The Education Gadfly Weekly

National Governors Association
April 2009

This issue brief provides a concise yet informative look at how governors can help replicate some of America's high-performing charter schools (KIPP, YES Prep, Green Dot, etc.). The authors find four main barriers to replication: state caps; cumbersome reporting requirements; discrepancies between charter and district school funding; and limited access to physical facilities. They recommend that governors looking to expand charter schools address these obstacles by establishing concrete measures of charter-school quality (obviously including student achievement) and shoring up reporting systems and governance requirements to balance strong oversight with necessary flexibility for the schools. They also urge governors to widen charters' access to facilities, appoint a specific governing body to further expansion, and rectify funding disparities. Each admonition is helpfully peppered with tangible lessons various states that have already attempted to expand high-performing charters. Although much of this brief is old news for charter aficionados, it's a great primer for governors; kudos to the NGA for wading into this topic. You can find it here.

Coalition for Student Success
April 2009

This paper from the Coalition for Student Success (of which Fordham is one of 56 members--and growing) suggests five priorities for states and districts to make sound use of the $100 billion in stimulus funding for education created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The big five: developing common (i.e., national) standards; improving the use of data (in particular, following the recommendations of the Data Quality Campaign); conducting "meaningful" teacher evaluations; turning around some schools and closing others; and developing classroom- and school-based reforms to help "struggling" students (i.e., those who are at least two grades behind). All of this is sound advice, and the few pages of elaboration on each provide useful examples and supporting arguments. Perhaps most helpfully, they include specific steps that state and district leaders can take. For example, to strengthen teacher evaluations, governors or chiefs should "require that tenure and retention decisions be tied" to them. Superintendents should revamp seniority-based staffing rules and bring in outsiders to establish a "baseline" of how the district's teachers perform against "a meaningful standard." Much of what's suggested in here won't be easy to accomplish, of course, and one fears that many states and districts will gratefully accept their federal billions without making these kinds of changes. (Arne Duncan insists that such places won't qualify for his $5 billion incentive kitty.) Here's hoping leaders aim higher. The paper concludes with a handy appendix, compiling the major components of ARRA funds (e.g., Phase I and II stabilization, Race to the Top State Incentive Grants, Teacher Incentive Funds, and more), their size, timing, and requirements. It's all available here.

Who doesn't count down the days to the end of school? For high school students in Mesquite, Texas, that day may be sooner than they think--provided they pass all their classes and the state tests. District leaders are proposing a deal for students: pass your classes and TAKS and you can get out of school a week early. They see it as a way to kill two birds with one stone: incentivize working harder, while making it possible to give students who are struggling more one-on-one tutoring time (during the last week of the year, at least). "It just seems like a great opportunity to work with a smaller number of students who may have some more intensive needs," muses district administrator Jeannie Stone. Sure, we should be careful about taking kids out of classrooms when they spend so few days in them as it is, but just as incentives work for adults, they work for teenagers, too. Further, unlike other green-tinged carrots, this one retains its orange hue, eschewing the realm of bribes in favor of that of rewards. It seems like there's little to be lost by giving this approach a try.

"Mesquite schools' proposal would let students score days off for passing TAKS, classes," by Karel Holloway, Dallas Morning News, May 11, 2009

Steve Barr, labeled "The Instigator" by last week's New Yorker, is living up to his new sobriquet. He's launched (or instigated, if you will) a Parent Revolution to give voice to frustrated parents, put pressure on the LA Unified School District, and counterbalance the power of that city's teacher union. Seems Barr thinks putting the P back into PTA is futile. The pledge is simple: if more than half of a poor-performing school's parents sign up for the Revolution, Green Dot guarantees an excellent campus within 3 years. It will fulfill this promise with some equally simple leverage: if LAUSD does not clean up the school or let Green Dot take it over and transform it, Green Dot will open a ring of small charter schools around the school--and quickly drain it of students and funds. A newly revamped Parents Union gathers petition signatures to make such a threat credible. Mary Najera, one of the organizers, explains: "This is a legitimate threat to the school district. And this is how we have to play to be heard. This is going to steamroll." With an unlikely cast of supporters, including the Service Employees International Union, The Broad Foundation, and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, this move is gutsy and innovative. It also just might work.

"Parents are urged to demand more from L.A. schools," by Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2009

Could New York learn a thing or two from Milwaukee? Definitely, if the newly-relocated Archbishop has anything to say about it. He's Timothy Dolan, who led the archdiocese of Milwaukee for seven years prior to his Big Apple appointment, and he believes that, when it comes to Catholic schools, Milwaukee's voucher program is "a genuine blessing." "The Catholic Church," he explains, "has always been an ardent advocate for parental rights in education." The problem, as he sees it, is that some Catholic leaders are ready to throw in the towel on their parochial schools. "What we have to ask ourselves is ‘Are they worth it?' And we say you bet they are. They're worth it because nobody does it better than the [Catholic] Church when it comes to education." To which we say, "Amen." There's no voucher law in New York, however, so Dolan has his work cut out for him. ("I know that the state of New York likes to consider itself kind of on the vanguard of enlightened progressive initiatives," he quips, "but in this regard Wisconsin is way ahead.") Still, he doesn't acknowledge any despair. That's because these "scrappy" parochial institutions have always fought for their survival. In fact, wrangling for every penny is part of the "pride and ownership among the people because, darn it, we fought for it...we do not take this for granted." But scrappiness alone isn't likely to save America's Catholic schools. Let's hope Dolan can turn fighting words into fighting actions. 

"Archbishop Timothy Dolan: Proudly Pro-Choice on Education," by Mary Anastasia O'Grady, Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2009

It might be the worst Canadian import since Celine Dion: Ken O'Connor's dubious notions about "standards-based" grading. This Toronto-based consultant, who dubs himself "The Grade Doctor," argues that students shouldn't be dinged for missing deadlines, assignments or tests or, for that matter, cheating. "In a standards-based system, grades need to be as pure measures of achievement that we can make them and they should not be inflated by good behavior or deflated by ‘bad' behavior," writes O'Connor. (It seems the only thing shoddier than his ideas is his grammar.) You might think that educators, who themselves resist being evaluated by "pure measures of achievement," might think twice about these noxious ideas. But alas, O'Connor receives up to $8,000 per day to flog these nostrums and apparently has plenty of willing customers. It may come as no surprise that the Wake County (NC) Public Schools, that bastion of dumb ideas (try here, here, here, here, and here, for starters), is one of them. We're with Wake teacher Jennifer Rosa, who worries that "students are quickly learning that they do not have to be held to deadlines and timelines." We suspect they are also learning that their school administrators are lacking in critical-thinking skills.

"Wake woos guru on grading," by T. Keung Hui, The News & Observer, May 11, 2009

(Don't read this if you're easily depressed. It's about the limits of government.)

Ever since I came into contact with government, both state and federal, and especially in the four decades since first going to work in it, I've been struck by the reality gap between what many Americans expect of it and what it's actually good at doing.

I've previously remarked that we tend to have the greatest faith in the prowess, efficiency, and effectiveness of whatever level of government we've had the least direct experience with. In other words, those who are deeply enmeshed in the toils of local or state government look to Washington to get things done, while those with long federal experience are apt to say "we'd better make sure that the states are responsible for meeting this next challenge."

In general, American government is better than some, worse than others. It's rarely corrupt and eventually completes most of what it sets out to do.  In this it differs from, say, India, Russia, and most of Africa. But it's usually slow, plodding, feckless, and not very responsive. In this, it differs from Singapore--indeed, from much of East Asia, including even China, at least now and then. (China is a mixed bag. It seems to be hopeless at public health matters, for example, even food safety, yet had drilling equipment in place within two weeks of deciding to build a big public-works project. And the modernization of Shanghai, Beijing, and other cities over the past two decades is staggering. Of course, government boosts its efficiency when it is known to shoot those who impede what it views as "progress.")

Why this rambly discourse on governmental competence? Because a leitmotif of the Obama era, particularly in conjunction with the economic downturn and major recent screw-ups by the private sector, is that "government should run things" or, at least, make many more of the big decisions about how things will run.

We hear this in connection with banks, for example, with AIG, with automobile companies, with health care, and much more. In education, we hear it--from the administration--in connection with student loans and now, from all sides, in connection with the use of "stimulus" dollars to effect a host of long-overdue reforms that schools, districts, and states have failed to accomplish on their own. Let Washington do it....If only the federal government would take charge of it....

Look harder and you'll see three themes entangled here.

• The use of federal investigative and regulatory power to try to compel, coerce, or frighten people and institutions into doing something different. (Look at Chrysler's restructuring or the "stress testing" of major banks.)
• The use of federal dollars to "bribe" changed behavior (more charter schools, say) or underwrite activities that wouldn't otherwise attract enough money (e.g., modernized state education-data systems).
• Direct operation (or very close supervision and/or actual ownership) of enterprises that previously ran outside the governmental orbit. That's what we're seeing in the student-loan sphere, for example, and in a host of financial institutions.

Every once in a while, we feel a tiny nudge in the opposite direction, as with the mantra that, when it comes to academic standards for U.S. schools, we need a mechanism that is "national but not federal." But what's mainly going on in that instance isn't so much mistrust of governmental competence as angst about politics and politicization. (And we turn out to have few mechanisms, at least in the education field, that qualify as national but not federal.)

The competence issue deserves more attention than it's gotten, however. I know the Education Department fairly well and my wife spent much of her career as a civilian employee of the Pentagon. (A Foreign Service friend remarked the other day that his experience with the State Department is identical.) Here's what these agencies display: None is a high-performance organization. All are extremely sluggish at making decisions. They waste a lot of money and are shoved about by lobbyists and earmark-crazed Congressmen. They are staffed mainly by careerists, some of whom are swell but many of whom are time-servers who could not care less whether things get done quickly and well. (I once estimated that, of the 400 or so Education Department employees who worked in my area, ten percent of them did ninety percent of the work.) They lack imagination, courage, and the capacity to deviate from established practice.

All those innate tendencies have actually worsened of late as Washington's "gotcha" culture produces ever more investigations, recriminations, and Inspectors General second guessing every decision--and certainly every decision that entails actual judgment calls rather than formula-following. (Remember Reading First?)

Try to get even simple things done by government and you will see how arduous it is. Try to get your Social Security check deposited in a different bank account or to sign up for a different Medicare drug plan. Try--if you work there--to hire or fire someone, or promote or reprimand them. Try to get a grant or contract issued. Try to get a regulation revised or a publication distributed.

It's really hard. It takes a lot of effort and tons of time and the initiative often misfires or simply vanishes into the ether. Sometimes it even gets you into trouble for having tried--thereby reinforcing the attitude of don't rock any boats or try anything different.

Government, in short, has enormous difficulty fulfilling its current responsibilities, coordinating its various parts, and accomplishing its present objectives. You don't have to romanticize the private sector's competence to harbor serious doubts that giving government even more duties is a formula for disappointment. That's true in education and in much, much else.

Shall we, then, try once more to reinvent government so that it works better? Good luck. True, civil service promotions are somewhat less automatic than they used to be, but agency after agency has failed to modernize its computer system--even after outsourcing much of the work. The Obama team talks of less outsourcing, not more. (They're spooked by Blackwater and Halliburton, I guess.) A few government agencies have recently hired modern-style COO's (including ED's new deputy secretary). We surely wish them well. But on a good day government does well to get the checks delivered to the right addresses. It can't run thousands of banks--much less tens of thousands of schools.

And it's naïve to expect otherwise.

A version of this piece appeared this morning on Forbes.com.

Ah, the unexpected consequences of budget woes. Low on funds, the Warwick High (PA) class of 2010 couldn't afford silver picture frames and gold money clips--pricey prom mementos from years past when class coffers were, ahem, loaded. But when the impish teens submitted the prom party favor purchase order to the school, they referred to their desired alternative knick-knack as simply "prom souvenirs"; sounded innocuous enough, so the principal quickly signed off. When the 450 trinkets arrived in time for the cafeteria gala--draining the class's paltry treasury, no less--school administrators were dismayed to discover that, in teenage parlance, "souvenirs" actually meant "shot glasses." Assistant principal Scott Galen admits the purchase "sends the wrong message," but we're more concerned this incident could send other things too, like teens to jail for underage drinking or alcohol-related driving incidents. It might be a good idea for the school to take a second look at the "souvenir" suggested for graduation.

"Pa. high school orders shot glasses as prom favors; official says party committee low on funds," Associated Press, May 13, 2009

Coalition for Student Success
April 2009

This paper from the Coalition for Student Success (of which Fordham is one of 56 members--and growing) suggests five priorities for states and districts to make sound use of the $100 billion in stimulus funding for education created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The big five: developing common (i.e., national) standards; improving the use of data (in particular, following the recommendations of the Data Quality Campaign); conducting "meaningful" teacher evaluations; turning around some schools and closing others; and developing classroom- and school-based reforms to help "struggling" students (i.e., those who are at least two grades behind). All of this is sound advice, and the few pages of elaboration on each provide useful examples and supporting arguments. Perhaps most helpfully, they include specific steps that state and district leaders can take. For example, to strengthen teacher evaluations, governors or chiefs should "require that tenure and retention decisions be tied" to them. Superintendents should revamp seniority-based staffing rules and bring in outsiders to establish a "baseline" of how the district's teachers perform against "a meaningful standard." Much of what's suggested in here won't be easy to accomplish, of course, and one fears that many states and districts will gratefully accept their federal billions without making these kinds of changes. (Arne Duncan insists that such places won't qualify for his $5 billion incentive kitty.) Here's hoping leaders aim higher. The paper concludes with a handy appendix, compiling the major components of ARRA funds (e.g., Phase I and II stabilization, Race to the Top State Incentive Grants, Teacher Incentive Funds, and more), their size, timing, and requirements. It's all available here.

National Governors Association
April 2009

This issue brief provides a concise yet informative look at how governors can help replicate some of America's high-performing charter schools (KIPP, YES Prep, Green Dot, etc.). The authors find four main barriers to replication: state caps; cumbersome reporting requirements; discrepancies between charter and district school funding; and limited access to physical facilities. They recommend that governors looking to expand charter schools address these obstacles by establishing concrete measures of charter-school quality (obviously including student achievement) and shoring up reporting systems and governance requirements to balance strong oversight with necessary flexibility for the schools. They also urge governors to widen charters' access to facilities, appoint a specific governing body to further expansion, and rectify funding disparities. Each admonition is helpfully peppered with tangible lessons various states that have already attempted to expand high-performing charters. Although much of this brief is old news for charter aficionados, it's a great primer for governors; kudos to the NGA for wading into this topic. You can find it here.