It'd be easy to just play the cynic card and chalk up Ty'Sheoma Bethea's appearance on millions of TV sets during President Obama's first address to a joint session of Congress to political opportunism. After all, ever since Ronald Reagan, Presidents from both parties have made it a tradition to tell inspiring stories of heroism, patriotism, hope, and all kinds of emotions and "isms" in between, using real-life people as the protagonists. And President Obama surely picked Ty'Sheoma and her letter from a dilapidated South Carolina public high school to drive home a political message about the need to invest in public education--a tricky issue given the ballooning deficits that face all levels of government for the foreseeable future.

But it was also easy--quite easy indeed--to be inspired by the letter written by young Ms. Bethea, who attends a school in an area of South Carolina so poor that it, and its schools, are now known widely as the "Corridor of Shame." (Note: to see a compelling documentary about the Corridor of Shame, check out a film by that name, which is available at this site). The letter was powerful because it reminded us of what is truly at stake during this difficult moment in our economic history: not just whether today's Americans will be able to lead prosperous lives but whether, for the first-time ever, our children will have a lower quality of life than we had because of our own failure to sacrifice and act for the greater good.

If you didn't catch Ty'Sheoma or her letter during President Obama's address, I strongly encourage you to watch this story:

The amazing story of how one letter from a 14-year-old in South Carolina could garner such profound national attention is also interesting because of it's implications for all of South Carolina's residents. Last week, the state's Governor, Republican Mark Sanford, made national news for his suggestion that he would actually reject some of the $2.8 billion in stimulus money that South Carolina was destined to receive after the Congress passed the stimulus bill. How can a state with the nation's third highest unemployment rate say no to free federal money that would help people who've lost their jobs, their houses, their livelihoods? Good question. But it looks as though Ty'Sheoma's letter and appearance in DC two nights ago, describing her rundown school, are changing the politics of the moment, making it awfully difficult for Governor Sanford to say not to the money without becoming the scorn of not just South Carolina's citizens, but also Americans writ large.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you didn't catch it earlier this week, the American Federation of Teachers--the nation's second largest teachers union--came out and publicly endorsed the idea of national standards for our schools. Writing on behalf of the union's 1.4 million members, AFT President Randi Weingarten (who was rumored to have been on Governor Patterson's very short list of possibles for junior Senator from New York) offered a passionate and persuasive call for changing our current kaleidoscope of what we intend to teach our children based on the lottery of zip code.

The best and easiest way to give a concise explanation for why we need national standards, as Ms. Weingarten successfully argues in her op-ed, is either to explain the current system of state standards and how it is (or isn't working)... or it's to reference another authority in video format. Let's go with the latter. Take it away Mr. Colbert:

So why is it that No Child Left Behind set ambitious proficiency goals for all students but left it up to the states to measure, or in some cases jerry-rig, their results? One reason why is that education has long been a local issue in America, so much so that the United States Supreme Court has declared that there is no such thing as an American right to education. (There is, of course, an American right to own a gun). The idea that education is a local matter has often resulted in the federal government deferring to local and state school officials to decide what gets taught in school. Thus, when NCLB was passed in 2001, in order to ensure that enough Republicans would vote for the bill, the President and its supporters in the Congress could not require all states to hold their children to the same high standard since NCLB was already viewed as being too much federal intrusion into education. The result. as many observers have put it, is a state vs. state race to the bottom in many instances where states have reason to expect less out of children rather than more. (To be fair, quite a few states have held the line in adopting high standards for their school children despite pressure to do the opposite).

A second reason why there is not yet a single national standard for all American children is that some stakeholders--namely teachers unions--were reluctant to support such an idea. The AFT, of course, has broken out of this reluctance, and kudos to them for doing so. But the NEA and its more than 3 million members continues to take no position in support of treating children equally by geography in terms of what we plan to teach them; a position that owes in large part to the NEA's belief that standards and tests are themselves a flawed way of measuring student performance.

With the AFT moving towards recognizing the importance of uniform high standards for our children, one must wonder whether there will be a serious discussion on this topic when No Child Left Behind comes up for reauthorization under the Obama Administration...

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Look, I'm as big a fan of round numbers and arbitrary goals as the next person, but the politicking and compromise between House and Senate leaders in pursuit of the final stimulus package that should be signed into law by President Obama before the end of the week seems a bit much.

The final cost of the bill looks like it will be $789 billion, which is $30 billion less than the House approved last week and $39 billion less than the Senate's version as well. One of the major reasons why the compromise version ended up being smaller was a push from a number of moderate senators from both parties who refused to vote for any bill that exceeded $800 billion. Like I said, there's something to be said for nice, round numbers and it's hard to make an economic case for why $801 billion is all that much different from $800 billion or $799 billion for that matter (beyond the notion that the more money the government spends, the more jobs, consumer spending, and investment might be spurred at the cost of higher national debt). But what I do know is this: $789 billion is a lot less than what the House and Senate passed separately... so something significant must have hit the chopping block.

So what was it, out of all of the various programs and tax cuts included in the bill, that Congress deemed to be the LEAST important? What a surprise: education. Two of the most significant changes from the original House package included a reduction from $14 billion to $6 billion for school construction, and states were set to receive only $44 billion in aid for necessary functions such as school spending to avoid school closings and teacher firings, down from $79 billion as originally planned.

Do either of these cuts make sense? I'm struggling to see how, both from the view of what will best stimulate our economy and create jobs, and from the view of what will go furthest towards improving our long-term chances of recovery. For starters, building and renovating schools is one of the most shovel-ready type projects that can create instant jobs in a hard-hit construction sector, while having the long-term benefit of providing children with new, safe, and sound places to learn. And direct aid to states to assist in school spending is instrumental if we want to stave off a host of future layoffs. For instance, a recent University of Washington study revealed that without federal government intervention, more than a half million jobs are likely to be lost in public education due to impending state budget shortfalls--and likely more when one considers falling local government revenues.

In the end, I suppose it can be said that $6 billion for school construction and $44 billion for aid to states is better than nothing. But you have to wonder what Congress's priorities are when it sets an artificial spending limit on the stimulus package, the impact of which falls most heavily on the very children for whom we are trying to build a brighter future.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Edu-news in DC this week is about the contract counter-proposal offered by Washington Teachers Union (WTU) leadership to DC Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee. The counter-proposal did not contain any major surprises in its substance, and still appears to be far apart from the contract DC schools offered last September.

If you haven't been following the negotiations, here's why they are so important: if implemented, DC's plan to pay teachers based on how much students are learning in class instead of by how old or how many degrees a teacher has is the most revolutionary attempt to reform teacher pay and, by extension teacher quality, in modern American history. The plan as originally suggested would give DC teachers a choice between a "red" plan that keeps teacher tenure around and pays teachers based on seniority up to a low ceiling, and a "green" plan that pays the best teachers--when it comes to improving student achievement the--up to $130,000 but would require a teacher to sacrifice tenure in order to qualify. The theory is that aligning teacher incentives with students' inherent desire to learn will accomplish a crucial educational purpose: ensuring that teachers go to work each day with the mission of getting the as much improvement out of their students as possible, while also sparking a change in the teacher labor market as more highly capable individuals consider teaching because excellent work will be met with due financial reward and accordant respect and prestige.

The DC Teachers Union, however, continues to react with anathema to that idea, since the plain implication for many of its dues-paying members (particularly those who are not doing a good job of educating their students) will either get fired under the new plan or lose in pay once it is recognized that their students simply aren't learning. This is particularly a problem for the union because new teachers who work for the district would be required to opt into the green plan, in which case the union wouldn't be able to protect them from firing.

The union did suggest a counter-proposal to Ms. Rhee's merit pay plan, however: a plan to institute "school-wide financial incentives." The idea is that instead of looking at, say, Mrs. Thompson as an individual to see how much her 7th graders have improved in reading thanks to her instruction--and then to pay her appropriately, the union would like DC to look at each school and give a chunk of money to each school that does really well, with some freedom to the staff at each school to divide up the dollars how they see fit.

What to make of this counter-offer? Well for starters, it's not a bad idea by any means. Anything that gets us as a society to start thinking about and paying teachers based on how good they are instead of how old they are is a plus. And the union is right to suggest that teachers will collaborate if they see their own salaries tied to the performance of their peers (although any good teacher would also recognize that if she's being judged individually that she'll stand to do better--that is, her students will learn more--if her peers are doing a good job as well, and thus have an individual reason to collaborate). So should Rhee take the counter-proposal and call it a day?

Not by a long-shot. At best, a highly effective teacher pay system would consider school-wide financial incentives as a supplement to, and not substitute for individual teacher merit. In other words, the primary factor in how much we pay a teacher should be how much her students learn, and if the whole school did well too then maybe we tack on a small (in proportion) bonus. But if you only do the latter, you run across the real risk that inert teachers (the unfortunately substantial number of teachers who already have tenure and who go to school perhaps with good intentions but who don't get much in the way of results) will not change their behavior at all, and instead free-ride on the hard work of any dedicated teachers in a school. Moreover, the school-wide system completely fails to recognize the outstanding efforts of thousands of incredible teachers who teach at chronically failing schools that might not otherwise quality for school-wide incentives because of poor leadership, a critical mass of ineffective teachers, or any other reason.

To make this point as real as possible, think about the last time that you worked in a group on something that the group as a whole was accountable for (i.e. a group project in school or at work where you turn in one final product). What grading system do you think would make you (and your peers) work harder on the project: a system where everyone in the group gets the same grade at the end regardless of how hard any one individual worked (or how much they slacked off)... or a grading system where each individual gets a grade based on how well the tasks that they were individually responsible for ended up, and where if the whole project was excellent the whole group got extra points?

Your answer should be the same for the way in which we pay our teachers.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)