The Education Gadfly Weekly

Few education analysts are as knowledgeable and provocative as the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless, and many denizens of the policy sphere look forward to his annual Brown Center Report on American Education. This year’s edition is no disappointment. As in earlier years, it tackles three big topics and manages to be provocative—and out of the mainstream—on all three.

But it’s real easy to misinterpret its message and misconstrue its policy implications.

Topic I has been read as saying that “the Common Core standards won’t raise student achievement.” Of course they won’t, not all by themselves. Standards merely describe the desired destination of the education journey; they don’t get us there. As Kathleen Porter-Magee has carefully pointed out on Fordham’s Common Core Watch blog, to achieve their potential, these standards must be well and fully implemented and joined to quality assessments, accountability systems, and much more. It’s possible to have good standards and low achievement (look at California and D.C.) and it’s possible to have weak standards and pretty good achievement (Connecticut and Vermont are good examples on this front). But, other things being equal, it’s far better to set a destination worth reaching than to embark on a random journey, and it’s far more helpful to those who will do the curriculum-building, the assessment-creating, and the classroom-instructing.

Topic II basically explains why achievement, and achievement gaps, are not the same on two different versions of NAEP, one of which is anchored to past curricular norms (the “long-term trend” assessment) and the other of which (“main NAEP”) is periodically refreshed to keep pace with current thinking about curriculum and pedagogy. As Loveless notes, “they may both be right.” But one should draw scant comfort from the fact that sundry achievement gaps are wider on “main NAEP” than on the long-term trend report. If—and in my mind it’s a sizable if—main NAEP truly reflects the knowledge and skills of greatest salience and value in today’s world, then those are what poor and minority kids also need to learn.

Standards merely describe the desired destination of the education journey.

Topic III explores a favorite Loveless topic, namely the uses and abuses of international test scores. He correctly observes that the media often exaggerate the weakness of American students by using the international score rankings in a misleading way and that, for a variety of important statistical reasons, scores that appear to be different may not actually be. Mostly, though, he objects to efforts—by many, beginning with the OECD itself—to devise causal explanations and extract policy guidance from such rankings. As Loveless irrefutably observes, “pointing to a single high-scoring country, or group of them, and declaring that one or more of their policies should be adopted by other countries is misguided. It combines the errors of making dubious causal claims and misusing rankings, and by ignoring evidence from low or average countries in the same policy question, produces a triple error, a true whopper in misinterpreting international test scores.”

Tom Loveless, The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, February 2012.)

A recent Education Next piece (“Obama’s Education Record”) by Fordham’s Mike Petrilli and Tyson Eberhardt presents a hard-hitting case against the President’s prowess as a K-12 reformer (a reputation sullied by overspending, lackluster results, and micromanagement). Still, compared to this mini-book (and attached video) from the Pacific Research Institute’s Lance Izumi, their essay reads like an Obama festschrift. (Nowhere, for example, do Petrilli and Eberhardt liken Obama to Louis XIV, as Izumi does.) While Izumi references the imprudence of ARRA spending (a critique echoed in Petrilli’s and Eberhardt’s piece), the majority of his broadside lambasts the Common Core State Standards—an unprecedented federal overreach in his eyes. For those who have followed the CCSS debate, Izumi’s deftly chosen (and not exactly even-handed) arguments are not new. He contends that these “national standards” are unconstitutional, costly, and none-too-rigorous. Big statements, if just loosely grounded in fact. We’ve previously rebutted the first argument. And the rigor of the CCSS is equivalent to the best of pre-existing state standards (which those states were—and remain—free to retain). We are obliged to note, however, that Izumi spurned our own analysis of their merits in favor of a more problematic one. As for the costs of the Common Core, that’s a trickier issue. Expect more from us next week (and then still more in the upcoming months). Izumi’s alterative to the Common Core? Expand school choice. A commendable idea, but one that has little to do with the state-led Common Core standards initiative. When it comes to federal involvement in education, Izumi has the “loose” part of the equation right. But he pays no heed to the necessary “tight” part. Maybe he doesn’t think there needs to be one.

Lance T. Izumi, Obama’s Education Takeover (New York, NY: Encounter Broadsides, Pacific Research Institute, February 2012.)

We’ve long cast doubt on the efficacy of school-turnaround efforts, notably those championed (and funded) by the federal school-improvement-grants (SIG) program. This new report from the Council of the Great City School offers a welcome primer on SIG—but does little to allay our concerns. The report first details the history, participation, and look of the SIG program: It was written into NCLB but got a makeover (and a boatload more cash) with the passage of ARRA. Now, SIG prioritizes schools (bucketing them into three “tiers”—I, II, or III—with Tier I being the neediest) and doles out dollars to districts accordingly. To be eligible for SIG, districts must choose one of four interventions for each funded school. In general, the “turnaround model” asks that schools replace their principal and half their staffs. The “transformation model” only requires a changing of the principal guard. The “restart model” converts the school to a charter—or hands the management reins off to an outside agency. The “closure model” is self-explanatory. There’s much more background on SIG here, but what’s interesting is the forty-three member-district survey the CGSC conducted as part of this report. From this, we learn that districts seem to be less aggressive with their turnaround efforts post ARRA (though many more are embarking on them). Before ARRA pumped $3.5 billion into SIG, only 24 percent of schools utilized the “transformation” model, the least disruptive of all. After ARRA, that jumped to 74 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of schools that undertook the more dramatic (and likelier-to-spur-change) restart or closure models plummeted. (Hat tip to the CGCS: Council districts opted for the “restart” and “closure” models more frequently than the national average.) What this seems to show is that, overall, districts are more interested in pocketing as many SIG dollars as possible than in embarking on real—and necessarily jarring—efforts to jumpstart failing schools.

Jonathan Lachlan-Hache, Manish Naik, and Michael Casserly, School Improvement Grants 2010-2011: The School Improvement Grant Rollout in America’s Great City Schools (Washington, D.C.: Council of the Great City Schools, February 2012).

From Lin-sanity to charter school discipline, Mike and Rick take on political correctness in this week’s podcast. Amber breaks down the recent Brown Center report and Chris defends Michael Jackson’s dance moves.

Amber's Research Minute

The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education

Download the PDF

Amber's Weekly Poll

What percentage of 25-29-year olds have attained their high school diploma or equivalent? (data from 2010)

Tune in next week to find out the answer!

What's Up With That?

‘Billie Jean’ dance move a show stopper - 9 year-old boy suspended for performing Michael Jackson dance move.

Mike Petrilli and Ty Eberhardt discuss the soft spots in President Obama's education record.

For a more in depth view at the president's education record, please read the article on Education Next.

American innovation doesn't start in the classroom.  Photo by Dave Parker.

A few weeks ago, a couple of Japanese scholars dropped by the Fordham Institute offices for a visit. This happens every so often—delegations of foreigners make the Washington ed-policy circuit, seeking a better understanding of America’s schools. As with most Asian visitors I meet, these gentlemen were curious about how we manage to produce so many innovative leaders. They want a Bill Gates, a Steve Jobs, or a Mark Zuckerberg of their own.

To which I replied: “You’re looking in the wrong place. It has nothing to do with our schools.”

This isn’t meant as a knock on our school system. But from ages zero to eighteen, our young people spend about 9 percent of their lives in class. Isn’t it likely that the other 91 percent contributes more to such attributes as their creativity or willingness to question authority?

I asked my visitors what Japanese adolescents do when they aren’t in school.

“They attend cram school,” was the answer. Uh huh.

American kids, on the other hand, are engaged in all manner of extra-curricular activities: sports, music, theater, student council, cheerleading, volunteering, church activities, and on and on. If you are looking for sources of innovative thinking, leadership and teamwork skills, competitiveness, and creativity, aren’t these better candidates than math class?

And then there’s the way we parent our kids. For better or worse, if you believe Pamela Druckerman, the author of the much-hyped Bringing up Bebe, U.S. moms and dads are terrible at teaching our kiddos self-discipline and delayed gratification. (Have you ever met an American parent that enforces a no-snacking-between meals policy? The French have no problem saying “Non!”) This, she suggests, fosters out-of-control toddlers and may lead to serious problems down the road, particularly for kids growing up in neighborhoods where community bonds have frayed. On the other hand, by allowing our young to negotiate endlessly with us and stand up for what they want, we are also teaching them a form of self-assuredness. Treating little kids as equals might wreak havoc in the short term, but it’s possible that it creates non-hierarchical, confident, transformational leaders in the long run.

I hope my new Japanese friends paid attention to what American kids were doing after school and on the weekends.

The Japanese visitors want to know what’s happening inside our schools. (A few years ago, national officials ordered Japanese schools to instruct kids to challenge authority. Consider the irony.) And for sure, some of our schools teach in ways that encourage such attributes like creative thinking. Getting students engaged in their own learning, asking them to solve real problems, getting them to read difficult texts and make sense of them, rather than regurgitate facts—all of this can help at the margins.

But for their sake, I hope my new Japanese friends paid attention to what American kids were doing after school and on the weekends, because that is when our special sauce is made.

Supporters of converting an Adelanto, California district school into a charter had boasted that 70 percent of parents backed the change, but the Los Angeles Times reported that nearly 100 later backed out of the petition, which the school board threw out on Tuesday. The failure to enact a ‘parent trigger’ and make Desert Trails Elementary a charter shows how difficult it is to campaign for the sweeping reform the law allows—just as it should be. As states like Florida and Michigan consider their own trigger laws, they should set the bar high to make sure that transformational change is possible only with a supermajority of parents, not the simple majority necessary in California. A parent trigger is good policy. It brings families to a bargaining table that has been the exclusive province of teacher unions and school boards, and it begins to rethink the way we govern public education—and does so in ways that meet the unique needs of low-performing and low-income students. The trigger also helps to counteract monopolies, whether those include strong-arming school boards or obstructionist unions. But a parent-directed reform with a tenuous hold on support and authority can lead to its own imbalance of power, a problem that can be checked if two-thirds of the families agree to sign up. That’s a threshold required to pass constitutional referenda in many states, and it’s one that can give parent unions an invaluable tool to turn around a struggling school.

Teresa Watanabe, “Campaign for Adelanto charter school falls short,” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2012

Ed. Note: The email version of this edition of the Gadfly Weekly failed to identify sections of this week's editorials by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Peter Meyer as quotations from other authors. We have great respect for the work of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Mark Bauerlein, and would never want to imply that it was our own. We apologize for the mistake.

Pundits and politicians have cited the loss of manufacturing jobs as a sign of American economic decline for decades now, but a recent Washington Post article suggests that the problem is an under-skilled workforce, not a lack of opportunity. With that in mind, Checker and Peter square off this week to debate whether a renewed and revised focus on vocational education is the key to the U.S.'s economic future.

21st-century VocEd  could be key to future economic prosperity

By Chester E. Finn, Jr.

I’m a huge fan of high-quality liberal-arts education for everybody and really do think it would go far to prepare better citizens, neighbors, and consumer/transmitters of America’s cultural heritage and democratic underpinnings. I’m also an acolyte of E.D. Hirsch and his core point that everyone—especially poor kids—needs to be culturally literate as well as equipped with the 3 R’s (though he emphasizes that his focus is K-8, not high school).

That said, I’m also becoming convinced that the future of our economy and the acquisition of good jobs will hinge as much on well-developed technical prowess as on Aristotle, Shakespeare, Darwin, Rembrandt, and Mozart.

Recent weeks have brought multiple reports of U.S. jobs going unfilled, or being outsourced to distant lands, because too few American workers have the requisite skills to perform them well.

On January 21, for example, the New York Times explained why Apple has its iPhones, iPads, and such manufactured in China. Among the multiple reasons, not all of them praiseworthy, this one stuck with me:

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Further evidence turned up in The Washington Post a few days ago, with employers in several states lamenting the dearth of technically qualified workers for decently-paid jobs now going unfilled:

[A]s the 2012 presidential candidates roam the state offering ways to “bring the jobs back,” many manufacturers say that, in fact, the jobs are already here. What’s missing are the skilled workers needed to fill them.

A metal-parts factory here has been searching since the fall for a machinist, an assembly team leader, and a die-setter. Another plant is offering referral bonuses for a welder. And a company that makes molds for automakers has been trying for seven months to fill four spots on the second shift.

“Our guys have been working 60 to 70 hours a week, and they’re dead. They’re gone,” said Corey Carolla, vice president of operations at Mach Mold, a forty-man shop in Benton Harbor, Mich. “We need more people. The trouble is finding them.”

America in 2012 needs to prepare thousands more people for jobs that do exist.

As such reports make plain, somewhere along the education continuum, America in 2012 needs to prepare thousands more people for jobs that do exist. The skills they call for, by and large, are technical and do not seem to require much of a “liberal arts” background, even if citizenship does. Many do not entail sitting at a desk or wearing a white lab coat. Rather, they involve today’s version of what used to be called “blue collar” and “foreman” work and the educational preparation for succeeding in them does not look much like what the “everyone should complete college” crowd seems to have in mind.

Recall the provocative Pathways to Prosperity report from the Harvard ed school a year back, observing that just 30 percent of the jobs in 2018 will require a bachelor’s degree and arguing for a “multiple pathways” approach to K-12 reform. This didn’t get the attention it deserved—and still deserves. For it demands not only rethinking the “college for all” mantra but also launching a bold makeover of America’s “vocational” high schools (and kindred postsecondary institutions), bringing them into the 21st century rather than either jettisoning them or retaining them unchanged.

My home town of Dayton is setting a good example with the recently opened David H. Ponitz Career Technology Center. Plenty more schools have incorporated the word “technical” or “technology” into their names. But as you scan their curricula, you find many that have clung to the old programs (carpentry, metal working, auto body) that still sound worthy but may well lead to underprepared and ultimately unemployable people—and that’s even assuming that their students bring strong basic skills (and cultural literacy) with them into ninth grade.

In sum: Somewhere between the dead-end of old-style vocational high schools and the fashionable but ill-advised “college for everyone” campaign is a course of action that will actually equip young Americans for both successful citizenship and the real economy that they will inhabit.

Education is no zero-sum game

By Peter Meyer

“Wouldn’t you want your plumber to be able to quote Shakespeare?” I posed the question to our veteran math teacher, thirty years in the trenches, and he said, succinctly and without hesitation, “No.”

At first, I was taken aback, but, as we chatted, I realized that he saw it as a zero-sum question. He had nothing against Shakespeare; he simply wanted his plumber to be a good plumber and considered the Bard a distraction.

I understand. We want our auto mechanics to know the difference between a brake line and a muffler, our carpenters to appreciate the importance of a plumb line and the use of a hammer—oops, nail gun.

But it is not a zero-sum game. And knowing the foibles of Macbeth does not mean you must be useless with a soldering gun.

And knowing the foibles of Macbeth does not mean you must be useless with a soldering gun.

And therein lies the conundrum. Had I posed the question this way—Would you like your plumber to be as quick in thought and as creative in action as Shakespeare?—he may have had second thoughts about his “No.” Would he want his plumber to be able to identify the lead pipes in his 1850 house? To know that his cranky fifty-year-old copper pipes can be replaced with plastic? To know that the state legislature was considering a bill to ban PVC? 

This is the skills dilemma.

The Washington Post suggests that our manufacturing resurgence is being hampered by the lack of “skilled workers.” What skills?

I attended an economic development seminar recently and listened to the CEO of our local hospital, one the largest employers in the region, talk about the lack of skilled workers. She didn’t mean doctors and nurses, though. She meant janitors and bed-pan assistants. “Our biggest problem is finding people who can read and write and show up on time,” she said.

I think it's time to bring back reading and writing, history, science, art, and music. That way kids at least know how to recognize a job opportunity when it presents itself. Mark Bauerlein's essay, the Mimetic Classroom, is apt here.

Think of it on the sports analogy. What sport is mastered simply by playing the sport? None of them. To improve in football or baseball or tennis or soccer, you lift weights and stretch daily, even though weightlifting and stretching are not practiced on the playing field. The principle is simple: at least part of training involves exercises not repeated in the game. One doesn’t hear football players in the weight room complaining, “Man, why do we have to do any more curls—this isn’t football!

A friend of mine, a Princeton history grad who went on to become a homebuilder and now teaches carpentry at a VocEd school, says he constantly lectures his would-be hammerers about the importance of basic math and communications skills. And he notes that VocEd, which has been “a dumping ground for dumb kids,” is changing. At his school, they have introduced three new standards for admission. First, a student must write a short essay about why he or she wants to be in a particular class. “You’d be amazed how many kids that eliminates,” says my friend. The school is also looking at a student’s reading scores and discipline record. “These won’t disqualify you, but the flags go up,” he explains. “And we deal with them. But these three things have been a huge step forward.”

We need more flags and we need to reconsider our definitions of skills. We can no longer afford to see VocEd as a refuge for the academically unprepared, because today’s economy—including its industrial sector—is far too dynamic and demanding. The point of a liberal arts education—and I include math and science in that education—is to teach some eternal verities so that, when the surface world changes, as it tends to do, we have citizens that possess the most important skill of all: the ability to adapt. As old Willie would say, “Now all the youth of England are on fire, and silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies: Now thrive the armourers, and honour’s thought reigns solely in the breast of every man….” Including the lathe operator?

» As Bill Gates opined in this morning’s New York Times, education discourse is better off—and comity about needed reforms somewhat more likely—without teachers’ test scores plastered on front-pages, where legitimate caveats about margins of error and sample sizes are likely to get swept aside. As Eduwonk notes, parents still deserve to know whether their children’s teachers (and others in their school) measure up; but they should get that information from the principal, not the morning paper.

» The Chicago Board of Education backed Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s latest move to shape up the Windy City’s schools yesterday, approving closures, teacher firings, or management changes at seventeen underachieving public schools. Gladfly is thrilled that, from Chicago to Cleveland to Providence, a growing number of big-city Democratic mayors are realizing that standing up to teacher unions isn’t just sound policy—it can be a politically smart decision.

» Tucked away in President Obama’s budget is a proposal to cut NAEP funding and shift from a "Nation's report card" to a system that benchmarks students against the PISA. While putting the performance of American students in international perspective provides some useful insights, tying our understanding of student achievement to a fatally flawed test like the PISA is a big step backwards. Besides, we already know how to compare NAEP results with those of other countries.

» The New York Times reports that states are tweaking new teacher evaluation systems as they implement them. While some reformers worry about watering down these promising innovations, we say: A dose of pragmatism and openness to experimentation here is something to celebrate.

Mike Petrilli and Ty Eberhardt discuss the soft spots in President Obama's education record.

For a more in depth view at the president's education record, please read the article on Education Next.

Mike Petrilli and Ty Eberhardt discuss the soft spots in President Obama's education record.

For a more in depth view at the president's education record, please read the article on Education Next.

Few education analysts are as knowledgeable and provocative as the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless, and many denizens of the policy sphere look forward to his annual Brown Center Report on American Education. This year’s edition is no disappointment. As in earlier years, it tackles three big topics and manages to be provocative—and out of the mainstream—on all three.

But it’s real easy to misinterpret its message and misconstrue its policy implications.

Topic I has been read as saying that “the Common Core standards won’t raise student achievement.” Of course they won’t, not all by themselves. Standards merely describe the desired destination of the education journey; they don’t get us there. As Kathleen Porter-Magee has carefully pointed out on Fordham’s Common Core Watch blog, to achieve their potential, these standards must be well and fully implemented and joined to quality assessments, accountability systems, and much more. It’s possible to have good standards and low achievement (look at California and D.C.) and it’s possible to have weak standards and pretty good achievement (Connecticut and Vermont are good examples on this front). But, other things being equal, it’s far better to set a destination worth reaching than to embark on a random journey, and it’s far more helpful to those who will do the curriculum-building, the assessment-creating, and the classroom-instructing.

Topic II basically explains why achievement, and achievement gaps, are not the same on two different versions of NAEP, one of which is anchored to past curricular norms (the “long-term trend” assessment) and the other of which (“main NAEP”) is periodically refreshed to keep pace with current thinking about curriculum and pedagogy. As Loveless notes, “they may both be right.” But one should draw scant comfort from the fact that sundry achievement gaps are wider on “main NAEP” than on the long-term trend report. If—and in my mind it’s a sizable if—main NAEP truly reflects the knowledge and skills of greatest salience and value in today’s world, then those are what poor and minority kids also need to learn.

Standards merely describe the desired destination of the education journey.

Topic III explores a favorite Loveless topic, namely the uses and abuses of international test scores. He correctly observes that the media often exaggerate the weakness of American students by using the international score rankings in a misleading way and that, for a variety of important statistical reasons, scores that appear to be different may not actually be. Mostly, though, he objects to efforts—by many, beginning with the OECD itself—to devise causal explanations and extract policy guidance from such rankings. As Loveless irrefutably observes, “pointing to a single high-scoring country, or group of them, and declaring that one or more of their policies should be adopted by other countries is misguided. It combines the errors of making dubious causal claims and misusing rankings, and by ignoring evidence from low or average countries in the same policy question, produces a triple error, a true whopper in misinterpreting international test scores.”

Tom Loveless, The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, February 2012.)

A recent Education Next piece (“Obama’s Education Record”) by Fordham’s Mike Petrilli and Tyson Eberhardt presents a hard-hitting case against the President’s prowess as a K-12 reformer (a reputation sullied by overspending, lackluster results, and micromanagement). Still, compared to this mini-book (and attached video) from the Pacific Research Institute’s Lance Izumi, their essay reads like an Obama festschrift. (Nowhere, for example, do Petrilli and Eberhardt liken Obama to Louis XIV, as Izumi does.) While Izumi references the imprudence of ARRA spending (a critique echoed in Petrilli’s and Eberhardt’s piece), the majority of his broadside lambasts the Common Core State Standards—an unprecedented federal overreach in his eyes. For those who have followed the CCSS debate, Izumi’s deftly chosen (and not exactly even-handed) arguments are not new. He contends that these “national standards” are unconstitutional, costly, and none-too-rigorous. Big statements, if just loosely grounded in fact. We’ve previously rebutted the first argument. And the rigor of the CCSS is equivalent to the best of pre-existing state standards (which those states were—and remain—free to retain). We are obliged to note, however, that Izumi spurned our own analysis of their merits in favor of a more problematic one. As for the costs of the Common Core, that’s a trickier issue. Expect more from us next week (and then still more in the upcoming months). Izumi’s alterative to the Common Core? Expand school choice. A commendable idea, but one that has little to do with the state-led Common Core standards initiative. When it comes to federal involvement in education, Izumi has the “loose” part of the equation right. But he pays no heed to the necessary “tight” part. Maybe he doesn’t think there needs to be one.

Lance T. Izumi, Obama’s Education Takeover (New York, NY: Encounter Broadsides, Pacific Research Institute, February 2012.)

We’ve long cast doubt on the efficacy of school-turnaround efforts, notably those championed (and funded) by the federal school-improvement-grants (SIG) program. This new report from the Council of the Great City School offers a welcome primer on SIG—but does little to allay our concerns. The report first details the history, participation, and look of the SIG program: It was written into NCLB but got a makeover (and a boatload more cash) with the passage of ARRA. Now, SIG prioritizes schools (bucketing them into three “tiers”—I, II, or III—with Tier I being the neediest) and doles out dollars to districts accordingly. To be eligible for SIG, districts must choose one of four interventions for each funded school. In general, the “turnaround model” asks that schools replace their principal and half their staffs. The “transformation model” only requires a changing of the principal guard. The “restart model” converts the school to a charter—or hands the management reins off to an outside agency. The “closure model” is self-explanatory. There’s much more background on SIG here, but what’s interesting is the forty-three member-district survey the CGSC conducted as part of this report. From this, we learn that districts seem to be less aggressive with their turnaround efforts post ARRA (though many more are embarking on them). Before ARRA pumped $3.5 billion into SIG, only 24 percent of schools utilized the “transformation” model, the least disruptive of all. After ARRA, that jumped to 74 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of schools that undertook the more dramatic (and likelier-to-spur-change) restart or closure models plummeted. (Hat tip to the CGCS: Council districts opted for the “restart” and “closure” models more frequently than the national average.) What this seems to show is that, overall, districts are more interested in pocketing as many SIG dollars as possible than in embarking on real—and necessarily jarring—efforts to jumpstart failing schools.

Jonathan Lachlan-Hache, Manish Naik, and Michael Casserly, School Improvement Grants 2010-2011: The School Improvement Grant Rollout in America’s Great City Schools (Washington, D.C.: Council of the Great City Schools, February 2012).