The impetus for that action has been the perfect storm created by plummeting state revenues due to the economic downturn in combination with an innovative federal stimulus proposal, the Race to the Top Fund

I wrote in July about how the fund was producing promising state level policy changes in response to the four criteria that states need to satisfy in order to be eligible RTTT funding.

That promising start has turned into a "breathtaking impact" according to Joe Williams, the president of Democrats for Education Reform. This Education Week article describes the dizzying array of states who have made substantial policy changes to allow charter schools, to enable student achievement data to be tied to teacher pay, and to enact new school turnaround plans.

If $4 billion in one-time competitive grant funding by the feds can lead to such wholesale change on issues that recalcitrant stakeholders have long fought, one has to wonder whether the Department of Education could do more with the rest of its nearly $50 billion in outlays. Perhaps RTTT has demonstrated that the recipe for meaningful school reform is for the federal government to provide cash and political cover to states to do the heavy lifting themselves. One major reformsthat could get accomplished in the future through a similar formula: enactment of national standards.

There is cause for concern however, if the RTTT becomes a victim of its own success. The $4 billion slated to be given out can only be sliced up in so many pieces. What if so many states have enacted policy changes to qualify that there is a shortage of grant money to reward deserving actors? Will the backlash of denied RTTT grant applications lead state lawmakers to backslide on their earlier changes? Only time will tell.

Until now. Enter Louisiana's new system for tracking teacher performance based on the schools that teacher come from. It's the first statewide system of its kind, but it likely won't be the last.

The key to the system is the buy-in of the state's various schools of education. As E. Joseph Savoie, president of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, observes, the state's system is "accountability on steroids."

Under the new program, data will be compiled on value added learning gains (how much students improve from year to year) and aggregated based on teacher training schools, the vast majority of which are based in the state's universities and colleges. Schools that consistently produce graduates who struggle to improve student achievement can face mandatory reforms and even closure.

Undoubtedly there will be those in the anti-standardized testing crowd who criticize this proposal as further entrenching the role of standardized assessments in K-12 education. There will also be some who believe that evaluating teachers is itself an impossible endeavor, much less evaluating where they were trained.

But these criticisms miss the crucial mark: what Louisiana's data system does is provide policy makers with key information about what is working and what is not. A college the regularly graduates first-rate teachers should not only be recognized and rewarded, it should serve as a model for schools that churn out low-performing teachers also.

The potential downstream effects of this kind of data system and public recognition (and shaming) device are profound: some day it might become recognized as prestigious to enroll in a school of education that is recognized for producing high-performing teachers, and school districts would do well to use signals such as graduation from a top teacher training to program in hiring decisions.

In the long run this may lead to a higher education landscape where students actually compete for spots in the best programs--the exact kind of message we want to send to talented young people who are interested in the teaching profession. In other words, what starts with the simple process of gathering data may well lead to cultural changes in the way teachers and teacher training is perceived by society writ large.

Not to worry, says Jay Mathews over at the Washington Post, for he has an interesting proposal as to what the President can do to placate friends and foes of serious school reform alike: lead a charge to close down chronically low-performing schools.

The idea has its merits. As one study has reported, just 2,000 American high schools--13% of the nation's total--produce more than 50% of our dropouts. Many of these so-called "dropout factories" have shown little progress in changing their ways.

But as Mr. Mathews correctly points out, closing these schools isn't as simple as one would think. Because it is the states (and local school districts) who control schools, the federal government can't just come in and shut down dropout factories on its own.

Instead, Mr. Mathews suggests that the President's school-closing initiative should focus on charter schools, because those are the schools that are most susceptible to state and federal influence and since there is broad consensus--among teachers unions and even charter school proponents alike--that bad charter schools should be shuttered wherever they are identified.

As someone who has taught in one of these bad charter schools in St. Louis, I can attest to the value of ending an experiment that has gone wrong, especially when it brings the hopes and dreams of children down in the process.

The problem with the idea is two-fold. First, shutting down charter schools (or even failing public schools) only has value if the schools that children would attend instead are any better. And the sad reality is that families are only opting in to charter schools because the other options, including nearby traditional public schools, aren't world-beaters either.

Second, shutting down charter schools may not be as easy as one would think. It's true that closing a charter school won't encounter the same kind of fervent opposition of teachers unions as would closing an ordinary public school since most charters don't have unionized teaching staffs that are a part of a powerful collective bargaining base, but charter schools still serve students and parents. And many of these parents, despite the fact that their charter schools may not be performing well academically, report increased satisfaction with the schools nonetheless.

Which brings us to the big-picture question that Mr. Mathews and President Obama need to consider when it comes to school reform in the first place: what is the end-game? Is the goal giving parents choices? If so, it doesn't seem like closing down any school is in line with that; schools should shut down as a function of parent choice in the first instance--if no one wants to send their child to a particular school it will get closed by default.

Or are we striving for an American education system where every kid has a first-class academic education? If that's the case, it's unlikely that any feel-good, everybody-wins type idea will get us there: the President will have to knock quite a few heads and need some help from other stakeholders--unions, school leaders, parents, and students themselves--to get there.

If that's the case, closing down just charter schools doesn't make sense; why not put pressure through federal incentive grants like the Race to The Top Funds on states to close down any and all failing schools. A parent's satisfaction seems like a red herring, after all, if her child can barely read and write.

The Virginia Grade Level Alternative, as the portfolio assessments are called, offers schools a second way to determine whether students are reaching proficiency that is based not on standardized test scores but rather compilations of student work over the course of a school year.

The idea is one which has received attention in various circles, notably during the campaign trail when then-candidate Obama suggested that portfolio assessments could replace standardized tests at least in part.

In Virginia, the portfolio assessments are available to some special education students and students for whom English is a second language. Instead of asking these students to demonstrate proficiency over reading, writing, math, and science using the same tests as other students, teachers document these students' learning throughout the year in a binder of class work, including worksheets, quizzes and writing samples. Decisions are made at the end of the year whether the binder merits a passing mark.

In theory, the idea sounds reasonable, since it is often unfair to ask students with severe learning disabilities and students who are just learning English to complete the same tests as their peers. It's also true that not every student is able to fully demonstrate their mastery of important concepts through tests, and that multiple measures of assessment are typically more accurate than single measures like standardized tests.

The problem is in practice. In Virginia, the number of students taking the alternate method of portfolio assessment is growing rapidly without much proof yet that a "proficient" score on the portfolios stands for actual mastery of skills. At Lynbrook Elementary School in Fairfax, VA, for instance, the number of portfolio assessments has increased from a handful in 2007 to nearly 100 this year and passage rates have skyrocketed from 41% to 100% among students with disabilities and 69% to 97% among English language learners.

More stressing is the fact that these students are not participating in portfolio assessments in addition to the standardized tests, they are doing them instead of the traditional measure. The result, sadly, is that the state's astronomically improved passage rates among students taking portfolio assessments may mean, at worst, that the portfolios are rubber stamps given to move any student along regardless of how much they have learned--or at best that we don't know how well schools are teaching these students.

The absence of this independent source of verification--i.e. if students were doing well on portfolios AND also demonstrating some growth on standardized tests (using read-along and other accommodations where necessary)--means that there is reason to be skeptical of statistics like the Washington Post's finding that in Fairfax County alone, proficiency rates were higher among students with disabilities than among ordinary students.

To be sure, it would be terrific news if it were actually the case that disabled and ELL students were actually outperforming their peers. And Virginia deserves applause for spending the extra dollars and effort to develop and to train educators to use the portfolio assessments to begin with.

But where the state can so easily institute a small reform--requiring portfolio students to also take standardized tests and perhaps to use a combination of the two measures to determine whether a student has met proficiency--but fails to do so, advocates of special education and ELL students are right to be worried that what is really happening is a sleight of hand where schools are giving passing marks to all students without regard for how much they have been taught.

Just as a severe drought has major downstream impacts on numerous aspects of life, so too has it been argued that a shortage of teacher candidates would wreak havoc on student learning in America. The shifting demographics of the baby boom era, comparatively increasing salaries in other professions, and a general decline in the quality of workplace conditions for teachers, it's been argued, would lead to a shortage that in turn would impact student achievement as principals and school districts struggle to find any warm body to stand in front of a classroom.

So much for that doomsday scenario: the economic downturn has led to not a shortage of teacher candidates, but a surplus.

What will the impact of this surplus be? One might be tempted to conclude that if a teacher shortage would lead to lower teacher quality and reduced student outcomes then a surplus of available candidates might logically lead to increased teacher quality and student outcomes, as principals and districts suddenly have their pick of the litter in terms of which teachers to hire. As one district official pointed out, "It is a tougher job market, and you get applicants that you might not normally have because of the economy."

And in general, that labor market logic should work. After all, if you're the boss of a company and you need to hire an employee, much better to have 20 people to interview and pick from than 5. Even if you don't have any job openings, your new-found ability to shop around might enable to you to replace a previously under-par employee with a better one since so many candidates are newly on the market.

But in U.S. public education, I'm afraid that the shift from a teacher shortage to a teacher glut operates only in a one-way ratchet for students: even when schools in theory have more candidates to hire from, it's highly likely that there will be little measurable improvement in the quality of a child's teachers in the aggregate.

The main reason is that it is so hard to replace ineffective teachers. To be sure, schools that have new openings to fill will likely have greater success these days in finding a good teacher than five or ten years ago, as the AP article discusses. But administrators in schools with bad teachers who might want to replace those teachers are out of luck to the extent that removing bad teachers, even for cause, is a nearly impossible enterprise due to teacher tenure rules.

A Kansas deputy superintendent, John Black, put it best, "Now we have these great applicants wanting to teach, and we don't have jobs to offer them." With due respect to Mr. Black, I'd point out that they do have jobs to offer them, but those jobs just happen to be filled currently by low-performing educators who are all but impossible to remove.

The rally yesterday, with video below, was organized by Save Our Schools Michigan.

The $212 million in cuts, which amount to a funding reduction of $127 per student, are scheduled to come as a result of an order signed by Governor Jennifer Granholm late last month in response to falling state tax receipts. At the time of her order, the Governor called on students and parents to pressure legislators to raise taxes in order to make up the shortfall, a power that she as the state's executive does not possess.

But those aren't the only cuts that Michigan schools will be dealing with this year--an additional $165 in per student spending was cut earlier in the year by the legislature itself, for a grand total of $292 lower per pupil spending. That amount means, absent a legislative solution to raise revenues, that the state will guarantee schools 4% less per student than it did in 2008-2009, when the state minimum was $7,316 per pupil.

How much does the money matter? This is often a subject of great debate among scholars in the area, as there is some evidence that indicates that more money alone is not a good predictor of improved student success.

But while it is certainly true that more school spending is not a sufficient condition for school improvement, it's hard to argue with the proposition that sufficient resources are a necessary condition. After all, Michigan's budget cuts mean that an elementary school of 400 students will have roughly $120,000 less to spend this school year; in a high school of 1,000 student the shortfall grows to $300,000.

Where will those savings come from in ways that don't hurt students, especially at a time when our schools are struggling to keep up with international competition and the rising demands of our global economy?

Here's hoping that Michigan lawmakers heed the call of yesterday's protesters and come up with a way to bridge the gap, even if it means raising taxes. After all, what could be more important to our nation's future than the quality of education we provide to our future doctors, teachers, and leaders?

The conflict over Ms. Rhee's leadership decisions and style is much a debate about style as it is about substance; most of the hard questions from D.C. council members at a hearing last Thursday reflected a concern over her autocratic decision making process and not about her goals and intentions. Which is what makes the American Federation of Teachers advertisement so interesting.

If you look at the ad, the first thing to notice is that the message is not readily apparent--it takes at least some careful inspection to decipher the specific meaning and criticism against Rhee. In today's era of fast-paced, hard-hitting media I wonder how many people even bothered to figure out the whole meaning of the ad.

But setting that aside, one has to wonder about the merits of the point that the AFT is making, on at least two fronts.

First, is the AFT saying that the only thing stopping DC's students from making significant progress is the fact that Rhee and the district's administrators are not collaborating with teachers in a respectful manner? If that's the case, one has to wonder whether the AFT would describe the city's schools as successful in the pre-Rhee years, when more union-friendly school chancellors like Clifford Janey, Arlene Ackerman and others.

An honest response from the AFT would have to concede that the schools were no better during those years where collaboration and respect existed. It simply cannot be the case that the fate of student learning rises and falls with how nicely superintendents treat teachers and their union reps. As a simple example, a district would be remarkably "collaborative" and "respectful" if it cut teacher work hours in half and refused to fire any teachers even if they were negligent--but it's hard to see how students would benefit from those changes.

Second, and perhaps more important, I think the AFT ad ignores the fundamental question with DC student achievement--and in doing so, it accidentally sends a boomerang attack at Rhee that bounces back with equally forceful criticism against the union itself.

You see, Michelle Rhee isn't autocratic and stubborn in her interactions with teachers just for heck of it; she's not taking a hard line position with the union just to give them a hard time. Relations are strained because Rhee and the union disagree about key areas of policy concern. Should chronically bad teachers be fired? Should good teachers be paid more than bad ones? Should the city allow teachers who are inspiring remarkable learning gains among their students to earn in excess of six figures?

Rhee says yes to all of these questions; the union so far has said no. And therein lies the problem: "collaboration" and "respect" are a two-way street. In identifying the DC public school reform equation as lacking the two ingredients of teacher collaboration and respect, the AFT national office is as much criticizing DC teachers for failing to meet Rhee halfway in a respectful manner as much as it is criticizing Rhee!

The problem for the union, of course, is that this hide-the-ball advertisement is more palatable than a straight up response to Rhee's substantive policy suggestions. An AFT full-page ad saying, "All teachers should be paid the same regardless of how well they teach" would not win over many hearts and minds...

The basic mission behind the schools is to provide students with a learning experience that is applicable to their lives and that engages them in close relationships with faculty--with the end goal of preparing students to enter college or professional careers.

But the question is, do the so-called Hip Hop High Schools successfully accomplish this mission and help their students succeed in the work force, college, and life beyond high school?

The promo videos about the school paint a picture of an informal learning community centered on project-based learning instead of standard textbook type assignments, with music and hip hop at the core. No doubt the appeal of this approach is to attract students who might otherwise not find anything in school worth sticking around for, and to engage them in some form of educational enterprise--which surely must be better than dropping out.

It's a point of contention among educators whether this goal--just to keep kids in school at all--is important enough to justify curricular approaches that don't emphasize science, math, and reading as much as traditional schools.

There are respected educators who would argue that the bigger problem in middle and high school education these days is not how to keep those students engaged, but rather how to provide them with the cultural literacy and foundational academic preparation in core subject matters so that they can succeed in higher education and beyond.

From this perspective, a hip hop high school may be little better than allowing students to stay at home and watch MTV and BET if there is little formal academic education taking place. And it's questionable whether such education is occurring: in Minnesota's High School for Recording Arts (HSRA), only 24% of 10th graders passed the state's reading proficiency test and only 13% of 11th graders passed the state's math test.

But HSRA proponents would be right to respond that these figures are not measurably worse than comparable traditional high schools that supposedly adopt an academic mission--like nearby Humboldt High School, a comprehensive school that serves similar proportions of low-income students and students of color. At Humboldt, only 25% of 10th graders passed Minnesota's reading test in 2008, and only 7% of 11th graders passed the math test.

In other words, if Humboldt is the baseline for the kind of education St. Paul kids are getting, and HSRA isn't doing much worse, isn't it worthwhile that HSRA provides an option to area students that they can get excited about? These students may not end up going to college in droves, but that's true of Humboldt anyhow.

Bottom line, if HSRA inspires students to stay in school and earn a diploma at rates higher than counterpart schools, there has to be some value in that. Time will tell if the Hip Hop schools in New York, Los Angeles, and soon to be Portland do any better or worse.

Gut-check: should that be grounds for a lawsuit?

What if I told you that three minority teachers--two African American and one Latino--who sued the state over the test under various discrimination laws, were fired in 2006 because they could not pass the test, which state law required all teachers to pass in order teach?

What if I told you those three teachers had been teaching in Boston public schools for several years prior to 2006, and that they had gotten satisfactory performance reviews from their principals?

And what if I added the fact that 76% of Boston's students are Black or Latino, but 62% of their teachers are white?

All of it sounds like a ripe set of facts for lawyers to jump into the fray, but for a variety of reasons, some technical and some grounded in well-settled legal principles, the minority teachers lost their lawsuit this past week (full opinion from the presiding judge here).

In short, the court found that there was no alleged evidence of the kind of intentional discrimination needed to justify some of the teachers' claims, and that the teachers waited too long to file their other kinds of claims through which evidence of the test's disparate racial impact might have been enough to prevail.

All of which goes to show the limitations of lawsuits and the judicial system in rectifying serious public policy concerns. The important news for folks who are concerned with the problem of under-represented minorities in the teaching force and it's downstream effects on minority students is that nothing about the legal outcome forecloses the possibility of policy change to bring more minorities into classrooms.

The bad news is, the policy path is a precarious one indeed. One the one hand, policy makers interested in hiring more African American and Latino teachers in Boston and similarly situated Massachusetts cities may have to lower the proficiency levels required on the Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensing in order to accomplish their goals. On the other hand, reducing our expectations for what teachers should know before being eligible into the classroom doesn't sound all that appetizing either.

The best solution, it would seem, would be to get rid of the teacher test as an all-or-nothing gate-keeping device into the teaching profession. To be sure, parents and the public should have access to information on how well educated classroom teachers are, but shouldn't we be willing to let anyone teach if they inspire students to learn, if they foster a safe learning environment, etc.?

In other words, this is a case where relying on inputs like teacher tests doesn't only prevent minorities from entering the profession--it keeps policy makers and principals from focusing on what is most important: how much students learn from a given teacher.

Count me among the surprised. This Newsweek article caught the story right at its outset, and laid out the basic--and stunning--lede:

Not only is the AFT, the nation's second largest teachers union, apparently dropping its long-standing opposition to compensation systems that would reward teachers who actually help their students learn, the union is affirmatively incentivizing its local affiliates to develop pay-for-performance plans through a $3.3. million innovation fund.

Count me among the new cheerleaders for the AFT, as this announcement marks, by my count, a third bold move on the part of unions in the right direction (move #1 here and #2 here).

This latest bold move comes as an analog to President Obama's already much publicized "Race To The Top Fund" to reward states that are innovating in terms of improving student achievement. One of the major criterion for fund eligibility is that states allow a linkage between student achievement data and teacher compensation. At the time, the unions opposed the idea.

No news yet on whether the AFT's innovation fund marks a shift in policy on the RTTT Fund's criteria, but either way $3.3. million to fund local union affiliate performance pay systems is nothing to sneer at. Who knows if it is the unions trying to rehab their image or if it is basic real politic: change is a-coming and perhaps Ms. Weingarten sees that it's better to be a part of the reform than to be on the outside looking in.

The upshot for kids is, eight school districts will now be taught by teachers who work under local union structures that are experimenting with new teacher evaluation systems, teacher pay systems, and other innovative ideas. It remains to be seen how effective any of the plans are, but at minimum we're seeing just more evidence of a shifting political consensus on what used to be a taboo concept: that teachers get paid based on how much students learn.

It's a promising development that could have profound implications for the human capital pipeline in teaching (i.e., would you be more interested in starting a career in teaching if you could make $60,000 in year three because your kids are learning a lot, or $40,000 regardless of whether they're learning anything at all?)... Eyes turn now towards the NEA, the largest teachers union in the country, to see if they'll come up with a similar innovation fund.

As close observers of the interplay between race and public education know, the trends towards increased diversity and integration of American public schools came to a halt in the 1980s, and school segregation is again on the rise. This time, of course, segregation is not by law but rather by the natural private ordering of things where white families have tended to leave city environments leaving behind high concentrations of minorities.

Just two years ago, the US Supreme Court struck down effors by two cities, Seattle and Louisville, to stem the rising tide of segregation in their school districts by taking race into consideration in assigning children to schools.

Which brings us today, where election results in Wake County, North Carolina mark yet another slide for proponents of diversity in schools. Ever since 2000, Wake County Schools have been a bell-weather district for the use of socioeconomic status instead of race in assigning children to school. The wealth-based school assignment system is aimed at ensuring that low-income students have access to the same kinds of schools and school resources as their wealthier counterparts by actually placing them in those schools.

Has it worked? A recent report produced by SAS, a leading research company engaged in value-added analysis of school achievement data, seems to indicate that it hasn't. (The full report is described and linked to in sub-sections here). The report found that the higher the concentration of low-income students in a Wake County school, the poorer the school performed in terms of assisting students in making academic progress.

And the report, for better or for worse, was a driving force in Tuesday's school board election results, which witnessed the election of four anti-SES assignment candidates to the board, with one candidate declaring, "forced busing is dead." With a majority of seats now in hand, the opponents of Wake's current diversity plan will push instead to return children to their neighborhood schools, without regard for the racial makeup of those schools.

So that brings us to the ultimate question. If you were designing a school district from scratch, knowing the reality in virtually all large population centers today that affluent, white citizens tend to concentrate in certain areas leaving poorer minority populations to concentrate in others, how would you assign kids to schools?

Would you emphasize the value of neighborhood, and send children to the schools nearest their homes--even if it means traditionally voiceless families and families with less access to the political process will find their children clustered together?

Or would you prefer the alternative, forcing children to get on buses that send them all the proverbial way across town (or across the county)? And what if it turns out, as the SAS report indicates, that the busing doesn't necessarily help low-income after all?

It's a thorny question, and no doubt one that will continue to raise blood pressures in Wake County and elsewhere. But for now, the people of Wake County appear to have spoken: neighborhood schools have triumphed over school assignments that attempt to further socioeconomic diversity.

That's not to say that unions don't have important interests or that workers shouldn't have basic workplace protections or anything of the sort--and of course teachers unions have played absolutely crucial roles in the historic development of schooling in America, in particular in fighting for gender equality within the profession.

So I'm always thrilled when I read about developments like this one, which demonstrate that the teachers unions are not always the enemy of school reform. Far from it, in fact; for if the unions carry out their promise to voluntarily assist school districts in efforts to distribute great teachers more equitably among low-performing and high-performing schools, a lot of children stand to benefit.

First, a description of the problem with how teachers are distributed currently.

We know (at least) two things about teachers generally and what makes some better than others. First, new teachers (as in teachers in their first three years) are generally not as good as veteran teachers. Second, teachers who are teaching "out-of-field"--as in teachers instructing subjects in which they do not have a major or minor--are also less apt to generate appropriate learning gains with their students. (Source: Education Trust research report).

The problem is both kinds of teachers are more heavily concentrated in schools serving low-income and minority populations. As the Education Trust report concludes, students in high poverty and high minority schools (defined as being more than 50% in either category) are roughly twice as likely to be taught by novice teachers as compared to low-poverty and non-minority schools (defined as less than 15% in either category).

The same is true for out-of-field teachers; students in high poverty and high minority schools are disproportionately likely to be taught by teachers without subject matter expertise.

With this in mind, the promises by both the NEA and AFT to "waive any contract language that prohibits staffing high-needs schools with great teachers" are encouraging indeed.

But this promise should be a starting point for discussions of union support for school reform, not the ending point. For as the picture above shows (finally, he explains the photo!), the more important question in teacher quality improvement is not how to divide up the existing pool of good and bad teachers (since that is in many respects a zero sum game), but rather it is how to increase the size of the pie altogether so that every child has a great classroom teacher.

And to do that, the unions are going to have to push the envelope much further, working out agreements on teacher compensation systems (to reward teacher effectiveness and not just certification and experience), alternative certification, and tenure. With any luck, this most recent announcement will represent a step by both unions in that direction.

Nevertheless, that's the political reality we live in. Children in America are not guaranteed any particular quality of education.

To be sure, each of the 50 states offer schools to children, but in reality the kinds of schools that are available are as wide ranging in quality as one can possibly imagine. Public schools in some wealthy towns are truly first-rate educational institutions; in some neighborhoods (often low-income and minority ones), however, children often stand to receive a quality of education that is nothing short of unconscionable.

Enter the Southern Education Foundation, a venerable advocacy organization that has been fighting to improve educational opportunity for disadvantaged children for well over a century.

Their name would lead you to believe, quite rightly, that they are concerned principally with educational challenges facing children in the Deep South. So the fact that they have taken the lead in sparking a national conversation about the right for a federal education amendment to the Constitution, by issuing this thoughtful report, just serves to underscore the crucial need for making quality education a right for all our children.

Quite simply, the scope of the problems that plague our schools are just too big for individual states and localities to handle--particularly in this economy--and communities need the resources and support of the federal government to make serious headway, regardless of where they are located.

As the report details, gross inequalities in school inputs, processes, and outcomes exist across states, among districts within states, and among schools within districts. But the greatest of these is the disparities among states. One way to see this is to consider how much more money is spent at a high school in a high-spending state (Alaska or New York) compared to a high school in a low spending state (like Tennessee, Utah, or Idaho). SEF found that over a four year period, an Idaho highs school student could have as much as $89 million less spent at their school than an Alaska high schooler.

So why amend the Constitution to add a right to quality education? In the end, it comes down to practical, civic, and moral reasons.

Practically speaking, amending the Constitution would force policy makers to address tough questions that are simply avoided in the present day. It would require policy makers to come up with a baseline for what kinds of opportunities every child should have by expressly describing necessary educational inputs (quality teachers, textbooks, instructional time, etc.). It would also force law makers to identify who is responsible if such inputs are not met so that students and families have a way to get what they deserve--a method of enforcement that is too often lacking today.

Even more practically, an effort to amend the constitution would create space for other vital educational reforms even in the case that it fails--see the Equal Rights Amendment and subsequent advances in womens' rights for an example.

As a civic matter, a debate about whether to enshrine quality educational opportunities in our nation's founding document would spark dialogue and thought among ordinary citizens about the importance and meaning of education--a conversation that has been sorely lacking. It would build public consensus and political will to do better by kids as a policy matter, but perhaps also on a family-by-family basis.

Most importantly, however, guaranteeing every child in America a right to quality educational opportunity is just the right thing to do. Our nation is built on the founding principle that everyone has a shot at the American dream if they play by the rules and work hard. The bedrock of that principle is the public school education; if it is inequitably distributed to disadvantaged groups, the very foundation of our country rests on shaky ground.

In other words, fixing that foundation by way of an amendment would do wonders for the long term civic and economic well-being of America, but it's just as important to do it because it's fair and right. Ask even those who are opposed to a federal amendment whether they think in practice every kid in the country should have access to a good school and they will (hopefully) say yes.

So why not put our money where our mouth is and pass a 28th amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing the right to a quality education?

Second, the topic of this week's discussion: an intriguing plan adopted recently by the Virginia State Board of Education that will require all of the state's seventh graders to set academic and career goals for their high school and professional careers.

The goal of the requirement is to push every student to think about their future in the process of engaging in the powerful exercise of visualization and goal-setting. As part of their academic and career plans, the seventh-graders will have to indicate what they plan to study in high school and how their education will help them get into college or find a job. And the board's rule would require teachers and parents to read and sign their support for their students' plans.

In the realm of school reform proposals, the Virginia Board's requirement is truly unique: it is essentially cost-free, is immediately scalable to all students in the state without regard for socio-economic or minority status, and it is something that few interest groups could reasonably propose. With that recipe, one has to wonder why more states haven't yet instituted similar goal-setting requirements.

But the more important question, of course, is what impact the plan will have for the state's youth. Intuitively, the idea is a good one: any student who starts eighth grade without having given serious thought to their life goals--even if only at a surface level--is one who will benefit from the new requirement. Right now, my guess is that low-income and minority children at historically low-performing schools are the ones who have the most to gain from the simple exercise of thinking about one's future life and plans.

To be sure, teachers will need to be effective in their pedagogy around the required plans; that is to say if teachers encourage students to think seriously about their plans and not just write, "I want to be a doctor" and be done with it, the benefits of forward-planning and goal setting may kick in. But if some teachers are allowed to function as just rubber stamps who give their classes thirty minutes to write down whatever comes to mind on a loose leaf piece of paper to turn in to the state, a worthwhile educational opportunity will have been missed.

Incidentally, in looking for a research study or anecdote to point to about the power of goal-setting, the evidence I kept coming across was a 1953 study performed among Yale University students where, allegedly, the 3% of graduating seniors who wrote down their goals for the next twenty years had accumulated more wealth than the other 97% of non-goal-setting graduates combined in that 20 year period.

The only problem is, that study never happened. There are, of course, plenty of theories around the importance of goal-setting (often times found in business school literature), but so too are their counter-veiling papers such as the "Goals Gone Wild" study I mentioned above that point to negative side effects of hyper-drive goal setting machines.

But even those negatives--distorted incentives, reduced intrinsic motivation, narrowed focus against non-goal areas--are ones that don't concern me quite as much in the Virginia plan where students will ostensibly be setting broad, universally positive goals such as, "go to college at X" or "become prepared for a successful career in Y." There's a big difference between those kinds of educational / professional goals and the often abused business goals in earnings forecasts and the like.

All told, it really seems like the Virginia Board has stumbled across a simple, obvious plan that can only help students who are lucky enough to engage in the serious exercise of visualizing their futures. Maybe in twenty years we'll see how much good it actually brought about!