As we prepare to enter a new year that may or may not see significant reform over federal education policy, this much is clear: there will continue to be plenty of action in the states.

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.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the longest time, schools of education have gotten a free pass. Amidst the tough talk of school reform and real accountability for schools, teachers, and students, very little has been said or done to hold schools of education accountable for what they produce.

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.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 01:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the President struggles with complex and politically sensitive issues like the war in Afghanistan, health care, and how to accept a Nobel Peace Prize, there are some in the education world who worry that Mr. Obama will not have any political juice left to make the tough decisions needed in K-12 education.

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.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The answer depends on who you ask, of course, but there is growing opinion based on a Virginia state-wide experiment in portfolio assessment that standardized testing may not be the worst way to measure student achievement after all.

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.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Researchers have been predicting a precarious outlook in American classrooms for years on account of a looming teacher shortage.

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.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With $212 million in state budget cuts slated to hit Michigan's schools next month, a gathering of roughly 1,500 parents, students, and concerned citizens coalesced in Lansing yesterday to demand that law-makers take action.

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?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Amidst calls for critically-acclaimed Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee to defend her decision to fire 266 teachers last month, the national headquarters for the city's teacher union issued an interesting advertisement in Friday's Washington Post (full ad pictured below; click on it for a zoom-able view).

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...

Posted by Aaron Tang at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

News from Portland last week about the growth of the High School for Recording Arts network: the network, which started with a high school in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1996 and has since established schools in New York and Los Angeles (in 2007), has just been recommended for school board approval to open a new school in Portland, OR.

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.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Between 2005 and 2006, only 39% of African-American individuals who sought to teach in Massachusetts Public Schools passed the Communication and Literacy Skills portion of the state's test for educator licensing. In the same time period, the passage rate was 75.6% for white teacher candidates.

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.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Many out there will be surprised to learn these proposals come from teacher unions, which are not afraid to take risks and share the responsibility for student success.”
- AFT President Randi Weingarten.

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.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Debates about integration and diversity in American schools have evolved a great deal since the early 1950s when it was still legal to segregate schools by race. In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, school districts instituted a variety of measures to integrate schools racially: forced busing across towns, the creation of magnet schools to draw children voluntarily into different schools, and redrawn district lines to name a few.

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.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As those who read this blog know, I have not always been the biggest supporter of teachers unions and their role in efforts to improve educational opportunity in America.

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.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In many ways, it seems like a backwards question: why should proponents of a federal right to quality public education have to justify such a right; shouldn't it be opponents of such a right who have the 'splainin to do?

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?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First, a disclaimer: I'm borrowing the title of this entry from a very interesting working paper published by the Harvard Business School.

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!

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a question that stirs the blood of many educators: should our reading and language arts classrooms focus on teaching classic novels like To Kill A Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Scarlet Letter, or should students be allowed to read novels of their choosing since doing so may help students develop a greater interest in reading?

Despite a growing focus on standardized test scores in classrooms throughout the nation, a recent New York Times article describes an emerging movement within reading instruction that answers the question in favor of student choice, even if it means our kids will never know that Moby Dick is a whale.

The new form of reading instruction, known as "reading workshop," is raising some eyebrows among more conservative, traditional educators. Chief among the opponents of reading workshop, which the opponents themselves would derive as "dumbed down," is the Core Knowledge Foundation, which published this witty parody to respond to the New York Times story (it's worth a quick skim if you have a moment).

The argument between the two camps basically boils down to a simple lesser-of-two-evils. In the modern day where youth have so many dynamic forms of media that command their attention, the thrill of digging into the next chapter of Huck Finn just might not be, well, quite as thrilling as it used to be. The reading work shop school of thought responds by saying, what kids read is less important than that kids read at all, and so we should let them choose books that excite them (within reasonable limits of course). In other words, it's the process of learning how to read that matters more than the actual content.

The Core Knowledge folks respond by saying the debate isn't that easy. True literacy, both in the reading and the cultural sense, demands more than the ability to recognize words on a page--it demands an ability to recognize common cultural references and social norms, many of which derive from classic novels. In this view, letting kids read Twilight and other contemporary novels is not just inadequate, it's unfair, since the approach is most commonly suggested for disadvantaged students who otherwise show less interest in reading.

Which camp is more persuasive?

It's hard to say, and I have to confess to being truly torn between the two views. On the one hand, I think reading--more so than Chemistry or US Government--is a subject in which the process of developing a skill is set is at least as important as the content itself (allowing students to read novels of their choosing is far more reasonable than letting children learn about the government of any country instead of the US, for example). Writing is the same way--we want students to get comfortable with writing, and we commonly let them decide what paper topics to write about.

On the other hand, to the extent that society is dominated by cultured references to certain books and to the extent that the classics exemplify the kinds of literary motifs we want students to learn, it does seem better for students to get familiar with John Steinbeck than John Grisham. Nothing should stop students from reading more books of their choosing in their own time, the Core Knowledge group would say, but school is for a commonly agreed upon set of important works.

I'm curious, though. What do you think? Do you see one approach that is clearly better than the other, in your view? I'd love to hear which one and why.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've written before in this space about the inevitable showdown between the Obama Administration and the nation's leading teachers unions over crucial matters of public policy concerning teacher quality in public schools. For the first seven months of President Obama's term, however, the unions and the White House appeared to be on good terms.

Until now. In a strongly worded letter delivered last week in response to the Administration's bold announcement of its $4.35 billion "Race To The Top" Fund for innovation in school reform, the National Education Association (NEA) finally distanced itself from what it called the President's "top-down approach" to education reform that "misses the mark." Comparing the Race To The Top Fund criteria with the No Child Left Behind Act, the NEA letter underscores a fundamental disagreement between the union and a reform-minded President over teacher quality issues that cannot be smoothed over with vague talking points.

There are three elements of the Race To The Top fund that concern the union the most. The first, unsurprisingly, is the fund's requirement that states allow student achievement data to be used for the purposes of evaluating school and teacher effectiveness--a common sense idea but one that goes against the basic union value of protecting every member (even if it comes at the cost of rewarding good teachers and identifying bad ones). The second conflict is over the fund's requirement that states not have caps on charter schools, a position that the NEA has long opposed. Finally, the NEA takes offense to the fund's encouragement of alternative teacher certification--the idea that we should be lowering barriers to teaching for individuals who show a clear capability and passion for teaching and who demonstrate success in the classroom.

The question now is simple: how will the administration react? If Secretary Duncan proceeds as planned with dispensing the RTTT fund dollars to only those states who have met their reform demands, will that signal the end of the NEA's grip over Democratic officials? Will the NEA cave in before that happens? Or will there be some kind of compromise deal that softens the fund criteria in a way that gives the union a public relations victory?

One thing is for sure: the NEA is in the trickier position here than the President. Typically, elected officials have to respond to interest group demands when the interest group has political liquidity; that is, the ability to move their support and campaign finances to candidates of another party. In education, however, it's exceedingly unlikely that the unions would ever find the Republicans to be more compatible with their views than even a right-leaning President--which gives the administration a great deal of bargaining power to do what it believes is best by children. The only risk for the White House is that it must handle the next weeks period of discussion with the unions in a respectful way so as to avoid the kind of protest like the one below, which took place in Los Angeles last year.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I came across this article today and was, as always, thrilled to see high school students coming together to make their voices heard for better schools. Duluth is going through some challenges that are fairly common to public schools across the nation in our current economic picture, including a controversial debate over new school construction measures.

What's remarkable about the student organizing that has emerged in the past few weeks is how much media attention they've drawn. The group, made up of 14 student organizers at three Duluth High Schools and some 300+ members on Facebook, was featured in two local TV news stories yesterday. I've embedded one video below (skip ahead to the 1:15 mark unless you want to hear about local Minnesotan reactions to the Brett Favre signing), and the second, better story, can only be viewed here.

As the group spends the next year fighting to ensure that the local school board's policies best reflect the needs of students, the pressing question will be whether that kind of youth engagement--a positive for all parties involved, to be sure--is enough to lead to the kind of serious, systemic reform needed. This is the kind of challenge that faces youth organizing groups in all facets of public policy, the challenge of walking the tightrope between two very different kinds of positive outcomes: civic engagement and participatory benefits for the students versus serious progress on the social and policy issues that the students seek to address.

Not that the two goals are mutually exclusive, of course--see the history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Civil Rights Movement for example. But there are two kinds of messages that the news media and the students themselves can try to sell here. Are the students going to consider themselves successful if they participate in school board meetings, have forums to discuss issues, and get students excited about democratic engagement? Or will they measure their own success based on whether their organizational goals have been met from a policy change perspective.

It sounds like the group is leaning towards the former, by choosing to remain neutral on key Duluth school issues such as the school construction debate. That's all well and good, but you have to wonder whether youth activists are at a disadvantage against other interest groups because observers can chalk up the participation of students in policy debates as an end of itself, and get good press for it without regard for the actual policy goals asserted by the youth activists. For instance, a school board can much more easily say, "we met with a group of students before making our decisions" and come out in a positive light even without doing anything the students ask for, than it can say, "we met with the teachers unions before making our decisions" while failing to cede to any of the union's demands.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is no such thing as an American public education. If a child goes to a public elementary or secondary school somewhere in America, everything that influences her likelihood of success—from the quality of her classroom teachers to the rigor of the standards she and the school are expected to reach—everything hinges on the happenstance and geography of her birth.

If she is born to a well-to-do family in an affluent New England town, the public schools there will reflect her fortune; if she is born into the poverty of the Deep South, her chances of going to college plummet dramatically. The reality is that there are different opportunities, different supports, different worlds for different kids here in America, even in a day and age where America’s children face more in common—international competition in high tech job markets, increasing demands on civic and social participation—than ever before. Yet our schools in America continue to train Californians to compete with Virginians and Georgians to compete with New Yorkers. So much, then, for the “American” dream.

And so much for America’s leaders who might claim to be the guarantors of the American dream. Eight students representing the more than 25,000 members of Our Education, a national non-profit youth organization dedicated to empowering the student voice in efforts to improve K-12 education, gathered in Washington, DC for two busy days of meetings with lawmakers from both parties and both houses of Congress to make the needs of students loud and clear. The results were not encouraging. Only four out of the forty Senators and Representatives who met with us declared their support for guaranteeing all American children the right to a high quality public education as a fundamental right. Put another way, 90% of the national officials asked did not say they would support a constitutional amendment to make high quality public education a right for every child.

But why is such a right necessary? This was a common refrain offered by the Representatives and Senators. After all, isn’t education supposed to be a matter of States rights?

The answer to this question depends on what one thinks is more important: the collective future of America’s children, or an ideological squabble over theoretical concepts of federalism and the role of government. Every day that our nation’s leaders prioritize the latter over the former is a day that exacts huge consequences on our children and our society as a whole—over one million high school students drop out of school each year, and gaps between U.S. students and international students cost the nation more than $2 trillion each year.

Support among American officials was a little bit more encouraging for national standards, legislative incentives to increase student representation on local school boards, and a federal Students Bill of Rights—the three other priorities expressed by Our Education’s student advocates. Nine elected officials declared their outright support for national standards; sixteen expressed support for federal legislation to encourage local student participation on school boards; and eleven were in favor of some form of Students Bill of Rights.

All told, two bottom lines are clear. First, without a major grassroots push to make public education a national priority, the current system of fifty state standards and 15,000 district providers of varying quality will continue to rule the day. This disjointed system will work cost the nation enormous sums in terms of economic, civic, and social deadweight loss, and it will short change millions of youth along the way. And second, no voice is better suited to stand up to change the status quo than the very young people who are affected by it in the first place.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

See if this description of a major public policy debate sounds familiar:

- A major public service and its related public policy area need serious reform
- The current industry providing the service has a monopoly over the service. To the extent that choice within the industry exists, it exists only among extremely similar establishment institutions that are markedly similar in the structure of their systems and in their incentives.
- One political party believes that a necessary component to fixing the public service is to break the existing industry monopoly over that service by creating or empowering a new kind of service provider to compete with the establishment
- The other political party believes that creating or empowering such a new service provider would spell ruin for the industry and the American public as a whole.

What issue am I talking about? If you thought "education" - you're right. And if you answered "health care" - well, you're also right. But something weird happens depending on which issue you're talking about: the two political parties completely flip sides of the debate.

In the health care arena, Democrats these days are pressing the argument that the "establishment" health care provider--health insurance companies--are doing a shoddy job and that the system is broken. In education, it's conservative Republicans who say that the establishment education provider--traditional public schools--are broken.

In health care, the Democrats want to inject competition as a way to hold the inefficient health insurers accountable--and they see a government health care plan as the most effective competitor. In education, it's the opposite: Republicans want the private sector to compete with the government schools, most commonly through voucher programs to subsidize the cost of private education. What's important to note is that there already is competition in both arenas--competition among various health insurance companies and competition among public schools and charter schools within a given locale.

But both parties argue that this kind of competition is not good enough, as evidenced by spiraling health care costs with little public health benefit and unacceptable levels of student achievement and graduation rates What they want is a paradigm shift in the kind of competition--not just competition within the industry provider but competition between the industry as a whole and a completely different kind of provider (a government health plan in health care; private for-profit schools in education).

So what should we make out of this strange role reversal?

One conclusion is that both political parties are simply logically incoherent. If the Democrats really think that competition and choice between the private sector and government is good in health care, shouldn't they think the same thing about education? And if Republicans really support competition between private schools and public schools, shouldn't they also support competition between private health insurers and a public option in health care? The fact that both parties change their minds might mean that what's really driving their policy preferences is naked political gain: health insurance companies largely fund GOP candidate campaigns while teachers unions typically support Democrats.

Or maybe it's not so simple as that. Maybe both parties are being logically consistent, not about choice and competition, but about the role of the government versus the private sector writ large. Maybe Democrats really think all of health care should be government run, just like all of education--and maybe Republicans think both services should be exclusively privatized. If that's the case, all of this talk about "choice" and "competition" is just a front; neither party could care less about government and private industry battling to do best by customers. But if that's the case, recognize what it means: the government health care option may really be a wolf in sheep's clothing designed to eliminate private health insurance altogether in a slow, steady march to a western European health system. And Republican pushes for charter schools and vouchers may represent an attempt to torpedo public education as we know it.

But neither party has the political capital to go as far in either extreme--some members of each party wouldn't even go that far. So what we're left with is this strange political reality where Republicans believe choice and competition is good for Kennedy Elementary School but not for Kaiser Permanente, and where Democrats think the opposite.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The US Department of Education describes it as the "largest-ever federal investment in education reform": $4.35 billion in "Race to the Top" funds that the federal government will hand down to states who are succeeding in four crucial areas school improvement:

1.) Adopting rigorous standards and assessments;
2.) Recruiting and retaining effective teachers, especially in classrooms where they are needed most;
3.) Turning around low-performing schools; and
4.) Establishing data systems to track student achievement and teacher effectiveness.

Sec Ed Arne Duncan wrote about the plan in a Washington Post op-ed, and the president announced the plan and its conditions Friday.

Already, the plan has precipitated the exact kind of race that was hoped for as states respond to the fund's criterion. Seven states have already lifted caps on charter schools--Tennessee, Rhode Island, Indiana, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Colorado and Illinois--and other states are posturing and even revising other laws on the books so as to be eligible for the funds. California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger even commented, "We will seek any reforms or changes to the law deemed necessary, including changes to our data system laws, to ensure California is eligible to compete" for the funds.

So the funds are having the desired effect in that they're inspiring (or coercing, if you listen to some commentators) states to take action.

But are they good actions from a what's-best-for-kids perspective? Time will tell, but right now the answer looks like yes. All of the four criteria--improving data systems to track student performance and improvement at the classroom level; high state standards; improving teacher quality especially in high-needs areas; and school turnarounds--are controversial but aimed at closing the achievement gap and improving American competitiveness. A chorus of op-eds and articles has even started to emerge that support the federal plan and chastise states who are not in compliance and who therefore lose out on an opportunity to receive the funds.

What's really remarkable, though, is the administration's theory of action here. Typically when the federal government has an idea for how to fix a policy problem in the states, it sets a broad federal mandate and gives dollars to the states to carry out that mandate. That's generally how medicare, medicaid and welfare work, and it's the norm as well for federal education spending so far in the form of Title I. But here, the government isn't giving the dollars as an initial matter with strings attached, it's setting conditions as a pre-condition to eligibility for the dollars to begin with! By analogy, the federal government is doing the equivalent of a health care proposal that would say to states, "the federal government is making a chunk of money available to any state that requires all of its citizens to have health insurance; provides subsidies to low-income citizens; and demands employer participation."

Would such a proposal work in the health care arena? Who can say for certain--but probably not unless the states thought the promise of federal money at the end of the rainbow would be worth the pain. Evidently states who are changing their education policies to be eligible for race to the top funds think the money is worth it... or perhaps there's something else going on: law-makers know that the four fund conditions are the right ones as a matter of policy, but simply did not have the political capital to implement them (i.e. teachers unions and other interest groups opposed them). The carrot of doing it for extra dollars, in other words, may just be the political cover that state law-makers desperately need to execute controversial policy change.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Can more schooling actually be a bad thing in some cases?

According to a new report issued by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, the answer may be yes--at least as relates to teacher pay. The basis for the argument is two-fold. First, research evidence reveals that teachers who have gotten their masters degrees in education demonstrate no enhanced ability to improve student learning as compared to teachers who only have a bachelors degree. Second, because teacher pay is typically tied to advanced degree completion, the amount of money US schools spend on pay raises for teachers who have gotten their masters is substantial: about $8 billion annually. As a result, schools are pouring huge sums of money down the equivalent of a toilet--if the goal is producing positive results for children.

Let's look at each of those propositions a little bit closer. The conclusion that a teacher's advanced degrees have little impact on student achievement has been reached by numerous researchers--at least when the advanced degrees in question are in the field of education (this report famously concludes, "consistent with prior findings, there is no evidence that a master's degree raises teacher effectiveness."). It does turn out that advanced degrees in specific content areas like science and math do have positive impacts on student learning in those subjects--but alas the vast majority of teachers who have masters have them in education, not in science or math.

Does all of that make sense? Well, if you've ever participated in or read about run-of-the-mill teacher training programs at most schools of education in the United States, you'll agree with the conclusion. Put simply, apart from elite institutions that offer highly selective and rigorous teacher training programs, schools of education just don't do much to turn teacher candidates into good teachers. I took a couple of teacher prep classes at Missouri Baptist University in order to obtain an emergency credential in St. Louis when I taught there in 2007-2008--and the classes actually hurt my ability to help students learn since they needlessly wasted hours of my time on fluffy journals, pointless online assignments, and so on.

So if masters degrees in education do so little for our children, why should adults who have obtained them earn more than those who haven't (sometimes as much as $10,000 per year more, in places such as Washington State)? I can't think of a good reason. Ordinarily, individuals with masters degrees earn more than their counterparts in the same field because their additional training--in finance and accounting, engineering, etc.--represents a skill or knowledge set that will improve their productivity and effectiveness as an employee. In a typical profession, if an employee has a masters degree but nonetheless fails to add value for the company, that employee will stand to get fired or demoted. In the absence of the ability to fire and remove teachers at will (or, at least those who are on tenure), the same kind of controls don't exist in education. When combined with the faulty assumption that a master's degree actually confers beneficial skills for teachers in the first place, the result is a lot of wasted money.

At the end of the day, to really understand the question, all we need to do is ask ourselves this question: is there a better use of $8 billion for American school children than randomly giving that money out to some teachers but not others, without any regard to how good they are at their job? Anyone can come up with answers to that question--there are a lot of good ways to spend $8 billion for kids. The challenge is convincing law makers and teachers unions to agree to let such a change happen.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the first time since the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2002, the ranking Republican member of the House Education and Labor Committee does not support the law. Meanwhile, of course, President Obama is a strong supporter of NCLB who has discussed strengthening the law's standards, accountability, and testing requirements.

But wait, isn't standardized testing supposed to be racially discriminatory, culturally biased, and so on? If so, does that mean that Republicans today are the party of compassion, racial tolerance and diversity while Democrats are going back to the days of Jim Crow?

Not a chance. In fact, scrapping NCLB and its standardized testing requirements would be far more racist than keeping it around.

Let me repeat that: when the time comes for re-authorization in the Congress, keeping the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act and its testing requirements on states would be far more racially sensitive and fair than repealing it.

I know, I know: a true liberal isn't supposed to support standardized testing. Standardized tests are racist, according to some liberal educators, because they serve only to perpetuate institutional racism by punishing minorities and low income children who do not perform as well as majority students for a wide variety of reasons. The questions are racially biased, they reinforce negative stereotypes about minority achievement, and the tests give racists "data" they can use to support other overtly discriminatory decisions.

The problem with that argument is, it can only possibly hold water with regard to "high stakes" standardized testing--that is, a test that actually visits some kind of consequence upon the student who takes it, depending on how well she does. The SAT is the prime example of a high stakes test today, since college admissions are so heavily tied to it--another example is the CAHSEE (California High School Exit Exam) which California students must pass in order to graduate from high school (it requires students to be able to read at the 10th grade level and do math at the 8th grade level in order to graduate). But affirmative action programs in colleges and arguments about the state's duty to ensure that high school graduates have a basic level of skills and knowledge respond to these concerns, even if only partially. What's more, in the history of No Child Left Behind, not a single student has been required by the federal law to take one of these "high stakes tests."

That's right, NCLB says nothing about high stakes tests. It only mandates tests that have no stakes for students; NCLB requires states to measure annually between grades 3 and 8 and once in high school to see how well students are performing on the state's standards and to hold schools and districts--not students--accountable for the results. To be sure, some states and school districts have added their own high stakes requirements to the tests, in effect declaring that students won't get promoted to the next grade or won't graduate without achieving at a certain level on the test, but that's a state and district decision--not the federal government's call. In California, for example, only CAHSEE has any stakes for students--every single other test given (i.e. the vast majority of tests in the state) as part of the state's standards and accountability system is no-stakes for students.

What does that mean for children? Well if a test has no impact on a child's ability to graduate or move on to the next grade, it's hard to see how there might be any racist effects or racism inherent in the system. Some liberals will argue that even attaching a number to a kid and telling them they were below basic or only basic in math in 3rd grade (without any actual consequences) will lead them to be ashamed of their race, or propagate racial stereotypes. But that theory of child-rearing basically says that we should never say anything bad to any child, lest they draw a negative conclusion about themselves or their identity as a result.

Contrast whatever negative impact there might be from telling minority children how well they fared on the state's standards against the negative impact of repealing NCLB and its testing requirements altogether. What's the downside there? For starters, we would no longer have any objective way of knowing just how much our schools and social structure are cheating minority and low income children out of what they deserve. You see, the biggest innovation of NCLB was not that it required states to test students regularly--the biggest innovation was what it did with the data that came from the tests: it forced schools and districts to dis-aggregate the data by sub-group.

In other words, before NCLB, in most states we had no idea what percent of kids were proficient in reading, what percent were basic in math, etc. Individual schools got good reputations by pointing to specific students who were the product of the system who went on and succeeded; wealthy suburban districts pointed mostly to high-achieving majority and high-income children. All the while, however, low-income and minority children were being short changed. NCLB's innovation--and its triumph with regard to racial equality and civil rights--was to pull down the curtain on schools and say no longer can schools only point to rich kids and white kids when declaring their excellence. Under the law, a school must improve achievement among its African American, Latino, special education, and English language learning populations too before it gets a mark of success.

If you get rid of that innovation, you effectively tell schools that they can build opaque walls around their classrooms again. And let's remember: it was within those opaque walls that the achievement gap was built to begin with; the gap has only gotten smaller since NCLB was passed in 2002.

One final note. If you're asking, who am I to speak on behalf of America's low-income children and children of color, you've got a fair point. Don't take it from me that NCLB is better for those children than the pre-NCLB days; take it from the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, and other civil rights groups who have all come out in staunch support for standardized testing and Bush-era education policies.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's not a great time to be graduating from college, particularly if you're one of millions who are saddled with student loan debt. In an economy that is still shedding jobs at faster rates than economists predicted, prospects are dimmer for this class of graduates than perhaps any class in recent memory.

All of which makes the federal government's new income-based college loan forgiveness plan, slated to begin today, so much more timely. The plan ties monthly payments to graduates' income levels, offering a measure of predictability and proportionality to the school loan industry that has been sorely lacking.

Interested graduates should visit the government's loan repayment website to see if they are qualified. By clicking on the handy calculator tool and entering basic information about their loan burden, income level, and family size, a graduate can see how much they'd be required to pay each month.

What does it look like in practice? Imagine a student who graduates with $100,000 in debt and takes a job as a teacher earning $40,000 a year and who lives by herself. With the income-based repayment plan, the student would owe only $295 / month--a number that is calculated by taking 15% of the difference between 150% of the federal poverty figure and the graduate's annual salary.

Seems sensible right? It ties the interests of the borrower with the interest of the lender (in this case, the federal government only--the loan program is only open to students whose debt is owed directly to the fed) because lenders have no interest in demanding such exorbitant monthly payments that their borrowers default. But here's the best part of the deal: after twenty-five years of payments, if the borrowing graduate still has any debt remaining, the remainder of their debt is completely forgiven.

That's right. The government will let you walk away from whatever else you owe if you've made payments reliably. And the deal is even sweeter if you're a student working in a public interest job like teaching: the government will forgive your loans after only 10 years.

Why is the government going bucky willy to help college grads all of a sudden? Part of it can be chalked up to good intentions and the sound logic of a long-term investment in a skilled workforce, the American dream and so on. Part of it also owes to the government and the Obama administration's self interest in meeting a particular political goal: slowly but surely moving the federal education loan system off of the private-bank oriented subsidized loan system and towards the more efficient direct loan program. The loan forgiveness and income-based repayment plans accomplish both goals: they help people pay for school while giving them an incentive to elect into the direct loan program on their own volition. For more info on the direct loan versus subsidized loan controversy, check out this previous entry.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a question that serious school reformers and education advocates have been tackling for years: what's the best way to reduce a drop-out rate in America that hovers around 30%, and that approaches 50% in certain low-income and minority communities?

In a maneuver that completely misunderstands the nature of the debate, Louisiana is poised to answer that question in a non-sensical fashion: by making it shockingly easy for a student to get a high school diploma. As it currently stands in the state, a student must score at the "basic" level on either the math or reading 8th grade test and at the "approaching basic" level in the other subject in order to attend and graduate from high school. Not a particularly lofty hurdle, right? Seems only logical that we would want our students to at least read and do math at or near an 8th grade level before giving them a diploma, right?

Yet Louisiana lawmakers have noticed that a large number of students are dropping out of high school. Their solution? Not to increase the quality of school programming so that students learn more, feel more engaged, feel safer, or recognize the value of a quality education. Not to increase funding for after-school and extracurricular programs that might increase student involvement in their schools. No, the legislature, by overwhelming majorities (38-0 in the state Senate and 87-10 in the house) has decided that the best way to reduce the drop out rate is to make it easier for kids to coast through high school without learning much of anything at all. The only kicker? Those students who take that track won't get a regular diploma, they'll get a "career diploma" on graduation day.

I don't even know where to begin when discussing how big of a mistake this act will be for Louisiana's future. In a day and age where we are rapidly realizing that today's children will need to master complex skills in order to succeed at the cutting edge of the 21st century economy, Louisiana's plan is tantamount to societal suicide--it gives license to educators who don't believe their students can learn and it tricks students into believing that they can succeed in the world without knowing how to read and write or do math and science at a basic level.

What Louisiana should be doing is the opposite of this bill: it should be demanding more of its schools and students, not less. Demanding more in the way of student achievement must come, of course, with providing more in the way of educational resources--finding quality teachers and paying them for their successes, ensuring adequate facilities and educational materials are present for every student, etc. But that's a trade that will do much better for Louisiana's kids than the trade Governor Bobby Jindal and state law-makers have effectively pulled: they've traded the future of their children for a short-term political gain they can cite since they will have "fixed" the drop-out rate problem.

The thing is, fixing the drop-out rate in high schools is not the end goal for our efforts to improve education. If all America needed to ensure its long term success was 100% of its 18-year-olds owning a piece of paper that says "high school diploma" on it, the federal government could solve that problem by printing out a bunch of the darn things and mailing them out to every adult in the state. That theory of education reform fundamentally fails to understand our challenges much like a basketball coach who, seeing that his players can't shoot during games, decides to lower the hoop to 5 feet and triple the circumference of the rim so that his players make every shot during practice. Yet that's exactly what Louisiana lawmakers have inflicted upon their children, with only a handful of dissenters voicing their opinions.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So much happening in the school news world this past week, but I've chosen to write about a topic that I think is of interest to most people who have attended public schools in America: teacher tenure.

Before that, I just wanted to write a couple of quick notes about two SCOTUS decisions handed down today. First, in Safford Unified School District v. April Redding, the Court got the big part right easily voting 8-1 that when an Arizona school conducted a strip search on a 13 year old girl to find "contraband" ibuprofen pills, it violated the girl's 4th amendment privacy rights. The court also ruled, 7-2, on the more contentious issue of whether the individual school officials who conducted the search could be sued for their involvement. The court said no, which I think is difficult to believe (did they really think it was reasonable to strip search a middle school girl over ibuprofen??) but ultimately a decision that won't hurt too many kids. After all, most principals stop short of strip searching minor student offenses for lots of reasons other than constitutional one--and the punishment of public shame and likely firing should be sufficient.

On a second note, the Court remanded (i.e. sent back to the lower court for further fact finding) the question of whether Arizona's English Language Learner funding levels were sufficient in accordance with the Equal Educational Opportunities Act. The case is far too complex to explain here in brief, but the bottom line is the issue is far from settled.

Now to teacher tenure. Here's a cartoon to provide some context:

A new report from the Center for American Progress outlines some common sense considerations we should take into account when thinking about teacher tenure. First thing it points out is that teachers in America get tenure in a hodge podge fashion without any regard for what really matters: how much students are learning. If schools were granting tenure to teachers who were producing outstanding learning gains year-in and year-out, I don't think the complaints about the system would be quite so loud.

Second thing is that once teachers earn tenure, there is nothing wrong with providing them due process protection against arbitrary firings. If a teacher has proven their ability to produce excellent learning gains, it may actually be good for kids to stop a principal or other administrator from firing that teacher without showing good cause.

Third, tenure shouldn't be absolute--at some point if a teacher stops producing outstanding learning gains tenure should be revocable so that administrators have the freedom to move that teacher around and so that the teacher himself has incentive to keep performing at high levels.

Fourth, any discussion of tenure can't be separated from a discussion of teacher pay systems and data collection regarding objective measures of what makes a good teacher.

Anyhow, bottom line is, tenure isn't working for the benefit of children at all in the current education system, but that doesn't mean the whole idea is flawed. Good teachers, like any other good employees, should feel safe in their jobs so long as they keep performing at high levels. What remains is the policy structure to create that human capital system--specifically the data to show which teachers are "good" and which are "bad" in terms of student learning to begin with...

Posted by Aaron Tang at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alright, so the title is a bit misleading: this blog isn't about putting up prison-style walls around our schools as some strange school improvement plan. If anything, my position on cage free schools is the same as my position on chickens and their eggs.

But every time I read a fiercely-written op-ed like this one in the Huffington Post, from widely-respected Ed Scholar Diane Ravitch, I'm reminded of an analogy that a college professor once espoused and that has stuck with me: fixing our education system is a lot like building fences around a herd of cattle.

If you build one line of fence, say on the western front of your property, it won't be very difficult for the cattle to head north or south and find their way out of your land. Much the same, folks out there who argue that the only thing we need to fix our schools is standards and accountability based on standardized tests are going to fail in their goals of closing the achievement gap and making America's schools the best in the world.

There is no silver bullet in school reform, no single fence that can keep the cows from escaping. What we need instead is a set of fences--three, in mind--that when put together can completely encircle the problem. To me, those fences are:
(1) Sufficient resources so that all children have access to basic educational materials like decent, safe classrooms and learning materials,
(2) A quality teacher in every classroom, and
(3) High standards that every child is expected to reach and an accountability system that rewards schools and teachers who help children meet these standards while identifying those who do not for corrective action.

Folks like Diane Ravitch, who would scrap No Child Left Behind in its entirety, think you can fix the educational crisis with just the first and second fences. The logical implication of that argument, however, is that our schools were better in the 70s, 80s, and 90s when NCLB didn't exist than they are now--a fact that is plainly false given overall increases in student performance since those eras and an achievement gap that is narrower (or at worst, the same) now than it was in those previous decades. (More data here).

The anti-NCLB argument forgets the fact that because of the law, for the first time in our nation’s history, every school in the country must report how well it is teaching low-income children, minority children, English language learners, and special ed children. If a school is teaching its rich white kids wonderfully but not doing anything to provide the same educational opportunities to less fortunate children, no longer can it hide the ball and point to generally high achievement and graduation rates in claiming success. Let’s remember, the achievement gap came about during a time in America’s educational history where there were no standards and no accountability whatsoever. If Diane Ravitch thinks its best to go back to those days where we just give schools a bunch of money (and $50 billion from the federal government is hardly a paltry sum) without asking for anything in return, I know this much: the achievement gap will not get narrower. At the very least, NCLB has shined the light on the many ways that schools and districts have under-served the children who need excellent schools the most.

But, of course, the standards and accountability fence isn't enough either. And this is where the standards and accountability proponents have gotten it wrong: you can't expect schools to improve just by demanding it. We have to give every school the resources and policies they need to hire excellent teachers and provide sound instructional materials--something that simply isn't available in too many schools. Reform efforts that overlook the resource / human capital piece are just as doomed to fail as those who want to give schools a bunch of money and hope for the best.

Are there other fences that you would add to my list of necessary components of successful school improvement efforts? A bunch of ideas can be quite helpful but are not necessary in my view, but I can certainly be persuaded...

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So how about this for a blast from the past, circa 8th grade US History. What is the difference between an Eli Whitney Musket and a public school?

The answer?

One is made up of essentially identical interchangeable parts, the other is not. Yet according to a new report issued by the New Teacher Project, we treat them both the same.

There is broad consensus, you see, that one factor above all others affects the kind of education that a child will receive: the quality of their teacher. In that sense, teachers are the farthest thing from interchangeable parts imaginable because if you take one teacher out of her classroom at random and replace her with another, chances are you'll get a dramatically different outcome among the students in that classroom. But if you are tinkering with an old Eli Whitney musket and you take out the wheel lock and replace it with a wheel lock from another Eli Whitney musket... voila! Nothing changes.

Pretty elementary stuff, you'd say, right? Only the vast majority of our school policy makers either don't understand it or aren't willing to act on it (and I'm guessing it's the latter). Here's some evidence to support that conclusion, all from the above report which surveyed responses from more than 15,000 teachers and 1,300 administrators in 12 districts and 4 states:

* 99% of teachers evaluated by their administrators on a binary "satisfactory" vs. "unsatisfactory" scale received a "satisfactory" mark
* When evaluations offered more rating options than just "satisfactory" and "unsatisfactory" administrators still marked 94% of teachers one of the top two ratings and only 1% as "unsatisfactory"
* 73% of teachers surveyed said their most recent evaluation did not identify any areas in need of development
* 41% of administrators say they have never denied tenure to a teacher or refused to renew the contract of a teacher who was on probation

If you looked at those statistics in isolation, you might think that America has one of the most impressive teaching forces in the world where virtually every educator is doing a solid job or better. But if you ask the same administrators and teachers some slightly different questions, it quickly becomes clear that the above statistics are hiding something very important:

~ 81% of administrators say there is a tenured teacher in their school who is performing poorly. (Really?? That means that something like four out of every five administrators who are evaluating teachers give a "satisfactory" rating to someone who they believe is doing a poor job as a teacher!)
~ 43% of teachers say there is a tenured teacher in their building who should be dismissed for poor performance (when I taught, I would have been willing to flip that number around and say that 43% of the teachers in the building should have been dismissed for poor performance, if only there were other teachers available who could do a better job!).

What's the upshot of all of this? When administrators rate everyone the same, it has two tragic effects. First, it means we can't identify the worst teachers in our schools who are failing our children and need to be replaced. But more importantly, in my opinion, it means we can't identify the best teachers either because so many teachers are getting high marks on evaluations that the praise becomes meaningless. And when you have a profession where the truly high performers aren't getting recognized--either on evaluations or in the form of increased pay--you have a profession that will be plagued by low morale and a shortage of high achievers who are interested in entering the work force. Does that sound like the teaching profession in America, generally??

The solution, of course, is to start making headway in identifying what exactly is good teaching, rewarding those who are doing it, and supporting and if need be replacing those who are not. Objective data in the form of how much students are actually learning (see my entry last week for a great example of this) would go a long way towards this end, since it'll take the subjective element out of a principal evaluation that no doubt leads them to retain and mark "satisfactory" far too many nice people who may unfortunately not be doing a good job as teachers.

But here's the rub: our policy makers have been slow to the draw in developing these data systems because of how unpopular it is among teachers unions to separate the good from the bad. Maybe hope is on the horizon, as President Obama pushes for change...

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alright, I'll admit it, I'm a geek. I love playing with numbers, watching patterns develop, seeing if data can help us predict the future in everything from baseball to student achievement. I'm also as much a fan of new technology as the next person, so when you give me a new toy that blends numbers, imagery, and cool tech, well I'm pretty much in heaven.

So all of this makes Colorado's amazing new toy something that I've grown a bit addicted to in the last few hours. What is the toy, you ask? Click the link and have a see for yourself (but don't worry, I'll give some more info as well). If you've decided to click on the link, don't worry about watching either the introduction or tutorial video, instead click "select by name" and start playing right away by clicking on different cities and seeing how the schools there stack up.

If you'd rather just read what this whole thing is about, I'll start here: the toy is called the "Colorado Growth Model Public View" and it's pretty much the most important public data system concerning school quality that's every been released. Here's the long and short of what it does:

1.) First, it does something run-of-the-mill that plenty of other public data sets on school quality do (such as greatschools.net, schoolmatters.com and others): it tells you how well a given school's students do on standardized tests. Take Trailblazer Elementary School in Colorado Springs, for example. Of the 328 students enrolled in the school, 82% of the students are proficient or better on the math portion of Colorado's Student Assessment Program. Pretty good, right? Compare that to Bruce Randolph High School in Denver, where of the 680 students, only a paltry 5% were at or above proficient in math. Not as good a school, right? If all you had was some of these other websites or the data available in any other state, you'd quickly draw the conclusion that Trailblazer must be a good school and Bruce Randolph must be a bad one. But not so fast...

2.) The second thing Colorado's Growth Model does is show something that no other public website shows: how much a given school's students have actually learned over time. Here, suddenly Trailblazer Elementary School doesn't look so good: it's only in the 24th percentile of student growth, meaning that three out of every four schools in the state are improving their students' learning ability more than Trailblazer! Turns out the parents who are excited to be sending their kids there are getting a bum deal: their kids may start out at a high achievement level but they'll regress towards an average level by the time they finish elementary school--or worse. And what about Randolph High School? Turns out it is in the 70th percentile for improving student achievement, meaning that it may be getting a bunch of students who start out below grade level in the 9th grade but the school seems to be doing a pretty darn good job at bringing those students up to speed.

So what kind of school did you go to? Unless you grew up in Colorado, it may be some time before you find out for sure. But ask yourself two questions:
1.) Did most of the students at my school have a good chance at passing the standardized tests?
2.) Did most of the students learn a lot every year, regardless of whether they would pass the tests or not?

You might think the two questions are asking the same thing, but they're not. The first question often gets to background characteristics of the kinds of students attending a school and not the school itself--in other words, even a pretty crumby school would have a hard time taking Bill Gates's 9 year old daughter and educating her so poorly that she would fail the 3rd grade math proficiency test. But the second question is arguably more important: how much are the students learning each year? A school in a tough neighborhood may be teaching a lot to its students without much success on the first question (i.e. Bruce Randolph School), and a school in a great neighborhood might be failing its students by failing to push them to do much more than be proficient.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, Bruce Randolph School was found to be such a miracle case that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited it earlier in April to tout the power and potential of school reform. Quite simply, the numbers don't lie.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three quick-hits from the world of education reform that share a common theme:

1.) Cuts in President Obama's proposed 2010 budget
Fresh off a $100 billion victory in the form of increased federal school spending in the stimulus package, some school reformers are now upset that the President has proposed to eliminate eleven "ineffective" programs altogether from the department of education's portfolio and reduce or re-fashion several other programs.

Although the department of education's overall outlays would increase $1.3 billion, or 2.8 percent, to a new total of $46.7 billion (not including the stimulus spending), some advocates had been hoping for a larger increase. Included in the programs to be cut are: the $295 million Safe and Drug-Free Schools State Grants; $133 million in abstinence education; $66 million in college access challenge grants, and others such as a $7.5 million gifted and talented program, $33.5 character education program, and more (full list here). Most of the programs were cut after internal review found the programs to lack evidentiary support of their effectiveness, and the abstinence education program was replaced with a teenage pregnancy prevention program.

The bottom line? Overall good news in the next two years for school spending advocates, but not every school-related program survived the Obama team's scalpel.

2.) Three out of four aspiring elementary school teachers in Massachusetts failed the math section of the state's licensing exam
The headline here may be that 73% of new elementary school teacher candidates in Massachusetts can't do math, and that our teaching force is woefully inadequate. There will be inevitable back-fire from teachers unions and the like saying that the tests are inaccurate, that you can't judge how good a teacher is based on a math exam, and so on. But to me, the real headline is that Massachusetts is doing something important: shining a light on the teaching profession in a public way. Now, I'm not sure that this is the kind of data that drives a straight line to student achievement (it would be better to have public data on how much each teacher's students learned in any given year) but maybe it's a start.

3.) LA Students threaten a walk-out
350 students walked out of a pair of Los Angeles High Schools to protest imminent school spending cuts in LAUSD yesterday, and more walk-outs are threatened for today.

The students are apparently upset that as many as 2,500 teachers may be fired as a result of California's woeful budget crisis. As much as I am a staunch supporter of student activism, my question for the students is a simple one. If you, the students, had the power to control which teachers should be kept and which should be let go, could you identify those teachers who you don't think are doing a good job teaching you and who don't care about your academic progress? It certainly can't be the case that every LA teacher is an excellent one, and it certainly can't be the case that these students are saying so (in fact, the arguably more common student protest is not a protest to save a certain teacher from administrative action, but rather protests to encourage administration to do something about a persistently negligent teacher).

So if this assumption is correct--that the students could identify a number of teachers at each school who they would let go if they had the power--then the real problem that the students are protesting here is either: 1.) any budget cuts to schools whatsoever (which may be valid from a priority standpoint, but not when you look at the state's books), or 2.) the fact that the LAUSD powers -that-be and their teacher union counterparts will invariably agree to fire not the 2,500 worst teachers, but the 2,500 least tenured ones. That, as the students are arguing, would be a tragedy, but it's a tragedy better served by a protest sign reading, "Fire Mr. X because he just shows movies all year, not Mrs. Y who is a great first-year teacher" than a sign reading "Save Our Teachers." I've worked in a crumby public school before (in St. Louis), and the reality is sad but simple: not all our teachers deserve saving.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LA Superior Court Judge James Chalfant handed down a decisive victory yesterday for Los Angeles Unified School District officials in the form of a court order enjoining LA's public school teachers from going on strike this Friday. The strike had been approved late last month by a majority of the members of the United Teachers of Los Angeles as a protest to massive cuts proposed in the city's 2009-2010 education budget which would have involved the termination of some 3,000 teachers.

Union leaders were predictably outraged by the decision, and there is some discussion of teachers defying the court order or at least engaging in civil disobedience before and after school hours. But neither a strike nor the court order preventing the strike will resolve the deep-rooted challenges that the economic crisis and years of inaction have brought about for the roughly 700,000 students in the district.

To begin with, the anger felt by LA's teachers is surely valid in that education is too-often a budget item of early resort chosen by cities and states when they have to slash spending, an item that is far more important than numerous other pet projects that somehow get saved from the chopping block. What is more, long-standing problems with financial mismanagement and decision-making at the district level that puts politics above student learning are still problematic (see this wiki link for an example), and it's easy to sympathize with teachers who are at risk of losing their jobs because of an economic crisis that was more the fault of Wall Street Tycoons than the fault of public school employees.

The thing is, just as a court order requiring business to resume as usual in LA's schools will do little to improve student learning opportunities, neither will a strike do much to address the underlying problems in LA's schools. The sad reality of an economic downturn is that reduced consumer spending leads to reduced tax receipts, and reduced tax receipts must be accompanied by reduced spending--either in the form of cuts we choose ex ante or cuts we can't choose when things get too late. And teachers unions shouldn't forget that they can be a part of the solution too: one alternative to seeing thousands of teachers laid off is to voluntarily reduce scheduled wage increases (perhaps teachers could negotiate wage freezes in exchange for increased autonomy from school district policies), and to cut some 160 teachers who are being paid $10 million a year to do absolutely nothing of educational value whatsoever.

But put yourself in Judge Chalfant's shoes for a moment. How would you have ruled on LAUSD's request to block the teachers from going on strike this Friday? As important as labor unions and the right to organize have been vital to our nation's progress over the past decades, is there a point at which the interests of school-children in an education free of disruption should trump that right to strike? What of the fact that the teachers unions explicitly agreed in their latest labor contract that they wouldn't go on strike? And what of the fact that a strike would have disrupted high school students taking AP tests and other classroom instruction?

The politics of teachers unions is complicated indeed, for it forces progressives to confront a conflict between two core principles: the right of workers to organize, and the rights of children to a quality education insofar as what is best for teachers unions is not always what is best for students. The decision yesterday in Los Angeles simply serves to highlight that tension in an increasingly uncomfortable way given the present day economic outlook. So if you were wearing the judge's robes and holding the gavel in that LA Superior court room at the end of the day, how would you have ruled?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Q#12) Which comes closer to your view?

A) The more students taking AP courses the better--even when they do poorly in the course, they benefit from the challenge and experience
B) Only students who can handle the material should take AP courses--otherwise it’s not fair to them, their classmates, their teachers, and the quality of the program.

<Question asked of 1,024 teachers on a recently published study from the Fordham Institute>

I'm always surprised about how people come down on this question. For every Jay Mathews out there, the Washington Post education reporter who writes feverishly in support of opening up access to AP courses for all high school students who are interested in them, regardless of their prior academic track record, there are many more who think that access to Advanced Placement classes should be a privilege reserved to the few students who have earned it.

The controversy exists for good reason. Almost everyone who's been to high school is familiar with the AP program (or its counterpart, the International Baccalaureate program), and more than 1.6 million high school students participated in 2007-2008--a sixty percent growth from just five years earlier. There's little question that the program is a net positive: it adds a much-needed dimension of academic rigor to high school curricula, offers rewards of college credit (and higher grade point averages in schools weighing AP classes on a 4.5 or 5.0 scale) to the students who participate, motivates many veteran teachers to hone their craft, and generally increases the outputs of our K-12 public school system.

The question is just who is the program supposed to benefit? The answer will differ depending on who you ask, but let's start with one pertinent stakeholder group: teachers themselves. 52% of the teachers who were asked the question above on Fordham's survey agreed with statement B compared to 38% who chose statement A. To drive things home further, 63% of teachers surveyed indicated that it would improve the AP program to screen students more heavily at the outset, limiting access to only those who are ready to do the work.

Do you agree with that viewpoint? One high school student who I've worked closely with over the past few years,who has taken numerous AP classes herself, and who I respect deeply, does agree with the majority of the teachers surveyed. As she explains it, opening up AP classes to just any student would water down the rigor of the program, make it hard on teachers, and do little justice to the students who are under-prepared.

My own view is quite different. I don't see 15 year-olds as static, take-them-as-they-come finished products. When a sophomore who has gotten C's and D's in her classes decides she wants to challenge herself and take AP classes in her junior year, I'm willing to give her a shot--although I, as some others have suggested, would require her along with any other student who wants to take AP or IB classes to sign a contract promising to do the required several hours of added homework per week. Kids change, and academic achievement is at least as much a product of hard work and effort as it is a function of the grades you got the year before.

To tell a student, either directly or passively through signaling mechanisms like honors track classes starting in middle school, that they aren't fit for AP-level classes is, in my opinion, only a few steps removed in logic from charging poll taxes to vote. You can articulate sensible reasons in support of both--both poll taxes and exclusive AP screening increase buy-in from participants, ensuring that those who participate do so thoughtfully--but in the end those reasons are trumped by much more important social goals: democratic solidarity and political and social equality.

So in the end, it comes down to what our priority for the AP program is. Is it to create an elite (and elitist) cadre of students who are thoroughly ready for college, a program that is a reward for young people who have already demonstrated success and a program will be measured by how successful each of its participants are? If so, your answer to question #12 on the survey is B. But if your goal is broader, to encourage college readiness among young people even if they haven't earned the opportunity through their prior work and even if it means that the best-of-the-best will share on their college applications something in common with the less "accomplished" students, bubble in the circle next to letter A.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the common themes I've seen in the so-called "Tea Parties" being thrown by conservative activists who oppose the federal government's recent stimulus and spending plans is the kind of thing you'll see if you scroll to the 23 second mark of this video:

If you don't have time to skip to that point in the video, the theme is this: the tea party protesters seem to enjoy justifying their actions by pointing to their children. For example, some of the most common signs at the tea parties read, "Stop taxing my grandchildren!" and "Stop spending my child's future!" And yes, as you'll see in the video, many protesters will bring their babies and toddlers to the actual events for a real live taste of the action.

The problem with this deficit-spending-today-is-bad-because-it-hurts-our-children-in-the-future argument is that it presumes that the best thing for today's children would be for the federal government to stop spending so much money today on things like building schools, rescuing state school budgets, keeping college affordable, and providing health care to the children themselves.

I've got news for those protesters: things aren't so great for young people as they stand today, and they only stand to get worse without an intervention. Take the perfect storm that is closing in on youth who dream of going to college these days: college tuition costs at public universities will be raised at record rates to offset state budget shortfalls (the UC system in California projects tuition rate hikes of 9.3%, for example); private universities are reacting to financial pressures by accepting more wealthy students who can pay their own way at the expense of perhaps equally deserving low-income youth; skyrocketing proportions of recent graduates are defaulting on their ever-growing student loan debt; and the K-12 public school system is hardly excelling in preparing students to even get to college in the first place.

So what should we do as these factors close in on young people, making college less and less affordable--even as it becomes more and more necessary to succeed in the global marketplace?

Well if you listen to the tea party protesters, their answer seems to be a combination of things: reduce federal Pell grants and student loans, making college even more expensive; cut federal aid to states, who will face the catch-22 of either raising tuition costs or sacrificing the quality of their higher education programs; reduce federal K-12 aid, rendering our children even less likely to be ready for college should they even be able to afford it; and make health care a privilege instead of a right for some 20% of children. If only we can do that much for our children, the protesters seem to suggest, we can be sure that our children and our children's children will thank us for it down the road.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Things are not always as we expect them to be, and that lesson was particularly true this past week in two separate worlds: the world of education reform and the world of reality television.

What do I mean that "things are not always what they seem"? Let's start with the reality TV world and see how that sheds light on a significant decision by the Obama Administration to effectively end the controversial DC Voucher program. Here's a clip from the British equivalent of American Idol that has been drawing rave reviews lately--trust me when I say it will be unexpected:

Alright, so how does that important life lesson from Ms. Susan Boyle--that things are not always what they seem--apply to the world of education?

Last month, without much attention at all, the Democratic Congress and President Obama moved swiftly to end a program that currently sends over 1,700 Washington DC public school students--many of them from low-income families--to area private schools. The program, now in its fourth year, has long been opposed by Democrats and teachers unions, while drawing most of its support from Republicans. So at some level, the decision to halt funding for the program after next school year couldn't have been that much of a surprise given the outcome of the 2008 election.

But the Congress and the President's joint decision to terminate the program cast a deep shadow over two important considerations--much the same as Susan Boyle's physical appearance kept hidden a remarkable talent. The first consideration is that, put simply, the voucher program works. The students who applied for and received vouchers (in the amount of $7,500, distributed randomly by lottery) to attend nearby private schools performed significantly better than control group students who applied for the voucher lottery but did not win and consequently attended traditional public schools. The difference in academic achievement was statistically significant in reading--a more than three month average advantage for the private school students as opposed to the control group public school students. There was also a slight--but not statistically significant---advantage in math scores, along with a substantial difference in parent satisfaction (but similar results in student satisfaction surveys).

To be sure, this isn't the only study out there about vouchers and their impacts on students, and much of the rest of the data is at controversial to say the least. But the study that I linked to above was commissioned by the Department of Education itself, not some right-wing school choice organization.

Now it's one thing to have a spirited debate over whether vouchers work and to reject funding for the program as a result, but what the Administration did instead is disconcerting: it hid the results of the study while Congress was debating the fate of the program last month! Upon releasing the results last week, a handful of news agencies have expressed disappointment in the Administration's decision to keep hidden this valuable information about the program's effectiveness that might have changed the nature of the funding debate. Alas, the upshot is that some 200 families who were already told earlier this spring that their children would receive the vouchers to go to private schools next school year have since been told that the Federal government is reneging on that promise.

Which brings us to the second *arguable* things-are-not-what-they-seem lesson courtesy of Britain's Got Talent to the education reform world: Maybe President Obama and Secretary Duncan are not the honest and bold reformers as has been advertised after all?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a quiet revolution happening at the US Department of Education concerning the department's rules governing tutoring services funded by the federal government under No Child Left Behind. Ok, maybe revolution is too strong of a word, but the conflict taking place is real and it underscores a serious area in which reform could truly benefit students.

The debate is about NCLB's requirement that schools provide free tutoring services (called "Supplemental Educational Services" or "SES" by the law) to low-income children in low-performing schools that fail to meet state targets for annual yearly progress for three consecutive years. In basic terms, the law functions this way: if a child attends a school that is measured as failing by virtue of its low standardized test scores three years in a row, that school is required by law to offer the child access to free tutoring before or after school, paid for by the federal government. But the fed doesn't pay for the tutoring with new dollars, it instead requires that the school use the federal dollars that it is already receiving under Title I to pay for the tutoring --as much as $1,800 per student, depending on where the child lives.

The controversy that has arisen in recent days started with an April 1st, but not April-Fools letter from new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, which stated that he would be changing the rules as they had been applied in the previous administration. Under the Bush Administration and former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, school districts were required to pay a third party to provide the tutoring service--usually a for-profit or non-profit company with some pre-designed tutoring program. The law thus functioned as a windfall for existing tutoring companies and a spark for the creation of many new companies, but the results were hardly encouraging, as there were wide gaps in the effectiveness of the program and many of them showed little benefit altogether.

Part of the reason why all of the money spent on the tutoring--more than $2.5 billion in 2005--yielded such little in the way of results was that very few students actually participated. The NY Times observed in 2004, for instance, that of the 2 million students eligible for the tutoring services, only 12% were actually receiving them. Secretary Duncan, based on his experience from Chicago, has argued that one of the reasons why the program has had such little effect and enrolled so few students is because of the old rule requiring schools to outsource the tutoring to private companies rather than provide the tutoring themselves. So it was of little surprise that Mr. Duncan's letter to school officials on April 1st indicated that he would be changing the rules to allow schools to provide the tutoring services directly.

What will be the result of that change? If you listen to the nation's leading education thinkers, probably not much. The reality is, as long as these services are dubbed "supplemental" and described as "tutoring" they won't have the kind of buy-in from parents, students, or educators (whether from the school district or an outside company) that is necessary to foster a learning environment. The data tell us that there is little reason to think that a wholly voluntary program provided by a low-performing school to its children will do in an hour after class what it has struggled to do for years; and just as little reason to think that some for-profit (or even non-profit) company will be able to swoop in and do it either.

So here's a better idea: what if we require schools that are chronically failing to use their federal dollars to extend the formal length of the school year and school day? Instead of sending a letter home to parents to tell them that their child is eligible for free tutoring if the parent is able to bring the child to school early every morning or pick them up after school hours (which poses two problems: first, parents often are reluctant to affirmatively enroll their kids in a tutoring program that is seen as remedial, and second, the pick up and drop off are themselves logistically challenging), let's just require all of the children to spend more time on the vital learning tasks that schools should be doing to begin with. Now it's no solution by itself, since a lengthened school day and year is only as effective as the teachers in each classroom, but it would guarantee a much higher rate of participation than the 12% we're seeing with the current "tutoring" services. And it would potentially give teachers the kind of additional time they need with individual students to make the kinds of connections that foster learning.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the availability of a staggering $44 billion in stimulus funding to states for education. The primary purpose of the funds will be to help local districts and states bridge the growing gaps in their own education budgets, preventing teacher layoffs and other resource cuts. But the administration has also suggested secondary and perhaps tertiary purposes: to assist in new school facility construction and to provide financial incentives for systemic school reform.

While the three purposes of the stimulus funding may intersect in their ultimate goal of improving the quality of public education in America, there is a growing debate over just how the money should be spent. The issue is how the $44 billion pie should be divided up among the states. It's a pressing question, and one that the Department of Education just doesn't have enough time to tackle well (given the more immediate to need to stimulate the economy), but here are a few of the ways that have been suggested along with the pros and cons. As you consider the options, think not only about which one you think is best but also how one might convince lawmakers to go that route in the future.

Option #1: Use existing Title I formulas to distribute the stimulus funding to states. The existing formulas are based on a combination of three factors: (1) how high a concentration of poor students the state has, (2) how much money each state already spends per pupil, and (3) how many students the state in gross.

While the three factors sound reasonable, a recent NY Times article highlighted some of the weaknesses of this approach, which is the one that the Department of Education will ultimately use. The main problems with this approach are first, that federal aid will essentially reward those states that already spend the most on their students, and second, that low-income students who face similar hurdles will receive different amounts of federal support simply based on where they happen to live. The reason why Congress has nevertheless chosen this approach is pretty straight-forward: Congress doesn't want states to take the federal dollars and just use it as a substitute for state dollars. By conditioning the amount of funding on how much the states are themselves willing to pony up, the idea is that you'll give the states reason to spend more and more of their own money on schools, which can only be a good thing. And by giving more money to states with higher concentrations of low-income students, the theory goes that you're targeting more intense areas of need.

The problem, of course, is that the formula results in funding levels that are not based on need, and have no relationship to actual student improvement. For instance, New York, where there are high concentrations of low-income students and relatively high state spending, will receive roughly $1,700 per student. North Dakota and Wyoming will get similar amounts. But California, where educational achievement is quite a bit lower and where there are huge number of at-need youth, will only get $1,300 per student.

Option #2: Give money to states based purely on need. The disparities in funding levels that seem to benefit higher spending and often higher achieving states has led to a natural counter-proposal to give the money based purely on need. In this approach, the Depart of Education would give money to those states that are (1) currently spending the least on students, and (2) show the lowest level of student achievement. This is a similar counter-proposal to those in the anti-No Child Left Behind camp who suggest that the federal government should not be punishing schools that fail to meet Annual Yearly Progress but instead subsidizing them with more federal support.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that it may do exactly the opposite of what we want in the long run. Instead of giving states a reason to spend more of their own dollars on children, it encourages states to keep their school spending levels artificially low since that's one way to get more free federal money. Worse yet, it incentivizes states to care little about student performance, since the worse their kids do the more money they get. Adopting this approach, critics argue, would be tantamount to a parent awarding their son $50 for getting D's and F's while giving only $10 to their daughter who got straight-A's.

Option #3: Condition grants to states on actual academic performance and improvement, rather than need. A third and more recent suggestion, one that is gaining popularity in state-level decisions on how to distribute state dollars to local districts, would instruct the federal government to give money to states based, at least in part, on how well the states are improving student achievement. States that show strong improvement in increasing their students reading and math skills would get funding boosts, while states that struggle would not. The idea behind this approach is similar to a parent rewarding their son with $50 when he brings his grades up from D's and F's to B's and C's, while giving their daughter less money when her grades go down from A's to B's.

None of the formulas is perfect, which only adds to Congress's and the Department of Education's challenge. But at the end of the day, this may be one of the most vital nuanced decisions that is made as part of the stimulus package when it comes to the long-term success of the program and of our nation as a whole.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 2006, every 3rd grader in the state of Texas was asked to read and interpret the meaning of a Pagago Native American folktale entitled, "The First Butterflies." Later on in the test, students were asked to demonstrate comprehension of a modern-day story concerning Native American powwows. (The actual 3rd grade Texas proficiency test can be viewed here.)

Reading comprehension tests with passages like these are often cited by critics of standardized tests as paradigm examples of how poorly suited the test-based standards and accountability movement is to improving the quality of education that our children receive. While the aforementioned passages might be relevant to some portion of Texas students who are familiar with Native American culture, critics suggest that comprehension passages such as those, which were selected to be on tests at random, tend to discriminate against a wide section of the student population, in this case against those who have no familiarity with Native American culture. Opponents to standardized testing often continue to point out that the result of these tests is classrooms where teachers feel the only way to prepare students for similar random-topic tests in the future is to make them take the random-topic tests of the past.

This critique of standardized testing is correct only in the narrowest sense, as widely renown education theorist E.D. Hirsch notes in a recent op-ed piece that appeared in the NY Times. The area in which the criticism is apt is in regard to the irrelevance of the chosen theme--Native American culture--to many of the 3rd graders being tested. After all, Texas's statewide curriculum standards don't require social studies teachers to mention Native Americans until the 4th grade, and even then they do so primarily with regard to Native American governments and economics. Further inquiry into Native American culture is mandated as part of the 7th grade social studies curriculum. So it's a convincing argument that the 3rd grade test is unfair to the extent that students in downtown Houston and Dallas who have never met a Native American family in their life, much less studied their culture, are asked to show comprehension (or even concern) for such passages.

But the solution is not to scuttle the entire enterprise of standardized testing as a means of finding out whether our schools are doing their job and providing our children with the life skills they deserve. The solution is to make the tests relevant, by aligning the subject matter of reading comprehension passages with the knowledge that experts in each state have already decided is essential to a well-rounded education.

Put it this way. No one argues (or at least, very few people argue) that a tenth grade reading teacher shouldn't be able to test his students on their comprehension of To Kill A Mockingbird when the class just read and discussed the book as a unit. Many would agree that such a test would serve valid educational purposes: in the narrow sense it puts accountability on the students to actually read and study the novel; in the broader sense it gives students an opportunity to demonstrate mastery over the literary concepts implicated in the story and if the test is written well, it requires students to apply grand themes (such as equality, determination) to new situations--the crux of critical thinking. But everyone would argue that a teacher would be accomplishing nothing of educational value if he followed up a unit on To Kill A Mockingbird with a test on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Yet that's exactly what a great number of states are doing in today's standardized testing world. As E.D. Hirsch says, "the key to reading comprehension is familiarity with the subject." That's why a 1988 study showed that low-level junior high school level readers who knew a good deal about baseball performed better than high-level readers in the same grades who knew nothing about baseball on reading tests where the comprehension passages were about baseball. It doesn't necessarily affect the underlying reading ability--the high level readers were still better readers than the low-level readers in a strict sense of word recognition and so on--but it does affect reading comprehension, which is what is so vital about learning how to read at the end of the day.

So what does that mean? Maybe critics of standardized testing would have less to criticize if each grade's reading tests covered subject matter that was itself deemed inherently important. If, for instance, a state's expert-created standards require 8th graders to show mastery of US history from the period of our founding through the end of Reconstruction, why not have the reading comprehension passages include sections having to do with the Boston Tea Party, the debate over the Constitution, and the underground railroad? If we want certain books or science topics to be on the 8th grade reading and science curriculum, why not include state test questions about those concepts on the standardized test? Ultimately, if we agree at the outset that we want our children to learn certain important knowledge sets in each grade, there's nothing wrong with testing to see if schools have actually taught those knowledge sets at the end of the year. If they have, kudos to the school and its educators (and by "kudos" I mean compensation, not just a high five). If not, all of the negative elements of accountability should be on the table.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most of the conversation around school reform these days centers on how to improve the quality of education that is offered in our nation's K-12 schools. That's fitting, of course, since the vast majority of American children are educated in school, and since the underlying premise regarding those one million or more youth who drop out each year is that they--and our society as a whole--would do better if we could keep them in school through graduation.

But a New York Times article published last week highlighted the reality that faces many of those high school dropouts today: high school just isn't for everybody. It's not defeatist to point out that even in a drastically improved American education system there will still be a significant number of young people who decide that school is not for them. Our challenge as a nation is to do right by these young people nonetheless. And the Times article describes an interesting program to assist high school dropouts that is, as it turns out, as successful as it is old-school.

The project, called the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program, was started in the early 1990s when Congress recognized the value of National Guard training as a means to instill core values in otherwise struggling youth. Each year, the program graduates more than 7,000 high school dropouts between the ages of 16 and 18 who are drug-free, have no felony records, and agree to abide by the rules. The program itself involves two primary phases. The first phase is a 20-week boot-camp type training (hopefully led by persons more adept, if not more effective, than Major Payne portrayed below), where youth participate in daily activities and service in a disciplined atmosphere. The youth wake up at 4:30 every morning, make their beds neatly, go on an hour-long run, wear uniforms, march, and study long hours in classes to prepare them to pass the GED.

After graduating from this initial camp, the second phase is a year-long period during which the graduates either return to their communities and pursue work or higher education, or enter the military. In both cases, the program pairs each graduate with a life mentor to provide support for difficult life choices and to assist in career planning.

The program's impact is hard to argue with. More than 70% of the program participants go on to receive their high school diplomas or GED's, almost double the rate of high school or equivalency completion for similarly situated youth who don't participate. The impacts are also felt in the employment arena, as program participants are almost 50% more likely to have a job within nine months of completing the program than are similar youth. An independent research study done on the program's effectiveness finds consistent results--all at the mere cost to taxpayers of $28 per day per youth (which is far less than the nearly $200 / day per youth for incarceration).

I'll admit - when I first heard about Youth ChalleNGe, my first instinct was to worry that this was an implicit way to stockpile our armed forces with low-income and often minority youth who had largely been failed by their public schools. But it turns out that only one in eight of the program graduates goes on to actually join the military, while more than two in eight continue on in higher education and more than half get paying jobs. In sum, when wayward high school dropouts enroll in the National Guard's youth initiative, commit to participating, and complete the program, they are far more likely to become contributing members of society. Maybe there are other downsides to relying on a military-focused institution to educate these youth, but the alternatives don't seem to be much more compelling.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The big news in the world of education reform this week is a speech the President delivered yesterday to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. I've embedded some of the most controversial portions of the speech in a video below for you to judge for ourself, but the bottom line from the speech is similar to what Mr. Obama has been saying for more than a year now, dating well back into his campaign. In sum, President Obama is taking the same kind of post-partisan approach to school reform as he has to many other issues, trying to find common ground with disparate elements of both parties on issues such as early childhood education, funding, teacher pay, and charter schools.

But I want to talk about a particular sentence of the President's speech because it caught my attention, especially in light of a pretty revealing study I just came across. About halfway through his speech, Mr. Obama declared:

"I'm calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity."

Now this is a loaded statement. The only way to read it free of any controversy is to suggest that Mr. Obama was simply calling on educators and policy makers to devote more resources and attention to improving the quality of standardized tests, which is how I hope and largely believe he intended it. But perhaps a more natural reading is that the President, like a large segment of the educator population who support a liberal view of curriculum, wants schools to focus less on facts, rote memorization, and test-taking and more on critical thinking and creative problem solving--the kinds of skills our children allegedly lack but will need in the 21st century.

Now I've done a fair bit of talking with students across the country, and one thing you can say to a room full of young people to get their agreement is that their schools should stop teaching them to memorize random facts and should instead teach them the kinds of "critical thinking skills" that they'll need in life. The line works well with parents too; it's a no-lose statement. No reasonably intelligent person, it would seem, would build an education on a foundation of fact memorization and test-taking when they could instead be learning how to solve problems on their own. And if only America's schools could get back to the glory days where we were #1 in the world in education and where our kids all thought critically in schools instead of being forced to take the same boring basic subjects, memorizing facts and so on and so on.

Sound right to you? Sure. Except the whole premise of the argument is unfounded. America has never had an education system that emphasized "critical thinking" over learning basic facts, memorization, and other boring standardized test type materials. This Phi Delta Kappan study bears out that fact rather convincingly: a host of studies on classroom instruction over the past four decades have shown striking consistency: around 90% of the time in school classrooms is made up of teacher-directed instruction and individual student work today, just as it was in a 1983 study and a 1984 study based on data going all the way back to 1970.

But surely NCLB has torpedoed the level of intellectual freedom our children experience in some way, right? All those standardized tests every year and the "teaching to the test" that must be happening has to have some kind of narrowing effect on what our kids learn, if not how they learn it, right? Kids today aren't learning the arts and music because our schools only care about their reading and math test scores, right? Apparently that's not true either. According to the PDK study, before NCLB and the accountability wave of the late 90s, schools spent 37% of their time on English, 17% on math, and 13% on related arts, with 5% each to science and social studies. Today, the numbers are 34% English, 16% math, 11% related arts, and roughly 6% each on science and social studies. If NCLB has torpedoed our kids diverse learning experiences, it's been a pretty gentle attack.

So at the end of the day, this whole "21st Century Skills" debate is something of a red herring. America's schools have always placed a higher priority on basic math facts, reading and grammar skills, and science and social studies facts than they have on music, the arts, and other non-academic courses. And those subjects have always been taught in teacher-centered classrooms, not in free-flowing, collective project type learning communities. One could certainly argue that this is a problem because it hampers creativity and so on, but in truth, that argument is based in theory, not in the history of our schools.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:09 PM | Permalink

In a bold announcement last week, President Obama charted a striking and controversial new course for college access and affordability. The President's proposals were unveiled as part of the Department of Education's 2010 proposed budget, and they contained two major changes to long-standing higher education spending practices.

For starters, the Department is poised to increase its spending on Pell Grants by $17 billion over each of the next two years, which was part of the stimulus bill passed in February. But the Obama administration is going three steps beyond just increasing the amount of money available to the program, which is the government's chief need-based scholarship program to assist low-income families with college tuition (90% of the grants go to children from families earning less than $41,000 per year).

The first step is that the administration plans to increase the maximum grant allowance from its current amount of $4,731 in the current school year to $5,500 in 2010-2011. Second, the administration plans to move the Pell Grant program in its entirety from the discretionary portion of the federal budget to the mandatory entitlement portion, ensuring that support for low-income college students will never be cut subject to near-sighted political calculations. Finally, the move would require the annual size of Pell Grants to grow at the rate of inflation plus one percent--ensuring that the aid given to needy students keeps pace with the rising costs of tuition. The move comes at a critical time, as Pell Grants at current funding levels cover only 35% of the cost of college compared to 77% just thirty years ago.

In addition to shoring up the Pell Grant program, President Obama took the opportunity to propose sweeping changes to the federal government's college loan policy as well--a proposal that amounts to a solid "Take That!" to the embattled banking industry. As it stands, the federal government provides loans to at-need college students through two different programs. One program, created in 1965 and which provided about four-fifths of all loans to students last year (totaling $56 billion to 6 million students) does so by subsidizing private banks who make the actual loans. In this subsidized program, the private banks who make the loans keep as profit the interest paid by students, but any time a student defaults the federal government steps in and picks up the tab--essentially holding the bank's part of the operation completely risk free. The second program, first created under the first Bush administration and bolstered under President Clinton, offers federal dollars directly to students without the banks in the middle skimming a substantial and risk-free profit margin. President Obama has proposed to eliminate the subsidized program and make all federal loans directly to the students themselves.

Which program is better? Well it depends on who you ask. If you ask the banking sector, the subsidized loan program is better because (privately) it is an easy and major source of revenue for a struggling industry and (publicly) because banks can provide a more efficient loan system through what some have mistakenly labeled a free market. In reality, however, there is nothing "free" about the government loan subsidy market, since it creates an eerily similar perverse incentives problem to mortage backed securities: the group making the loan (banks) have no incentive to guard against default and track down borrowers who are in arrears. On the former front, the banks have been saved by the fact that both loan programs use the same financial aid application process, so borrowers in both programs have the same initial risk of default. But the latter incentive problem has proven all too real: the direct loan program has a student default rate 4% lower than the subsidized program.

That default rate, combined with the handsome profits that banks take off the top (instead of getting those dollars to the needy students) means that President Obama's proposal will save as much as $4 billion a year that can be given to college students who drive our economy and create wealth, rather than the very banks who are partly to blame for our current economic crisis. The plan still has to gain approval in the Congress, where the banking sector's lobbyists have a shot to kill it, but the moment is ripe if indeed there ever were such a moment for reforming a system that disadvantages students and taxpayers to benefit bankers. There's no reason, of course, to spite bankers just for the sake of spite--but when a sound economic decision can help send millions of young people to college, it's hard to find fault in it.

For more on the difference between the two loan programs and why the direct loan program is better, check out this issue brief.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

The House of Representatives voted to approve an $819 billion stimulus plan today, but despite the optimism displayed by its supporters and an unprecedented hug-it-out meeting between President Obama and Republican law-makers yesterday, the final vote on the measure was decidedly discouraging: not a single House Republican voted for the stimulus plan.

The partisan-line vote speaks to a lot of interesting elements of the dynamic within this 111th Congress and between it and the President, but it also reflects a fundamental debate about the nature of the stimulus itself. And it's enough of a debate that it should give us pause in determining whether the package approved by the House is in fact the kind of stimulus package that is best for Americans.

The basic structure of the debate is this: how much of the package should be apportioned to immediate programs that will inject new blood (i.e. dollars) into the economy now, and how much should be targeted at the kinds of long-term solutions that our nation desperately needs if we want to sustain a growing, prosperous economy in the future?

The problem is, there are very few spending proposals that are capable of doing both at the same time. For example, tax cuts will inject dollars into the economy now, but they won't do much at all to fix major problems in our health care, energy, education, and other infrastructure systems. On the other end of the spectrum, dollars dedicated to implementing long-term fixes like renewable energy research or teacher compensation reform, while crucial to the long-haul, won't do much to save or create jobs, improve consumer confidence, and spur capital investment quickly.

To complicate matters, there is a school of thought that looks at this problem as not just a simple debate between now and later, but as a debate between now and never--which is to say that the stimulus bill represents a profound opportunity for progressives to implement controversial but much-needed policy solutions that may never arise again. Under this school of thought, why not use this political moment to make big changes to health care, education, and energy policy, even if it means prevailing along strictly partisan lines (and especially if Republicans are going to play the party of "no" anyways).

This broader policy context is, as usual, perfectly exemplified in the world of K-12 education policy. The stimulus plan passed by the House today contains a paradigm-shattering $150 billion in additional federal education spending over the next two years, which would more than double current school spending by DC. The thing is, almost all of the spending is of the quick-fix kind, aimed at saving existing jobs ($39 billion in grants to states and local government to help prevent teacher layoffs and the like) or creating new jobs ($20 billion for school renovation and construction, which some argue actually is an example of a spending program that helps America both now and later, although there's not great data linking student learning to shiny, new classrooms).

To be sure, some of the money is planned for what might better be described as long-term fixes ($8 billion for increasing Pell Grants to low income college students and a spending increase for Head Start) that might not do much for jobs today, but will improve our chances of having a productive, innovative work force in the future. But it's fair to ask: why not spend more on future fixes? What good will we have done if we add almost a trillion dollars to our national debt over the next two years, only to discover that one of the biggest root causes of economic weakness--a low-quality public education system--is as bad as ever?

What would it look like to have these kinds of long-term policies? Why not create, as a condition on the $39 billion in direct aid to states, some requirement that the state actually improve student achievement (and perhaps improve data collection systems as a first step), or else be forced to pay back pro-rated portions of the aid as loans once the economy gets back on track? Why not expand on the (paltry?) $200 million that the House has recommended for a program to spur on innovative teacher compensation systems to align the economic interests of teachers with the educational interests of children and families? Or why not create a condition that in exchange for the huge influx of federal dollars, states increase the length of the school year and school day--a vital, common-sense, albeit unpopular solution that is ripe for a moment like this? After all, what better way to create political cover for local school officials against the short-term student and educator backlash from a plan to increase the amount of time our students spend in school than to say, "we had no choice; we needed the money to keep our schools open and keep all our teachers at all, and the federal government was the only one who could provide it!"

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As President Obama vowed to "restore science to its rightful place" in his widely watched inaugural address from our nation's capital, school officials in Texas acted to do the same, amending the state's science curriculum standards to get rid of language that supporters of creationism and intelligent design had trumpeted for the past two decades.

The decision by the Texas State Board of Education came after heated debate among its 15-person membership, where 7 of the members are avowed social conservatives. The debate itself was over specific language in the state's science standards which requires students to critique all scientific theories and explore the "strengths and weaknesses" of each. The "strengths and weaknesses" language was first inserted into the standards twenty years ago in an effort to appease social conservatives, and has since been used as justification by proponents of creationism who seek to promote teaching religious objections to evolution in the classroom.

In endorsing the removal of the language from the state standards, the State Board of Education risks a backlash from parties who object to the unqualified teaching of evolution in our schools. But supporters of the decision point to a significant benefit of the decision that makes the backlash worthwhile: the reality that textbook publishers, who frown upon the practice of publishing alternate versions of the same book for different markets with different standards, are more likely to continue publishing science-based explanations of evolution without reference to religious objections.

The debate over the teaching evolution in our schools is much, much older than most of our contemporary reform debates over teacher quality, accountability, charter schools and so on. The famous 1925 Scopes Trial, which pitted famous American attorney Clarence Darrow against the equally famous politician and creationist William Jennings Bryan, is one of the earliest famous incidents, portrayed through the famous movie "Inherit the Wind" (I've pasted the famous scene from the movie below - start watching at about 3:35 for maximum effect).

In the 84 years since the Scopes trial, however, proposals to teach Creationism in our schools as a counter-weight to evolution have come and gone routinely like the tides, but this week it seems as though the combination of President Obama's inaugural nod to science and the Texas School Board decision will mark a low tide for creationists in the battle over science instruction in public school classrooms.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

These days, it's not too rare of an occasion when you unfold your morning newspaper (ok... more likely when you open up your web-browser to your newspaper homepage) and scroll down to see a headline that makes you cringe. Rising unemployment numbers, falling stock values. Violence and death in the Gaza strip, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. Corporate scandals and Ponzi schemes. Tax cuts for teachers.

Wait, what?

Some background: yesterday's NY Times Column by the highly esteemed writer and political commentator Thomas Friedman ran under the headline "Tax Cuts for Teachers," and among the many ideas he puts forward in the column is the exact proposal suggested in the headline.

And now my admission: I intended no sarcasm or sleight of hand when I included that headline in a list of news topics that make me cringe. (Ok, ok, I obviously didn't intend to equate the idea of cutting teacher taxes with the sheer magnitude of the problems raised in the other headlines in the above list, but I do mean that it was a bad headline - if only because Friedman's article raises much more eloquent and well-thought out ideas than the tax cuts).

Cutting taxes for teachers is a horrible idea for two primary reasons, despite what would likely be its moderate impact of encouraging more people to enter the teaching profession.

The first reason why cutting taxes for teachers is a bad idea is that there are far better ways to use the lost tax revenues to further the vital goal of increasing the entry of high quality professionals into teaching. We're talking about real money after all; eliminating income taxes for all teachers could cost somewhere in the ballpark of $20 billion / year (according to respected education analyst Kevin Carey), and increase the average annual teacher salary by somewhere around $6,000.

To be sure, this will necessarily attract some people to consider teaching as a profession, but there are better ways to use the $20 billion: namely, to spend that money in a more targeted fashion to hire new teachers in hard-to-staff fields like math and science, in hard-to-staff districts with higher levels of low-income and minority children, and to pay teachers who aren't just entering the profession but who are actually doing a good job at it as well.

What do I mean by that? For starters, Friedman's basic cut-taxes-for-all-teachers proposal would reward our nation's oldest teachers and those who have the most advanced degrees. This means that a first year teacher making $35,000 (the average annual starting salary) would stand to get something like a $3,500 tax break, while an older teacher making $65,000 a year would stand to receive a disproportionate $10,000 break. Setting aside the fact that research and common experience both indicate that neither of these two factors have much influence on how much students actually learn, ask yourself this: if you were considering entering the teaching profession, under which of the two salary schedules below would you be more likely to make the jump?

Package #A: You start out at $38,500 and maxed out at $75,000 only after 30 years of teaching regardless of how hard you worked or how well your students learned.

Package #B: You start out at $45,000 and can earn up to $75,000 after only a few years if your students make great strides in the subjects that you teach.

Mr. Friedman prefers package A; I think that more people are likely to consider teaching and their incentives are more aligned with what's best for kids under package B. (Full disclosure: it might cost more than $20 billion / year to implement package B if a large number of teachers go above and beyond the call of duty and bring about exceptional student learning in their classrooms - a tradeoff that I am more than eager to make).

There's a second problem with cutting taxes for teachers, and this problem is political. Namely, what about the argument for cutting teacher taxes is so special that it can't be raised (equally effectively) for nurses, firefighters, policemen, doctors? Opening up the treasury to well-meaning educators through a tax cut may strike a harmonious tone in the minds of most Americans, but the tone will grow ever so discordant when most Americans make the logical analytical step: my job is important too, shouldn't I be entitled to some of that tax relief? In other words, what on its face appears to be an easy political sell would, in practice, end up nothing of the sort.

Finally, out of fairness to Mr. Friedman, I have to point out that I think the broad idea behind his recent column is absolutely, 100% correct: in our rush to stimulate the economy today, we can't only invest in "shovel-ready" projects because these projects are band-aids (albeit the highly-necessary kind of band-aid, not the touchy-feely kind). We also need to address the root causes of the problem in America's economy, and no issue is more fundamental in that respect than improving our schools. I just happen to disagree over whether cutting taxes for teachers is a good way to bring about that improvement.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pop quiz. Take a look at this picture and see if you recognize the gentleman who is portrayed...

If you don't recognize him, you're one of what I'm guessing is well in excess of 99% of Americans who cannot put a name to his face. If you guessed that his name is Michael Bennet, you get two points for using context from the title to arrive at the correct answer. And if you actually knew without needing the title that the person in the picture is Michael Bennet, the new junior Senator from Colorado, you get a million points for being either an astute news watcher or a dedicated follower of Denver politics.

But why, in an education blog, does Mr. Bennet's nomination matter so much? After all, I haven't written (nor will I write) about the controversial Roland Burris appointment in Illinois or the fiery debate over Caroline Kennedy in New York. In short, Mr. Bennet's nomination matters so much because of his track record of success in three years as Denver's public school superintendent, and the possibility that he will work together with other Senators and Representatives to fashion a strong education policy under the Obama administration.

FIrst, a little about Mr. Bennet, who at 44 has never so much as run for--much less held--an elected office. He made waves as a corporate lawyer specializing in restructuring failing businesses (if you've been to one of these lately, then you've seen some of Mr. Bennet's handiwork, albeit indirect, as a debt-restructuring specialist), and also served for two years as chief of staff to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper (who most Coloradoans expected to be Governor Bill Ritter's choice to replace outgoing Senator Ken Salazar, and not Bennet). Then Mr. Bennet was tabbed to serve as the Superintendent of Denver Public Schools.

To reiterate, Mr. Bennet's professional resume is most notable because for what it lacks than what it posessess: the last time Mr. Bennet ran for any office or received any kind of a vote may well have been in a high school student council election. But if you look closely enough, there's a lot in his resume as a public servant overseeing Denver's schools that should be encouraging to any onlooker concerned with federal education policy.

For instance, in the past three years, Denver reading and math scores are up by 6%. Early education access has been increased with more full-day kindergarten and pre-school openings, and the school district's budget has been balances in each of the past two years--a remarkable feat given the prior five years worth of $83 million in budget cuts. Perhaps most vitally, Mr. Bennet worked with Denver's teacher unions to create one of the most innovative teacher compensation programs in the country.

The program--called ProComp--reflects well on Mr. Bennet as much for its cutting edge policy provisions as it does for the tricky political process that he successfully navigated to see the plan through to success. Teachers unions are traditionally strongly opposed to any payment structure that seeks to differentiate pay based on student learning gains or anything else that is not seniority or advanced degrees, but Denver's teachers agreed to buck that trend. In ProComp, Denver's teachers have a 9-year agreement with the district to tie teacher salaries to four distinct components: student learning gains, professional evaluations, market incentives (such as bonuses for harder-to-staff schools and subjects), and the old stand-by knowledge and skills. Crucially, the program has no ceiling for how much a teacher may earn--effectively allowing a teacher to be paid truly according to their worth in meeting the educational mission of their school.

Without question, the appointment of Mr. Bennet is risky, as most commentators have pointed out. Mr. Bennet will have to run for re-election in two years as a result of his special appointment, and with no campaign or elected office experience, no one can say for sure whether he will be up to the challenge. But if he is, America's children have another strong advocate in the halls of the Capitol to fight for their access to quality public schools.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

He was the odds-on favorite in this blog last week, and sure enough, the ninth United States Secretary of Education will be Arne Duncan.

The selection drew strong praise from both sides of the education reform debate, as evidenced by this press release issued by the "disrupter" group, Democrats for Education Reform, and this release from the traditional, "incrementalist" approach champion, the National Education Association. Both sides haled Mr. Duncan as a savvy choice who would put their proposals first--merit pay and charter schools for the "disrupters" and increased funding and teacher pay for the "incrementalists".

If I haven't made it clear before, let me say it again: both sides are not likely to be right regarding Mr. Duncan. With only a limited amount of political capital, not to mention money, available to spend on K-12 reform issues in his earliest days in the White House, President-Elect Obama will be hard pressed to devote the kind of attention that would be needed to appease both sides in this debate.

Arne Duncan has a history of working collaboratively with the unions to achieve some significant results for Chicago's school children during his seven years as CEO of the district, so the potential for success at the federal level certainly exists. But how will he fare when the first set of major challenges comes down the pipeline? For instance, will he consider it a greater priority to push broadly for full-funding of No Child Left Behind (the NEA argues that it is under-funded, when compared to authorization levels, by $71 billion), or will he use increased school funding as a carrot to get unions and other traditional stakeholders to accept change on teacher pay, charger schools, accountability, and other fronts?

To help shed some light on how Mr. Duncan may perform, I dug up this video on YouTube of testimony he gave before the House Education and Labor Committee this past summer on how to close the achievement gap:

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With a new administration preparing to enter the White House, I got to thinking about what we have seen change over the past eight years in federal education policy. There are some who argue that one of President Bush's most lasting legacies from his time in office will be his impact on K-12 and Higher Education. The President himself agreed with this assessment, referring to the No Child Left Behind Act as one of the "most significant achievements of my administration."

So what exactly will this legacy entail? It's hard to know for certain right now, since so much may change when the Obama administration tackles No Child Left Behind reauthorization, but there are at least a few lasting impacts that aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

One lasting impact is a heightened federal role in K-12 education policy. It's easy to forget just how tenuous was the authority and political support for the federal government to actively shape local and state level school policy. Take a guess as to when the following statement appeared in the Republican Party's National Platform:

“Our formula is as simple as it is sweeping: the federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula... That is why we will abolish the Department of Education, end federal meddling in our schools, and promote family choice at all levels of learning.”

1944? 1960? 1980?

Nope. How about 1996... just five years before President Bush took office and ramped up the federal government's "meddling" in schools to an unprecedented degree.

So historians will not be exaggerating in the future when they say that President Bush (43) was fundamentally responsible for ushering in a new, major role for the feds in school improvement efforts. But there's more to his legacy in education than simply ratcheting up the federal role in schools, there's the vital matter of how the feds are now involved in school policy that is equally paradigmatic.

The easiest way to characterize this fundamental shift in how the federal government approaches its role in improving education is to recall one of the best instances of rhetoric President Bush used during his time in office. Credit his speech writers for using the phrase, the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that plagued our schools. Put simply, perhaps the greatest legacy that President Bush will leave behind in K-12 education policy is the now-firmly entrenched role of the federal government in holding schools accountable for student success, no frills, no excuses. Prior to 2001, only a handful of states expected schools to show returns on public tax investments by way of student learning gains - now, school level accountability is the rule, even if an oft-derided one.

Courtesy of the Education Trust, I want to leave two images in closing to show exactly what President Bush was referring to by the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that absolutely must be eviscerated if all children in America are to receive the quality of educational opportunity they both need and deserve. You can compare and draw the conclusions for yourself by picturing, in your mind's eye, what kind of school handed out each of the two assignments:

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is it just me, or with a full two months until President-elect Obama will take the oath of office as our nation's 44th President, is everyone and their political pundit mother questioning Barack Obama as though he is already our chief executive?

To be sure, a lot of the scrutiny Obama has received is rooted in key decisions that he is in the process of making regarding his plan to address our struggling economy--decisions such as the makeup of his team of economic advisors, the details of his stimulus plan, his level of support for an auto-maker industry bailout, and so on. And other sources of scrutiny are timely simply because they concern intriguing cabinet level selections, with Senator Hillary Clinton headlining the list.

But Mr. Obama is already drawing what can best be termed "challenges" from observers as to his leadership ability and reform views on a wide variety of less prominent issues as well--and education is a terrific example of this. Two pieces just this past week--one in Newsweek and another in the Wall Street Journal--call out Mr. Obama and whether he will be able to deliver on his promises of the change we need, changes that are particularly vital in school reform.

Newsweek questions whether Senator Obama's purported commitment to change in education will actually ring true through the lens of recent developments in D.C. Public Schools, where controversial Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee has threatened to unilaterally revoke teacher tenure in exchange for a merit pay system that would reward the district's best teachers salaries approaching $130,000--where "best" is judged by how much students improve in learning. In the Wall Street Journal, Stanford Professor Terry Moe questions more broadly whether Mr. Obama will have the political gumption needed to take on teachers unions to make changes that many in the school reform arena think are crucial: expanding school choice, strengthening school accountability, and reassessing teacher pay in exactly the kind of ways contemplated by Michelle Rhee.

Why the attention and, arguably, premature concern over Mr. Obama's ability to deliver reform in education when he becomes president? I suppose part of it owes to a desperately hungry media news cycle that has had a year's worth of Obama-watching and that is loath to give it up now that the election season is over (But wait! Media! What if we entered President Obama in this hotly-contested, closely-watched, and rife-with-implications electoral race!) And another part of it has to do with the de facto nature of a constitutional conundrum concerning where power actually rests during lame-duck periods like the one we are in now.

But another source of the unrest and concern over Mr. Obama's ability to lead has to do with the nature of the electoral coalition he put together and that propelled him to the White House. It's no surprise that any time a candidate receives more than 66 million popular votes that not all of those voters will agree with each other on big issues, but in education there is a divide, alluded to in the WSJ op-ed that has unique implications: a good percentage of the Democratic base plays by the old playbook of teacher-union driven reform models, while many others ask more exclusively, what is best for school children?

Here's where a recent development kicks in: President-elect Obama tabbed a pro-union, old-school reform thinker, Linda Darling-Hammond, to be the leader of his education policy transition team, drawing concerns from progressives in the newer camp of school reform. The same thing has happened, in some eyes, in the economic team put together by the Obama leadership, a team that has a lot of old-school ties to the Clinton years (not to mention Mrs. Clinton herself at State).

What does it all mean? We're still two months away from President Obama's first day in office, but already the second-guessing is starting. The second-guessing, however, does little good (other than to give me something to blog about). Better for us, as a nation and punditry, to ease off on the political commentary a bit and wait until the President-elect actually gets into office and develops a record on these very issues. Once that happens, any and every move and decision made by the administration will be fair game.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While large numbers of young Americans have gotten involved in the political process lately--both through exercise of the right to vote as well as through protests on issues such as California's recent Proposition 8 banning gay marraige--students in Europe have been busy making their own political statements in resounding fashion.

The video and pictures below are from protests in the streets of Italy (video) and Germany (photo), where students in the past weeks have taken bold action to show their anger with government proposals in each country cutting education spending and services:

It's impossible to analyze the events in Italy without reference to the flagging economic conditions affecting the entire globe. Italy is on the front-lines of the economic downturn, with the world's third largest debt (behind only the US and Japan), but only the 7th largest economy by GDP. In light of the economic situation, Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi has sought to make dramatic spending cuts--as much as $7 billion Euros, or $9 billion US--in the education system. Proposed cuts would include eliminating as many as 70,000 teaching positions in elementary schools and reducing spending in Italian high schools and universities.

In Germany, student protests are just beginning (compared to the protests in Italy, which started towards the end of October). German students are upset with overcrowded classrooms, high-pressure school exit exams, and teacher quality in general.

While estimates vary, the number of youth protestors in Italy has been widely reported as in the hundreds of thousands--anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000. Given that Italy's population is five times smaller than the United States, one has to wonder what would happen if hundreds of thousands or even millions of American youth stood united to demand improvements in our schools.

To be sure, much remains to be determined as to whether Italian student protests will lead Prime Minister Berlusconi to recant on his promises to cut education spending, or whether there will be some electoral blowback (a Reuters report showed Mr. Berlusconi's approval rating falling a significant 4% in just the past month as the protests have gotten underway). But if the experience from student social movement building in Chile is any lesson, we almost certainly have yet to see the final impact of the protests.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A treasure trove of implications for school children can be mined from the election returns on Tuesday--not just as a result of the big race but also from a number of key ballot measures I discussed last week.

But before getting to the initiatives, a quick dissection of what President-Elect Obama may mean for children in the early months of his administration. There are two quick and easy wins that look to be likely bets on any 100 days type calendar: expanding funding for children's health insurance --a measure vetoed by President Bush--via SCHIP and passing a new college tuition tax credit to benefit at-need college students in exchange for community service.

The tougher question is what President Obama will do about reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (AKA NCLB). It's unlikely that he will tackle NCLB in the early part of his legislative calendar simply because: 1.) It will cost a lot of political capital to do so, and 2.) that capital, in the eyes of most Americans, is more urgently needed on economic action, energy policy, troop numbers in the Middle East, and even health care. So the best answer to the question, what will President Obama do on K-12 education in the very early going? He'll punt... at least until middle-late 2009.

To the ballot measures. Missouri, Colorado, Maryland, and Arkansas each had ballot proposals to increase access citizen access to gambling with a back-end result of increasing (or substituting) public education funding. All four initiatives passed. Just goes to show what happens when you bundle up a bunch of core American values--freedom, education, risk-taking, greed--in one neat package and place it on a ballot: people will vote for it.

Nebraska and Colorado each had initiatives to ban affirmative action, part of California millionaire Ward Connerly's steady march to rid states of the policy one by one (affirmative action bans have been passed in Connerly's home state of California, Washington, and Michigan in previous elections). The ban passed easily in Nebraska, but was just declared defeated in Colorado, by the narrowest of margins.

Colorado wasn't done with controversial measures affecting education, though. A trio of anti-union measures, Amendments 47, 49, and 54 were up for decision as well, and the first two were defeated easily, largely through the campaign organizing of the Colorado Education Association. 47 & 49 would have made it illegal for school districts to force teachers to pay their union dues by witholding pay from their paychecks, a fairly common practice in schools across the nation--but Union control lives on. Amendment 54, however, passed narrowly--a measure designed to limit the lobbying influence of organizations who receive no-bid / non-competitive contracts from the government. The measure was supported as a pro-democracy plan to limit lobbyist and special interest influence; teachers unions are likely to file suit over the initiative on first amendment grounds.

Lastly, the initiatives I was personally most curious about: Oregon measures 58 and 60. Both failed by wide margins--58 proposed to restrict non-English instruction in schools and 60 attempted to change Oregon's system for teacher pay from a seniority-based system to a merit-based system. No question that 58 runs counter to progressive notions of equity along racial and ethnic lines by essentially rendering Spanish and other second language classes not just inferior, but illegal in certain school settings.

But measure 60 is a bit tricker. It is the kind of measure that was no doubt destined to fail, but which just may prove prescient; the kind of idea that is rightfully placed directly before voters because entrenched political interests are unlikely to support it. The idea is this: if we, as a people, believe that data systems are appropriate and in place such that educators can be measured, rewarded, or recognized as in-need of improvement based on how much they are helping their students learn, then shouldn't that be a system of paying teachers that deserves consideration instead of paying our oldest teachers most (which may be, at best, only loosely tied to student learning)? In other words, it's totally appropriate to pay an experienced teacher "A" the most money out of an entire staff if teacher "A" is in fact helping their students advance the most in math, reading skills, science, etc. And if that's the case, can anyone make an argument for why we would pay teacher "B", whose students, year-in and year-out, show absolutely no improvement in reading or math skills more than teacher "A"? No way right?

Now what if I told you that teacher "A" has been a teacher for 6 years and teacher "B" for 30 years. Would you suddenly want to pay teacher "B" more (in some districts, as much as 100% more) just because he is older? I can't think of a single reason why we'd do that. At its heart, that is what measure 60 was about, though. Of course, there are lots of nuances about the data and why any merit system has to be cautious so as to avoid over-drawn conclusions, but Oregon Measure 60 is not some political hack job idea--it's a serious issue.

Finally, in perhaps the most important decision still to be made, word on the street is that there is a leading contender in the race to be the First Dog promised to Sasha and Malia Obama:

GOLDENDOODLE!!!!

Posted by Aaron Tang at 01:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 4th promises to be a crucial and historic moment in American history for more reasons than just the headliner presidential election. Also at stake are more than 150 ballot initiatives and referenda in 36 states. Many astute observers are already aware of the most prominent among these initiatives such as California’s proposed amendment to ban gay marriage (currently polling almost neck-and-neck) and South Dakota’s amendment to ban abortion part II, but there are also a host of important ballot proposals that have not quite made the popular news media radar screen.

There is more at stake in the voting booth than just these state level initiatives too; in many towns and cities voters will have to choose between increasing taxes for various services or abiding by the pressure of a slowing economy and cutting local spending. In California alone, for example, there are more than 50 local education-related ballot initiatives having to do with teacher salaries, new text books, new school buildings or building repairs, and so on. Most of these local education spending bonds pass during ordinary election cycles, but during this economic downturn, it is anyone’s guess how much voters will be affected.

Chief among the crucial state initiatives concerning education are four categories: gambling for education proposals, proposals to end affirmative action, a set of controversial initiatives aimed at curtailing union power in Colorado, and a really controversial initiative in Oregon aimed at drastic reform of how teachers are paid throughout the state.

The first set of interesting ballot proposals are in play in Missouri, Colorado, Maryland, and Arkansas. Depending on how one looks at them, they are either pro-gambler’s rights proposals or proposals to supplement or modify existing school spending structures. Basically the states propose either to expand state lotteries, extend casino hours and gambling limits, allow slot machines, and raise casino taxes to fund education. In Missouri, for instance, there is a state cap limiting the amount of money that individuals can lose by gambling in a certain time period ($500 per 2 hours) that would be lifted, with all additional revenues turned over to schools—an amount estimated between $100 and $130 million per year.

Sounds like a pretty good idea, right? The primary concerns that have been expressed against the law are either the pretty standard anti-gambling argument, which may be true—but how much we should prefer to protect irresponsible folks who are pretty wealthy from harming themselves over providing better schools to kids is an open question. The second concern with these proposals, however, is a bit more on point: what if state legislatures decide to use the revenue generated from these plans to replace, rather than add to, current school funding plans? If this is all that the initiative would amount to then it’s not as clear that it’s worth supporting, and there are no guarantees in the actual law to ensure that new revenues would be added to the school funding pie.

In Colorado and Nebraska there are ballot proposals to end affirmative action. These are hardly new ideas, as similar measures have passed in California, Washington and Michigan all within the past decade. Both states’ anti-affirmative action measures look likely to pass.

Colorado has 5 more interesting ballot initiatives of its own, in addition to the affirmative action measure. Amendments 47, 49, 54, 58, and 59 propose collectively to limit the power of teachers unions and marginally increase taxes on industries such as oil and gas to further fund education. 47, 49, and 54 in particular have drawn the ire of teachers unions, for they attempt to stop unions from requiring that teachers join the local union in order by, among other things, making it illegal for a school district to automatically detect union dues from a pay check to be paid to the union headquarters. These "right-to-work" laws already exist in a handful of states which has brought down rates of union membership, though it is hard to say if this has led to any major gains for students. Amendment 54 would prevent anyone who receives a no-bid contract from the government from making a campaign contribution to any candidate. The idea seems pro-democracy in spirit, since wealthy corporate donors wouldn’t be able to buy influence from candidates, but some groups such as the teachers unions and firefighters who would be proscribed from contributing under the law have attacked it as an amendment limiting their free speech rights. More on these amendment proposals here; an argument against them from a Colorado teacher here.

Lastly, a pair of extremely interesting initiatives are on the ballot in Oregon courtesy of initiative-proposer-extraordinaire Bill Sizemore. Measure 58 would prohibit non-English-language teaching for more than two years, and Measure 60 would switch teacher pay to a performance-based rather than seniority-based system. You know these measures are controversial just by following the money: already Oregon teachers unions have spent over $6 million fighting these two initiatives.

Of the two, Measure 60 is especially worth watching, since it basically calls for the exact kind of paradigm shift in how teachers are paid that prominent education experts have called for in recent years—a proposal that even Barack Obama supports in principle. The idea, backed by a group called “Preserve Our Best Teachers” is simple, that classroom performance and not seniority should determine teacher pay raises. Unions object ostensibly because of data concerns with evaluating just which teachers are providing the best educational instruction to their students, but the concept of a professional being paid based on how good they are at their job, if it is discernible, is a tough value to oppose.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An insightful report was released this week by Steven Wilson of the Education Sector, an independent non-profit that does educational policy analysis. The report raises a major question about the numbers game facing school reformers: namely, how are we going to get more high-quality teachers into the schools where kids need them the most? Wilson presents the numbers question from the perspective of succesful charter schools that are emerging throughout the country.

Put succinctly, Wilson finds that teachers in widely-renown high-achieving charter schools (such as the 75 schools that belong to three celebrated charter networks--the KIPP schools, Achievement First schools, and Uncommon Schools) are so rare in terms of academic background and other qualifications that it would be virtually impossible to replicate these schools' high quality teaching staffs in other schools.

He draws this conclusion by starting with an analysis of the high achieving schools and what percentage of the teachers there come from selective colleges (as just one proxy for talented young teachers). It turns out that somewhere around 80% of the teachers in high-performing charter schools serving low-income youth graduated from colleges that are regarded by Barron's profile of American Colleges as "very competitive". By contrast, in the public schools writ large, only 19.2% of teachers graduated from the "very competitive" colleges.

What does that mean? Well for starters, it clearly means that we need to get more of our nation's brightest young people into teaching, and programs like Teach For America can help with that. But Teach For America currently has 5,000 corps members--barely 1% of the total number of teachers in just the public schools employed by 66 school districts in the Council of the Great City Schools. Moreover, only 140,000 students graduate each year from colleges ranked by Barron's as "highly competitive" - and even if half of them chose to spend two years teaching in these low-income city schools, only 33% of classrooms in the schools would have such a teacher.

Wilson goes on to suggest trying out programs to turn existing teachers who do not fit the elite college typecast into high-performing teachers as a way to out-flank the sheer numbers shortage. As a principle, he is absolutely right to suggest that nothing about a person's college inherently makes someone a qualified (or unqualified) teacher. After all there are plenty of book-smart people who would not have the personal skills to thrive in low-performing schools, and plenty of very educated and thoughtful people in schools that Barron's hasn't blessed with it's "highly competitive" label.

But Wilson's suggestion to focus our dollars, policies, and political capital on improving existing teachers is an interesting choice, since it has a clear alternative: spending the money and political energy to attract and retain high quality educators from all educational backgrounds. Put another way, what if instead of assuming a two-year teaching commitment from today's talented college grads we could recast the financial incentives and work-place conditions of the teaching profession to encourage them to spend 10 or 15 years teaching? What if instead of paying the oldest teachers the most and forcing talented young teachers to leave because they're not earning what they are worth, we flipped compensation on its head and paid the best teachers the most no matter what their age? Wouldn't a 25 year old making $55,000 teaching because they are getting tremendous learning gains for their students be more inclined to stay in the field than one who makes $35,000 as is the case these days? It's a numbers game when it comes to fixing our schools... but the trick is choosing among a load of options as to how to make the numbers work.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the roller coaster ride that is the United States and global economy continues, one need look no further than to your neighborhood public school to see how the financial crisis will affect ordinary Americans. Stories are emerging across the country (New York here and California here, for instance) of states and local school districts passing emergency mid-year budget cuts which will result in delayed school construction projects, reduced classroom budgets, and squeezes on teacher salaries. An Education Week article published this week lays out in great detail many of the practical implications that will be felt in America's schools.

There are effectively three broad categories of losses that schools will incur in the coming years, each of which will have significant impacts on school children. The first category is direct losses that school districts have sustained as the result of a significant portion of their operating and capital budgets being held in stock assets that have lost tremendous value. The most obvious examples are school districts such as the 26 in California's San Mateo county which had budget resources tied up in Lehman Brothers at the time of the company's collapse. More than $60 million is now tied up in bankruptcy court proceedings from the county's 26 districts, with the schools likely to lose a significant portion of that total.

Making matters worse is that some of the affected districts will need those dollars in the near-term in order to finance school repairs, make payroll, and other day-to-day operations. Sequoia Union High School District, for example, estimates a loss of $6 million from the county's decision to invest its savings in Lehman Brothers--money that will have an impact on the district's 8,200 students this year.

But even those school districts without huge direct losses from falling asset values are getting pinched as well. The overall downturn in the economy, evidenced by reduced economic activity, falling property values, and home foreclosures will also have an impact on school district pocketbooks by reducing annual tax revenues that all schools rely on, at least in part. Since local property tax funding accounts for as much as 70% of many school districts' revenues, district leaders across America are watching with a weary eye as home foreclosures and falling property values persist. This is the second category of trouble that the financial crisis is threatening upon schools.

This effect is compounded by the fact that reduced property tax revenues may, in some cases, affect the credit scores that rating agencies give to districts who try to sell bonds to finance their school budgets -- meaning that schools will have to pay investors higher interest rates to raise money for building fixes, books, and other expenses. A half point interest rate increase on a $250 million, 6-month loan would amount to an extra $1.2 million that a school district or state has to spend on things other than teachers and school improvement efforts.

Thirdly, many schools are running into short-term problems associated with the nature of their budget receipts. School districts that receive property tax revenues in lump-sum payments once or twice during the year typically finance the early months of their budget cycles with safe, short-term loans. But as banks increasingly hoard cash reserves, the rates that schools have had to pay have increased drastically, leading to further cuts in order to make payroll and finance other school necessities.

The federal government's $700 billion rescue / bailout may help to address some of the structural issues, but as long as the economy itself is contracting, schools will have to bear some significant brunt of the nation's losses. Which means that the only sure-fire long-term investment that America can make to ensure a healthier future economy--an investment in our children--will undoubtedly take a backseat.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Philadelphia student activitists made the news in a terrific Philadelphia Inquirer article this week for their efforts to ensure that ongoing teacher union negotiations with the school district would focus on what matters most: student learning.

At stake in the union contract negotiations are some pretty typical issues: teacher pay, length of contract, work hours. Specifically, the city's new schools superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, wants to increase the length of the school day and raise pay for teachers in hard-to-staff subjects and schools. While both ideas are widely regarded as having positive impacts on student achievement and closing the gap between wealthy and low-income students, the unions have been reluctant on both fronts. The union is also bargaining for a long-term contract, while Superintendent Ackerman is looking for a one year deal--purportedly because she would like to become more familiar with the district before signing a longer teacher union contract.

Commenting on the ongoing negotiations and how they have tended to miss the issues that matter most for students--such as getting high quality teachers into every Philly classroom regardless of the school's achievement levels, socioeconomics, and racial breakdown--one student observed, "I've seen students cut class and come to my classroom to avoid bad teachers. The system of teacher distribution in Philadelphia is broken."

What is fascinating about this news item is that the student protestors, more than two dozen organized by the Philadelphia Student Union who gathered outside an elite magnet school in the city to deliver their message, got quick responses from the negotiating parties. The Superintendent's spokesperson issued a statement saying, ""The district's top priority in negotiating the current contract is ensuring that we place teachers where children most need them." She went on to say that Superintendent Ackerman would welcome sitting down with students and parents at the negotiating table if the unions approved it.

Unfortunately, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers union president, Jerry Jordan, did not express his support for the idea of student participation in the negotiations, although he pointed out that the union "has always taken a position of watching out for kids." One may wonder how this position of watching out for kids can possibly be consistent with refusing to let them have a voice in these issues that direly affect their education.

What might it look like if low-income and low-performing schools were staffed by caring teachers who are committed to their students? Maybe something like this (a staff video made to congratulate graduating students in a Bronx middle school):

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bold statement from Washington Post's Jay Mathews in his most recent column touting the vital importance of firing bad teachers as a step to improving schools. His argument--an increasingly common one in light of proposals made by DC Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee--is that school children in low-income, chronically low-performing schools will not experience significant achievement gains until administrators have the power to fire the manifold bad teachers who disproportionately work in such environments.

Mathews's inspiration for writing the article is the experience of a principal at a DC charter school called KIPP DC:KEY Academy, where two low-performing teachers were fired before Christmas and replaced with what Mathews describes as, "proven talents" who turned around their classrooms to the benefit of students. In ordinary public schools, because of union protections for teachers, principals do not have the freedom to act this quickly and unilaterally. Instead, in traditional public schools the principal would likely only have the power to authorize mentorship and professional development for the struggling teacher, make negative comments on evaluations, and then recommend not rehiring the teacher at year's end (or in some cases, after a period of years of probation).

Mathews is right to point out the powerful lever that charter school principals have to weed out hopeless teachers, but he misses an equally important, if not more important issue: what good is it to be able to fire teachers if there aren't higher quality alternatives to replace them? In the DC KIPP academy example that Mathews cites, it only helps that the principal can fire the two bad teachers because she has access to two better teachers who can replace them!

The problem is, most schools don't have a deep reserve pool of high quality job-seeking teachers in wait, should their initial staff members prove ineffective. Indeed, from my own teaching experience, where our school was able to fire three teachers mid-year (15% of the full time teaching staff), the challenge of taking over an often times dysfunctional classroom from the previous teacher can prove insurmountable to even the most hard-working replacement. If that replacement is not a "proven talent" as was the fortunate case for the DC KIPP principal, the power to fire a teacher is only half of the solution.

The other half, of course, is increasing the pool of high quality teaching candidates in low-performing school districts--a challenge which is much more complicated than the power to fire. It incorporates licensing rules, pay structures, workplace rules, and other issues that have plagued K-12 public education for some time. In other words, the power to fire is only a part of the equation--truly fixing our struggling schools will also require a fundamental shift to the human capital picture in public education.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Wall Street Journal op-ed published earlier in the week brought attention back to the connection between Senator Obama and a former domestic terrorist--a connection couched in Mr. Obama's experience in education reform. So it merits asking, who is Bill Ayers and what difference should it make in our estimation of the Democratic candidate for President of the United States?

This much is uncontested: Bill Ayers participated in the bombings of several public monuments, including the New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the US Capitol Building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. He was a leading member of a radical, leftist terrorist organization called the Weatherman. He spent a short period of time in jail after turning himself in for these crimes in 1980. And he is affiliated with US Senator Barack Obama.

But what is the nature of that affiliation? And perhaps more importantly, what does Bill Ayers believe and how does he act today? Without question, if Senator Obama has in any way shown signs of supporting Mr. Ayers admittedly guilty and radical past, his candidacy would be suspect. But there is no evidence that this is the case.

To begin with, the connection between Senator Obama and Mr. Ayers comes down to three principal items. First, and most notably, they served together on a Chicago school reform initiative called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an effort designed community partnerships with local public schools that was also launched in fifteen other communities. Also serving on the board of the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago were individuals such as Patricia Graham, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Arnold Weber, former president of Northwestern University.

How, you might ask, did a self-admitted domestic terrorist come to rise to lead a well-funded and well-reputed school reform initiative? Because Mr. Ayers, since his days as a leftist terrorist, has gone on the straight and narrow. He is currently a distinguished professor of education at the University of Chicago who has garnered attention for his academic efforts in pedagogy, along the way working with officials such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daly and others.

The second connection is that Mr. Ayers and Senator Obama also served together on the board of an anti-poverty foundation called the Woods Fund of Chicago, which continues to provide support to organizations that seek to educate and empower low-income residents of Chicago. Thirdly, Mr. Ayers contributed $200 to Senator Obama's Illinois State Senate election campaign in 2001.

So does Mr. Obama support a hyper-radical leftist ideology of domestic terrorism? Does he support some unorthodox, militant view of the role of public education? There is no evidence of it. After all, Senator Obama was only eight years old when Bill Ayers committed initial, unjustifiable acts of violence. But I'd love to hear facts about their relationship and how it might impact the next five weeks if you have evidence or conclusions that I've missed here!

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"I've always said you get 100 votes if you change the name." - California Congressman George Miller, the Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, discussing the likelihood of No Child Left Behind being renewed in the next president's administration.

Representative Miller's comment sheds light on an interesting phenomenon. The American public overwhelmingly supports action to improve public education, even at the federal level. When asked in general whether they support the goals of the law--increasing student achievement and narrowing the achievement gap for low-income & minority children by holding schools accountable for student performance--large numbers of voters agree. But when you ask someone how they feel about the actual law named "No Child Left Behind"? Cringe, sneer, boo.

Need numbers? Start with last month's Phi Delta Kappa / Gallup poll, which found that 67% of Americans thought the law should be changed or scrapped. Or how about this ETS poll, which found that Americans favored the law 56% - 39% when it was explained based on its component parts and goals, but were against the law 43% - 41% when it was actually referenced by name.

Maybe that's why the No Child Left Behind is the "10,000 pound gorilla" in the room that neither of the candidates is talking about.

But how, you ask, is it the case that so much about the law rides on the name alone, and not the actual substance? Part of it is a branding issue--interest groups actually opposed to the substance of the law such as the teachers unions have done a great job equating the brand of NCLB with teaching to the test and other unsavory, if vague, notions. Another part is just a general lack of understanding about what the law actually entails; a post hoc ergo propter hoc effect, so to speak. Public schools have been struggling, particularly in low-income urban and rural areas, for quite some time in the US, but today's observers tend to attribute this failure to the most recent event in education policy: NCLB. It's no better logic than attributing my winning $10 on an instant lotto ticket because I had a banana for breakfast, but it's a common enough fallacy that NCLB would be probably unpopular regardless of its name.

One thing is for certain, though. Both candidates have been right as a strategic matter to steer clear of mentioning NCLB in their campaign speeches. It's toxic, and it's just as easy to score points by talking about education as a values issue instead of the nitty-gritty that seems to make NCLB so controversial. Seems like we'll have a big gorilla just hanging out until the election is over, when some new catchy name will be unveiled to headline a law that will most likely be strikingly similar to the existing No Child Left Behind Act.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the time of the election cycle when things get painful. Candidates and campaign staff, on the one hand, have to dig deep to make tough decisions about tactics and targets with limited time and resources as November 4th draws close. And they do so amidst heigtened attention even after some 20 months of non-stop campaigning with hardly any sleep.

But the most painful part of the campaign season for most ordinary Americans is how we are subjected to senseless lies and irresponsible attack ads which make it virtually impossible to make any kind of accurate judgment about what the two candidates would do for our country.

One of the most disgusting ads I've seen in quite some time was put out just two days ago by the McCain campaign. Understand that I would be the first to call out the Obama campaign if they had put the ad out instead--my interest here is in challenging either candidate when they misrepresent their own positions and records on the ever-important issue of public education reform... or in this case, when one misrepresents his opponent's views. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the issue is too vital to millions of children and indeed the very future of our nation to play partisan political football with. Judge for yourself in the following 30 second clip being shown in various battleground states:

The ad basically alleges that Barack Obama thinks it is more important to teach kids about sex than it is to teach them how to read. It begins by misrepresenting a series of Education Week and Washington Post articles that actually speak approvingly of Senator Obama's maverick and reform-minded views on school reform, and then goes on to suggest in voice-over--on top of a picture of a smirking Obama--that his only accomplishment in education is a sex education bill for kindergarteners. The not-so-subtle implication is that Senator Obama is actually a run-of-the-mill sleezeball or perhaps worse, a pedophile.

The truth? Senator Obama is actually well-regarded by reform-minded education thinkers who respect his bold uncoupling of the Democratic platform on education from the narrowly-focused goals of teachers unions which have dominated Democratic views on school reform for the last half century. And the sex education bill that he passed while in the Illinois Senate? It actually supported age-appropriate sex education that would help teach children how to protect themselves from sexual predators and pedophiles. In other words, if one watches the McCain ad while considering the truth, the ad actually implies that Senator McCain is against providing children with critical information that may help them avoid sexual abuse.

But Aaron, wait! Who are YOU to say that the McCain ad is mis-representing the Washington Post and Ed Week positions on Senator Obama's education platform? Aren't you no worse than the McCain ad if you don't provide facts to back up your assertions? Fair enough. So don't take it from me that the Washington Post and Ed Week support Senator Obama. Take it from them, directly, here (the Washington Post actually fires back at the McCain camp directly for twisting its words, and here for the original Ed Week piece.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Give John McCain credit: he spent more than two whole minutes talking about public education in his nomination acceptance speech last night and about his general vision for improving our schools were he to be elected president. Barack Obama, for what it is worth, only spent seventy seconds in his acceptance speech last week.

Senator McCain begins explaining his views on public education in the first minute of the above video, with a bold pronouncement that, "Education is the Civil Rights issue of this century." He continues to talk about the importance of giving every child access to a good school, and the role of the government in providing families with choice if their neighborhood public school is failing. It is all pretty standard rhetoric at this point for Republican candidates--and rather appealing rhetoric at that, since even many of those who are against the controversial idea of vouchers can understand the sentiment of wanting to provide all children with the chance to get out of a chronically low-performing school.

But at two minutes and fifty-three seconds, Senator McCain fires a direct shot across the bow at his opponent, saying, "Sen. Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucracies. I want schools to answer to parents and students." A powerful charge, indeed, which the McCain campaign hopes to mount as part of a broader challenge against the idea that Senator Obama will bring change to Washington, DC. If Senator Obama only wants to make schools answer to unions and bereaucracies, after all, how will that put children in any better a position than they are today?

The problem is, the charge is patently false. Regardless of whether one has conservative or liberal leanings on public education issues, no objective observer could look at the Obama education plan without thinking that he is walking a fine line with regard to teachers unions who have long been a friend to the Democratic party. Even a full year ago, Obama was making bold and risky statements to the face of the unions themselves --such as his appearance in front of the National Education Association in July 2007 where he expressed his support for teacher merit pay, an idea that could not be more anathema to the unions.

In an election where both candidates have made unfair and at times inaccurate statements about each others' records and character, one would hope that an issue as important as the education of millions of children might be sacred ground. For the next two months, sadly, it doesn't seem that this will be the case.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The economy. War in Iraq. Health care. Energy and environmental policies. All of these issues, at different times, have dominated the headlines of the 2008 presidential election cycle. So too, have campaign strategies, personal attacks, and the occasional speaking gaffe.

Lost in these headlines, however, has been one key topic that may well have as much impact on the future of our nation as all the rest: education. Indeed, school reformers interested in pushing education into a more prominent position of debate between Senators Obama and McCain have more or less held a backseat over the past several months.

This is not how the leaders of at least one non-profit organization envisioned the election cycle. Ed in '08, a $60 million effort funded principally by the Gates Foundation to raise the election day prominence of public education as an issue. The group has made major ad buys in radio, print, and even on TV without much impact--one TV ad is embedded here:

Why hasn't education been more talked about? It's hard to say. After all, it's not as though the voting public isn't interested in public education, and it's not like there aren't meaningful debates to be had over key issues like teacher pay, charter schools, pre-kindergarten, and school accountability. One possibility is that other news have been "sexier" in the sense that they are more timely and seemingly urgent--the housing crisis and gas prices fit this description. Another possibility is that the two campaigns do not disagree enough on the major questions (both are more or less in support of NCLB with modest revision) to be the point of a debate. Either way, it doesn't bode well for America's children that more public attention has been paid thus far to John McCain's real estate holdings and Barack Obama's wife's dress color than to their schools.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A diverse and highly respected group of leading education reformers from across the country gathered today in Denver, CO to challenge Democratic officials to fight for fundamental changes to the nation's public schools. Elected officials such as Adrian Fenty and Cory Booker, the mayors of Washington, DC and Newark, NJ respectively, were joined by a slew of prominent school experts and civil rights leaders who called for a commitment to six key steps to fighting the achievement gap that plagues low-income and minority students.

The six steps include: providing universal access to pre-kindergarten programs for low-income children; expanding parent choice and access to charter schools; improving standards and accountability systems so that high achieving schools and teachers can be rewarded and modeled; extending school days and the school year to help low-performing children; improving teacher recruitment and hiring practices; and re-examing school funding within the realms of teacher pay and after school programming.

The six proposals are hardly radical ideas; each of them has been suggested to improve student achievement at one time or another. What is interesting, however, is the timing and target of the call--a plea for action by widely respected Democrats who see education as an issue that can propel the Obama - Biden ticket to victory in November.

A recent PDK / Gallup poll seems to confirm this possibility. In the poll, respondents were asked which presidential candidate they would vote for if they were choosing solely on the basis of improving public schools. 46% said they would vote for Senator Obama, compared with only 29% who supported Senator McCain (the remaining 25% said they did not know).

The poll result is noteworthy for two reasons. First off, it shows a clear issue-motivated party preference on the part of voters that did not exist in either the 2004 or 2000 president elections, when President Bush was virtually tied with Sen. Kerry and Vice President Gore on the question of who would improve public schools more. To the extent that this preference is deeply held, education seems to be an issue on which Senator Obama has potential to draw voters to his camp.

The second interesting element of the poll is that the clear candidate preference has emerged in spite of a relatively quiet campaign season when it comes to the issue of education. It is one thing that voters express preferences on economic issues and the Iraq war, where both candidates have spoken extensively on the subject and where clear distinction exists. But voters support Senator Obama on education even without a clear sense of how he differs substantively from Senator McCain. One wonders if Senator McCain would be wise to draw comparisons between his education platform and Senator Obama's, rather than contrasts as a way to reduce the gap expressed by likely voters.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lots of happenings in the past few weeks to catch up on, perhaps none more interesting than a speech given by Senator McCain to the NAACP two weeks ago where he officially unveiled his education platform for the presidential campaign.

While the edu-world consensus seems to be that there wasn't too much in the way of earth-shattering policy suggested in the speech, there were at least a couple items that caught my attention.

The first observation has to do with the over-arching positioning behind Senator McCain's proposals. It's pretty clear that he has no intent of making education anything close to a center-piece of his campaign, instead choosing to allow education to serve as an echo and reinforcement of themes upon which he and his advisors have already bet their campaign livelihoods. For instance, the second and third sentences of his education platform declare:

"Now is the time to demand real, new reform earned through discipline, grinding work, tough choices and leadership. John McCain has dedicated his career in public service to the hard and sometimes unpopular work of achieving meaningful reform."

Sure, sounds great, but I couldn't help but notice that the same two lines could have been used in a campaign statement on health care, energy policy, campaign finance, the housing crisis--heck the two lines could be an intro to Senator McCain's position on Major League Baseball and steroids. My point here is not to criticize the Senator, especially since he has some thoughtful viewpoints on teacher pay, teacher recruitment, and school choice later on in his plan. But I do mean to point out that the first question his campaign asked when weaving an education platform was not, "what is best for children?" but rather, "what makes the most sense for this campaign?" To be fair, Senator Obama has arguably done the same on the issue.

Second observation has to do with Senator McCain's opponent and the issue of race. He spent a good minute in the opening of his speech praising Mr. Obama in front of a predominately African-American audience, both graciously and eloquently. But I wonder how much of Senator McCain's remarks and choice of venues--in front of the very same NAACP that he refused to speak at in 2007--have to do with this recent poll from the Public Education Network that shows that African American and Latinos actually support the No Child Left Behind Act more than do white voters, by a pretty significant 3-to-2 margin.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

News yesterday from the presidential campaign trail was that Senator McCain was preparing to give an address before the NAACP next week discussing his plans for how the federal government can help improve public education outcomes in America. While his talk, even by his own campaign's admission, is unlikely to be as deep and detailed as Senator Obama's parallel speech on education more than a month ago, word is that he will discuss No Child Left Behind and a handful of more intricate issues such as teacher pay-for-performance.

The fact that none of the presidential candidates have been so measured in their approaches on education--even Senator Obama's 19-minute address six weeks ago did not contain any headliners--indicates that they have both bought into the current orthodoxy of education reform in Washington, DC: the standards-based accountability movement. This is the movement that has resulted in states setting standards for what students should know in each subject area by each grade level, and implementing testing systems to measure whether those standards are being met.

In principle, the standards based accountability movement is a sound strategy that owes much of its genesis to successful business practices designed to monitor and enhance productivity. But unlike the business world, where workers rarely object to the idea that they will be held to a set of performance indicators to determine their efficacy, we have seen a fair deal of back-lash from educators and other stakeholder groups against the standards based model in education, particularly on the testing front.

I have often been quick to play devil's advocate against this brand of backlash, asserting the general logic that anytime an institution is suddenly and openly confronted with its own failures (and in the institution of public education, the magnitude of those failures is immense indeed), that the institutional stakeholders will reject and rail against the accountability system that reveals its weaknesses. But it must also be admitted that there is some degree of resonance to what those who object to NCLB and standards-based school reform are saying. The appeal of their arguments can be described this way: is the end goal and sum-total of what we are trying to achieve in public education reform really just an increase in the number of students who correctly fill-in some arbitrary percentage of bubbles on an annual test?

To be sure, those bubbles, the arbitrary percentage, and the tests themselves represent real skills that are indicators of what our children need to know to compete in the world economy. But that's also the problem: they are only indicators. If Susie Q. passes her state-written 4th grade reading proficiency test she still has a ways to go before she has earned her way into a prosperous participation in the global economy.

None of this would be a problem if we didn't have better indicators. That is to say, most people agree that institutions, whether public or private, ought to be held accountable to meeting their stated purposes, and we should use the bets-tailored indicators possible to decide if they are in fact succeeding. But in the case of public education, I believe we do have better indicators to determine whether our schools are meeting the goal of preparing all youth for productive future lives as democratic citizens and members of an ever-changing global work force: college completion rates and, by extension, high school drop-out rates!

In other words, in addition to holding schools accountable for annual yearly progress on standardized tests, shouldn't we be asking our schools to meet the more publicly-accessible end goal of increasing the proportion of students who complete college (which is an indicator for success in today's world that adds a more humanizing element than a passing score on a 4th grade math test, I submit)? So here's my big idea for Senators McCain and Obama: come up with a plan to inject new Federal and State dollars** into public schools and school districts as an incentive to reward those districts who BOTH increase their numbers of graduates who go on to complete college AND who decrease high school drop out rates by at least the same amount. A program that essentially challenges schools to provide more students with a full high school education AND do so in a way that prepares them for success in college can only do great things for our national economy and certainly our society. Schools who participate in the program would be rewarded for doing what their ultimate purpose is in the first place, and a race to the top could ensue as opposed to a race to the bottom with the standards on current state tests.

Best of all for the candidates is, in my opinion, the political aspect of such a proposal. Why? Because when I say "new" federal and state dollars, I really mean it. Put it this way: if America's high school drop out numbers were reduced by half, and a similar number of youth went on to complete college instead of stopping after getting a high school diploma, America would increase government tax revenues by at least $40 billion simply through direct and indirect benefits of reducing our incarceration rate! Since high school dropouts are 8 times more likely to go to jail than high school graduates, and since a year of prison costs the government an average of $27,000 plus lost tax revenues as prison inmates do not work, much of the incentive program to push schools to bring up college completion and bring down high school dropouts would pay for itself (over a period of time).

Now if only we could find a leader willing to stand up and stomache the political costs of putting the money up for such a program up front with the firm belief that America's people do indeed desire to educate themselves, and do want to achieve success in the workplace and beyond...

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the school year winded down for the 240 middle school students and 20+ staff at my school, there was a lot of carnage.

In the last week, two of the students who I had thought made a great deal of progress were expelled because of a fight involving a thrown garbage can and a brandished fire extinguisher. This would have been the most notable occurence of the day, except that earlier in the day the 8th grade math teacher finally called it quits. He had shown remarkable resolve by staying in the classroom despite not getting along with the students or much of the administration for most of the year. But twenty minutes before the fire extinguisher fight, the math teacher stormed out of the building and quit after he was pelted in the face by a group of several students who used fruit cup, oranges, and other foods as ammunition.

But the end of the school year was actually less bloody for the students and teachers than it was for the administration. My principal had been fired a month before the end of the year and replaced with a new principal who had a stronger background in urban education. The last month of the school year was thus filled with a great deal of stress for the other two administrators (a dean of students and a director of curriculum and instruction), along with the few teachers who were hoping to return. In theory at least, the new principal would be evaluating those who hoped to return to decide who would make the cut and return next year.

Well on the day after school let out, we found out that both the dean of students and the director of curriculum & instruction were fired. Which means that not a single administrator will be carried over from the school's first year into year two.

What are the implications of this? For the students, I have to say that it is a good thing. Sometimes when an organization fails at its mission, there is something to be said about sticking with the people who made up the organization so that they can improve based on lessons learned. Other times, institutional memory can be a bad thing if unsuccessful practices become ingrained. In the case of our school, we needed a brand new fresh start.

But there are broader implications as well. Our school is far from the only one in the nation where administrators and teachers are being fired (or deciding not to return) left and right. In a profession where half of the employees quit their jobs within five years there are a whole host of problems that arise. Indeed, any serious policy response to teacher quality problems has to address problems with retention as urgently as it addresses recruitment.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nine minutes and forty-five seconds into his speech, Barack Obama gets it.

"... From the moment our children step into a classroom, the single most important factor in determining their achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from. It's not who their parents are or how much money they have. It's who their teacher is."

In the longest single-issue, education-only speech any of the candidates have given for the public record thus far, Barack Obama did not disappoint earlier this week. Speaking in front of an audience of students, educators, and parents outside Denver, CO (a notable location, and location, of course, is everything), Senator Obama outlined a serious of key principles and policy ideas that would guide his legislative leadership on education were he to be elected president (full text of the speech here).

If you can get past the relatively slight amount of political pandering, where the Senator criticizes NCLB with the standard throw-away sentiment that NCLB left the funding behind, he actually makes some fair points. To begin with, he takes the bold and even slightly controversial position among liberal educators that NCLB itself is a good law with good goals. The problems, he correctly points out, have to do with the implementation. So far so good.

He then goes on to tell the truth about another straw-man argument that liberal educators wrongly bash the federal law for, the idea that NCLB has turned schools into factories where teachers no longer innovate in the classroom but only "teach to the test". And he did it in a way that garnered applause from an audience that I believe didn't quite catch his deft pivot. Stating, "we need to realize that we can meet high standards without forcing teachers and students to spend most of the year for a single, high stakes test," the Senator then changes gears to say that, "if we want our children to be great... our schools shouldn't stifle innovation, they should let it thrive." In doing so, I believe the Senator is pointing the blame for the "teaching to the test argument" at the correct party: not the federal government, but rather the schools and school districts who over-react to the concept of accountability by turning to rote memorization and test prep! As he goes on to say, the idea of school accountability for learning is important, and a standardized test is a necessary thing. But standardized tests and critical thinking skills, art, music and the like are not either / or propositions, they are both / and propositions.

Most importantly, the Senator sees the crucial issue threatening the quality of education in America: teacher quality. He recognizes that our children--particularly those in low-income urban and rural schools--will only go so far as their teachers can teach them, and that right now, our teachers are far from good enough. So he suggests a number of promising teacher recruitment programs and financial incentives that will help bring much needed talent into the field.

Unfortunately, the only place where I'm afraid he falls short is in a lack of candor over the other side of the teacher quality coin. Carrots are great to bring more people into the profession, but sticks are needed too--in fact the carrots won't do much without the sticks when all is said and done.

After all, we don't really have a shortage of nice people who come to school to teach every day. Plenty of low-quality candidates come to interview at my low-performing school each month, after all. The problem we have is that schools, by and large, are too slow to get rid of the worst teachers. More pointedly, schools are also too reluctant to pay good teachers what they deserve and bad teachers what they deserve as well. I hope the reason why Senator Obama did not come out and say this is because he understands that he can only make these kinds of changes if he doesn't go on a public anti-teacher union crusade, and not that he is unwilling to broach the issue. It won't be pretty if he tries, but if he can bring unions, students, and parents to the same table, crazier deals have been struck in the name of what's best for the future.

Lastly, I've heard Senator Obama use this refrain about needing parents who are willing to turn the T.V. off if we are going to really give our children the education they deserve--this idea of shared sacrifice and responsibility. It's a brilliant political line, and a popular part of his education passages in speeches. It accomplishes two things: (1) it gives him the appearance of "street cred" as a truth-talker, unafraid to confront delinquent parents, and (2) it seems to make sense. The real beauty of the line, though, is that it accomplishes both tasks without any political cost! Why? Because the parents he is talking about, by and large, do not recognize that they are the ones at fault! Parents as a whole are quick to point out when other parents are doing a bad job, but rare to admit that they are failing their children (and if you need to know more, just ask me to tell you about a student who's mom enrolled him in the wrong grade at the start of this school year because she forgot what grade he was supposed to be in!).

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A US News & World Report article published earlier this month provides an accurate overview of how education has been treated on the presidential campaign trail so far this election cycle.

In short, education has played an insignificant role in both of the primaries, and appears to be headed in the same direction in the general election. None of the three remaining candidates have staked out bold positions on the most important K-12 and higher education issues, and none of them have made much in the way of headlines in terms of promises or policy proposals.

Both Senators Obama and Clinton appear to be content with criticizing funding levels for NCLB, clamoring for increased loans to help with college affordability, and drawing moderate lines on teacher pay and quality initiatives. One disjunction between the two is that Senator Clinton has toed the teachers union supported line of rewarding teachers based on how well whole schools are doing whereas Senator Obama has taken the more controversial stance of rewarding only those individual teachers who are dramatically improving student achievement.

For his part, Senator McCain has had even less to say about education. He doesn't even yet have a full education platform published on his campaign website, and has really only issued standard GOP responses on education, trumpeting such ideas as school choice, merit pay for teachers, charter schools, and sometimes even vouchers. To the degree that education remains a low-priority issue, it will benefit Senator McCain since he has little expertise on the matter, especially given a traditional Democratic advantage among voters who consider education to be a key election day issue.

My only challenge to the article regarding low attention paid to education on the campaign trail is to the title. US News has the piece printed under the headline, "Presidential Candidates Have Little Opportunity to Talk About Education." I question whether this gets to the heart of the matter, or if it actually gives the candidates a bit more credit than they deserve regarding this issue which, after all, may be one of the most pressing policy matters facing our nation's future.

To me, the presidential candidates have plenty of opportunity to address whatever issues they deem to be important. After all, we're talking about candidates who give multiple speeches each day talking about all of the changes they'd like to make to the country. Senator McCain, for instance, has had no trouble making headlines with his unique views on global warming and climate change--issues which he has raised on his own, without having to wait for the right "opportunity". In other words, I'm afraid the candidates have not lacked in opportunity to address education, but have instead lacked sufficient interest to make it a crucial topic. And if you're wondering why none of the candidates (not just this year, but really for the past half-century since K-12 education has become a federal issue) have made K-12 school reform a priority, allow me to ask you a question to offer a hint why education will take a backseat for the foreseeable future: how many elementary, middle, and high school students are allowed to vote?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you want to know how good a school is, here's a novel idea: ask the students.

At a bad school, you'll hear complaints that are well-founded, such as a number of the quotes from a powerful report published earlier this week in Washington, DC .

One elementary school student complained, "Give us harder work, not the busywork that we already know."

A middle school student, when asked about her teachers, said that "they let you know you are failing but then let you go on struggling and then send you to summer school."

A student at the same school reflected, "Teachers don't teach us a thing throughout the entire period. When visitors come, they start working."

And at one of the city's high schools, one history class had an almost unbelievable lesson plan, where students were asked, "Where is your favorite place to shop?"

The concept of students complaining about school is not a novel concept, of course, especially at this time of the year when summer is just around the corner and patience grows thin on the part of adults and students both. But there is something telling in these comments from DC's students--and its telling more because of who says them, than what they are saying.

After all, were you really all that surprised to hear that it was students from an inner-city with high levels of poverty complaining about bad teachers, low expectations, and overall low quality of education? I hear similar statements from students all the time in my school, and I have to confess that they are often on point. In short, reports of student discontent are numerous in DC, St Louis City, and other areas with high concentrations of low-income and minority children, and they often hit on important themes, such as those having to do with low quality teachers or run-down school buildings.

Meanwhile, if a school is actually pretty good, you'll likely hear a combination of compliments and complaints. The difference about the complaints, however, will be marked. Instead of focusing on obvious problems such as inept teachers, broken facilities, lack of safety, and inadequate student support and discipline, in the nicer suburbian schools, complaints will sound a lot more like the student in the video below, which is to say high on passion and energy, but low on common sense.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday marked the 54th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. The decision, reached by a unanimous Supreme Court, struck down laws that segregated schools on the basis of race. No longer would children of color be forced, by virtue of the circumstances of their birth, to attend schools separate from those attended by whites.

What has been the impact of the court's ruling, now that we have the benefit of 54 years of wisdom in hindsight? There are three frameworks through which politicians, educators, and casual onlookers typically refer to the decision, and depending on which one you chose to adopt, the decision has been either completely successful, partially successful, or completely unsuccessful.

The simplest way to look at the impact of Brown v. Board is to make a purely legalistic analysis. In this lens, the Supreme Court set out to do one very simple thing: get rid of the pernicious practice--as ordained by local and state laws--of forcibly sending one group of children to school A and another group to school B based solely on skin color. Never mind whether school A is nicer, has better teachers, spends more money per child, increase student achievement more than school B; in the legalistic sense, the only goal to be sought was the realization by law of the court's finding that "separate but equal [schools] are inherently inequal".

In the legalistic sense, the Supreme Court succeeded completely. Fifty-four years after the ruling, there is not a single school district or state that affirms a policy of race-based segregation. There may be other reasons why a child cannot attend a particular K-12 school, but to public knowledge, race alone is not one of them.

Some, however, would argue that the legalistic analysis is too simple, and that the proper way to analyze Brown's impact is to measure whether black children are actually being enrolled in white schools at appropriate rates. Call this the intermediate frame of analysis; the idea that the actual goal of the Supreme Court in Brown was not just to outlaw school segregation as a policy, but rather to go one step further and actually integrate schools to some appropriate degree. In other words, in this analysis, getting rid of school segregation laws is only step one of a two-step process envisioned by the court. To determine whether the decision has been successful requires us to measure how far we have come in the second step (are our schools actually integrated), and not the first.

In this second way of looking at the decision, it's probably the case that we have experienced only mild success in the wake of Brown. Although for a while the pace of integration was fast post 1954, it has slowed and even reversed in recent years--segregation has actually been on the rise for blacks since the late 1980s. Of course, the difference is that today's segregation is not shoved upon blacks by Jim Crow laws, but rather subtly arrived upon as the complex result of demographic forces, housing markets, and school districting lines. In any case, a person adopting this framework likely looks at the past 54 years with mixed feelings: thrilled with the complete reversal of school segregation laws (which was hardly a given even in the 1960s), but concerned with rising de facto segregation in our schools.

The third way of looking at the decision is to take a much more end-oriented view, even more so than the intermediate framework. In this third lens, the purpose of the Supreme Court's ruling went far beyond the direct act of striking down a certain group of local and state school policies, and it even went beyond an end-state where schools were proportionally integrated with perfect blends of white, African-American, Latino, Native American, and other groupings of students. The goal by which to judge the Brown decision--a judgement that we can only conclude to be wholly negative--is whether African American children are receiving equal quality education as white children, as measured by a batch of sensible indicators such as high school completion rates, college going rates, and yes, performance on standardized tests. With gaps persistent along each of these metrics along racial lines, the end-oriented analysis would have to conclude that we still have much work to do in the wake of Brown.

It's interesting to note a fracture between the second and third frames of reference, since it is not necessarily the case that succeeding in one goal merely requires success in prior goals. The end-oriented analysis might suggest that the goal of perfect melting pot public schools is not necessary to reach the more important result of equality of educational opportunity. Indeed, to reformers in this camp, the recent relapse in segregation in particularly urban school settings might be perfectly acceptable if it was accompanied by strong achievement gains in the minority-dominated schools (alas, this has not been the case). Put another way, many educational reformers have admitted that spending political capital and money on integration efforts may run adverse to the more important (in their minds, at least) cause of closing the achievement gap, since simply having a black child sit next to a white child in school is a guarantee of no equality in outcome.

Conversely, proponents of the intermediate analysis reply that equal educational opportunities will never happen until children of color attend the same schools as white children, the schools that receive the most financial and political support. It is a heated discussion that takes place under the surface if at all, but one that will have implications for whether low income and minority children will ever receive the kinds of schools they deserve.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite a regular stream of criticism from politicians and educators about the law--some for its complete abolition, others for severe revision to the point of rendering it unrecognizable from the law's original goals--the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 remains, for the most part, safe and unchanged.

That's not to say that it hasn't been challenged and at times, threatened. But one of the more serious threats was unmistakably denied last week, when a federal judge ruled against Connecticut's lawsuit challenging NCLB as an unfunded mandate.

The root of Connecticut's lawsuit was a claim that the cost of fulfilling the annual 3rd through 8th grade testing requirements of NCLB was greater than the amount of money the federal government was providing the state in Title I funding. Connecticut sought an exemption from the US Department of Education to continue testing only in 4th, 6th, and 8th grades as it was doing prior to the law's passage. But the federal circuit court judge ruled that Connecticut had failed to provide any evidence that the federal government was not providing enough money to pay for the testing. NCLB's mandate to test every year between 3rd and 8th grade and once in high school, in other words, was sufficiently funded.

The case itself was simple in its holding, and relatively uncontroversial. The more interesting question for those of us concerned with the implications for chilrden is, where is all of the anti-NCLB sentiment coming from? The law has pretty universal goals, after all: to reduce the achievement gap and ensure school accountability.

My observations about the origins of anti-NCLB sentiment among educators is that it is partly due to top-down teacher union influence, and partly due to a bogey-man type mentality. In the former regard, national level officials in the NEA and AFT have long regarded NCLB as a problematic path for reform, since its chief proposal (school level accountability for student achievement) diverts attention from policies that would enhance teacher union membership or teacher benefits (such as class-size reduction or across-the-board teacher pay raises).

In the latter regard, my experience is that a significant number of teachers are upset about NCLB because of a post hoc ergo proper hoc* logical fallacy. Essentially, teachers get frustrated about their jobs for a multitude of reasons (low administrative support, lack of staff-wide teacher quality, poor student behavior, pay that they believe to be too low, to name a few). Many of these reasons may just have to do with the fact that teaching is, of itself, a challenging job. But since the passage of NCLB, teachers have attributed their angers and frustrations to the laws, rather than to more subtle demands that have long existed on the profession.

In short, teachers are blaming the NCLB-bogey man for non-NCLB-related problems. A great example of this is when teachers blame NCLB for high-stakes testing policies that school districts and states decide to implement. NCLB itself says nothing about making a certain grade level test a requirement for grade promotion; the states are to blame for it!

Sadly, this kind of attribution problem is probably par for the course any time a significant policy change is made without immediate results. But what we must make sure to avoid is giving up on a potentially positive policy because of wrong-headed backlash.

* Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is latin for "after it, therefore because of it". It is a logical fallacy to blame a problem on another thing just simply because the thing happened before the problem. In this case, teachers are blaming NCLB for some of their problems because NCLB happened first. But there may be (and in many cases, I submit that there are) other sources for the problems that are related to the federal education law.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Debates about No Child Left Behind often come down to fractures based on perspective. Many of the educators I've met ground their opinions on the law in their experiences in the classroom. To these educators, NCLB's annual testing requirements have turned schools into factories where innovative lessons have been replaced by rote test preparation. Moreover, the annual tests have placed onerous expectations on students, filling some youth with such anxiety that they shut down or disengage from school entirely.

On the other hand, policy makers analyze the law from a perspective that can be characterized generously as a birds-eye view, or cynically as an ivory tower view. From their vantage point, requiring regular standardized tests in schools is crucial to ensure that schools are successful in their core purpose of advancing student achievement. Moreover, detailed, thoroughly examined data on how our students are doing within each racial and socioeconomic grouping is absolutely necessary if we want to close down the pernicious achievement gap affecting low-income an dminority students.

Now I'll be the first to admit that for most of my time in the education policy arena, I've fallen squarely in the latter camp. But now that I've taught and gone through a year where standardized testing has been a serious challenge, I am better able to understand the nuances of the debate.

The basic problem boils down to a simple fact: students of all ages and all backgrounds are already not inclined to test-taking. Now some tests are easier to stomache than others. Tests that are relevant and reasonable are always better than tests that seem arbitrary and unnecessary. Tests that students feel well-prepared for are also more likely to be taken seriously than tests that seem overly difficult.

On both of these fronts in my school this year, however, NCLB required standardized testing did not fare well with my students. Since passing the tests is not required for grade promotion (which, contrary to popular belief, is usually the case with most of these tests), the students did not see any direct reason to try hard on the tests. Moreover, the tests asked many questions that were inaccessible to the students, particularly on the math and science sections. So students who were already uninspired to try hard on the tests found themselves frustrated with confusing questions.

When that happens, the natural inclination for almost all of my students was to quit trying. There was a lot of random bubble-filling going around my room, and test sections that should have taken an hour only took 15 minutes. And there were a lot of angry students lashing out at teachers and other staff members who they perceived to be the reason why they had to take the seemingly unreasonable tests.

But here's where the rub is. Because the students did not try hard on the test, the data from the tests will not actually be a reliable way to measure our school's success! So the education policy maker's original goal of getting data to evaluate schools will not be met, and the process will only anger children and their teachers in the process. No wonder why there are so many educators who are upset!

Yet to demand that NCLB's testing requirements be shelved also misses the point. Because the real root cause of the controversy over the tests is that many of the students, in my school at least, find them so difficult that refuse to try. Addressing this root cause problem by demanding an end to standardized tests makes as much sense as a shopping mall getting rid of its security cameras when it finds out that there has been an outbreak of theft.

The solution? The best I can think of is for states and the federal government to enhance the ability of schools to reward students who try hard on the test. This means rewarding not just absolute achievement levels, but improvement from one year to the next--a trend that is emerging already. If my students saw that making significant gains on the test could result in them receiving a cash incentive or some other kind of reward, I firmly believe they would have tried harder... and policy makers would have more accurate data with which to judge our school.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A great blog called "Education Election" has been running courtesy of the National Education Writers Association at http://edelection.blogspot.com/ which I encourage you to check out. It cover news stories in which presidential candidates have discussed education, and adds a good bit of analysis as well.

One intriguing note is that Barack Obama has made news with his positions and proposals for education a total of 37 times since the start of the campaign season, Hillary has been covered 34 times, and John McCain has been covered only 10 times. Though it doesn't mean anything about the content or quality of their views on education, there may be some conclusion that is reachable regarding the priority with which each campaign views education as an election issue.

You don't need to take it from me or the education writers association, however. You can take it from the McCain campaign itself, which has all but admitted that education will not play a major role in his campaign. Indeed, "education" only appeared on the issues section of his website very recently, and he has refrained from virtually any substantive discussion thus far.

Why has the Arizona Senator said so little about schools and school reform? This terrific article by Richard Whitmire on Politico.com explains it well. Basically, McCain has a choice to make. On the one hand, he can do what most GOP nominees have done for the past quarter-century and minimize education as a federal election issue by mostly talking up school choice, empowering parents, and avoiding tougher issues around NCLB and accountability. This is what worked for Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.

On the other hand, Senator McCain can do what the current President Bush did back in 2000 and 2004, which was to encroach upon traditionally democratic territory by pushing more centrist and aggressive reforms such as charter schools, teacher quality reform, and other ideas that are less appealing to the Republican base but more promising from a student achievement perspective.

Which one will he choose? It looks like the former right now, except for the fact that his chief education advisor is a woman named Lisa Graham Keegan - a real firecracker who has made major waves as chief of schools in Arizona and as the head of a DC based group called the Education Leaders Council (*full disclosure - I worked for Ms. Keegan as an intern back in 2001 and was quite impressed with her passion for finding solutions to help children learn*). Arizona is perhaps the premier state in the country when it comes to putting conservative talking points on school reform into action, as it has widely available charter schools, vouchers, and other parent choice mechanisms in play. The results haven't been conclusive however - one study, at least, has gone so far as to rank Arizona last in K-12 education outcomes.

It will bear watching in the coming months, while the Dems continue to slug it out, whether Sen. McCain sets up an aggressive reform agenda on education, or whether he lets it serve as a back-burner issue to Iraq and national security.

Also, I wanted to leave you with this humorous video from Comedy Central's the Colbert Report that is education-related:

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Try and make sense of these two sets of facts:

Fact set 1: The state of Missouri reported an 85.8% high school graduation rate for the 2006-2007 school year. In the same year, New Mexico reported a high school graduation rate of almost 90% to the US Department of Education. Multiple states provide similarly high rates in their official reports to the federal government.

Fact set 2: At the middle school where I teach in St. Louis city, no fewer than ten 8th graders have dropped out of school or have been expelled without any intention or re-enrolling elsewhere. This means that our junior high school graduation rate is just over 90%.

How can these two sets of facts co-exist? To be sure, part of it owes to the nature of the St. Louis City school district, which has lower school completion rates than Missouri as a whole. But the main source of the dissonance is something altogether different, and worse: most states are simply lying when they disclose their high school graduation rates.

There is little surprise as to why the states are so willing to lie about their graduation rates--it's just good public relations. Admitting that thousands upon thousands of students are quitting school early does not win points with current residents, potential residents, and certainly not voters. The more perplexing issue is why we (the public, the federal government, America as a whole) have not made a fuss about it.

It might be helpful to start with an explanation for how states are able to under-report high school dropouts so dramatically. The trick lies in how a state defines the dropout rate. New Mexico, for instance, defines its high school dropout rate as the percentage of enrolled twelth graders who do not receive a diploma in a given year. That is a little bit like saying America's armed forces has had a 0% casualty rate in Iraq based on the number of deaths & injuries we've sustained in the past twenty four hours. As anyone who's been in school before can testify, youth start dropping out of the education pipeline as early as 7th grade (I've seen it first-hand)--these dropouts should count against state graduation rates everybit as much as 12th grade dropouts.

Some states have started to fix these obvious errors. North Carolina reported a 95% graduation rate in 2006, but changed its formula last year such that a more accurate rate of 68% was published in 2007. But Missouri, New Mexico, and other states are still fudging the numbers and misleading the public about the success (and failure) of their schools.

All of this is why Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's announcement that she will be creating a new federally mandated high school dropout rate formula was so encouraging last week. Education shares at least some similarities with the business world (though the comparisons are not completely parallel--a debate for a different blog entry), and perhaps the most important one is the need for rigorous, high quality data collection to drive outcomes. Maybe this will get the ball rolling on the high school graduation issue... and ensure that the 10 students who Missouri (read: the adults in my school) has failed in my middle school are acknowledged and not simply forgotten.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a notable development last week, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Palm Beach County School District in Florida over what it claims is a violation of its students' basic right to quality education as promised in the state constitution.

In the lawsuit, the ACLU argues that the county school district has failed its students--especially minority children--by not offering a "uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality education." It is, on the face of it, the same argument that has been made to varying effect in more than 20 states to date: states are not providing children the quality of education that they promise either implicitly or explicitly in their constitutions. But the ACLU has taken a different angle in the latest lawsuit, because rather than suing for a more equal distribution of school spending and other resources, the group is instead suing for the district to improve high school graduation rates, particularly among low-income and minority students.

It may sound like a minor distinction, but it is a meaningful one in both legal terms and practical terms. Legally, any precedent set by decisions such as the ones in New York State, and New Jersey does not apply because the existing suits challenged resource distribution within the state. ACLU is making no such complaint in this case, arguing instead that it is the responsibility of the Palm Beach County School District, and not the state of Florida, to make the needed changes.

Practically, I think the lawsuit is, perhaps regrettably, loaded with potential pitfalls. For starters, while the focus on graduation rates is on-point to the degree that a HS diploma is virtually a necessity to compete in the 21st century job marketplace, the ACLU's suit fails to acknowledge that a HS diploma is only valuable if it actually represents real skills and knowledge learned. By concentrating on a single measure of output (graduation rates) without regard for whether the measure is an accurate representation of student learning, the ACLU may just be trading one education injustice for another by a different name (would the ACLU be happy with this news headline in 2012: 100% of Palm Beach County Students Graduate High School; Only Half Can Read"?)

Secondly, the lawsuit fails to recognize the fact that the Palm Beach County School District is not singularly accountable for law student achievement. If anything, the lawsuit sends the onus of legal accountability in the wrong trend from state-level suits. If states have not been able to level the educational playing field in the past two decades, how much less successful will we be if we try to rely on individual school districts? From a scale perspective, is the ACLU going to file a similar lawsuit in the 15,000 other school districts in the country? To improve educational outcomes for all youth--including low-income and minority youth--we need to be talking about this as a problem of a crucial, national scope.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

California's Second District Court of Appeals issued a ruling last week that declared thousands of parents who currently home school their children to be in violation of the law. The ruling represented a stunning reversal of a growing trend in American education, as the number of children being home schooled has grown steadily to a total of over 1.1 million children last year.

The ruling received immediate criticism from key policy makers in California, including the state's chief of schools Jack O'Connell and from the Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is almost certain to be appealed to the California Supreme Court on a fast track.

What were the grounds for the decision? To begin with, the ruling all stemmed from an isolated incident in which two parents, who happened to homeschool their children, were suspected of child-abuse. The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) then sought relief from a juvenile court, asking the court to send the children back to a public school where they would be safer and where teachers could spot signs of physical abuse. The juvenile court judge ruled, however, that the parents had a right to homeschool their children. Last week, however, the LA-based 2nd District Court of Appeals ruled that no such right existed in the state constitution and that consequently, only parents who have credentials from the state department of education to teach in a public school should be eligible to home school their children.

Forget the glaring irony of the ruling, which is that the state is now requiring home-schooling parents to have a teaching credential that tens of thousands of state-paid public school teachers are themselves lacking. The question we should ask about this decision is whether, in the end, it helps or hurts children. Will students have more access to quality educational opportunity if parents are forced to get a teaching certifiicate in order to home-school, or less access?

In my estimation, they will have less access to quality educational opportunities if the Appeals Court decision is affirmed by the state Supreme Court. But I believe this for a different reason that you might think. Educational opportunity will, I believe, not suffer principally because home-schooling parents do a better job than the public schools. It will suffer because of the implicit foundation of the court's ruling: that somehow, going through the process of getting a teaching certificate makes a person a better teacher than they were before.

How long will it be before policy makers, educators, and judges recognize that a piece of paper, a "teaching certificate" earned through taking an arbitrary number of fluffy, un-rigorous, and un-proven education classes does not make someone a good teacher? There are many homeschooling parents who do a better job of educating their children than their public school counterparts today who are not credentialed, and plenty of credentialed teachers who are worse than teachers in the next room over who are teaching on emergency certificates. Until education starts hiring, retaining, and rewarding teachers based on the quality of their outputs--that is, student learning--and not on the quality of their inputs--a fancy piece of cardstock issued by state bureaucrats--precious little gains will be had for our students, in California classrooms, kitchens, and anywhere in between.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I find it fascinating every time I hear about the achievements, struggles, and general state of charter schools in cities across America. Amidst all of the mistakes, failures, and outright tragedies that have taken place at my first-year charter school in St. Louis, It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture with the charters movement. It is a truism nowadays to observe that charter schools, in the aggregate, are similar to traditional public schools insofar as there are some that are exceptional, some that are in need of shuttering, and a great many more whose quality is in between the two extremes. And while the charter school I work at is a definite example of a case where greater autonomy has not led to improved outcomes for our students, it is always refreshing to watch videos like the one below that show how charter schools can thrive on the other end of the achievement spectrum:

What is it that makes some charter schools first-rate, and others not? From my vantage point, it's all about the people. The obvious manifestation of this is how even the best of intentions in classrooms cannot succeed without high quality teachers to implement lessons, follow up with parents, manage classroom behavior, and contribute to a positive culture of high expectations. But human capital issues play out in many more ways in schools than just the one-on-one interaction with students.

The best example of this is with how decisions are made by school leaders in charter schools. Because charter schools are bound to a lesser degree to specific state and district processes on resource allocation with schools, principals and other decision makers have the ability to leverage their budgets and staff hours in much more fluid and effective directions. But a necessary quality for these decisions to take place is that the school leaders must be wise enough to make the right choices. In the absence of this wisdom and sound decision making, the absence of beauracratic red tape over school-level decisions can actually make charter schools comparably worse than traditional schools.

Think about it this way. It does no good for an NFL head coach to install a new offense where the quarterback has the freedom to call whatever plays he sees fit from the line of scrimmage, without knowing who his quarterback is! Of course if you have Peyton Manning or Tom Brady to make decisions you want to empower them to make calls on a case-by-case basis. The same is true in charter schools. Allowing dedicated, intelligent principals to make decisions instead of a far-removed assistant super-intendant over a curriculum decision, school day schedule, discipline process, or staff placement can have positive effects. But what if you have a rookie quarterback who has not shown the ability to make good decisions? In this case, increasing the amount of devolved autonomy can actually hurt the team--or the school in the case of a bad principal.

It seems to me that the Boston Charter Schools have some talented principals and strong teachers who are willing to work extra hours and have the right expectations for students. In St. Louis, sadly, we do not yet have these kinds of people in numbers sufficient enough to make charter schools any better than the traditional alternative.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A California teacher asks his students, "Why should I care?" as a group of boys walk out of his room to cut class.

A high school psychology teacher hands out textbooks... and then asks her students to color gingerbread men for a grade. When some of the students ask the teacher to teach them more information, the teacher responds by challenging her students to transfer out of her psychology class if they don't think they're learning anything.

These are just two of many tough, honest stories being shared by students across the state of California at a project called California Right to Learn, which is being run through the terrific youth website www.youthnoise.com. As a judge for a contest they recently held to pick the five best stories submitted by students so far, I was deeply impressed by the degree to which young people care about their schools... and the degree to which they realize that our nation's leaders are all-too-often cheating them out of the high quality education they deserve.

As the co-director of an organization that has engaged over 20,000 youth in an effort to call attention to the problems in our nation's schools, I of course believe in the power of young people to effect change on the problems facing our schools. It is a simple theory of change, really. Our schools suffer from a lack of quality educators, a culture of failure, insufficient resources in many cases, and a dearth of tough, common sense policies to bring about the change we need. And the only way to fix these problems is to call for a sea change of public pressure on politicians to do better.

Make no mistake: the victories that the American people have won to change the direction of our society in the past century have all benefitted from youth leadership. The Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War protests, women's movement and more have all had critical youth elements. Student sit-ins and protests have won victories from East Los Angeles to St. Louis to Boston, on a wide range of issues. I've embedded a video below of a student sit-in that took place in St. Louis just last year.

The challenge facing youth activists who aim to attract public and political will to improve our schools is that there has yet to be a smoking gun image that pushes the movement over the top. For instance, when video footage of Bull Connor sending attack dogs and fire hoses against peaceful protestors in Birmingham made it to TV sets across the country, the Civil Rights Movement took flight. But what is the parallel image in our schools? Crumbling buildings and inept teachers are the norm, but they do not appear to be enough to spark mass action. It may not be until such an image is created and disseminated when youth and other advocates experience the progress they seek.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, two Denver public schools took a bold step that may lead to significant change in the way schools are run throughout the country. The two schools, Bruce Randolph Middle School and Manual High School, received approval from the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (the local affiliate of the NEA, the nation's largest teachers union) to break from key parts of their union contract. The union's approval signified a major development in a long legacy of teacher union control over American schools, as both schools will now have newfound freedom in the teacher hiring process, teacher pay, and in altering the length of the school day and year.

Word of the schools' breaking away from key union contract provisions spread rapidly across the nation. Denver's school board, which also has to approve the modified contract, looks poised to approve Manual's changes--especially because they already approved changes in Bruce Randolph weeks ago. The upshot? As many as 18 more Denver schools are now considering similar proposals to break free of teacher union rules that some find restrictive and negative for student achievement.

Some have watched these developments with great excitement, as reducing teacher union control in schools has long been a change sought by elements in the school reform arena--particularly conservative ones. The theory adopted by these reformers is that teachers unions get in the way of what is best for students by protecting bad teachers, stifling creativity and innovation from potentially excellent teachers (since these teachers will not be paid more for their success under union contracts), and by generally being out principally for the best interests of teachers--which may sometimes run counter to what is best for kids. Union supporters, on the other hand, point to the great gains won by unions in workplace regulations and treatment of employees, especially in improving pay and conditions for female employees over time.

The key question to watch for in Denver, however, is not about politics. It's not about whether the two newly freed schools prove anti-union proponents wrong. It's about whether the schools are able to make any substantive changes for their students. In the end, the greatest way that they can do this is to dramatically alter the makeup of their teaching staffs to have as many dedicated, intelligent, and effective teachers as possible. If they can find these kinds of teachers, retain them, and reward them for their excellence, then the idea of increasing individual school autonomy will have gained staem. But if the schools face the same old problems, it will just prove that unions are not the be-all and end-all problem plaguing urban education.

As much as I respect the view points of both camps in this debate, my suspicion from my own experiences in a non-unionized charter school here in St. Louis is that the newly freed Denver schools will quickly realize that the increased autonomy is not a guarantee of any kind of success. Many charter schools already experience the same freedom from union and district bureaucracy as Manual and Randolph have fought for, and it hasn't always done these charter schools good. Better to think about individual school freedom as one of many fences that is needed to cage in the problem of under-performing schools. Reducing union power alone is not a sufficient means to educate every child, but in some cases it may help.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was very impressed to read this honest op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday, written by a veteran teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. T.C. Williams is an intriguing high school for many reasons, one of which is because of how it represents an unique cross-section of American diversity. For instance, 43% of the student body at the school is African-American, 25% is Hispanic, 24% is white, and 6% is Asian. 31% of the students at the school are qualified for free or reduced lunch, which means it has more low-income youth than the state average. And it is a fairly large school as well, with 2,100 students split among just three grade levels, 10-12.

But the most intriguing thing about T.C. Williams is that it is one of the highest spending schools in the country. In a state where the average per student expenditure is just under $9,000--close to the national average--T.C. Williams spends a staggering $15,000 per student per year. As the op-ed points out, all of this money has been spent on a luxurious set of facilities, including a new $98 million school building, a universal laptop initiative that began three years ago and that provides every student in the school with a free laptop computer, and countless other technologically advanced instructional devices. If you're looking for a state-of-the-art high school, 30-year English teacher Patrick Welsh suggests that you'll be hard pressed to find one more advanced than TC Williams.

But what has the return been on this incredible investment? If student test scores are one measure, not much. Out of the eleven subjects tested at the school as part of Virginia's Standards of Learning proficiency exams, Williams outscores the statewide average in just two subjects: chemistry and algebra II. In the other 9 subjects, the school's students perform below state averages.

Why hasn't the school been able to get more bang for its buck, so to speak? Mr. Welsh suggests that the school's administration has been overwhelmed by the "technology bug" - a tendency among school leaders to lose sight of the most important objective (student achievement) in lieu of headline grabbing technology purchases. Mr. Welsh gives the example of a $40,000 expense to buy 77 "school pads" for $500 a piece. The school pads are supposed to make teachers jobs easier, except many of the teachers in the building had expressed no interest in using them. One teacher even said that the $40,000 investment seemed to be little more than a refurbished version of this old toy that was popular twenty years ago.

From my vantage point in a school where education technology is a laughable luxury (one teacher who asked if we might be able to buy security cameras to watch over areas where students were vandalizing, bringing in weapons, or even engaging in inappropriate sexual activity with other students was literally sneered at for the idea), it's hard to imagine that Williams teachers are actually up in arms over administrative requirements to utilize technology in their classrooms. I would give anything for a computer system that could track attendance throughout the building, let alone a tv and dvd player in each room. But the TC Williams example makes this much perfectly clear: throwing money at the problems in our schools will not alone solve anything. Without clear direction as to what purchases will and will not have a significant impact on our schools, too many administrators are just making blind guesses as to what will work best.

If you ask me, Williams would go a lot farther towards helping students if it used a healthy chunk of its resources to identify, hire, and reward excellent teachers... and replace those who are not delivering results with the children. In the end, a good teacher with a chalkboard will do more for her children than a poor teacher with a $20,000 smart board and accompanying magna-doodle.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three separate events--one research paper, one op-ed in a prominent daily, and one clever pop culture reference--all discussed different sides of a compelling systemic school reform idea within the past week. The multi-faceted appearance of these three pieces seems to show a growing momentum behind the idea of paying important school stakeholders--students and teachers--for success.

The first item that was released this week was a research piece commissioned by the National Governors Association on the prominence of pay-for-performance system in virtually every other profession. The report finds from cross-sector analysis (i.e. looking at how people are paid in the business sector, other public sector fields, and so on) that there is hardly any evidence of a pay system failing to improve employee productivity when the pay system rewards those who are adding greater value to the company's end goal. In other words, when you reward the best people in your company, it brings the whole company up because: 1.) the people already within the company all strive to be the best, and 2.) people outside the company see the direct benefits of working hard at this company and want to work there too.

The researchers, Emily and Bryan Hassel, suggest that the conclusion policy makers should arrive upon is that there should no longer be debates over whether to pay teachers based on how much they are able to increase their students' learning. Instead, the debate should be over how to switch to this pay system. On this front, they suggest a couple lessons learned from other careers, namely that paying teachers with performance bonuses is more effective than bumping up their salaries and that pay bonuses must be significant enough to actually change employee incentives and behavior.

The second article is an op-ed from the Washington Post that talks about a Baltimore City Schools plan to spend over $1 million on paying students for performance. Although a much less refined idea than teacher performance pay in that few districts have implemented substantial pay plans for student success, this is an outside-the-box idea that has great potential for success, particularly in low-income rural and urban schools where junior and high school students face greater pressures to leave school. It will be fascinating to see how Baltimore's plan works in the coming years and whether the end result is higher graduation rates, college going rates, etc.

Lastly, a New York Daily News column from a respected education expert Kevin Carey draws a clever parallel between the current teacher pay debate and a debate that happened within professional baseball a decade ago. Fans of the book Moneyball will recall the book's protagonist, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, and his at-the-time heretical idea of eschewing scouting reports in favor of hard data on young prospects. Beane's premise is that subjective and qualitative evaluations of baseball players was only a very rough predictor of future performance and that statistical data was a much stronger indicator. This is the same idea that pay-for-performance fans are suggesting: let's stop basing teacher pay on superficial and input-oriented measures, and start paying those who are getting on base and show good plate discipline (i.e. increasing reading and math scores the most)!!

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

News out of Chicago yesterday that will provide a great deal of data on a much debated topic in urban school reform: how effective, if at all, are efforts to transform schools by completely starting over in a school building with new teachers and new leadership? Chicago school officials, including Chief of Schools Arne Duncan, are proposing to fire the staffs of eight low-achieving schools and replace them altogether with new educators.

There is little evidence thus far to indicate whether such drastic steps will work. Even though sweeping school-wide restructuring including staff reconstitution is one of the proscribed punishments in the federal No Child Left Behind Act, few schools have yet produced enough student learning data to show whether the turn-arounds actually work.

Some experts who support the plan argue that the only way to bring about wholesale change in chronically under-performing school is to scrap existing cultures of failure and to replace them with new leaders, new teams of teachers, and fresh outlooks. Opponents of the plan point out that identifying and building these kinds of high quality, highly-motivated teaching teams is itself unlikely due to a sub-par urban education job market. Students are likely to get more of the same, but at a steep price in restructuring costs under the turn-around plans according to these detractors.

From my vantage point, I believe that the turning around these schools in such dramatic fashion can be an opportunity for great progress, but nothing is guaranteed. On-lookers are right to note that teacher and principal quality is the most important variable, and that if the newly hired teachers are no better than the old ones, reconstituting the staff will have been all form and little substance. With this in mind, many parents are right to point out that any existing teachers who are on staff and who have proven to increase student achievement on a consistent basis should be retained--there's no reason to throw out the good with the bad.

Let the experiences in my first-year charter school, however, serve as a caution. There is actually much to be learned about traditional public school turnarounds from the experience of newly opened charter schools, since both enterprises have similar opportunities for student benefits: newly hired teaching staff, new curriculum goals, new leadership, new culture. But all too many first year charter schools struggle out of the gate, and a large part of the reason why is that schools are frequently rushed to get ready for the start of the school year. If these Chicago schools slated for turnarounds are not able to attract the best and most dedicated staff, and if they are hurried in the hiring, planning, and preparation processes, I'm afraid that all of the trouble will have been for very little value.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A small policy change adopted today in Florida has the potential to unleash significant changes in early elementary classrooms and school budgets all across the country. Florida's state legislature today decided to approve FreeReading.Net, the nation's first open-source, free, and on-line textbook materials provider. The website's resources will be approved for a limited number of Florida students next year, as a supplemental reading program for grades K-3.

While it is a comparatively small development from the perspective of the number of students affected, the willingness of the state legislature to break free of a textbook publisher dominated system of classroom materials production signals possibly profound changes in the years to come. Experts estimate that schools spend between $5 billion and $8 billion a year on textbooks and materials, money which could be well-used in other instructional capacities such as teacher quality enhancement.

The challenges faced particularly by low-income urban and rural school districts in purchasing enough up-to-date textbooks is well chronicled in America. One South Carolina school built in the 1890s that was featured in the powerful movie, the Corridor of Shame, had textbooks which boasted that man might, at some point, even be able to fly to the moon. To be able to free up much needed resources for these schools to spend on teachers and capital enhancements instead of on textbooks could be very helpful. Moreover, the benefit of open-source texts is that they are continually renewing and improving, eliminating the need of buying updated editions of books.

The schools that could, in the future, benefit most from a switch to online, open-source texts are the new schools that are just being built and opened. For these schools, the initial capital investment needed to purchase books for students can be overwhemling. My school in St. Louis, for instance, had to purchase reading, writing, science, math, and social studies books for 300 students. At a cost of $150 per book (plus supplemental resources), the total price tag would have exceeded $200,000 dollars out of an annual school budget of less than $2 million in state funding. The school decided instead to purchase just a class set of each book, which has caused parent and student critiques of its own.

What are the possible weaknesses of a move towards open-source and online texts? Probably the major one is that it might exacerbate the existing digital divide between students who have the internet at home and those who do not. Between one quarter and one half of my students do not have internet access at home, so to ask all students to access their textbooks online would cause them some problems. This isn't a deal-breaker for the open source text as a whole, though--since it's no different than having only a class set of textbooks as we do now anyway. Another drawback would be one of a political nature -- textbook publishers are not likely to approve of the change since they are the big losers in the end. But let me offer a "visionary" idea to any textbook publishing execs out there: instead of fighting something that seems to be good for kids, why not use your existing knowledge and resource competitive advantage to transition your current and future materials to the web, and change your profit engine to online advertising??

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By most accounts, there are seven major players left in this exciting presidential primary season who might conceivably win their party's nomination. Of the seven, not a single one has made a public statement in their campaign speeches, literature, or on their website in support of the No Child Left Behind Act, which provides federal funding to school districts in exchange for holding those schools accountable for student learning. While some have expressed cautious acknowledgement of certain elements of the law, the overarching theme from the candidates is that the law needs radical changes or even needs to be scrapped.

What makes all of this surprising is the fact that pro-NCLB statements and op-eds like this one, a joint piece from the National Urban League and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and this one, published by the US Chamber of Commerce are published all the time. If the candidates aren't trying to woo Latino voters, African-American voters, and the votes of big business, who exactly are they trying to persuade?

When Senator Obama chides that NCLB "left the money behind" and that "the law has failed"; when Senator Edwards promises to "radically overhaul" the law, and when Senator Clinton promises to "end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind," one must wonder what minority voters, businesses, and other pro-NCLB groups are thinking. Maybe voters just don't care about the education issue in this presidential election.

They're certainly not looking to the Republicans to defend the law that actually holds schools accountable when they fail to improve the achievement of low-income and minority students year-after-year, instead of just turning a blind eye as our nation did for the better part of two centuries. Governor Huckabee talks about the reclaiming power of states in education, undercutting the accountability measures of NCLB. Mayor Giuliani says he opposes NCLB because it doesn't give parents nearly enough choice (a convenient ideological position, but one which is entirely unsupportable when you talk to many of the parents at my school--one parent actually enrolled her child in the wrong grade level at the start of the school year). Only Governor Romney and Senator McCain have offered responses that seem closer to support for the law, though they both criticize it (Romney on the states rights front, McCain on a more general it-needs-tweaking front, which is probably most accurate).

It remains to be seen, of course, which two candidates will emerge out of the primary process and whether their positions on NCLB will be changed by the time the general election comes around. Several of the candidates such as Obama, for instance, have avoided putting up detailed plans on educations on their campaign websites so far, possibly to avoid the pitfalls of being on record too soon. But the politicking can only last so long before parents, educators, and other concerned citizens must demand honest answers about how to move forward with the law, and not just clever sound bites.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The federal government has failed to provide states with clear enough notice as to who must pay for the costs of complying with the No Child Left Behind Act, or so says the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled Monday against the Bush Administration and the law which has caused much debate since its inception in 2002.

At stake in the lawsuit, which was filed by a collection of local school districts and teachers unions and which is being paid for the by the nation's largest teachers union, is a serious issue: whether states must comply with a law that some have charged to be an underfunded mandate. To be sure, NCLB does require states to test their students annually in core subjects to determine whether they are making sufficient progress. These tests and the costs of design and administration have been a burden on states and districts, but it has been a burden towards an important goal according to one of the bipartisan law's co-authors, MA senator Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy wrote in a Washington Post editorial defense of NCLB that the law has certainly had weaknesses that need to be corrected. But it also has many important positive impacts as well:
"On the plus side, the law demands that all children must benefit -- black or white, immigrant or native-born, rich or poor, disabled or not. Before its enactment, only a handful of states monitored the achievement of every group of students in their schools. Today, all 50 states must do that... All schools now measure performance based not on the achievement of their average and above-average students but on their progress in helping below-average students reach high standards as well."

From my vantage point, the debate over NCLB is likely to see two stages over the next year and a half. The first stage will be set by the presidential election, which, unfortunately, will probably squander any real dialogue about needed improvements and changes. Democrats and Republicans alike have been guilty of using NCLB as a political football on the campaign trail, making sweeping statements against the law in its entirety rather than getting specific as to what has been effective and what needs changing. Until the election is over, real discourse over the big questions on the use of value added measurements of student progress, teacher quality improvement, and the possibility of national standards will not take place. But they will almost assuredly be a very early conversation in the new president's administration, which will be stage two of the debate.

It is a debate that could not be more important, or urgent. A report released a couple years ago but that I just came across underscores the urgency: the expulsion rate of preschoolers across America is so high that it is actually three times higher expulsion rates for K-12 students!

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the biggest challenges I face in the classroom every day is the challenge of conflict resolution. At least ten times each day, one of my students will invariably do something to another student that the second student does not approve. Sometimes it's an inappropriate comment or a cruel insult, other times it's the stealing of a pencil or maybe some other practical joke that is not appreciated. Occasionally it's physical violence like a slap, a push, or the throwing of an object at someone.

If I wrote up every kid who did this and sent them down to the office, there would be no kids left in class -- and the office would be flooded and incapable of doing anything about it. So my job as a teacher is to stop any of these minor incidents from turning into a major argument or fight. Usually I'm able to do so (after much practice), but sometimes things escalate out of control. But through it all, I have one common question that I ask to my students who have had something bad done to them by another: do you want to do the right thing, or the easy thing?

The implication, of course, is that the easy thing for them to do would be to hit the person who hit them in return, throw something back at them, or get in a shouting match by insulting the other person's hairstyle or family background. On the other hand, the right thing would be to ignore the other person, concentrate on your work, and be the better person for it. It's character education, and it's extremely difficult to teach to an 8th grader unless you're teaching by example (which means I've taken on more than my fair share of insults without responding in kind). But it is one of the most important lessons I can try to teach the students, so I reinforce it every day with different allusions to historical events.

The problem is, it's awfully difficult to teach the students about doing the right thing over the easy thing when there are so many instances of adults doing the opposite themselves. Notwithstanding all of the things that go on in my school, take this story out of Oregon as an example. 25 schools in Oregon have taken the easy road over the right road, to the decided detriment of their students--more than 20,000 in total. These 25 schools have been identified by state tests as being in need of improvement since their students have not made adequate progress towards state proficiency goals. To help them reach those goals, the federal government--as part of the dollars-for-accountability bargain made by the No Child Left Behind Act--provides each school with additional Title I funding, approximately $200,000 per year in each school. This additional funding is supposed to be used on tutoring services for the students, teacher training, additional staffing, and other programs. All that the federal government asks in exchange is that the schools improve student achievement each year and notify parents how well they are doing towards those goals. If they fail to meet these goals for five years, the federal government does reserve the right to demand that the school be reconstructed with new staff to try and provide the kids with better opportunities.

But these 25 schools in Oregon (along with other schools across the country) have made the easy decision, not the right