The Education Gadfly Weekly

NewSchools Venture Fund & FSG Social Impact Advisors
March 2008

This is the first in what we're told will be a series that highlights the best practices of the promising educational organizations that the NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF) supports. The inaugural volume is organized around three topics: human capital, organizational growth, and curriculum and quality. The first of those sections, focusing primarily on how NSVF's partners recruit teachers and principals, is the most interesting, especially considering today's emphasis on teacher quality. One chapter, for instance, highlights High Tech High's self-designed and state-approved teacher credentialing program, which made it the first charter school network (or EMO) allowed to certify its own teachers. Although High Tech High's model draws on some typical ed-school practices (through its partnership with the University of San Diego), it benefits greatly from the flexibility to give candidates training in, and exposure to, the classrooms where they'll actually be teaching. There's plenty of other good stuff packed into the 250-plus pages of this report. Download it here.

Seems Australia's new government has pulled a bait and switch, promising citizens Down Under significant education reform and then forgetting about most of it. So says Kevin Donnelly, esteemed commenter on all things edustralian, in a recent article wherein he notes that new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has not acted upon campaign commitments to establish a national curriculum, nor is he headed toward the creation of effective standards for measuring student progress and holding schools accountable. "No wonder," Donnelly writes, "more than 30 percent of students go to non-government schools." He recommends freeing state schools from bureaucratic messes, implementing a system of vouchers, and refashioning the nation's teacher-training programs. Good suggestions, all.

"Rudd's cycle of promises is more spin than revolution," by Kevin Donnelly, The Australian, April 19, 2008

You have to hand it to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and her team: they are hardly dawdling during their Administration's closing months. On Tuesday, they announced a massive set of regulatory changes to No Child Left Behind that incorporates many of the "pilot programs" and reauthorization proposals that Team Bush and others have floated over the past year. Mirabile dictu, maybe they don't really need new legislation after all.

While Spellings put forth much that's laudable and sensible, upon close inspection there's a bit less there than meets the eye, particularly when it comes to the law's interventions for schools deemed "in need of improvement." The problems with the law's current "cascade of sanctions" are multiple and legendary, but Spellings's new regulations don't provide the overhauls necessary to right that ship.

Take the lethargic efforts of many school districts to advertise the law's "free tutoring" (also called SES) opportunities. The proposed regulations would make a number of small and useful changes. For example, districts could spend federal money on marketing and outreach activities and charge that spending to the 20 percent of their Title I funds that they are supposed to allocate toward tutoring and school choice. Districts would also have to notify parents of their choice options at least 14 days before the start of the school year, and publish a description of their efforts to inform parents of these opportunities. Plus, before moving the tutoring dollars to something else (permitted today when not enough parents show interest), they would have to submit details to the state showing that they made an aggressive effort to sign up parents and failed. This sort of sunshine can't but help.

Still, what the new regulations don't do is implement a "use it or lose it" policy--requiring districts to either spend their tutoring dollars on tutoring or watch them disappear. That's probably the sole approach that could create strong enough incentives for many districts to begin running effective tutoring programs. Like Missouri mules, sometimes they need a 2x4 across the withers.

Spellings's proposals would also tighten the requirements for the fifth year of school improvement, when districts must "restructure" persistently failing schools. Basically, districts would have to show that this phase of reform is actually more significant than previous interventions. They can't just replace the curriculum or remove the principal and declare the school "restructured." Well and good. But it would be so much better if the notorious fifth option for restructuring, basically any other approach that the district fancies, were eliminated outright.

It's not entirely the Administration's fault that its regulations didn't go further. No doubt the Department of Education's lawyers wouldn't let them issue proclamations that flat-out contradict the clear language of the law. In the end, the statute has a number of flaws that only Congress can correct. Yet, with the Democratic primary race stretching far into the horizon, a shaky economy, and a war in Iraq, a slightly tweaked NCLB is probably the best we can achieve for the next year or two.

Finally, we know what separates great teachers from their more-middling peers: "unconditional love." So writes educator Mark Ryan in an op-ed for The Arizona Republic, a respected newspaper that doesn't usually print pieces about love, joy, sunshine, and kittens. But this is a time of hope, we're told, and Ryan's article fits the bill. Unconditional love, he notes, means that a teacher "never gives up and gives in, even to students whose academic development is slow and social growth stunted." Such educators are "as demanding of a student's persistence in meeting high standards as the teacher is of himself or herself." These are all certainly good qualities, but indications of "unconditional love" they are not. Holding all students to high standards and never giving up on classroom stragglers are, in fact, part of a teacher's core job description and shouldn't be portrayed as rare actions based on individual, wispy feelings. Ryan is right to believe that an educator's persistence in the classroom leads to student success, but he is wrong to couch such determination in the language of love. Talking about high expectations, standards, and accountability may not be romantic, but it has the virtue of being accessible, precise, true, and replicable.

"Great educators have attitude of unconditional love," by Mark Ryan, The Arizona Republic, April 24, 2008

Denial of hard facts and unwelcome implications runs the gamut. At its outer edge, we find a few sorely misguided folks denying that the Holocaust occurred, doubting the wickedness of Stalin, contending the greatness of Lincoln. Once upon a time, the Catholic Church denied Galileo's discovery that the planets revolve around the sun. On a modern denial cloud of their own are those who dispute evolution or the transmission of AIDS. In the privacy of our homes, we may deny increasing avoirdupois, receding hairlines, the tattered state of a favorite garment, the whiff of cigarette (or cannabis) smoke around a protesting teenager.

Denial has many origins and explanations, but its primary source is obvious: facing reality would be inconvenient, embarrassing, unpleasant, or costly (whether in money, votes, reputation, book sales, family relationships, or other metrics). So the denier insists that it isn't true or didn't happen. Sometimes that insistence is just for public consumption and personal aggrandizement--there is attention to be had and money to be made from certain kinds of denial. Often, though, the denier really believes it or manages to convince himself, too.

As we mark the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk on Saturday, most people gratefully acknowledge that epochal commission report's sounding of an overdue and much-needed alarum, pointing out to Americans a generation back that the country faced a quality crisis in its schools that would imperil our very future if we failed to take urgent steps to boost their performance and escalate the academic achievement of our young people. Other influential commentators, analysts, and panels pounded similar drums and helped to usher in an unparalleled era of education reforming--Tom Toch dubbed it "the excellence movement"--in which we still find ourselves.

But then there were--and, amazingly, still are--the deniers, those who declared that ANAR was overwrought, ill-informed, or just plain wrong. Some were social scientists asserting that the data didn't bear out the conclusions. Others were interest groups insisting that the schools had never been better and anything more that was needed to perfect them could easily be handled if we trusted the experts and dug deeper into our pocketbooks. Some were writers and speakers who swiftly saw that they could command an infinity of handsome book sales and lecture fees by reassuring educators that all was well and that dastardly critics were conspiring to weaken public education and replace it with vouchers. Several of the best known deniers were dubbed the "three B's" because their names were Berliner, Biddle, and Bracey. But they weren't alone. Their companions included, to name just two more examples, the so-called Sandia Report and any number of big-selling books by Jonathan Kozol.

Does that sound like ancient history that I need not bother to exhume? Would that it were so. But this very month, writing in the online journal Cato Unbound, none other than Richard Rothstein opted to observe ANAR's silver anniversary by declaring yet again that the Excellence Commission's 1983 diagnosis was gravely flawed and that the reformist course on which it set America "has done more harm than good." Echoing him this week was his Economic Policy Institute colleague Lawrence Mishel, who declared that ANAR's analysis was "simple, seductive--and wrong." (Sol Stern and Rick Hess also responded to Rothstein's piece.)

Observe, first, that Rothstein, a deep-dyed liberal if ever I have met one, a man who expends much time asserting that fundamental social change (e.g., income redistribution, universal health care, etc.) must precede any serious education gains, was airing his latest denials via the ultra-libertarian Cato Institute. Strange company, perhaps. Yet it echoes the odd left-right alliances that have emerged to clobber some of the more obvious reforms (e.g., national tests) that flow logically from ANAR. Overstated, the right so mistrusts government that it would rather retain weak schools than risk new interventions, especially from Washington, whilst the left is protective of interests (minority kids, teacher unions, etc.) that it judges would be harmed by higher standards, greater accountability, and such. This teaming up occasionally besets even choice-style reforms where the left is loath to disturb the public-sector monopoly while the right scorns what it views as tepid half-measures such as charter schools.

Most remarkable to me, though, isn't opposition to specific solutions but denial of the problem itself. It's not as if ANAR were alone in telling America that its education socks need to be pulled up. There's the testimony of employers, the remediation rates in colleges, TIMSS data and PISA data, NAEP data, and much more. (Even SAT scores before they got "recentered"--another instance of denial.)

Rothstein specializes in saying that achievement wasn't really declining at the time of ANAR, indeed was by some measures improving--and that even if it were flagging, fixing it wouldn't do much to strengthen the economy. Then he usually goes on to say--joined, again, from the right, this time most prominently by Charles Murray--that so much of the variation in education achievement is caused by forces beyond the reach of schools that reforming them is pretty nearly futile. In the end, as Sol Stern shrewdly points out, Rothstein contradicts himself regarding the state of education play in 1983 and the Excellence Commission's analysis.

But Rothstein's follies aren't the key issue on this anniversary. He is merely the latest (and perhaps most erudite) of ANAR's deniers. The larger point is that problems only get solved after their existence and gravity are recognized. (Ask any shrink or former alcoholic.) The biggest single reason, I believe, that America's education reform efforts of the past quarter century have yielded such meager returns is that we haven't given them our all. The biggest single reason for that is that the system itself hasn't acknowledged that a full-scale makeover is needed because it doesn't accept the fact that its shortcomings are grave. And the biggest single reason for that refusal is the continued existence of a denial industry that may be more robust and effective than the K-12 enterprise itself.

Happy anniversary indeed.

Additional perspectives on the anniversary of A Nation at Risk can be found at "‘Nation at Risk': The best thing or worst thing for education," by Greg Toppo, USA Today, April 23, 2008 and "Education Lessons We Left Behind," by George Will, Washington Post, April 24, 2008

In the United Kingdom today, over 8,000 schools were shut down by a strike of the National Union of Teachers, angry because its members' pay, which has risen 19 percent in real terms since 1997, is scheduled for only a 2.45 percent bump next year. Thus, no school for little Nigel. Just about everyone, even those in Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labor government, has come out against the union. And George Bridges, former campaign director for Conservative Party leader David Cameron, has had enough of this sort of thing. In a piece titled "Time to crush the National Union of Teachers," he writes, "If we are to raise standards in education, we have to break the NUT's grip on schools." The strike isn't truly about money, Bridges notes, but about scrapping standardized tests and pushing a leftist agenda. To combat it, he recommends that the Tories make the "argument about standards, not structures" (i.e., focus less on the process of forming good schools than on emphasizing its results; tell parents about the fine schools that choice will produce, not the process of school-choice itself), and he pushes a "Big Bang" theory of reform through which many things are done at once (rather than the incremental changes that often occur). His plan is ambitious. To which Bridges would surely respond, "So are our enemies."

"8,000 schools could close in tomorrow's national teachers' strike," by Alexandra Frean, The Times of London, April 23, 2008

"Time to crush the National Union of Teachers," by George Bridges, The Daily Telegraph, April 22, 2008

NewSchools Venture Fund & FSG Social Impact Advisors
March 2008

This is the first in what we're told will be a series that highlights the best practices of the promising educational organizations that the NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF) supports. The inaugural volume is organized around three topics: human capital, organizational growth, and curriculum and quality. The first of those sections, focusing primarily on how NSVF's partners recruit teachers and principals, is the most interesting, especially considering today's emphasis on teacher quality. One chapter, for instance, highlights High Tech High's self-designed and state-approved teacher credentialing program, which made it the first charter school network (or EMO) allowed to certify its own teachers. Although High Tech High's model draws on some typical ed-school practices (through its partnership with the University of San Diego), it benefits greatly from the flexibility to give candidates training in, and exposure to, the classrooms where they'll actually be teaching. There's plenty of other good stuff packed into the 250-plus pages of this report. Download it here.