Someone just emailed me this wondering if the immigration people talk to the education people…

Better Lesson (social network-style lesson plan sharing) gets a TechCrunch shout-out on its latest round of funding. From where I sit, tools to help teachers and better professional development still seems like a big opportunity for innovation and business activity in the K-12 space.  Big unmet need and if it’s indeed true that it’s better to be a painkiller than a vitamin, plenty of pain among frustrated teachers. Also, a place where tech-enabled tools and strategies can play a role.

Yoo hoo…When you’re attacking Pedro Nogeura for being too pro-charter school you’ve lost the argument.

Washington Redskins play the St. Louis Rams on Sunday, perfect time to link this TIME interview with Rams defensive coach and former teacher Brandon Daly.

Check out the Administration’s new teacher prep reform package here (pdf). In a deviation from the norm, NEA apparently on board but fairly critical statement from AFT this morning complaining about holding schools of education accountable using student test scores of graduates and also chiding the Administration for ignoring their 2000 report on this issue. Stay tuned.

I’m late to this issue of paid trips for public officials and others in our field but here are a few thoughts.  First, this is a place where transparency can play a big role.  I actually think it’s OK for vendors to sponsor trips but it’s important to disclose that where relevant (eg in an article) and in the case of public officials to do so in a real-time way.  Don’t feel comfortable disclosing? Don’t go.  Second, not everyone thinks this way. Wireless Generation*, for instance, has a strict no entertainment policy, no gifts, no meals, no nothing except sponsoring open events, like a reception.  I think that’s too extreme though because, third, these sorts of trips can be a good way to learn about issues, spend time with colleagues, etc…insofar as it’s transparent.  When  you stop and think about it the idea that people are for sale for a lunch or a trip is pretty stupid.  As in politics, it’s the overall industry structure, not the small gives and trips, that create the problem.  In our case it’s bad  or non-existent signals for quality, a small market of very large vendors, and problematic state and local procurement policies.

I’ve been asked by more than a few folks what I think about the Rishawn Biddle – Rick Hess smackdown about the achievement gap.  Here’s a (relatively) short answer.  I don’t know how anyone can look at the data on college completion released this week, data on high school graduation, or frankly pretty much any outcome data from our educational system and not come to the conclusion that we have a serious problem of inequitable outcomes.  Forget the Chinese, I think that tears at our social fabric in some troubling ways and does violence to any semblance of equality of opportunity.

But, I think Rick is right that the trade-offs in addressing it are too often not acknowledged.  I don’t buy the idea that we have to give up music, arts, and so forth.  Plenty of schools disprove that every day. Rather, we should acknowledge that focusing on one group of students diminishes attention on another.  I for one, however, think that (within reason of course) it’s worth it on both social equity and economic grounds (also check out this report (pdf)) and found the recent Fordham report interesting but hardly earth-shattering (especially absent more trend data about what this looked like historically).  And of course it’s not an entirely zero-sum game although resource/emphasis choices do have to be made and despite all the happy talk about growth models and similar ideas they don’t eliminate those choices.  In the past, Rick and I have written about the trade-off issue ourselves even though we disagree about the best direction for policy.

I also think RiShawn has a point about professional contrarians in the chattering class.  You do sometimes get the sense that people are looking for a clever argument and headlines absent any underlying coherent theory of action or recognition that their words have consequences and that this debate affects peoples lives in terms of how it influences public policy.  And because those indulging themselves this way tend to be among the more comfortable in our society and the least directly affected by the data I discuss above, it’s disquieting.

*BW has consulted for Wireless.

New data on poverty for Hispanics has educational implications.  Larger context via this TIME column from a few months ago.

And the new report out this week on college completion is essential reading (pdf).

Bellwether and CAP are launching a weekly series of short blog posts on innovation in the public sector, here’s the first one, they’ll run for a bit.

Bipartisanship seems to be breaking out on education again. Last Friday’s White House event to formally launch the administration’s waiver strategy was lousy with Republican governors and state education chiefs saying that while they disagree with the administration on a lot of things they love the new flexibility.  This week in New York I helped Brian Williams with NBC’s Townhall with governors as part of Education Nation and asked Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell (about minute 0.59)- head of the RGA – about all this talk about dismantling education.*  He spoke up for state and local control but also talked about partnerships and declined to endorse the anti-Department of Education language we’re hearing on the campaign trail from the GOP candidates.  So that’s great right?

Well not so fast, and that’s the issue I look at in this week’s TIME School of Thought column:

A new consensus is emerging in education politics. But can the center hold? And would reformers even want it to? Bipartisanship is supposed to be a good thing — except for when Republicans and Democrats come together to try to paper over our education problems. That’s what worries me about the recent string of seemingly positive events.

One thing I am partisan about is the need for a vigorous and reliable media in our country.  You can do your part to support that by clicking here and reading the entire column over at TIME’s site. It’s got Senator Lamar Alexander’s NCLB bill, waivers, ESEA rumors, and the disconnect between what states say excellence is and what it actually is.

*I also asked Maryland’s Martin O’Malley – head of the DGA – about why more Democratic governors aren’t working with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, given his pretty successful education record there? And I asked governors of both parties about why when we talk about a 21st Century education system all the time we still are content with a 19th Century approach to funding it – via a heavy reliance on localized property wealth?  You can see all that on the video above starting about minute 59.

In this week’s TIME School of Thought column I take a look at the GOP field (Perry, Romney, Huntsman, Bachmann, Gingrich, and Paul) and their views, positions, and histories on schools.

Given how preoccupied everyone is with the economy, education is even less of an issue in this presidential campaign than usual. Most of the Republican candidates do not even include education positions on their websites. And the two GOP heavyweights who have garnered the best reviews from education reformers on both sides of the aisle are not even in the race: former Florida Governor Jeb Bush is sitting the campaign out, and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty dropped out after finishing a disappointing third in the Iowa straw poll. But as President Obama gets ready to put the debate about how to reform No Child Left Behind on the front burner (he’s planning a big speech at the White House for this Friday), the GOP candidates can’t avoid education forever. As some start to drop hints about what their education plans might look like, here’s a handicapper’s guide to the leading contenders and their views — and record — on education.

You can read the entire column for free – and pass/fail if you prefer -  by clicking on this link.

New York Times blurb for Reading Partners’ entry into NYC. The program has rapidly expanded in Washington, DC, and first launched in California.

Also, two papers on next generation learning ideas from Parthenon. And this AEI Outlook on compliance is worth a look.

Over at TitleIderland Nancy Connor takes some time to respond to this Eduwonk post (which itself was in response to this post she penned).

I agree with her take on the School Improvement Grants- although I think the triage approach the SIG initiative takes makes sense, it’s the intervention strategy itself that needs a second look.  But this graf is worth discussing:

Too often when a school was identified as needing restructuring under NCLB, the tendency was to go for the “any other major restructuring” option, which became a defacto way of shoving the problem under the rug. It was easy to say that having central office personnel spend more time in the school or replacing a principal who was retiring anyway met the letter of the law. It was a Band-Aid approach. The tougher options were avoided for many reasons, including the noted lack of will. But it is hard to assemble the will when many stakeholders regard the “restructuring” designation as illegitimate because of NCLB’s simplistic identification system. It is difficult to take a rating system seriously when a school that misses targets for a single group of kids gets the same “failing” grade as a school that misses virtually every target.

She’s clearly right on the first point, the tendency to take the easy way out by using the “any other major restructuring” option.  Sara Mead wrote about this a few years ago.  But when I wrote in my earlier post that, “…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.” Connor’s second-point is exactly what I was talking about.  Don’t bemoan the law, instead explain and convince the stakeholders, convince the public, and/or change the politics to create a better environment for change.  In too few places have local school leaders stepped-up and acknowledged that there is a serious problem – that the measuring stick might not be perfect but the persistently under-performing schools its identifying (and that’s hardly all of them but is more than 5 percent, by the way) do need serious interventions. Rather, the problems with the measuring stick are being used to shield schools – rhetorically and substantively – from interventions and even hard conversations and there is not enough leadership pushing past that.

In other words, state and local officials could differentiate more themselves and communicate more aggressively around this but they’re not. For all its problems I don’t think that is one you can fundamentally lay at the feet of No Child Left Behind or that just changing the law will fix.

RCP’s Carl Cannon takes a look at Jeb Bush and education in FL.

The Strategic Data Project fellowship is seeking a new round of applicants (pdf). There are information sessions in Boston (pdf) and New York (pdf) as well.

DC Public Education fund needs a new leader (pdf), this is a great opportunity to help drive change in D.C.

Want to get in the implementation game? Education Delivery Institute is hiring. And Teach For America is seeking a Director of Research and Analysis.

Congrats to Roland Fryer, one of this year’s MacArthur fellows.

The Economist takes a look at schools. The analysis overlooks just how much the debate about internal comparisons is alive with correlation – causation fallacies and cherry-picking of data and evidence but it’s hard to argue with the point that the education debate is shifting to a more empirical footing – that’s a big story of the last decade.  Also, watch for Ontario to emerge as the new Finland soon.  The fishing is better in Canada, so I’m fine with this trend.

E.D. Hirsch has an important op-ed in The Times about reading.  I don’t think the one-year drop is that big of a deal but he’s right about the larger trend:

The most credible analyses have shown that the chief causes were not demographics or TV watching, but vast curricular changes, especially in the critical early grades. In the decades before the Great Verbal Decline, a content-rich elementary school experience evolved into a content-light, skills-based, test-centered approach.

Everyone has an opinion on the Paul Tough article in the Sunday Times Magazine, and it’s a great piece of writing you shouldn’t miss.  But, don’t let the focus on it allow you to miss another spectacular piece – Clifford Levy’s account of his family’s school experience while he was a foreign correspondent in Russia.  There’s actually some overlap but it’s also just a wonderful story.

David Feith’s book “Teaching America” on civics education is just out. It’s a compilation of essays – I wrote one – and you can learn more through the website. There is an event in NYC next week to discuss it and events in D.C.

And a new report on civics education from the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools.  It’s a follow-up to their 2003 “Civic Mission of Schools” report. Here’s the report. And here’s Les Francis on that one.

Want more? Here’s my business plan for media to help with this issue from TIME School of Thought this summer.

This “new” ESEA bill introduced (good Politics K-12 overview here) by a group of Republican Senators – Alexander (TN), Burr (NC) Isakson (GA) and Kirk (IL) – is basically a time machine back to the 1990s.  There are some sensible ideas – I don’t think anyone really argues that the “highly qualified teacher” have worked.  But overall it’s just a pre-No Child version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act with some extras like program consolidation thrown in.  In fact, some of the same folks who back then were attacking the Clinton Administration’s approach to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as lacking teeth now want to take us back to the days when states got to decide how much an inch was and pick their own rulers to measure.  No Child Left Behind is far from perfect and long-overdue to be updated at this point but this would be a big step backwards. If the only bipartisan thing going in education is to toss minority and poor kids in the nation’s exurban and suburban communities under the bus because accountability is politically and substantively difficult then that’s not a bipartisanship worth having.

Though a rise in scores would be better, the drop in SAT scores this year isn’t as bad as it’s being made out to be in some quarters – actually in the long run it’s kind of good news if you think we should be expanding the ranks of students thinking about post-secondary education.

No, not that one.  Check out this new video with several of the organization’s leaders talking about the challenges and the work that Stand for Children does. Lost in the hoopla about Illinois was a sense of the depth and breadth of Stand for Children*, what they’ve accomplished across a host of states, and how they’re an important part of this growing mosaic of state education advocacy groups.

Stand for Children – Our Students Deserve Better from Stand for Children on Vimeo.

*Bellwether consults for Stand.

Michigan takes steps to addresses the cut score issue on state tests. This is another piece of missing context in the ongoing “AYP” circus.  More general background on cut scores here (pdf).

A new Bellwether paper by Kim Smith and Julie Peterson takes a look at how to increase the demand for innovation in education.

Our schools face a productivity crisis: we have raised our expectations for what they will accomplish and the number of students they will prepare at high levels, while holding resources relatively constant—or even decreasing them. By “productivity” we do not mean merely “efficiency.” Efficiency is about cost savings and when narrowly pursued, can actually put quality at risk. But improving public education is not about cutting corners, it’s about delivering greater and deeper learning to a greater number of our children, without a significant infusion of additional resources, be they time, money or energy, or all of the above…

…In other sectors, the “venturesome” role of customers allows innovation to flourish. As innovation researcher Amar Bhide has observed, “the willingness and ability of users to undertake a venturesome part plays a critical role in determining the ultimate value of innovations.” But in education, there simply isn’t enough of this so-called “venturesome” or “smart” demand to go around. Education buyers—mostly districts, but also states and schools—are, like most government agencies, extremely conservative and with complex, increasingly difficult jobs. Of course, there are some early adopters who eagerly push the market forward by piloting new programs and experimenting with new technologies, but the wider education field rarely rewards these innovators by adopting more effective innovations quickly and broadly, as other fields like technology, retail and manufacturing commonly do.

Though not unrelated issues I’ve long thought that economic mobility and social cohesion are more important reasons to improve our schools than economic competitiveness. (As an aside when I joked with my daughter the other day that if she didn’t work hard in school the Chinese would come and buy everything up her first reaction to that prospect was a wish that they arrive with food.)

Anyway, yesterday’s article in The Wall Street Journal about Proctor and Gamble and the middle class was depressing on that score and should be as much of a wake-up call as a story on international test scores (actually more, in my view).

While you’re at the WSJ, Stephanie Banchero & David Kesmodel turn in an overview of the state of play on value-added measures in education that’s worth checking out.

A big fight brewing over school construction? This Politico story points that way. We’ll need refreshments so be sure to load up on Davis-Bacon!

I was at a conference last week about public sector employment law.  Interesting discussions about the legal issues the increasing scrutiny of collective bargaining, salaries, benefits, and pensions is raising.

At one point someone asked a question about teachers with the predicate that everyone knows teachers don’t go into teaching for the money.   This is another of these chestnuts it would be great to put behind us.  Of course teachers don’t go into teaching just for the money, for starters the cash compensation isn’t all that good in many places.  But while I wouldn’t file this under “true but useless” as with a lot of things in education that nugget of “insight” obscures more than it reveals.  And, if the goal is to pay teachers better than today then perhaps the profession’s advocates ought not sell it as a missionary’s line of work but rather as a profession like any other where money along with other non-monetary incentives combine to make it attractive to some people.

The question made me think about a comment I heard Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg make earlier this year at the New Schools meeting.  He was asked about why Facebook was a for-profit rather than a non-profit given all the social things it seeks to do.  You could ask the same question of Google or a variety of other companies.  Zuckerberg responded that people come to work at Facebook for a lot of reasons – to make a difference in the world, to work with highly talented people and advance their careers, because they like to write code and work with software, because it’s an exciting and dynamic company, or just to make money because it’s a lucrative place to work – or some combination of those reasons.  His point was that the varied reasons allow Facebook to attract more talent than it might otherwise.

In education the reasons are different than the Facebook example but are varied as well.  For some the security is appealing, for others the flexible schedule, the deferred compensation (pensions and health care in retirement) becomes attractive as people progress in their career, and of course working with kids or trying to make a difference for them drives people – or some combination of these and other reasons. But money matters, too, in various ways.  You see this in labor market behavior, for example, and you see it in the data about pensions and retirement decisions.  Doing it just for the money and being influenced in one’s professional choices by money are two different issues and we’d be wise to disentangle them in the public conversation about teacher pay.

Compensation isn’t just about today’s teachers, it also matters in terms of recruiting tomorrow’s.  And to paint teachers as just do-gooders who are immune to the choices and incentives that drive all of us is just another way we infantilize rather than elevate teachers in our society. Besides, in a more pragmatic and political vein, in the era of public sector belt-tightening and Tea Party demands for austerity singling out one sector and saying they don’t care about the money (and often in the same breath saying they should be paid more)  doesn’t seem like a particularly smart strategy.

Some quick reax to the education parts of the President’s speech last night.

First, we’re talking about school construction again? Really? I’m getting that mid-1900s vibe…E-Rate anyone?  When I heard the President mention wiring schools for the Internet I threw on some Pearl Jam!

Actually, investing in education infrastructure makes a lot of sense from a stimulus point of view and because there is a real need.  But – cliche alert! – the devil is in the details. If infrastructure funding is spread too thin it ends up having a short-term stimulative effect but not laying the foundation for longer term initiatives.  Not unlike the debate about the ARRA recovery act, if enacted these dollars will be stimulative, sure, but they can also be stimulative and reform-oriented, too. Those are not opposing goals.  In this case, school districts can spend money in dribs and drabs, and that surely spreads it around more, but bigger projects – especially around energy efficiency, serious work to building envelopes etc…cost real money.  And the bigger projects have more long-term impact.  $30 billion is not a small sum but in the context of capital issues in our approximately 100,000 schools even with an amount like that you have to go deep not wide.  To put it another way, with the E-Rate we wired schools just in time for wireless Internet to become more efficient approach.  Let’s look ahead to the next thing with these dollars rather than investing a lot in soon-to-be-outdated approaches.

I’m still a fan of the regional infrastructure bank approach (here’s Sara Mead on the issue with a ten-year old paper that’s still relevant (pdf) and a shorter version from Ed Week) for education capital finance because it can create a more lasting funding mechanism over time.  But the infrastructure bank idea is just a small part of this overall package and based on the paper released so far it doesn’t look like it’s tied to the education dollars.

On the edujobs proposal.  It’s the same debate we’ve been having, yet again.  Are we going to have perpetual bailouts that are caused by inept hiring and human capital strategies?  Are we going to ask for any reciprocal reforms from states?  Say, just for example, committing to ending last-in/first-out layoff policies in exchange?  Here’s an example from Boston of why that might make sense. Here, too, the issue is less the spending per se than whether it’s actually going to move the field forward or just go for more of the same.

In 2001 and 2003 Fordham put together publications about teaching and curriculum relative to 9-11 and its aftermath.  With the 10th anniversary this weekend they’re releasing a compilation of essays from those volumes. Provocative stuff for educators, wonks, and everyone in between.  You can check it out here (pdf).

I get a lot of questions about what charter school guru Todd Ziebarth is up to these days.  And actually, although he’s pretty low key about it, the truth is that he’s taken something of a detour and is now playing outfield for the Toronto Blue Jays.

Students First is hiring for multiple roles.  Here are a few:  Senior Writer and Analyst, Policy and Data Policy Manager, and Director of Legislative Support.

Here’s a great opportunity to do community organizing and ed reform work in Petersburg Virginia (pdf).

And in New York (city or Albany) here’s a chance to get involved in school turnaround and accountability work in an interesting way (pdf).

My review of “Class Warfare” is below but per the attached (pdf) the book is now on The New York Times bestseller list at #26.  At #22 is “Wendy and the Lost Boys,” which is apparently not about the founding of TFA.

I previewed the Steven Brill ed reform book this summer but today’s TIME School of Thought column is a longer review of the book. It’s an important and well-researched book although it’s somewhat ahistorical and zealous as well:

I am one of 208 people Steven Brill interviewed for his education-reform chronicle Class Warfare. In addition to having an index and notes at the back of the book detailing who told him which details for each chapter, the lawyer turned journalist includes a section on sources, listing us in alphabetical order, followed by a separate page with job descriptions of 56 people he interviewed who requested not to be named. I mention these details to give you an idea of a) how methodical Brill is as a reporter and b) how dishy his book gets with all those unnamed interviewees. The source list in Class Warfare may read like the Who’s Who of modern education reform, but the chapters that precede it often feel more like The Real Housewives of Policy Wonk County…

You should read the entire book but for now you can read the entire review (and do your part to help the media industry) by clicking on this link.

Keep an eye on this professional development initiative. Tutor.com has already done some impressive work with anywhere/anytime tutoring for students – in fact, not well enough known but children of all active duty armed forces personnel, including reserve and National Guard on active duty, are eligible for free services from Tutor.com via a Department of Defense initiative.  So PD for teachers is a logical next step although it’s likely to bump into some of the deeper cultural issues in the education field. Big eval planned so stay tuned.