There is a lot of angst and upset in Virgina over this year’s “adequate yearly progress” results under No Child Left Behind.   62 percent of schools didn’t meet performance targets, a sharp jump from last year.  Everyone is outraged about the law.  After all, 99 percent of schools around the state are accredited, right?

Well, here’s a different way to look at it. 14 percent of African-American 8th-graders in Virginia score proficient or better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (and only 40 percent of white students do) in reading.  Just one in four boys in Virginia is proficient or better, too.  Mathematics isn’t really any better.  Given that backdrop, is it really so surprising that when a law comes along that requires the use of disaggregated data – so overall averages can’t obscure big pockets of low-performance – 60 percent of schools need to do better?

No Child Left Behind is hardly perfect, but it is pointing out in a pretty uncomfortable and quite important way that Virgina’s approach to school accountability and accreditation obscures the struggles of too many of the Commonwealth’s students.  Don’t shoot the messenger, heed the message.

There arguably is a train wreck around state standards but it doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with No Child Left Behind – predates it even! This will be no matter for the advocates though, they can quickly pivot from “NCLB is creating a race to the bottom” to “NCLB is keeping us from having really high expectations…”

Renegade Upstarts sounds like a good name for band.  In fact, it’s a movement quietly – and not so quietly – happening in and around teachers unions. This week’s School of Thought at TIME takes a look at the new organizations that are springing up as alternative voices within and around the teachers unions. Can they succeed where many others inside and outside of teachers unions have not?

…But perhaps the biggest strategic pressure for reform is starting to come from teachers themselves, many of whom are trying to change their unions and by extension change their profession. These renegade groups, comprised generally of younger teachers, are trying to accomplish what a generation of education reformers, activists and think tanks have not: forcing the unions to genuinely mend their ways. Here are the three most talked about initiatives…

…It’s too early to tell whether any of these groups — or even all of them working in tandem — will succeed in changing the teachers’ unions. Will the uprisings bring about a transformative revolution like Tahrir Square or a deadlock like Libya? And while ridiculous seniority policies provide easy targets, more complicated issues such as teacher evaluation and creating a genuinely professional culture within schools lie ahead for them. Union leaders, meanwhile, bristle at the upstarts and so far seem less inclined to help them than to co-opt or marginalize them. And there is an obvious structural hurdle facing the insurgents: like all unions, teachers’ unions exist to protect their members, creating a natural conflict between, say, maintaining job security for everyone and implementing measures that differentiate based on performance or create real accountability for results. 

…But when you talk to progressive union leaders and the teachers at the vanguard of this new movement, it’s striking how much they have in common — even accounting for disagreements around specific policies. Most notably, they share a frustration with the education conversation today and a desire for actual change.

You have an alternative, too.  If you choose to read the entire column you can do so by clicking here.

Then here’s your chance to win $10K.

To help get a sense of the different laws dealing with teacher quality passed in the last few years Bellwether took a look at some of the key ones in CO, FL, IN, IL, and TN.  We’re making the analysis public and you can get it right here. Keep in mind that we’re looking at the laws themselves, not implementation so it’s possible that a good law could be implemented poorly or that skillful state officials could make a poorly designed law work well in practice with some implementation fixes.

That said, this month’s Education Insider asked policy insiders about the biggest risk of these laws and 79 percent said the biggest risk was that the ambition of these new laws outstrip the technical know-how of the field today.

I’m not opposed to a new round of waivers on No Child Left Behind, but the devil is in the details.  Unfortunately, the details seem to be getting short shrift lately in favor of the same talking points.  To wit, let’s take a look at today’s NYT story on the forthcoming Duncan waiver proposal.  Here it is (mostly) annotated with text from the article in itals.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will unilaterally override the centerpiece requirement of the No Child Left Behind school accountability law, that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.

Well, it’s not really 100 percent, more like 92 percent or so, and it’s not 2014 in practice but really several years later. And in practice for a school to make “adequate yearly progress” often only 6 or 7 in 10 of its students need to be passing a test at the proficient level right now.  And, to be proficient doesn’t mean a perfect score on a test, often more like getting half the questions on a test right.  That all makes it sound too reasonable though. Besides, those are details!  Nothing but details!

Mr. Duncan told reporters that he was acting because Congress had failed to rewrite the Bush-era law, which he called a “slow-motion train wreck.”

This is the same Mr. Duncan who a few months ago predicted that 82 percent of schools would not make “adequate yearly progress” this year.  That hasn’t happened, as many predicted it wouldn’t at the time. He’s the S&P of AYP!  Still, a lot of schools are struggling to meet performance targets.  That’s surprising, why, in a country where 8 percent of low-income Americans can expect to earn a bachelor’s degree by the time they are 24 and that has high school dropout rates for minorities approaching 50 percent?  But that’s context!  Nothing but context!

Conservatives said it could inflame relations with Republicans in the House who want to reduce, not expand, the federal footprint in education. But Mr. Duncan and White House officials described their plan as offering crucial relief to state and local educators as the No Child law, which President George W. Bush signed in 2002, comes into increasing conflict with more recent efforts to raise academic standards.

Actually, both these things can be true at the same time.  No one expected No Child Left Behind to be in place for a decade and waivers do encroach on Congress’ turf.

Under the current law, every school is given the equivalent of a pass-fail report card each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve, and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.

Whoa…The law (and some subsequent waivers during the Bush Administration) actually allows for some differentiation, the states have just done a lousy job actually doing it.  And the two major aspects of the law’s accountability system that didn’t differentiate – public school choice and free tutoring for students in persistently low-performing schools – are already waiver eligible and their sharp edges are long gone.  And if you’re worried about suburban schools that are neglecting some low-scoring students the last thing you want to do is ease up on accountability – what do you think this whole rhetorical push about “labeling” schools is all about anyway?  People in “good” suburban schools don’t want to hear about achievement gaps and the leaders of those school systems are responding to that.

About 38,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools fell short of their test-score targets under the federal law last year, and Mr. Duncan has predicted that number would rise to 80,000 this year.

Skeptics said Mr. Duncan’s predictions were exaggerated, but a huge number of schools are falling short under No Child’s school rating system. Eighty-nine percent of Florida’s public schools, for instance, missed federal testing targets, although 58 percent of Florida schools earned an A under the state’s own well-regarded grading system.

Skeptics said? Well actually there is data and the numbers are nowhere near the Administration’s claim.  Besides, is Florida really the most illustrative example? Most states are not Florida, which is a genuine national reform-leader.  Go next door to Alabama, for instance.  But that’s data, nothing but data!

When Mr. Duncan sketched an outline of the administration’s waiver plan in June, Representative John Kline, the Minnesota Republican who is chairman of the House education committee, demanded that Mr. Duncan show by what legal authority he would override the federal law. Mr. Duncan responded by citing provisions of the No Child law itself that give the education secretary broad waiver powers.

Oh man, this is complicated.  Who is right?  How will we ever get to the bottom of this?  If only the law actually said something about this that could be shared with readers.

For a waiver to be approved, they said, states would need to show that they were adopting higher standards under which high school students were “college- and career-ready” at graduation, were working to improve teacher effectiveness and evaluation systems based on student test scores and other measures, were overhauling the lowest-performing schools, and were adopting locally designed school accountability systems to replace No Child’s pass-fail system.

Those requirements match the criteria the administration used last year in picking winning states in its two-stage Race to the Top grant competition. Ms. Barnes said states would not be competing against one another with their waiver applications. But the similarity irked critics.

“It sounds like they’re trying to do a backdoor Round 3 of Race to the Top, and that’s astonishing,” said Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. He called Mr. Duncan’s plan “a dramatically broad reading of executive authority.”

Conservatives are “irked” with an Obama policy?  OK, rare and clearly newsworthy.  By the way, was AEI so outraged when former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings actually went outside the law and created new law as part of her waiver package?  I recall silence but please correct me if I’m wrong about that?  Besides, I thought these guys liked a strong executive.  Anyway, the details on the Duncan plan are not public yet but *so far* it sounds like he’s only proposing to use policies that are on the books because of a previous Congressional authorization (in ARRA) not making up new law.  But don’t let that get in the way of a good talking point!

The plan appears likely to gain broad support from state education officials, however. More than a dozen states have already asked the department for changes to their No Child school accountability plans, or are about to do so, said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. “Many states feel that we need major changes in the law, because it’s identifying such an outlandish number of schools that it’s losing credibility,” he said.

Wait, the states want flexibility and a way out from some of the accountability?  No way! Unprecedented!

The law allowed states to adopt local academic standards and determine their own passing scores on tests after it took effect in 2002. The requirement that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014 encouraged lower standards, which make it easier for more students to score as proficient. Since early 2010, however, more than 40 states have agreed to adopt higher standards, and the 2014 deadline is complicating their efforts, Mr. Duncan said.

Actually, when the Fordham Foundation went on a hunting expedition to document this “race to the bottom” all they found was a “walk to the middle” in some states.  And how exactly is the 2014 deadline complicating state efforts to adopt higher standards since there is no assessment in place yet for these new standards and still no formal governance arrangement in place for what it means to adopt them in the first place?

In Tennessee, for instance, 91 percent of students scored at or above the proficient level in math under the state’s old standards, but under new, tougher standards adopted recently, the proportion plummeted to 34 percent.

Wait.  That makes it sound as though there is a reason schools aren’t meeting performance targets, I’m completely confused now.

“The current law serves as a disincentive to higher standards, rather than as an incentive,” Mr. Duncan said.

That is probably true, actually, but would it kill someone to explain why?

Aspen’s Ross Wiener has a good and sober look at the cheating issue in the Washington Post today. He makes a point that I made a few months ago in  TIME and that is too often overlooked in the back and forth about cheating: Until support (training, hiring, curriculum, evaluation, etc…) for educators is matched with expectations put on them you’re going to get some cheating.

I’ve written repeatedly (for instance here and here) about how the breakthrough technical innovation of Teach For America is its screening process for prospective teachers. TFA has also made some important cultural innovations but that’s a separate issue.  A new study from Will Dobbie at Harvard takes a look at the technical side of recruiting in relation to student achievement (pdf). At Ed Week Sawchuk looks at the larger implications of the study.

Being able to use non-readily-observable characteristics like tenacity, perseverance, and problem-solving skills in the hiring process in a predictive way is one way to improve teacher effectiveness.  High-performing (and in some cases large) organizations from the U.S. armed forces to for-profit and non-profit ventures use various screens like this – if you interview at Bellwether and you’ll get a taste of it, for instance.  It’s overdue in education and it’s a shame all the ridiculous back and forth about Teach For America continues to obscure what that organization has learned over two-decades by refining and changing their practices. They recruit effectively at a wide-range of schools – there just might be something to learn there that could be applied more broadly.

Check out this item from the Washington Post on acceptance rates and some background on this year’s incoming Teach For America corps.

Some really thoughtful feedback to yesterday’s TIME column about how my wife and I chose a school. Couple of things worth amplifying.  First a friend pointed out that she and her husband have no choice but to move because all the options around them are low-quality – that’s a real issue and I hope it was implicit in our piece that the discussion was predicated on being able to choose among some acceptable options.

Second, a few people both on TIME’s comment section and in emails to me were dismayed that I didn’t mention curriculum and what a parent should look for.  That omission was deliberate. Curriculum matters a lot but this was about how the average parent could choose a school and curriculum is sufficiently complicated that I don’t think everyone should splash around in it.  After all, even the experts don’t agree.  That’s why I left it at: “Can the teachers talk with you after class about the curriculum and how they make decisions and set expectations” in the column.

Third, a TIME commenter was bummed that I didn’t mention talking to kids.  I thought this line pretty much covered that: “And we talked to kids, whose perspective is invaluable because they live it every day.”  They’re a great resource and in addition to talking to your friends and neighbor’s kids I’d be leery of any school that didn’t let you spend time talking to students and didn’t have (older) students show you around and talk candidly with you.

Finally, a few comments on rural (about half the school districts, a third of the schools, and a fifth of the students nationally) where there is often little choice as a few people pointed out.  That’s true, there are fewer options, and we saw that while living for almost eight years in a rural community. Yet, while rural locations add some constraints, some of our rural problems are a failure of creativity.  For my part, I’m sick of all the chatter about how distance learning is the way out. It’s a lot more complicated than that and there still is too little high quality material in the online sector – plus a lot of it just replicates the mediocre instruction you can get live and I wouldn’t want my kids sitting through that so don’t want it for rural kids either.  But, cooperation among rural districts – and there are some good example of this – as well as using technology in high-quality ways, and allowing smaller schools, can offer parents more options even in many places with more dispersed population.

As part of Education Nation write an essay about your work – win a trip to New York City!

School of Thought at TIME is back from its summer break and so are my kids, who are starting kindergarten.  I don’t generally write about them on this blog or in TIME and that’s not going to change but my wife and I made an exception this week.  Hope it’s useful, interesting, or both.

I’m a policy guy, not a daddy blogger. As a general rule, I don’t discuss my children in this column or on my Eduwonk blog, but when TIME asked me to write about how my wife (who also works in education) and I chose our kids’ elementary school, I figured why not. We are constantly besieged by friends and colleagues about how we went about picking a school, as if there was some secret education-analyst methodology I was privy to. I wish that were true! But even though I don’t have access to the secret sauce, I do have a pretty good sense of how to kick a school’s tires. Plus, I think it would be a shame not to use all of our parental angst for the greater good. And so, as our kids start a new year at a public school, here are some lessons from our school-hunting experience that might help guide yours.

Unlike a lot of school-shopping parents, you have a choice.. Choose to read the entire column here.

Don’t miss Vicki Phillips on the Gates Foundation’s Shared Learning Collaborative.

New study on Rocketship Ed’s Dreambox work, well-worth checking out.

This conference on public sector employment law looks interesting, timely, and likely to have actual content of interest. Here’s a new report from the Commerce Department on gender and STEM careers. Titleonederland says obligate those Title I dollars now!

Tennessee SCORE is seeking a Director of Policy and Research. And Charter Board Partners is hiring as well - great new organization.

Easy pun, I know. The new GAO report on the School Improvement Grants ought to be sobering.  Whiteboard has more.

This “everyone is saying teachers are overpaid” meme has quickly gained traction among the credulous.  You can apparently attract celebrities like John Stewart and Matt Damon to rallies by playing the mom card and telling them that people are saying teachers are overpaid and it’s important to push back on that notion.  Great, except for the most part it’s another in a long list of strawmen in the education debate.  In fact, to the extent anyone in the mainstream of the education conversation is saying anything even approaching “teachers are overpaid” the conversation centers on the sustainability of current public sector benefit schemes for retirement (pdf) and health care.  And while some of the “crisis” rhetoric is overblown there is a real problem with teacher pensions in some states. In the public debate that’s a different issue though than cash compensation, which is what people usually discuss when they want to argue about this. So, it is worth pointing out that while teachers are not overpaid, the wages are competitive in many places.  Like the pension issue, and given the structure of our education “system” like most issues, there is a a great deal of variance.

Let’s take Virginia as an example.  If you teach in Prince William County, a suburban community southwest of Washington, D.C. that’s not a cheap place to live but also is not Arlington, Loudoun, or Fairfax counties you’ll crack $100K a year on a 223 day contract (pdf) and be above $90K working a shorter schedule with a bachelor’s degree by the end of your career.*  Your earnings go up with more credit hours and degrees – generally paid for by school districts.  And you get a pension.  So a household there with two teachers in their late 30s with 15 years of experience wouldn’t be too worried about the government cutting the tax break for their jet but would be far above the median income in Virginia (about $61K) and also in the upper 10 percent of U.S. households.  I don’t happen to think that’s too much, teaching should be professional work and earn a professional wage – still, it’s not a bad wage either.  Starting salaries aren’t too shabby either.

On the other hand, here’s the salary schedule in Madison County Virginia.  It’s a rural county about 40 minutes north of Charlottesville, Virginia and about 90 minutes southwest of Washington, D.C. (and not that far from Prince William County).  There, 29 years of service and you’re still making in the $50s and less than the median income in VA.  Even accounting for the lower cost of living in Madison County and its surrounding counties this isn’t a competitive wage for professional work.  And just as Prince William isn’t the extreme example on the high end Madison is not an outlier on the low-end of Virginia teacher salaries, there are counties that pay less elsewhere in the state.

Takeaways:  First, again, look beneath the rhetoric, there is a lot of variance in cash compensation for teachers and while teachers are not overpaid, in many places it’s also hard to argue that they’re systematically underpaid either.  Second, in the teacher pay conversation it’s important to distinguish what is being discussed a lot right now – sustainability of benefit schemes – with what isn’t, notably the idea that education reformers are keen to cut teacher pay or don’t think teachers should be paid a competitive wage.  As I noted on Twitter yesterday it’s ironic that villains du jour Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee raised teacher pay in their districts more than almost any of their peers nationally…Third, at some point we will have to have a conversation about productivity and quality. Rather than spending a lot of time arguing about how much teachers are paid we’d do better to have a conversation about how they’re paid.  Despite the National Education Association’s subtle Kremlin-like signaling shift on performance pay at their annual meeting this year the fact is that “steps and lanes” (paying teachers based on degrees and years of service) remains the overwhelming method used.  Differentiating based on challenging assignments, geographic and subject-matter shortage areas, and, yes, performance, is long overdue in a field that aspires to be seen as professional.

Finally, while money matters, the conversation focuses on money at the expense of all the non-monetary things that matter to professionals, too.  Opportunities for professional growth, leadership opportunities, new responsibilities and challenges, and various other non-monetary tools are commonplace in most fields but surprisingly absent in this conversation as well as in many schools and school districts as an incentive and reward.  Accountability matters, too, for professionals and we have a long way to go on the technical, knowledge, and cultural side to get that closer to right.

*Update: A sharp-eyed commenter notes that not all teachers in a county like Prince William will be on the extended contract.  It’s a good point and re-reading I realized that sentence should have made that more explicitly clear than it did.  Regardless, the basic points about variance, relative household income, and what constitutes a competitive wage in a place like Virginia stand regardless.  The comment also brings up the whole issue of a 190-day +/- contract and the impact on salary, an issue for another day.

Blue Engine turning in some good results, check it out. Good example of new ways of doing things.