Four Futures Of School Reform Reactions, Right Now!

Fun event at the Aspen Institute this morning around the Futures of School Reform book and about the themes the project surfaced more generally. You can watch the event on Cspan later today (don’t miss HGSE’s Richard Elmore on the second panel).  I was part of the Futures project and it was an outstanding chance to step back from the day-to-day and really think about what might be possible and/or desirable in education with a diverse group of people.  A valuable exercise and the organizers at HGSE deserve a lot of credit.

Today’s event featured certain chapters – but the entire book warrants reading – and a few things stand out for me based on the ideas in Futures and the discussion this morning:

Poverty.  Futures features a chapter looking at what schools can/should do to better integrate efforts to address the conditions of poverty with schooling.  That naturally sparked a predictable debate about poverty and education. Honestly, for a field that allegedly doesn’t pay a lot of attention to poverty we sure do talk about it a lot! More seriously, it’s a frustrating “debate” because there is – among all sides of the education debate – generally agreement that poverty matters and is an issue.  There is also a fair amount of  agreement on social policy remedies and concern about the ridiculous levels of child poverty we tolerate today, although this can break down more, but far from exclusively, along party lines.

Where there is lot of disagreement is around what all this means for education policy.  In my view the crux question is the ‘all else equal one.’ Basically all else equal should we expect more from schools than they are delivering today?  Before you answer bear in mind that we have sub-60 percent graduation rates for minorities, 8 percent of low-income students earn a B.A. by age 24, etc… One can answer that question by saying, yes.  One can also say, yes, we should, and we should also be doing more to support children and families.  One can also answer it saying, no, we should not.  It’s a stark question but its starkness leads to policy and public spending choices either way rather than what we have now – an ascriptive debate that obscures a fair amount of common ground as well as the hard choices.

Choice. To me this is the most future of the futures issues. More choice and a mixed model of schooling is coming, it’s just a question of how fast and what it looks like.  People can disagree about whether that’s good or bad but the choice genie is out of the bottle and in this country we like choices. As I noted today at the event, choice is like gay marriage.  The polling on gay marriage makes it pretty clear that the demographics favor it and it’s going to happen because younger people favor it.   So opponents of gay marriage can slow down its legalization now but over time they are checkmated by demographics.  The  same is true of expanding choice in education, in my view.

What we talk too little about, however, is another stark question: Choice brings with it many benefits but it also has drawbacks. Today we put up with low-quality (and a lot of educational inequality) today, how much should and will we tolerate under a more choice-driven system?  It’s too glib to say that competition will take care of this – in education so far the evidence suggests otherwise.  And in most walks of life we recognize that some inequality is the price you pay for progress. It’s why, in general, we don’t have markets that are maximized just for efficiency but instead have regulations.  And it’s why we balk when inequality seems to be too great.  When it comes to choice we should be talking frankly about this question and without the easy answers that good policy or more political courage will take care of it.

Teachers’ jobs.  There is plenty of debate about the policy side of the teacher issue – evaluations, preparation and licensing, tenure and so forth but the school side is a huge issue, too.  We have to – within the context of the custodial role schools play looking after kids – make them more professionally friendly places. This is not a pro or anti-union issue, the unions have talked about mentoring and career ladders for a generation, for instance, but also support work rules that de-professionalize teaching. Rather, it is about recognizing what professionals today want from a workplace and trying to incorporate that into the life and operations of schools to the extent possible. For example, some flexibility in scheduling, tools and support to better leverage teachers’ work, collaborative models, and so forth. You often hear the quip that school is only worse for the kids than for the teachers.  That overstates it, but not too much.  If we want to professionalize teaching it’s vital to professionalize the job itself, not only the policies that surround it.

It’s going to be micro. Regardless of November’s elections we seem headed for a period of unevenness in policy, expectations, and accountability in education.  You see that in President Obama’s Race to the Top, the No Child Left Behind waivers, and also in Governor Romney’s emphasis on letting states set the course on education.  It all has a theme in common – we’re worrying less about a common floor or approach. Like all policy choices that one has tradeoffs, benefits and costs. But coupled with the decentralized nature of education governance it means that ideas like better integrating social and educational services, incorporating some lessons from overseas (for example around recruitment of teachers) and so forth are going to happen at a more micro level (states, large school districts, etc…) not through some grand stroke of national policy. That matters right now and to every chapter in the book in different ways.

Smarick And Aldeman Blog, UFT’s School Struggles, Teacher Evaluation Debate Does, Too. And Win A HEP Book!

First big thanks to the team at Bellwether for their great blogging at the top of the month and to the Obama and Romney campaigns for debating ed policy here last week.  You can read all that below. Going forward you can find Bellwether’s Andy Smarick over at Fordham’s Flypaper blog and BW’s Chad Aldeman at Ed Sector’s Q & E blog.

Apropos of nothing, education isn’t a big issue in the presidential race this year but there are a host of interesting state and local races and ballot initiatives around the country with big eduimplications.

Mike Antonucci with the best take I’ve seen about the struggles of the UFT’s charter school in New York City and some takeaways.  Point #2 is especially worth reading.  Any pleasure about this school’s struggles is the mirror image of the zest with which too many anti-reform types greet stumbles by reformers.

Harlem Village Academy’s Deborah Kenny writes about teacher evaluation in The Times.  Some of the same themes as this recent paper from Bellwether about teacher evaluation.  And if you want to know what states have and haven’t done on evaluation check this analysis out. But, politically this whole debate is stuck to some point because today’s emphasis on the mechanics of evaluation is a response to the lack of autonomy school leaders generally have.  If you don’t want “objective” measures and you don’t want supervisory discretion then you’re basically left with Ouija boards.  Mokoto Rich looks at some of that in The Times today.

In that story Linda Darling-Hammond argues that classroom observations are more reliable than value-added.  Here’s the politically incorrect dirty secret no one seems to want to say: Based on data from the Gates MET project and elsewhere they’re not unless you employ an army of evaluators – and they’re a lot more expensive regardless.  People say value-added bounces around but observations really do…What’s more pertinent is that value-add by itself doesn’t do anything to help teachers improve practice while observations can. And because most teachers do not teach in subjects and/or grades that are assessed by standardized tests it’s sort of a moot point anyway and other approaches are necessary.  Best piece that I’ve seen on the tradeoffs is by Tom Kane in Ed Next.

David Skinner’s new book ain’t bad at all – and has an educonnection. I’ll send a new Harvard Education Press book to the first person to post or contact me and correctly say what that connection is.

Romney Campaign: Restoring the Promise of American K-12 Education

This week surrogates from the Obama and Romney campaigns will discuss education policy issues here.  You can see previous posts below. This is a post by Marty West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and advisor to the Romney campaign:

Ensuring that all children in the United States have access to an education that equips them to pursue their dreams is both a fundamental American value and essential for lasting economic prosperity.  Yet in too many corners of our nation, disadvantaged children lack access to an effective school that can give them the opportunity they deserve.  Across the nation, our K-12 school system is a world leader in spending yet lags on virtually every measure of results.

Governor Romney’s plan to restore the promise of the American education system begins with a renewed commitment to choice and innovation.  For starters, he would take the $25 billion in federal funds for low-income and special education students and make them portable, following eligible children to any district or charter school—or enabling them to enroll in a tutoring program or take courses online.  This simple step would render irrelevant existing regulations on the use of federal funds that constrain local innovation; eliminate a key obstacle to making state and local education funds portable; and firmly establish the principle that public education funding should empower students, not sluggish and change-resistant district bureaucracies.  States like Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana and Ohio, all of which have taken the lead in creating private school choice programs would, for the first time, be able to use federal funds to support those efforts.  This is exactly the way Pell Grants work in supporting higher education options for students and one of the reasons why we have seen such innovation in different approaches in delivering higher education.

Of course, choice is only valuable if good choices exist.  To promote the supply of high-quality schools and encourage technological innovation, Governor Romney would require states accepting federal funds to eliminate caps on online programs and charter schools and establish equitable funding policies for digital education providers.  He would make federal funds available to support the expansion of charter management organizations with a track record of strong performance.

And he would expand and secure permanent funding for the over-subscribed DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides 1,700 desperately poor children in the nation’s capital with the opportunity to attend a private school.  A Congressionally mandated evaluation confirms that the program boosts high school graduation rate for participating students.  Yet President Obama, despite his inauguration promise to set aside ideology and fund programs that work, has repeatedly tried to eliminate the program and been sadly effective in curbing its growth.

Choice also needs to be supported with transparent information, if it is to drive improved performance.  That’s why Governor Romney’s proposals to reform No Child Left Behind focus on ensuring that parents receive accurate, timely information about their schools’ success in raising student achievement.  Report cards will assign schools clear letter grades, report student (and subgroup) performance against national benchmarks, and include information on spending that allows parents and taxpayers to hold schools accountable for their use of public funds.  In exchange for increased transparency – and in recognition of the woeful track record of the federally mandated school turnaround efforts favored by the Obama administration – states will be granted new flexibility when it comes to intervening in low-performing schools.

Finally, the evidence is clear that the supply of high-quality schools depends above all on our ability to attract effective teachers into the profession – and keep them there.  Here the federal government can help by getting out of the way.  Governor Romney would eliminate the “highly qualified teacher” provision of No Child Left Behind which, though well-intentioned, serves only to reinforce outmoded certification regimes that prevent talented individuals from entering the teaching profession and to create headaches for trail-blazing organizations like Teach for America.  He would also consolidate the $2.5 billion in federal funding currently aimed at promoting teacher quality, most of which is used for class-size reduction or low-intensity professional development with no evidence of effectiveness, into flexible block grants for states that have adopted new teacher evaluation systems, reward effective teachers with additional compensation and advancement opportunities, and have eliminated statutory and contractual barriers to basing personnel decisions on performance.

It is unfortunate that, rather than debate Governor Romney’s education proposals, the President and his surrogates continue to launch misleading attacks suggesting (most recently) that Governor Romney will cut Pell Grants.  This has been proven false by numerous third-party fact checkers. The President, in turn, has failed to put forward a plan to pay for the $58 billion hole facing the Pell Grant program over the next 10 years, nor has he said how he would pay for a permanent fix to prevent student loan interest rates from doubling. He has also failed to strengthen higher education for job training.  The Inspector General at the Department of Labor recommended that his $500 million green-jobs training program be shut down because it had only placed 15% of its participants.

In a May speech to the Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit, Governor Romney noted that the tragedy of our education crisis “is not just a matter of test scores and international rankings. It’s the frustration of a sixth grader who wants to learn more, but is stuck in a class that’s moving too slowly. It’s the embarrassment of a 10th grader who knows he can’t read the books he’s assigned. It’s the shame of a 12th grader who’s supposed to be ready to graduate, but hasn’t mastered the skills he or she needs to succeed in life.”

Right now, far too many American students experience that shame.   As Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney worked with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature to implement a reform agenda that made the state’s public schools the best in the country.  As president, he will bring that same focus and commitment to our national educational challenges.

Obama Campaign: Community Colleges And American Competitiveness

This week surrogates from the Obama and Romney campaigns will discuss education policy issues here. Below are earlier posts from both campaigns. This is a post by Melody Barnes, former Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, on behalf of the Obama campaign:

This election is about the challenges facing our economy, and President Obama knows that community colleges must be part of the solution.  That’s why he’s investing in America’s world-class network of community colleges to prepare men and women for middle-class jobs in industries that will ensure international competitiveness.   And President Obama will bring together community colleges and employers, training 2 million Americans for good jobs that exist.

President Obama took office during the worst economic crisis in a generation.  But we’ve gone from losing 750,000 jobs a month, to the private sector creating over 5 million jobs over the past 31 consecutive months. In the face of widespread layoffs and downsizing, many Americans turned to a community college to train for a new job or update their skills to keep the job they have right now. Knowing the importance of our community college system, the Obama Administration invested wisely to help keep tuition down and classes available so community colleges could welcome new students in droves.

But the President knows there’s more to do. In places like Iowa and Pennsylvania there are businesses looking to hire, but not enough workers with the skills to do the job. Community colleges play an important role in addressing the skills gap, and the President’s plan to strengthen them is timely. An estimated 20 million jobs through 2018 will require workers with an occupational certificate or two-year associate’s degree, and community colleges will help American workers prepare to fill those jobs.

President Obama has set a big education goal as part of his economic agenda.  By the year 2020, America must once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.  Our economic vibrancy is dependent upon that goal.  According to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, if America fails to produce more college graduates by 2020, we will have 1.5 million too few graduates to meet the demands of our economy.  Fortunately, because of President Obama’s leadership, we’re already making progress.

The President is working with community colleges to improve job training programs that set a goal to prepare two million people – including veterans and dislocated workers – for good-paying jobs in fast-growing industries such as advanced manufacturing and aerospace.  And, public-private partnerships are training and connecting workers with jobs in emerging industries like clean energy and biosciences, information technology and health care.

In addition to helping community colleges meet the demand, the President is making sure all students can afford tuition.  He doubled funding for Pell Grants, helping to make college affordable for nearly 10 million students across the country.  He created the American Opportunity Tax Credit that provides families a tax credit worth up to $10,000 over four years of college, and he capped student loan payments at 10 percent of income for responsible borrowers.  As soon as this year,1.6 million students will be able to select colleges based on career goals and not just by the price of tuition.

Actions speak louder than words, and it’s clear that President Obama, Vice President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden – a community college teacher – support America’s community colleges as a gateway to a stronger middle class and a stronger economy.  Mitt Romney’s actions reflect a very different record and vision.

In his first year as governor of Massachusetts, Romney made deep budget cuts to higher education, cutting investments in community colleges by more than 17 percent and slashing financial aid. By the end of his only term, fees at community colleges had increased by more than 30 percent, and in 2006, the cost to attend community colleges in Massachusetts was 59 percent higher than the national average.

As a presidential candidate, Romney shared his college affordability plan; he told students and families to “shop around.”  And by selecting conservative Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney embraced Ryan’s extreme budget that would shortchange students while cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans. The Romney-Ryan budget would slash funding for Pell Grants for nearly 10 million students and let the college tax credit expire.  Finally, Romney would repeal President Obama’s student loan reforms that reinvested savings in our nation’s community colleges to instead put billions of tax payer dollars back into pockets of big banks.

President Obama believes that investing in the American people is the key to our economic prosperity. That’s why he’s fighting for community colleges and clear pathways to employment. Ultimately, he knows that well trained and well-educated American workers make American businesses the best in the world.