School Choice Researchers Unite in Ed Week

February 22, 2012

Pictured (L to R): Rick Hess, Jay Greene, Greg Forster, Mike Petrilli and Matt Ladner

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Today, Education Week carries a joint editorial signed by nine scholars and analysists. We came together to agree that Mom and apple pie are good, Nazis and Commies are bad, and the empirical research supports the expansion of school choice:

Choice’s track record so far is promising and provides support for continuing expansion of school choice policies…Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both. Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time. Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact. None of these studies has found a negative impact…Other research questions regarding voucher program participants have included student safety, parent satisfaction, racial integration, services for students with disabilities, and outcomes related to civic participation and values. Results from these studies are consistently positive…

In addition to effects on participating students, another major topic of research has been the impact of school choice on academic outcomes in the public school system…Among voucher programs, these studies consistently find that vouchers are associated with improved test scores in the affected public schools. The size of the effect in these studies varies from modest to large. No study has found a negative impact.

We have diverse viewpoints on many issues, but we share a common commitment to helping inform public decisions with such evidence as science is legitimately able to provide. We do not offer false certainty about a future none of us knows. But the early evidence is promising, and the grounds for concern have been shown to be largely baseless. The case for expanding our ongoing national experiment with school choice is strong.

This may well be the most important part:

The most important limitation on all of this evidence is that it only studies the programs we now have; it does not study the programs that we could have some day. Existing school choice programs are severely limited, providing educational options only to a targeted population of students, and those available options are highly constrained.

These limitations need to be taken seriously if policymakers wish to consider how these studies might inform their deliberations. The impact of current school choice programs does not exhaust the potential of school choice.

On the other hand, the goal of school choice should be not simply to move students from existing public schools into existing private schools, but to facilitate the emergence of new school entrants; i.e., entrepreneurs creating more effective solutions to educational challenges. This requires better-designed choice policies and the alignment of many other factors—such as human capital, private funding, and consumer-information sources—that extend beyond public policy. Public policy by itself will not fulfill the full potential of school choice.

Although I also feel particularly strongly about this:

Finally, we fear that political pressure is leading people on both sides of the issue to demand things from “science” that science is not, by its nature, able to provide. The temptation of technocracy—the idea that scientists can provide authoritative answers to public questions—is dangerous to democracy and science itself. Public debates should be based on norms, logic, and evidence drawn from beyond just the scientific sphere.

Signatories:

Kenneth Campbell is the president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, in Washington.

Paul Diperna is the research director for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, in Indianapolis.

Robert C. Enlow is the president and chief executive officer of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

Greg Forster is a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

Jay P. Greene is the department head and holder of the 21st-century endowed chair in education reform at the University of Arkansas, at Fayetteville, and a fellow in education policy at the George W. Bush Institute, in Dallas.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, as well as a blogger for Education Week.

Matthew Ladner is a senior adviser for policy and research at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, in Tallahassee, Fla.

Michael J. Petrilli is the executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in Washington.

Patrick J. Wolf is a professor and holder of the 21st-century endowed chair in school choice at the University of Arkansas, at Fayetteville.

Our color-coordinated mechanical lion battle chariots that join together into a giant robot are still under construction.

Defender of the empirical research universe!

17 Comments | charter schools, research reports, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

NEPC’s attempt at strategic nihilism

August 4, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

In the American film classic Animal House there is a scene where students smoke marijuana with their English professor, played by Donald Sutherland, and speculate that it could be the case that the molecules in your fingernails each contain a microscopic universe.

You can’t prove that there aren’t microscopic universes in your fingernails, after all, so they might be in there!

A nice post from Mike Petrilli on the Florida NAEP score gains prompted a response from Kevin Welner from NEPC that shows that the spirit of Sutherland’s Professor Dave Jennings is alive and well at the University of Colorado.

Again there is no attempt to address any of the gaping holes in retention theory. These holes include the fact that Florida’s 4th grade reading scores had improved substantially before the retention policy went into effect, and that they have continued to rise even as retention has fallen off substantially, and that they have fallen off substantially because of a very large improvement in 3rd grade scores.

Welner attempts to tiptoe around this by noting that our EdNext article addressing these points were addressed to a previous Walter Haney paper on the subject rather than the NEPC stuff, which is a distinction without much of a difference. The Chatterji paper contains a carbon copy of the Haney analysis. Amazingly, Chatterji dinged Burke and I for not doing a literature review (not the norm in our tribe) and then cites neither the Education Next paper nor Haney’s analysis. At best, she employed a double standard and at worst, she owes Professor Haney an apology.

Welner’s broader project is to attempt to use the causation problem as a shield. We don’t know, after all, exactly what caused Florida’s remarkable learning gains. Florida’s reformers had to implement their reforms in the real world rather than in a petri dish or in an Intention to Treat Random Assignment study. Welner believes that this allows him the opportunity for strategic nihilism:

The truth might be: (a) there are not actual improvements (the current study is too weak to say whether or not there are), (b) there are improvements, and they’re caused by a combination of all these things, (c) there are improvements, and they’re caused by something none of us pointed to (perhaps the green shirts??), or (d) there are improvements, and they’re caused by some of the things we’re pointing to BUT some of the other things we’re pointing to are actually harming students (just not enough harm to overcome the benefits of the other things).

In other words, when it comes to understanding the FL package of reforms, we are flying blind.

Welner is flying blind all right, but it is by choice. Let’s take each of these little gems on one at a time:

A. The NAEP results show very substantial improvements, as do other indicators.

B. I have always held that the exact cause for the improvement is impossible to know, because Florida’s reformers enacted multiple reforms simultaneously. The logical response to this is not to do none of the Florida reforms, but to do all of them.

C. Florida lurked near the bottom on NAEP for many years, enacted reforms in 1999, and then enjoyed sustained gains over time. While it could be the case that some mysterious X-factor caused the improvement, I’ve yet to hear a plausible theory regarding this. Dan Lips and I addressed multiple possibilities in the Education Next article, including demographic change, spending, etc, and found no evidence to support them.

D. This could be the case, but I haven’t seen a single scrap of evidence to suggest that it is actually the case- return to B above.

Welner is of course correct that there is a correlation and causation problem to consider. As a practical matter, there is nothing else to do but to carefully examine the evidence and history and draw the best conclusions that we can. Dan Lips and I did this in the Education Next article. Florida’s reforms coincided with the student population becoming poorer and less Anglo. State lawmakers increased funding per pupil, but it wasn’t by much and is still below the national average. NEPC complains about a lack of mention of the preschool voucher program when those kids have yet to age into the 4th grade NAEP sample. The class size amendment was implemented very slowly, long after Florida’s scores had begun to rise.

If Dr. Welner would like to provide a plausible explanation for why Florida’s NAEP scores increased so much after 1998, I’d be very interested to read it.

If he prefers to attempt to continue to play games, NEPC’s credibility will go on double secret probation.

 

 

 

 

4 Comments | research reports | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Don’t Go Wobbly, Mike

June 9, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Over at the Ed Next blog, Mike Petrilli asks the question: if not the 100% proficiency requirement of NCLB, then what? Mike concludes:

So let’s get specific. Assuming that these 1 million kids remain poor over the next 12 years, what outcomes would indicate “success” for education reform? Right now the high school graduation rate in poor districts is generally about  50 percent. What if we moved that to 60 percent? Right now the reading proficiency rate for 12th graders with parents who dropped out of high school is 17 percent. What if we moved that to 25 percent? The same rate for math is 8 percent. What if we moved that to 15 percent?

To my eye, these are stretch goals–challenging but attainable. Yet to adopt them would mean to expect about 400,000 Kindergarteners not to graduate from  high school 12 years from now. And of the 600,000 that do graduate, we would  expect only 150,000 to reach proficiency in reading (25 percent) and just 90,000 of them to be proficient in math (15 percent).

90,000 out of 1 million doesn’t sound so good, but without improving our graduation or proficiency rates for these children, we’d only be taking about 40,000 kids. So these modest improvements would mean twice as many poor children making it–9 percent instead of 4 percent.

And what about the other 91 percent of our Kindergarteners? We don’t want to write them off, so what goals would be appropriate for them? Getting more of  them to the “basic” level on NAEP? Preparing them for decent-paying jobs instead of the lowest-paid jobs? Driving down the teen pregnancy rate? Lowering the incarceration rate?

Is this making you uncomfortable? Good. If we are to get beyond the “100 percent proficiency” or “all students college and career ready” rhetoric, these are the conversations we need to have. And if we’re not willing to do so, don’t complain when Diane Ravitch and her armies of angry teachers complain that we are asking them to perform miracles.

I agree that the 2014 cliff was utopian and counterproductive, and further that the safe-harbor provision does little to rescue NCLB as originally formulated. As Congress dithers on reauthorization (and when have we ever known Congress not to dither?) the 2014 event horizon approaches. Many states back loaded their proficiency requirements to the 2012-2014 period, and ooops, here it comes.

Our goal should be a system which encourages systemic improvement and academic growth rather than a system which requires “perfection on a deadline.” No one is better at creative insubordination than school administrators, making perfection on a deadline a dangerous proposition.

Rather than set goals, we need to focus on aligning the incentives of the adults in the system to match the interests of children and taxpayers. Let’s not bother with any Soviet style 5 year targets, and focus on incentivizing the behaviors we want, and disincentivizing the behaviors we don’t desire. Rather than bemoan a lack of parental involvement, let us promote policies that strongly encourage it. If we can do this, improvement will follow. Stretch goals should come in the form of raising cut scores over time and other forms of raising the bar. All the while, important incentive pieces like parental choice and financially incentivizing academic success must proceed.

Florida pursued this course, and coincidentally the ur-reactionary Ravitch is down there today. The St. Pete Times reports:

“Particularly in  Florida, it’s a disaster,” she said during a visit Wednesday with the St. Petersburg Times editorial board. “What we are doing is killing creativity, originality, divergent thinking. All the things we need in the 21st century are what we’re squeezing out of a generation of children.”

In a speech today at the Florida School Boards Association annual meeting in Tampa, Ravitch plans to continue her full-throated campaign to “save public education” from its obsession with testing.

“This is institutionalized fraud,” she said, referring to the phenomenon of ever-rising scores. “Because we are graduating just as many kids who can’t read as we did 10 years ago.”

She acknowledged that Florida’s focus on reading has produced real gains. But she said other test improvements may have come about partly from the state’s focus on reducing class
sizes.

Ravitch and her “armies of angry teachers” are living in an alternative universe where she gets to make wild allegations about destroying the creativity of a generation of children without offering any evidence, make claims about education policy (in this case class size) which have been clearly refuted by empirical investigation and label the state which has produced more combined NAEP gains than any other for low-income children “a disaster.” Her point about 12th grade scores may be true in some states, but is not the case in Florida, where FCAT scores, AP passing rates and graduation rates are all improving. Why bother looking anything up if you can simply confidently assert nonsense?

Ravitch is noisily preaching to her reactionary choir as history blows past her, making her the George Wallace of the soft bigotry of low expectations-a sad but ultimately unimportant figure. Meanwhile, the serious conversation of K-12 carries on without her. Getting back to Mike’s post, I think the reactionary he should be worried about is not Diane Ravitch and her army of angry teachers but rather Charles Murray and his potential army of angry taxpayers.

The country after all spends about $10,000 per year per child-amounting to about $50,000 by the end of 4th grade-more if there was public pre-school provided. For that amount of money, which is largely the envy of the rest of the planet, it seems reasonable to teach the vast majority of children how to read. If it can’t be done because of “poverty” then why are we spending so much money going through the motions of pretending to try? Only educating an elite may offend our sensibilities, a Murrayite could argue, but only educating an elite while spending trillions of dollars on maintaining an illusion of educating the uneducable is far, far worse.

Far left meets far right at far gone, so to speak.

Americans are not quitters, and we are not going to give up on public education. Nor are we going to embrace some dorm-room bull session pipe dream of embracing state socialism to fix our education problems, which is just as well, because it wouldn’t work anyway. The grown ups in the K-12 reform conversation, both on the left and right, are pursuing greater productivity for the existing enormous investment in education.

I can forgive Mike for assuming we need some sort of gosplan, and that the gosplan needs to have an assumed rate of failure- he works in DC, and there is something in the water. Focusing on aligning the interests of adults with the interests of children while increasing parental involvement in a variety of ways will produce improvement. We’ve had enough utopian exercises (Goals 2000, NCLB 2014 with Common Core on hot standby). Our focus should be on thoughtful management of incentives in order to produce improvement. This is mostly going to involve sustained hand to hand combat in state capitals- a long hard slog.

Let’s get on with it-sometimes the hard way is the only way. Forget about a master plan or a schedule for improvement Mike- let’s get as much improvement as fast as we can get it.

8 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Hemisphere Fallacy! Drink!

April 15, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Fordham hasn’t even released its new report explaining why all sensible people favor the creation of an unstoppable national juggernaut to safeguard the decentralization of America’s federal system of government, and we already have to drink up.

In the new Gadfly, Mike Petrilli writes:

Speaking for the anti-“tight” right, Greene argues that “dictating the ends with a national set of standards, curriculum, and assessments will necessarily dictate much of the means.” (And, to be fair, he did so in a witty and amusing blog post, in which he proposed a “drinking game” for readers of Fordham’s forthcoming ESEA proposal, due out next week.)

But it’s unclear why he finds the concept of “tight-loose” so preposterous. Consider this: Here are the most likely potential mandates that Congress might attach to federal Title I funding in the next ESEA:

  1. States must adopt rigorous academic standards (and cut scores) in English and math that imply readiness for college and career.
  2. States must test students annually in English and math.
  3. States must build assessments and data systems to allow for individual student growth to be tracked over time.
  4. States must develop standards and assessments in science and history, too.
  5. States must rate schools according to a prescriptive formula (i.e., AYP).
  6. States must intervene in schools that fail to make AYP for several years in a row, or in schools that are among the lowest-performing in the state.
  7. States must develop rigorous teacher evaluation systems and ensure a more equitable distribution of effective teachers.
  8. States must ensure that Title I schools receive comparable resources—including good teachers and real per-pupil dollars—as those received by non-Title I schools.

The way Greene argues it, Congress has to either choose “none of the above” or “all of the above.” But of course it doesn’t. We at Fordham would select items one through four off this a la carte menu, and leave the rest for states to decide. That, to us, would be “tight-loose” in action.

Hemisphere fallacy! Drink!

Mike continues:

Does Jay believe none of these should be required? And if so, isn’t he arguing for federal taxpayers to just leave the money on the stump? Why not make the principled conservative case and say that Title I and other federal funding streams should simply be eliminated?

And:

Let’s quit with all the over-the-top rhetoric. Give the list of eight mandates above a good look. Congress is likely to move ahead with the first few and will definitely reject the last few; the real debate is about the ones in the middle. In other words, we’ll be arguing over the precise definition of “tight-loose,” regardless of what the anti-“tight” right or the anti-“loose” left have to say about it.

I’m not Jay, but I think the answer to all this is obvious:

  • Mike is wrong to question Jay’s integrity by arguing that “principle” requires him to either support federal education mandates or support repeal of Title I;
  • Mike is wrong to imply that it’s unserious or “over the top” to debate the merits of anything other than the hemisphere-style middle ground that is likely to be the locus of congressional debate in the immediate term; and
  • Mike is self-contradictory to do both in the same post.

Oh, and by the way – “tight/loose”! Drink!

10 Comments | instructional reform, politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Common Core Smackdown

January 13, 2011

Actually it was much more civilized than that.  You can see below my discussion with Mike Petrilli on the pros and cons of Common Core (national) standards.

7 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Arne Duncan to schools: WAKE UP!

November 19, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Rick Hess has provided a summary of a speech that Arne Duncan delivered at AEI yesterday that is a MUST READ. The hyperlink function of the blog seems to be malfunctioning, so here is the link:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2010/11/bam_pow_whomp_sec_duncan_knocks_it_out_of_the_park.html

Go read it NOW.

P.S. The Longhorn family is happy to accept Mike Petrilli into the ranks of BOOM Nation. As Lyle likes to sing:

3 Comments | school funding | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Hemisphere Fallacy Sighting

October 21, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In a new Flypaper post, Checker and Mike argue that the federal government takeover of schools implementation of common standards can follow one of three paths:

1.      “Let’s Become More Like France.” Here, we picture a powerful governing board—probably via a new compact among participating states—to oversee the standards, assessments, and many aspects of implementation, validation, and more.

2.       “Don’t Rock the Boat.” We keep the Common Core footprint as small as possible. An existing group is charged with updating the standards when the time comes, but everything else stays with states, districts, and the market.

3.      “One Foot before the Other.” This middle ground foresees an interim coordinating body that promotes information sharing, capacity building, and joint-venturing among participating states. By the time the Common Core needs revising, this interim body may evolve into something more permanent or may recommend a long-term governance plan.

In other words, our options are:

  1. Too big, strong, and heavy handed.
  2. Too weak, limited and complacent.
  3. Just right!

Guess which one they favor. No hints!

JPGB readers will recognize Fordham’s longstanding addiction to the hemisphere fallacy – making themselves look good by oversimplifying the landscape into two extreme errors held by the extreme extremists on either side of them, and the reasonable middle ground occupied by reasonable middle grounders like themselves.

Some people say the earth is flat and others say it’s round, so the reasonable middle ground is to say it’s a hemisphere.

Personally, I’d rephrase those three Fordham options as follows:

  1. So big and bold that the federal government takeover of schools becomes obvious, provoking an inevitable backlash from Americans who have repeatedly made it clear they don’t want any such thing.
  2. So weak and limited that the federal government won’t actually be able to take over the schools.
  3. Just strong enough to hand all schools over to federal control, but not so strong that the handover becomes obvious.

While we’re on the subject, Neal McCluskey notices something interesting in the new Fordham report:

All that said, there is one, small part of the report that I find quite satisfying. A few months ago, Fordham President Chester Finn called people like me and Jay Greene “paranoid” for arguing that national standards would be hollowed out by politics. Well, in the report, while it is not explicitly identified as such, you will find what I am going to take as an apology (not to mention a welcome admission):

How will this Common Core effort be governed over the long term?…This issue might seem esoteric, almost philosophical in light of the staggering amount of work to be done right now to make the standards real and the assessments viable. But we find it essential—not just for the long-term health of the enterprise, but also to allay immediate concerns that these standards might be co-opted by any of the many factions that want to impose their dubious ideas on American education. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to worry about this possibility [italics added]…

No, you don’t.

I’m not sure I would take it as an apology. If Checker wanted to apologize, he would. But he hasn’t.

Which leads me to wonder why he’s suddenly so anxious to make sure there’s something out there in print that shows him expressing exactly the same doubts we do. Something he could point to later, perhaps?

4 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

We Won!

September 29, 2010

I have no idea why a bunch of ed reformers are so gloomy.  Matt has already observed how Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli can’t seem to enjoy the moment when ed reform ideas go mainstream.  Now Liam Julian is joining the poopy parade, lamenting that the new crop of naive reformers are doomed to fail just as past ones have, and “it never works out.” And continuing the gloomy theme, Rick is worrying that school choice (in the form of vouchers) over-promised and under-delivered, losing the support of people like Sol Stern.

That may be, but as a graduate student observed to me today, choice (in the form of vouchers) may have lost Sol Stern, but choice (in the form of charters) just gained Oprah, the Today Show, and the Democratic Party platform.    Overall, he thought that was a pretty good trade, especially since he had to look up who Sol Stern was.

Let’s review.  It is now commonly accepted among mainstream elites — from Oprah to Matt Lauer to Arne Duncan — that simply pouring more money into the public school system will not produce the results we want.  It is now commonly accepted that the teacher unions have been a significant barrier to school improvement by protecting ineffective teachers and opposing meaningful reforms.  It is now commonly accepted that parents should have a say in where their children go to school and this choice will push traditional public schools to improve.  It is now commonly accepted that we have to address the incentives in the school system to recruit, retain, and motivate the best educators.

These reform ideas were barely a twinkle in Ronald Reagan’s eye three decades ago and are now broadly accepted across both parties and across the ideological spectrum.  This is a huge accomplishment and rather than being all bummed out that everyone else now likes the band that I thought was cool before anyone ever heard of it, we should be amazed at how much good music there is out there.

We won!  At least we’ve won the war of ideas.  Our ideas for school reform are now the ones that elites and politicians are considering and they have soundly rejected the old ideas of more money, more money, and more money.

Now that I’ve said that, I have to acknowledge that winning the war of ideas is nowhere close to winning the policy war.  As I’ve written before, the teacher unions are becoming like the tobacco industry.  No one accepts their primary claims anymore, but that doesn’t mean they don’t continue to be powerful and that people don’t continue to smoke.  The battle is turning into a struggle over the correct design and implementation of the reform ideas that are now commonly accepted.  And the unions have shown that they are extremely good at blocking, diluting, or co-opting the correct design and implementation of reforms.

Rick Hess correctly demonstrated how important design and implementation are almost two decades ago in his books, Spinning Wheels and Revolution at the Margins.   And it is always useful for him and others to remind reformers of the dangers that lurk in those union-infested waters.  But for a moment can’t we just bask in the glow of our intellectual victory — even if our allies are a new crop of naive reformers?

(edited for typos)

6 Comments | money myth, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Determined Pessimism of Rick and Mike

September 23, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

My friends Mike Petrilli and Rick Hess have been either (a) cautioning people about becoming overly optimistic about Waiting for Superman  and our ability to improve K-12 outcomes or (b) ridiculing the idea completely.

Hmmmm…

Let me begin by saying that I am no starry-eyed naif when it comes to the possible impact of the film. I wrote the other day that I am starting to entertain the idea that it might be a big deal. Union reactionaries do find themselves increasingly isolated in K-12 policy discussions, and many of their catspaws will be turned out of office in November.

Let me say in advance however that the unions are not going anywhere. They still control hundreds of millions of dollars, legions of organized activists and all the lobbyists that they care to employ. I’m not claiming that a tipping point has been achieved and it is all downhill from here for them, merely that they are in for what could prove to be a sizeable rough patch.

Where I seem to differ with Mike and Rick is with their seeming determined pessimism regarding the realm of the possible for improvement. Rick and I appeared on a panel together at the State Policy Network a couple of weeks ago, and discussed the same issue.

Readers of this blog find themselves subjected to my battering away with Florida’s NAEP scores on a regular basis. I won’t bother going into the litany because you already know it, so let’s take a couple of other examples where real reform agendas have been instituted, and what has been going on with their NAEP scores.

I pick a couple because, well, only a few exist. You have to be in a position to roll the establishment to do these things, and keep them rolled. Very few have pulled that off. However, the results are encouraging.

I am encouraged that New York City now outscores some statewide averages on NAEP, despite a student body that is 84 percent minority and 85% FRL eligible. NYC kids scored 217 on 4th grade reading in 2009, only 206 in 2002. That’s a meaningful difference, and should embolden Chancellor Klein.

Likewise, DCPS is still an academic blight, but has made substantial progress since the mid 1990s. When my coauthors and I tracked the learning gains of general education low-income students for the 50 states and DC from 2003 to 2009 in all four main NAEP subjects, Florida came in with the biggest gains and DC came in with the second largest gains. Coincidence? I doubt it- both Florida and DC have engaged in far-reaching reforms.

MA is justifiably proud of having the nation’s highest NAEP scores accompanying their standards-led reforms. It has been mentioned before that the usual suspects fiercely opposed their adoption.

Notice that there is no one path up the mountain here-but there are some common threads to the reforms: testing, accountability, choice. So maybe I’m like Ronald Reagan and I just think that there has got to be a pony somewhere in all that manure. It seems to me, however, that there is a pattern here: in the limited number of instances when jurisdictions take control of policy away from the reactionaries, keep it away from them for a sustained period, and implement reforms that they hate, NAEP scores make substantial improvement.

My own experience in interacting with lawmakers, candidates and philanthropists around the country is that they almost all like substantial improvement in NAEP scores. It doesn’t matter whether they are on the right or left or center. The funny thing is that everyone but those directly benefiting from the status-quo seem to not only want improvement, many of them are willing to fight for it.

So have we “cracked the code.” Yes, as a matter of fact, I think a few places have done so. Yes with fantastic difficulty and always imperiled sustainability. The success of reformers is limited and fragile, but very real. If the third largest state in the union doesn’t represent “results at scale” then what pray tell does? 

We have learned a great deal over the past 20 years. Our decisions are being guided less by theory and more by experience. Less and less this is less about “Assume a can opener” and more and more about “You know, they did something like that in X, let’s see what we can learn about the results.”

If throwing money at schools, lowering class sizes, expanding preschool, open classrooms, whole language or <fill in the blank here> had produced these types of results, this blog would not exist. There would be no need for an education reform cottage industry, and no one would donate to it. They failed. It’s too bad, because I would much rather be spending my life an executive at Rhino Records putting together compliation CD’s of punk rock bands covering all of Dean Martin’s greatest hits. The cover would have a guy in a tux holding up a martini above a violent mosh pit.

A’int Love a Kick in the Head? Oi….let me demonstrate! But I digress…

Our ideas have barely been tried, and very rarely in sustained concert with each other. Unless someone is able to demonstrate the Florida NAEP, the DCPS NAEP, and the Trial Urban District Assessment NAEP for NYC and Miami have all been cooked, the only reasonable conclusion to reach is that unions hate policies that succeed in substantially improving the education of children.

There have been and will continue to be misteps. There will be gains and losses along the way. This is a war, and war is hell. The unions are not going away, but neither are we nor the evidence of our successes. As Dino’s pally Frank used to say, the best is yet to come.

7 Comments | blogging, competitive effects, instructional reform | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Oh, Those Poor, Powerless School Boards

August 12, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Mike Petrilli draws attention to this Washington Post column by Laura Berthiaume of the Montgomery County, Md. school board. Mike seems be taking Berthiaume’s claims pretty seriously. I’m not sure why.

Berthiaume is responding to the Post‘s complaints that school boards bend to the wishes of the unions, because the unions have disproportionate power in school board elections.

She begins by acknowledging that the Post is basically right:

It is true that all current board members have gotten their seats with some level of union blessing.

Well, give her this at least: she’s not doing this the easy way. Beating your opponent at chess by knocking down your own king as your opening move is a tough challenge!

She writes:

In the balance of power between the board of education and the bureaucracy, the superintendent and his staff hold all the cards.

That’s a mighty strong claim, considering that, on paper, the superintendent works for the school board. So how does she justify it?

They outwit, outlast and outplay.

Well, forgive me for asking, but: whose fault is that?

Berthiaume elaborates:

When the union felt threatened by an impending state action more tightly linking teacher evaluations to student performance, an “agreement” between MCPS and the unions was announced in The Post on April 21 — and all but one board member found out about it that same morning, in the newspaper.

Well, OK, that was a nasty thing for the superintendent to do. And to hold him accountable you did what?

In my experience, the board actually has little to no impact on union contract negotiations: The superintendent and his staff negotiate the contracts.

And the superintendent is supposed to be held accountable for looking out for the district’s interests in these negotiations by whom?

Even if there ever were actual board opposition, it would be met with a fierce, resolute wall of angry staff.

And the staff work for whom?

Just what does Berthiaume think the voters of Montgomery County put her in office to do? Just what does she think the taxpayers of Montgomery County are paying her for? To rubber stamp whatever the superintendent and his staff do?

If they’re just there to look good, why don’t they put their pictures on the ballots so we can judge for ourselves which candidates are best qualified to fulfill the expectations of the office?

Look, I understand the obstacles to reform are humongous. But if God puts you in a position of responsibility (and really, he’s put all of us in some kind of position of responsibility) then it’s your duty to fight for the right as smartly and as spiritedly as you can, get whatever you can get, and go home at the end of the day satisfied that whatever else others may have done, you fought the good fight.

And if you really think your ability to accomplish anything is zero – well, shame on you for wasting the talent God gave you by spending your time on something you admit is useless!

Update: Just to be clear, Berthiaume is right that the Post shouldn’t go easy on the superintendent and lay all the blame on the board. But she should quit going so easy on herself and laying all the blame on the superintendent!

2 Comments | teacher union, politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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