The Education Gadfly Weekly

Christopher A. Lubienski and Peter C. Weitzel, eds., The Charter School Experiment: Expectations, Evidence, and Implications (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2010).

This edited volume seeks to summarize the performance of the charter school movement thus far. You won't be surprised to learn that the results are mixed. Charters have given families more choices, but parents don't always make wise ones. Charters, overall, deliver academic results similar to their district counterparts, but outcomes depend greatly on location and student demographic. And competition from charters has brought improved performance in some local district schools, but not very many. The volume, which begins with a history of the charter school movement, dissects the implications of these realities for the movement's future. Since its creation, public policy around charter schools has mutated and matured. The three original goals of the charter movement - access, innovation, and competition - may not be as relevant today as they once were. Stepping back and assessing charter policy, charter schools, and intra-school practices, the editors conclude with a few worthwhile considerations as the charter school experiment enters its third decade. They ask whether these schools have moved away from one monolithic model to incorporate many school types, and they push for a re-examination of the role of charters: Should they be creating a better school system, or simply better students? There's still work to be done on the charter front. But, from this mixed review, we choose to see the glass half full.

Citizenship, patriotism and political engagement are cornerstones of our republic. Yet not much has been known about the proclivities and practices of those with substantial responsibility for cultivating these values and habits—namely, the nation’s social studies teachers. This new AEI study sought to correct that by asking over 1,000 high school social studies teachers (from public, private and Catholic schools) what they are trying to teach their students. Some findings are reassuring. For example, over 80 percent of high school social studies teachers think their students should “respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings.” (That’s basically what the general public wants schools to teach.) But other findings raise red flags. Only 36 percent of teachers say it is “absolutely essential” to teach students key facts (like state capitals) and dates (like December 7, 1941). More alarming: only 24 percent reported being “very confident” that their students emerged knowing the protections provided by the Bill of Rights.

Gary J. Schmitt, Frederick M. Hess, Steve Farkas, Ann M. Duffett, Cheryl Miller, and Jenna Schuette, “High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do,” (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, September 2010).

David F. Labaree, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2010).

In this new book, Stanford Professor David Labaree offers a bleak reality-check on American public education, explaining that the system itself—in its structure and contradictory ideals—is to blame for the failure of education reform. In our competition between societal and personal aims for education—creating good citizens and curing social ills versus assisting individuals to prosper in a market economy—personal aims have won the day. It is the consumers of education, rather than its reformers, who shape its direction. Labaree offers an historical account of reform movements in American public schooling, explaining their inherent failure at each juncture. Though he remains at the 30,000 foot level, addressing such massive reforms as desegregation, academic standards and school choice in just a few pages each, Labaree does show how the complex organization of a four-level education structure and the loose couplings among those levels create insurmountable barriers for reformers. More fundamentally, he questions America’s education goals. In his final pages, Labaree offers defeatist recommendations to reformers: scale down your ambitions, be pessimistic, and remember that consumers—not you and your fellow reformers—are driving the system.

Pension reform—not typically a hot political issue, nor one full of intrigue—has emerged as a major platform element for candidates running for governor, legislator, and state treasurer in many locales. As almost everyone is beginning to understand, the standard public-sector practice of paying out a guaranteed monthly stipend (called “defined benefit”) is proving fiscally unsustainable, the more so when joined to generous health-care benefits. The private sector has been shifting to defined contribution plans (think 401(k)). So how does America, in the face of entrenched public-sector practice and intense union lobbying, make a similar shift for its state and local employees—teachers included? We take the matter to the voting booths. On November 2, California voters in ten cities (including San Francisco and San Diego) will see ballot initiatives aimed at reining in public employee pension costs. Polls suggest that most of these Golden State voters favor some reform. Over on the East Coast, pension reform is receiving top-billing on gubernatorial candidates’ platforms. The Republican candidate for governor in Florida has already dropped $1 million on television ads slamming Democratic nominee Alex Sink, the state’s CFO, for losing billions of dollars by poorly investing the state’s pension funds. Equally big stories around pension reform are popping up in New York, Minnesota, Nevada and Oregon—to name a few states. This “things need to change” public sentiment has GOP candidates riding high, and those on Democratic tickets scrambling to find a voice that people want to hear. It’s doubtful that November 2010 will be marked on the tombstone of defined benefits, but the upsurge of interest around this seemingly mundane topic has us hopeful.

“Pensions Become a Heated Issue in 2010 Politics,” by Stephen C. Fehr, Stateline, October 1, 2010.

This article first appeared (in slightly different form) on National Review Online.

We’ve previously recorded our doubts about congressional Republicans when it comes to education reform. They don’t have much of an agenda, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan co-opted much of what they had. They’re mostly MIA on the whole issue. To the extent that they’re focusing at all, they hint at atavistic yearnings for states’ rights and local control, despite ample evidence that those don’t often yield good results for kids.

The problem is that the prospect of the Democrats retaining control of Congress is at least as unpromising and arguably worse.

In the great education-policy schism of the Democratic Party, while President Obama and Secretary Duncan generally come down on the reform side, their fellow Democrats in Congress generally land on the establishment side. The administration wants resources and reform; the Hill wants to take the money and run.

Sure, the 111th Congress gave us Race to the Top, but that was a drop in the bucket compared to the $100 billion “stimulus” fund of which it was part. And just a few months ago, Democratic lawmakers put federal taxpayers on the hook for another $23 billion in “edujobs”—without demanding a scintilla of positive change from American schools in return. The motto of leaders like Tom Harkin (D, Iowa), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, could be “Spend more, reform less”—hardly a winning formula for our beleaguered education system and the kids stuck in it.

The problem runs deeper than the sheer fiscal irresponsibility of raiding the Treasury. This sort of federal spending actually harms our education system by encouraging state and local officials to avoid the difficult decisions needed to put their schools back on a sustainable path. We’ve witnessed an education spending bubble over the past two decades, as first a booming economy and then soaring housing values poured tons of dollars into public-school budgets. That money got spent (and then some) by shrinking classes, adding specialists, beefing up salaries, and promising lavish health-care and pension benefits. But now that bubble has burst. Federal support can keep the consequences at bay for a while, but not forever.

Worse, as we learned this week from the indispensable Mike Antonucci, the education workforce actually grew 2.3 percent during the Great Recession. That’s right: While the private sector slashed jobs, trimmed benefits, renegotiated contracts, cut pay, and sometimes declared bankruptcy, the education part of the public sector actually fattened. It’s as if the Democrats have created a privileged class of Americans—remember the Soviet nomenklatura?—consisting of public employees who are insulated from the perils and pains to which ordinary citizens are exposed.

And while spending John Q. Taxpayer’s hard-earned dollars to hire more educators and grow the public sector, reform-averse Democrats on Capitol Hill have also been quashing needed changes in our schools. They’re chronically hostile to the Teacher Incentive Fund, willing to dump charter-school dollars in favor of jobs bills, death on D.C. vouchers and Reading First, allergic to another round of Race to the Top, and broadly opposed to competitive grants while favoring the formula-driven distribution of ever more money.

The few congressional Democrats with reform proclivities—one must at least acknowledge the large presence of Rep. George Miller (D, Calif.) —can’t resist the temptation to try to regulate everything into submission from Washington. A decade ago, Miller pushed for the ill-fated Highly Qualified Teachers provision of No Child Left Behind (which now threatens to kill off Teach For America in his own state). But lessons of federal overreaching are never learned, and so he’s back with a new initiative: protecting student athletes from the damaging effects of concussions. (Yes, concussions.) A recently introduced bill would, according to Miller’s Education and Labor Committee:

Make sports safer for student athletes by asking school districts to implement a concussion safety and management plan. The plan that school districts develop must educate students, parents, and school personnel about concussion safety and how to support students recovering from concussions. It would require schools to post information about concussions on school grounds and on school websites. It would also support “when in doubt, sit it out” policies for students suspected of sustaining a concussion during a school-sponsored athletic activity.

Now Uncle Sam is to function as a sports trainer? In addition to school principal and student lender? Is the federal taxpayer going to pay for all this? Do Miller and his colleagues ever say to themselves, “You know, maybe this isn’t something that needs Uncle Sam’s involvement. Maybe it isn’t something he can do well.”

Even as Republicans murmur about getting Uncle Sam completely out of K–12 education—and thus out of the education-reform business—Democrats are torn between featherbedding their union pals and micromanaging the nation’s schools from thousands of miles away. Not a very appealing choice.

We can, however, glimpse a path through this thicket. Call us naïve, but it goes like this: Come to some agreement at a national (though not federal-government) level about what students should know and be able to do, at least in a few key subjects. (Think “Common Core.”) Develop strong assessments linked to such standards, and make sure schools’ and students’ performance on those assessments are fully transparent. Then empower states to figure out how to get their students up to the standards and how to intervene in schools that aren’t making progress. Get the feds out of their nitpicking ways: Kill the Highly Qualified Teachers mandate. Kill Adequate Yearly Progress. Kill No Child Left Behind’s “cascade of sanctions.” Provide grants to induce good behavior if you like (à la Race to the Top and the Teacher Incentive Fund), but mostly get off the backs of America’s schools. Push for reform, but with a clear-eyed view of what can be achieved from Washington. Make sure all parents know how their kids’ schools are doing—and how everybody else’s schools are doing—on a clear, common metric. But don’t try to run the schools from Capitol Hill or 400 Maryland Avenue.

We call that “Reform Realism.” And it’s not so far from what the Obama administration has proposed in its Elementary and Secondary Education Act blueprint. If the Republicans take the House and the Democrats keep the Senate, this blueprint could serve as the perfect tool for triangulation—and would be a pretty decent policy outcome, too. Certainly better than what either party on Capitol Hill is offering today.

This piece first appeared in slightly different form on the National Review Online blog, The Corner.

If ratified by union members on October 14, Baltimore's new teacher contract will move the "Charm City" a modest distance into the 21st century; but it's nowhere near "monumental"—as school system CEO Andres Alonso has termed it—and much of it depends on decisions that haven't yet been made. The most important of these is exactly how to link teacher evaluations to student academic achievement, which is supposed—under Maryland's Race to the Top commitments—to count for half of those evaluations. A vast, lumbering statewide committee of educators has just begun to ruminate on how this is to be done. The state's weak testing system makes it a major challenge, however, as does the commitment to apply it to all teachers even though no useful test data are available for many of them. 

Supposing that somehow gets worked out and put into practice within the term of this three-year contract, Baltimore's teaching workforce will earn considerably more—money that a hard-pressed city and state may or may not be able to find during these lean times—and the ancient lock-step "salary ladder" will be replaced by a "career ladder" that individual teachers can move up on the basis of their performance. Top pay will rise above $100,000 and a few decisions previously made downtown will be delegated to individual schools.

Not bad—and yes, these changes were "bargained" by labor and management, not forced down anybody's throat. But those who would claim monumentality for this contract aren't telling the full story. Nothing in it undoes the seniority system or "last hired, first fired." Nothing empowers principals to select, deploy and compensate those teachers best suited to a particular school. Nothing extends the school year so Baltimore's many poor kids will have the sort of learning opportunities that are becoming standard practice in the best charter schools. And nothing interferes with teacher tenure or rids the system of incompetent instructors.

Sure, it's a start, and Alonso, a serious reformer, will wring all he can from it. But on a scale from zero to one hundred, it moves Baltimore from five to about thirty-five—where it stays only if the state really gets its own act together, the prospects for which are anything but certain.

Citizenship, patriotism and political engagement are cornerstones of our republic. Yet not much has been known about the proclivities and practices of those with substantial responsibility for cultivating these values and habits—namely, the nation’s social studies teachers. This new AEI study sought to correct that by asking over 1,000 high school social studies teachers (from public, private and Catholic schools) what they are trying to teach their students. Some findings are reassuring. For example, over 80 percent of high school social studies teachers think their students should “respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings.” (That’s basically what the general public wants schools to teach.) But other findings raise red flags. Only 36 percent of teachers say it is “absolutely essential” to teach students key facts (like state capitals) and dates (like December 7, 1941). More alarming: only 24 percent reported being “very confident” that their students emerged knowing the protections provided by the Bill of Rights.

Gary J. Schmitt, Frederick M. Hess, Steve Farkas, Ann M. Duffett, Cheryl Miller, and Jenna Schuette, “High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do,” (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, September 2010).

Christopher A. Lubienski and Peter C. Weitzel, eds., The Charter School Experiment: Expectations, Evidence, and Implications (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2010).

This edited volume seeks to summarize the performance of the charter school movement thus far. You won't be surprised to learn that the results are mixed. Charters have given families more choices, but parents don't always make wise ones. Charters, overall, deliver academic results similar to their district counterparts, but outcomes depend greatly on location and student demographic. And competition from charters has brought improved performance in some local district schools, but not very many. The volume, which begins with a history of the charter school movement, dissects the implications of these realities for the movement's future. Since its creation, public policy around charter schools has mutated and matured. The three original goals of the charter movement - access, innovation, and competition - may not be as relevant today as they once were. Stepping back and assessing charter policy, charter schools, and intra-school practices, the editors conclude with a few worthwhile considerations as the charter school experiment enters its third decade. They ask whether these schools have moved away from one monolithic model to incorporate many school types, and they push for a re-examination of the role of charters: Should they be creating a better school system, or simply better students? There's still work to be done on the charter front. But, from this mixed review, we choose to see the glass half full.

David F. Labaree, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2010).

In this new book, Stanford Professor David Labaree offers a bleak reality-check on American public education, explaining that the system itself—in its structure and contradictory ideals—is to blame for the failure of education reform. In our competition between societal and personal aims for education—creating good citizens and curing social ills versus assisting individuals to prosper in a market economy—personal aims have won the day. It is the consumers of education, rather than its reformers, who shape its direction. Labaree offers an historical account of reform movements in American public schooling, explaining their inherent failure at each juncture. Though he remains at the 30,000 foot level, addressing such massive reforms as desegregation, academic standards and school choice in just a few pages each, Labaree does show how the complex organization of a four-level education structure and the loose couplings among those levels create insurmountable barriers for reformers. More fundamentally, he questions America’s education goals. In his final pages, Labaree offers defeatist recommendations to reformers: scale down your ambitions, be pessimistic, and remember that consumers—not you and your fellow reformers—are driving the system.