The Education Gadfly Weekly

Christopher T. Cross, Taniesha A. Woods, and Heidi Schweingruber, eds.
Center for Education, National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences
2009

Even as too little attention is paid to preparing pre-schoolers for the reading/literacy demands of the primary grades, the math side of school readiness has been even more shamefully neglected. Riding to the rescue is a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, chaired by Christopher Cross. It has produced a long (what do you expect from the N.A.S.?), deadly earnest (ditto) and very researchy (likewise) but ultimately valuable report. Turns out that little kids are far more capable of math learning than is commonly recognized (and they readily engage in it when given the opportunity). Unsurprisingly, it also turns out that competent adult help does them a world of good in this area--and that disadvantaged youngsters need more such assistance. Turns out, further, that today's early-childhood arrangements generally slight this part of learning--from state standards right down to classroom (and day-care-center) practice. And, of course, we learn that much can and should be done to rectify the situation. You may weary of the panel's 21 conclusions and 9 recommendations--the latter, of course, follow straightforwardly from the former and mostly end up looking obvious--but the Academy has well served the cause of school readiness in America by giving this topic the attention that it warrants. You can find it (for a price) here.

Marguerite Roza and Raegen Miller
Center for American Progress
July 2009

For teachers in many states, obtaining a Master's degree in education is just about the best investment they could make. In New York, for example, a teacher who puts down some $7,000 for a one-year Master's program is contractually guaranteed to earn a permanent salary bonus of $7,109 (on average) every year following completion of the program. It should be no surprise that, in that state, a full 78 percent of teachers hold Master's degrees. (It's worthy to note that a MA is required in four of the five pathways to obtaining a Professional Certificate in the Empire State.) But like Bernie's guaranteed returns, this safe and lucrative investment masks a frightening reality: Master's programs in education are pretty much useless when it comes to improving teacher effectiveness. Which means, according to Roza's and Miller's analysis, that New York spends $1.1 billion--and the country as a whole, $8.6 billion--every year to reward essentially-frivolous degree-grubbing. (And that tally excludes the vast sums, often public dollars, spent on Master's of Education tuition every year.) The authors don't oppose rewarding graduate degrees, but say the education system should reward those that make a palpable difference, like advanced study of science and math. If bonuses and raises were tied to attainments that matter, like Master's degrees that improve teaching effectiveness, teachers would be more likely to invest in them. And their students might actually benefit from the investment. Read it here.

Two editorials in the past week point to a widening realization across the political spectrum that U.S. teacher unions serve their members, not students. The Wall Street Journal illustrates this point with a piece about two episodes that clearly place union demands at odds with school quality. The New York City case, which we discussed last week, was finally resolved when Joel Klein exploited a contract loophole to keep parent-financed teachers aides in schools. But in Baltimore, the union has gone after the highest-performing school in the city, and in some subjects and grades, the state, demanding that its teachers be paid more. The school can't afford the pay raises and is being forced to cut staff and hours, two of the very things that make it so successful. The LA Times, a less likely union-basher, also makes an earnest appeal for the United Teachers Los Angeles to reprioritize. Its editorial chastises UTLA's efforts to undermine a new LA Unified School Board resolution that would allow charter operators, community organizations, and the union itself to open 50 new schools; after years of softball reforms that have yielded soft results, invigorating "the district with new models...has to trump union concerns," the paper writes. The clearest example of the shifting landscape in LA-LA land is Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former UTLA organizer himself, who is now pleading with his former union colleagues for cooperation. Maybe this media attention from both sides of the country, and the political aisle, will encourage unions to put the kibosh on its bold and brassy push for adult-centric priorities. Or maybe not.

"Teachers unions, listen up," editorial, Los Angeles Times, July 31, 2009

"Pay your teachers well," editorial, Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2009

A previous version of this piece misspelled the last name of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Villagairosa. It has since been corrected.

Vacation gave me the opportunity to catch up with a bit of early American history, particularly the eventful last two decades of the 18th Century. During that extraordinary time, the thirteen colonies concluded their war of independence; forged the Articles of Confederation as a sort of first-draft constitutional framework for the new nation; found that arrangement unworkable in tackling domestic needs and international challenges; secretly drafted, during the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787, a new Constitution that embodied a half-dozen key compromises and largely avoided the intractable issue of slavery; improved the document (and its political prospects) with the Bill of Rights; got it ratified; launched the new government with George Washington at its helm; worked through a series of tough issues and additional compromises during which the new governing arrangement both proved its viability and was shielded from forces of disunion; began to construct a new capital city; gave rise to two distinct political parties; and (in the 1796 and 1800 elections) demonstrated that the presidency was a temporary office, not a quasi-monarchy, and that power could transfer peaceably from one party to the other.

Wow. The world, I think, has never seen a more fecund or consequential period of governmental and political invention, combined with fine-tuning, test-driving, and careful nurturing.

American education today finds itself in a similar period of challenge. But can we muster the imagination, leadership, and persistence to devise a different and better arrangement?

Much as the Articles of Confederation proved no match for the problems and opportunities facing the new nation, so our traditional K-12 structures and governance arrangements are showing their obsolescence and frailty. "Local control" via elected municipal school boards cannot cope with today's realities of metropolitanization, mobility, and interest-group politics. The "one best system" of public education fails to provide enough choices or to accommodate diverse cultural, economic, and familial demands. State-level standards, assessments, and accountability schemes cannot handle the imperatives of a modern post-industrial nation on a shrinking and more competitive planet. Traditional approaches to preparing, licensing, deploying, and compensating educators are ill-suited to contemporary career paths and management practices. Separating education from other human services is costly, redundant, and irrational. Time-worn means of delivering instruction are archaic alongside today's technologies. Familiar modes of financing schools, based on dramatically varying property values and income levels, yield results that are neither equitable nor efficient. And our "marble-cake" policy structure of local, state, and national officials has proven better at blocking needed change than at effecting it.

One might plausibly describe 2002's enactment of No Child Left Behind and today's "Race to the Top" federal-funding carnival as the latest and most forceful efforts to make the old system work better--by creating, in Washington, incentives and sanctions intended to tug and prod state and local education systems to deliver better and more uniform results and to change their practices in specific ways.

And one might fairly describe the backlash to NCLB, and the conniving, finagling, competing, and obsessing over "Race to the Top" dollars, as the old system's desperate struggle to retain its prerogatives while changing just enough to avoid forfeiting the additional federal money. Indeed, there are many echoes from the 1780s.

Now as then, however, the truth is that the old system is itself obsolete. Further tugging and kicking at it from the banks of the Potomac is not going to modernize it.

Something akin to a "Miracle at Philadelphia" is needed, some coming together of forward-looking leaders able to conceptualize and construct a new set of arrangements.

A tentative and limited version of that is happening now in the sealed room occupied by drafters of "common" academic standards for reading and math, summoned together this hot Washington summer by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to devise a modern version of world-class K-12 standards for the United States.

If they do a good job, they may point the way toward further "constitutional" changes in our education arrangements. But standards comprise just a small fraction of what needs to change in American education and I have not spotted any plausible efforts to tackle the rest.

I'm not certain what form such an effort might take. We might, though, recall four key elements of America's passage from "Confederation" to "Constitution" that will need to be echoed in any successful reinvention of our education system:

--Imagination. The founders could not only visualize what wasn't working--British rule, then the flimsy system embodied in the Articles--but also what was needed instead, and they had the creativity to design it, even though nobody had ever seen anything like it. They weren't just patching an old arrangement; they were inventing a new one that would endure.

--Statesmanship. Though the men in that steamy Pennsylvania hall shared important concerns and dreams, they also brought divergent priorities with them. To reach a semblance of consensus, these had to be worked through in artful compromises, trade-offs, and "package deals." People took the common weal--and the importance of their mission--seriously and were able to rise above selfish interests. (Having Madison in the room didn't hurt.)

--Courage. Washington was there, too. He and his colleagues had just licked the world's strongest army and navy. He was accustomed to being shot at--and triumphing over deep adversity. (Winter at Valley Forge?) They well understood that, in Franklin's memorable phrasing, hanging together was preferable to hanging separately. Nothing about them was timid, easily coerced, or readily cowed.

--Adaptation. What they produced wasn't perfect, not even fully formed. It needed immediate repairs, then further modifications (both formal amendments and such unwritten evolutions as the judiciary's emergence as a full-fledged third branch). It called for additional fine-tuning as time passed and values changed.

American education today resembles America itself in 1785. The old arrangement isn't working well enough and cannot be made to. A new constitution is needed. 

In my own mind, vital elements will include national standards and measures; statewide "weighted-student" financing; amalgamation of education governance into general government; school-level control of curriculum, operations, budgets, and staffing; wide-open choices among schools; a far more flexible approach to personnel; and the replacement of traditional "districts" with an array of virtual systems and regional or national operators (some of them technology-based). But that's just the beginning.

Are we up to anything of the sort? Can we afford not to try?

A different version of this piece appeared this morning on National Review Online.

The New York State Regents shenanigans will be just one of the big issues with which newly minted State Chancellor of Education David Steiner needs to contend. We noted his appointment last week, but his chock-a-block to-do list is worth a second inspection. Where should he start? Tom Carroll, President of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, offers a helpful list of priorities. In addition to tackling the testing problem, Carroll argues, Steiner should: increase the transparency of state report cards for parents; tie dollars to school performance ("If you simply reward corralling students, and not actually educating them, then you will have a lot of schools that corral students but don't actually educate them."); reform the state's bureaucratic charter rules, perhaps building off of his (Steiner's) own background working with top charter leaders on Teacher U; abolish "Carnegie units," an anachronistic way of measuring required seat time in lieu of actual learning, in high schools; and encourage his new agency (the state department of education) and bosses (the Regents themselves) to count more on research instead of responding to political pressures. Others (see here and here, too) are also ready to advise. Gadfly is glad he doesn't have Steiner's job but wishes him well.

"A primer for success," by Thomas W. Carroll, Albany Times Union, August 2, 2009

When recently released graduation rate statistics were greeted by the business community with a hefty dose of skepticism, Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott decided to call on employers, and the Texas Association of Business in particular, to voluntarily stop hiring folks who haven't made it through that teenage rodeo--high school. "It would send a powerful message to these kids to stay in school," Scott said, adding that the diploma-less hiring freeze would also be "better for businesses and better for the state in the long run." Though it's not clear how Scott's idea would turn into viable policy, creating real-world stakes for kids to weigh before dropping out or failing to complete their graduation requirements is certainly innovative. Graduation rate numbers are likely to go down once the Lone Star State fully implements last fall's stricter federal reporting regulations and schools will start feeling the pressure to push more students across the finish line. (Our recent graduation rate primer explains more.) Unlike those changes, which are likely to fall victim to system gaming, changing the rules of employment seem most likely to encourage students to keep playing.

"Texas education chief suggests voluntary ban on hiring dropouts," by Terrence Stutz, The Dallas Morning News, July 31, 2009

Christopher T. Cross, Taniesha A. Woods, and Heidi Schweingruber, eds.
Center for Education, National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences
2009

Even as too little attention is paid to preparing pre-schoolers for the reading/literacy demands of the primary grades, the math side of school readiness has been even more shamefully neglected. Riding to the rescue is a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, chaired by Christopher Cross. It has produced a long (what do you expect from the N.A.S.?), deadly earnest (ditto) and very researchy (likewise) but ultimately valuable report. Turns out that little kids are far more capable of math learning than is commonly recognized (and they readily engage in it when given the opportunity). Unsurprisingly, it also turns out that competent adult help does them a world of good in this area--and that disadvantaged youngsters need more such assistance. Turns out, further, that today's early-childhood arrangements generally slight this part of learning--from state standards right down to classroom (and day-care-center) practice. And, of course, we learn that much can and should be done to rectify the situation. You may weary of the panel's 21 conclusions and 9 recommendations--the latter, of course, follow straightforwardly from the former and mostly end up looking obvious--but the Academy has well served the cause of school readiness in America by giving this topic the attention that it warrants. You can find it (for a price) here.

Marguerite Roza and Raegen Miller
Center for American Progress
July 2009

For teachers in many states, obtaining a Master's degree in education is just about the best investment they could make. In New York, for example, a teacher who puts down some $7,000 for a one-year Master's program is contractually guaranteed to earn a permanent salary bonus of $7,109 (on average) every year following completion of the program. It should be no surprise that, in that state, a full 78 percent of teachers hold Master's degrees. (It's worthy to note that a MA is required in four of the five pathways to obtaining a Professional Certificate in the Empire State.) But like Bernie's guaranteed returns, this safe and lucrative investment masks a frightening reality: Master's programs in education are pretty much useless when it comes to improving teacher effectiveness. Which means, according to Roza's and Miller's analysis, that New York spends $1.1 billion--and the country as a whole, $8.6 billion--every year to reward essentially-frivolous degree-grubbing. (And that tally excludes the vast sums, often public dollars, spent on Master's of Education tuition every year.) The authors don't oppose rewarding graduate degrees, but say the education system should reward those that make a palpable difference, like advanced study of science and math. If bonuses and raises were tied to attainments that matter, like Master's degrees that improve teaching effectiveness, teachers would be more likely to invest in them. And their students might actually benefit from the investment. Read it here.