Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Golf clap…

The Wall Street Journal reports on another establishment institution that has broken with the teachers union and endorsed school choice.  Here’s a taste:

The Council on Foreign Relations is the clubhouse of America’s establishment, a land of pinstripe suits and typically polite, status-quo thinking. Yet today CFR will publish a report that examines the national-security impact of America’s broken education system—and prescribes school choice as a primary antidote. Do you believe in miracles?…

The military can’t tap the 25% of American kids who drop out of high school, and 30% of those who graduate can’t pass the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery. In Afghanistan, according to one report cited by CFR, 33 of 45 U.S. officers in positions requiring foreign-language skills weren’t proficient by State Department standards.

The good news is that this grim data is helping to change the education debate, moving away from the dogma that fixing schools requires more money. Even excluding teacher pensions and other benefits, per-pupil spending today is more than three times what it was in 1960 (in 2008 dollars).

The CFR reports says this “suggests a misallocation of resources and a lack of productivity-enhancing innovations. . . . U.S. elementary and secondary schools are not organized to promote competition, choice, and innovation—the factors that catalyze success in other U.S. sectors.”

Spoken like Milton Friedman, but now endorsed by a Council task force led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York schools chief Joel Klein, who is an education executive at News Corp., which owns this newspaper. The authors also include former Fortune 500 executives, leading researchers, and even Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers….

Five members out of 30—including Ms. Weingarten, no surprise—offer dissenting views with familiar complaints that charter schools can’t grow “to scale” and that private vouchers undermine the ethos of common schooling. As if failing public schools don’t undermine far more.

But the real story is how much progress the reform movement has made when pillars of the establishment are willing to endorse a choice movement that would have been too controversial even a few years ago.

The Association for Education Finance and Policy just completed its meeting in Boston, punctuated at the end by celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.  In Boston.

Department of Education Reform faculty, staff, and students were present in force and did a great job of presenting their research and developing ideas for the future.

Here was one of the best presentations:

UPDATE:

And here is a recording of Mike and Anna (I think) singing in Southie

And their photo:

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I have been contacted about the Report Card on American Education that I coauthored for the American Legislative Exchange Council by people who have drawn a mistaken impression from a quote from Winston Churchill included in the book. We are dedicated to not taking ourselves very seriously on this blog, but I do want to be serious about this. The people who have made contact with me are sincere, so I wish to be very clear about this issue.

I graduated from public schools and universities, and thus I am indebted to public education.  As the son of a former public school educator, I appreciate the self-less dedication and invaluable talent of our nation’s educators.  As a board member of a public school and a father of children who are in public schools, I am completely invested in the success of today’s students and schools. To use a poker term, I’m all in.

The Winston Churchill “End of the Beginning” quote was solely intended to communicate that America is at a turning point in the continued struggle to equip all students with the knowledge and skills necessary to reach their potential.  I sincerely regret any interpretation linking our nation’s educators to those who carried out many of the horrific events of Churchill’s era. I did not make such a link and moreover I did not intend for anyone to draw such an inference.

Last May I put up a post suggesting that the U.S. Department of Education was breaking the law by backing Common Core national standards, assessments, and curriculum.  Today the Pioneer Institute released an analysis by two former top lawyers from the U.S. Department of Education agreeing that the Common Core effort has crossed the line and violated the Department’s statutory authorization.

As stated in the press release:

“The Department has designed a system of discretionary grants and conditional waivers that effectively herds states into accepting specific standards and assessments favored by the Department,” said Robert S. Eitel, who co-authored the report with Kent D. Talbert….

‎”Our greatest concern arises from the Department’s decision to cement the use of the Common Core ‎State Standards and assessment consortia through conditional waivers,” said Eitel. “The waiver ‎authority granted by Congress in No Child Left Behind does not permit the Secretary to gut NCLB ‎wholesale and impose these conditions,” added Talbert. “As shown by the eleven states that have ‎already applied for waivers, most states will accept the Common Core State Standards and the ‎assessment conditions in order to get waivers,” Talbert stated.‎

States need not apply for waivers, the authors said, but most states are desperate enough to escape No ‎Child Left Behind to agree to the conditions. “And once a state receives a waiver, escapes NCLB’s strict ‎accountability requirements, and makes the heavy investments required by the standards, that state ‎will do whatever it takes to keep its coveted waiver,” said Eitel. In the view of the authors, these efforts ‎will necessarily result in a de facto national curriculum and instructional materials effectively ‎supervised, directed, or controlled by the Department through the NCLB waiver process.‎

And people who continue to insist that this is all a voluntary process must also think that handing over ‎your wallet is voluntary when a robber says, “Your money or your life.”  After all, you had a choice.

[UPDATE: The 1979 law by which the U.S. Department of Education is authorized in its current form clearly prohibits these activities.  It states (in section 103b): “No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law.” (emphasis added)]