do the wrong thing, you hurt kids but you win more games and leave a program in ruins as you catapult to the next job and get a salary increase.

What about the states? Are you going to be pushing them to do more with less?

…For instance, Iowa was thinking about cutting back on early-childhood spending, and I challenged them not to do that. The governor, to his credit, came out a couple of days afterward and said they were maintaining their commitment to early-childhood education.

So would you pull Race to the Top money from a state?

Absolutely. No question. But as long as folks are working hard in good faith, I’m good with that.

You can read the entire interview by clicking here.

Sara Mead’s got your Cliffs Notes on the federal Early Learning Challenge grants material released yesterday.

Arne Duncan is threatening waivers and Congress is grumbling. There is howling on the right and left about the feds being too pushy and punishing schools and teachers.  Anecdotes and accusations fly, and lawyers have leapt into the edu-fray.

It is getting awfully noisy, and ear-splitting politics seldom produces smart policy. So how about a summer’s end education policy reset?

President Obama should hold an education beer summit.

To encourage bonhomie and keep egos in-check, gaudy Hawaiian shirts and baggy shorts should be required attire for attendees (Arne Duncan, George Miller, John Kline, etc.)  And to keep the discussion fact-based and rational, everyone should arrive prepared to discuss Paul Manna’s Collision Course: Federal Education Policies Meet State and Local Realties (CQ Press, 2011).

In this trim book, Manna, a William and Mary professor, judiciously reviews all the credible studies available about NCLB and its implementation.  The result?  An even-handed assessment that clarifies the law’s strengths (e.g., increased school focus on disadvantage students) and weaknesses (e.g., test-gaming).  Manna’s big find is that:

“NCLB created positive momentum and inspiring results in some states and local communities … [but] overall its theories of action were fundamentally in conflict with the institutional landscape on which American schooling operates.  That conflict prevented NCLB from realizing the grandest ambitions of its authors and from avoiding problems that plagued prior ESEA reauthorizations.”

To further help policymakers move forward, Manna also identifies five big things that the feds tend to do well in education policy.  Washington is good at:

1. Focusing public attention on school problems;

2. Providing money to needy schools;

3. Creating incentives to change school-level behavior;

4. Gathering and publishing useful data and information on education; and

5. Creating conditions that help state and local education reformers succeed.

These lessons are broad, but they would provide a sensible basis for discussing how to improve NCLB’s centerpiece, Title I, and maybe the entire federal role in schooling.

But none of this can happen without presidential leadership.  So, come on back to DC, Mr. President.  Get those invitations issued, and send out Joe Biden to grab a case or two of cold ones.

Kevin R. Kosar edits the Federal Education Policy History website.

This C-Span conversation with Diane Ravitch and Steven Brill is really worth watching.

Over at HuffPo Joy Resmovits turns in a good look at education in Texas under Governor Rick Perry. She gets at what I see as the real Texas story, some good things happened under Bush when he was governor and under his predecessors but Perry has largely coasted on that.  Doesn’t mean the schools suck and is a complicated narrative because it means giving Bush – gasp! – some credit.  But the facts point in that direction.

Even with everything else on his plate Joel Klein is still all over the education issue.  Thought piece on education reform here and a review of the Steven Brill book here – must read if you’re following the Gotham details.

More Texas sucks fallout. PolitiFact takes a look at Secretary Duncan’s claim that class sizes are growing fast in the Lone Star State.

And Steven Brill turns in a must-read essay about the education state of play on Reuters.

Three notes on the Michelle Rhee – DCPS cheating issue that is again front and center after today’s NYT column by Michael Winerip:

1. It still seems to me that it’s pretty clear some cheating went on in D.C.  But I’d be surprised if Rhee even tacitly knew about it.  And it’s worth noting that the National Assessment of Educational Progress – a test that’s hard to cheat – shows gains in D.C.
2. Rhee’s in a tough spot here. She’s the former chancellor, which means a policy of not commenting on an ongoing investigation in the city’s schools is a reasonable one.  No one wants their predecessor splashing around in a situation like this or talking with the media.  And if she were doing that you could write a column about how inappropriate that is.  But, this is exactly why Rhee’s initial instinct to comment as well as the substance of her remarks were ill-considered and created the box she’s in.  Still, at this point she should stay quiet until the ongoing investigation is done and cooperate with it.
3. In general, and in this case, cheating investigations are really messy and generally turn on confessions or corroborated accusations.

My take on the larger cheating issues here.

Smart post from Title I Monitor about the work of the fiscal commission and historical echoes. Implicit commentary on our changing politics, as well.

A Connecticut Middle School principal writes about some collaboration between charter and district public schools. Too little of this.

I was surprised that of all the things one could criticize Rick Perry about Secretary of Education Arne Duncan chose the quality of Texas schools. They’re not great but nowhere near the nation’s worst.  And they do compare favorably with Chicago’s schools so it seemed an odd choice of ground to fight on.  In any event, I asked Duncan about this during an interview for next week’s School of Thought column at TIME.  Here’s how it went:

Why is Arne Duncan messing with Texas? I asked the Secretary of Education about this a few hours after he injected himself into the presidential-election scrum. Policy wonks like me had woken up to baffling reports that Duncan told Bloomberg Television’s Al Hunt that the Texas school system “has really struggled” under Rick Perry, the GOP governor who just announced he is running for President. “Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college,” Duncan said in the TV interview, which is scheduled to air this weekend, telling Hunt that he feels “very, very badly for the children there.”

When I asked Duncan about this dire assessment in an interview I had scheduled today for my next School of Thought column, the former head of the Chicago school system was light on specifics…

You want specifics?  Click this link and read the entire column over at TIME.

It seems we’re having a bit of trouble with the comment feature on the blog – we use a spam filter because the quantity of spam comments is unbelievable and would render the comment section unusable otherwise.  But that software sometimes acts up.  If you’re having problems posting please email me at eduwonk AT eduwonk.com and tell us what happened so we can replicate any problems and solve them.  Thanks!

This week’s TIME School of Thought is about advice for parents sending kids off to college – a lot of that going on this week and next.   To help think about the issues I talked with Dr. Drew about wellness, sex, drugs and alcohol, and mental health.

With thousands of kids starting to pack for their first year at college or preparing to return after the summer break, now is a good time to talk to them about some important health and wellness issues on campus. To help parents figure out what to look for, and worry about, School of Thought asked Dr. Drew Pinsky, the bestselling author and TV and radio host who has been dubbed the “surgeon general of youth culture” by the New York Times. On his college radar: prescription drugs, hook-up culture, and processed food. As a practicing physician and the father of triplets, Dr. Drew isn’t fielding abstract questions — his own kids are starting university this fall.

Colleges students face choices about all these issues, but here’s an easy choice for you – click here to read the entire column.

Several Race to the Top jobs in Albany helping New York.

Diane Ravitch and Simon & Schuster are lawyered-up and in some back and forth about the new Steven Brill book “Class Warfare.”  What seems to be in dispute is not whether Ravitch took speaking fees from various stakeholders in the education debate but how much exactly and whether Brill’s calculations are flawed.

But from where I sit the key questions seem to have more to do with transparency and obligations to disclose than speaking fees per se as well as how the media should balance highly informed and connected commentary with disclosure and conflicts of interest.  Those are not questions with simple answers.  Read the letters yourself:

Ravitch attorney to Simon & Schuster (pdf).

Simon & Schuster respond (pdf).

Will all this spark a thoughtful conversation about transparency in the education debate?  Or will it devolve into the usual food fight?  You’ll never go broke betting on the latter!

For the record, I disclose paid speaking fees just like any other consulting income when writing about groups/issues where it’s germane.

Eric Schwartz and Fred Frelow discuss extended-learning time in Ed Week coming out the ELT summit earlier this summer.

Here’s a pretty cool and useful tool to look at charter school performance in New York City.

Update: Similar tool for D.C. here.

The #1 and #2 finishers in the Republican straw poll in Iowa this weekend have some interesting (read not especially relevant to the mainstream debate) views about schools and ed policy – Paul has the standard libertarian take and Bachmann is more than a little out there and had a rocky experience launching a charter school.  But the next finisher, Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty, who subsequently dropped out of the race, has been regarded as something of a leader on education.  Indeed, when “education insiders” were asked, “which of the announced Republican candidates for President would be the best for education policy?” We were not handicapping odds of winning but rather policy quality. On that measure over the past few months Pawlenty consistently finished well ahead of the pack.  But in addition to Pawlenty’s other struggles, education doesn’t seem to matter a lot in the campaign right now and seems unlikely to absent some economic changes.