The Education Gadfly Weekly

Marguerite Roza
Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington
July 2009

If you want to avoid sharp increases in class size, you have to pick your poison when it comes to budget slashing, according to a hypothetical analysis done by Marguerite Roza. On average, the teacher pay schedule increases three percent per year of work; that's in addition to a three percent average annual cost of living increase. Together, this means the typical public-school teacher will make six percent more each year. But with district budgets squeezed by the economy, most districts cannot afford those increases without laying off teachers, too. So she runs the numbers through five scenarios, from maintaining the pay increases and the cost of living adjustments to rolling back salaries 5 percent and abandoning the 3 percent salary step increase. Keeping the salary scale as is will result in 17 percent class size increase and laying off 14 percent of the teacher work force. Freezing salaries completely (no step increase; no cost of living increase) still means 7 percent of the teacher work force must be laid off and class sizes will increase by a corresponding 8 percent. But abandoning the step scale all together and slashing salaries by 5 percent will keep both layoffs and class size increases at bay. All options are presented in a handy and easy-to-understand table. This analysis brings to the fore the debate over "last-hired, first-fired" policies and dishes out an unavoidable truth: You can't have it all when you're faced with a down economy--even if you're unionized.

After much squabbling and power grabbing, the New York state legislature has given mayoral control of New York City's schools back to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, thirty-eight days after the six-year old measure expired. Ironically, the United Federation of Teachers helped Bloomberg score this victory, though some insist that the new law doesn't do nearly enough to rein in Bloomberg's sometimes heavy-handed tactics. Gadfly tends to see the legislative tweaks, which focus on increased transparency, oversight, and community input, as a decent compromise. Bloomberg (and schools chancellor Joel Klein) retains much of his former power, but district superintendents will get more operational authority; schools will have to communicate with parents more often; and the city must hold community hearings before shutting a school, amongst other things. But what's still unknown--and left unresolved by the state law--is what happens come November 2013. The Senate's extension is for six years, which will at least leave 2 years for another mayor. (We're assuming Bloomberg's impending reelection in November 2009, which looks promising; he is currently ahead of his primary challenger, city comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr., by 10 points in the polls.) As history has taught us, mayoral control is only as good as the mayor to whom the power is bestowed, and those he appoints.

"N.Y. Senate Renews Mayor's Power to Run Schools," by Jennifer Medina, New York Times, August 7, 2009

We predicted that Deborah Gist would bring her hard-knock reformer skills to Rhode Island, possibly manifesting in an overhaul of that state's timeworn, ineffectual teacher evaluation system. This seems to be exactly what she plans to do. In a move somewhat reminiscent of Gist and D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee's Plan B, the Ocean State's board of regents recently approved a new slate of teacher evaluation requirements. Most school systems will be starting from scratch, as today they not only have no consequences for ineffective educators (or rewards for effective ones), but also review their instructors so infrequently as to make evaluations near-meaningless. Under the new Rhode Island standards, districts are required to revamp evaluation systems to include classroom observation, student performance, and outside input (like parent and student surveys), and to conduct evaluations at least annually. The changes will go into effect mostly in fall 2010, though some districts are waiting until collective bargaining agreements expire in two to three years to implement the changes. Which brings up a point in need of clarification. Though districts are also required to use the new evaluations to help struggling teachers and reward effective classroom practitioners, it's not clear how they will circumvent the union contracts that for the most part champion job protectionism and tenure. Will they take a lesson from the District, which tied these evaluations to teacher recertification, the key in Gist's earlier strategy to circumvent union rules? If Rhode Island's students have anything to say about it, the answer is yes. Rising Ocean State eleventh grader Johanna German explains: "Recertification needs to be connected to what actually goes on in the classroom." RI has got the Gist of teacher review; now it needs to give these evaluation systems teeth.

"R.I. regents approve new guidelines for teachers," by Jennifer D. Jordan, The Providence Journal, August 7, 2009

"R.I. Regents to bolster teacher evaluations," by Jennifer D. Jordan, The Providence Journal, August 6, 2009

Here's one way school districts can cut costs and increase student learning: embrace "grade skipping" for their most advanced pupils. So argue Laura Vanderkam and Richard Whitmire in a recent Ed Week commentary. Compared with traditional "talented and gifted" programs, this is a real bargain; it costs schools very little to put a first grader in third grade math or a fifth grader in sixth grade reading whereas enrichment teachers are another addition to the faculty. And "if a student moves through K-12 in 11 or 12 years, rather than 13, taxpayers save money," conclude the authors. Still, the practice remains unpopular with educators. A 2008 Fordham report found that a whopping 63 percent of teachers opposed accelerating students. For a plan that economical, taking another look seems eminently sensible.

"What Ever Happened to Grade Skipping?," by Laura Vanderkam and Richard Whitmire, Education Week, August 11, 2009 (registration required)

Refuting the widely-held notion that charter schools cater almost exclusively to urban communities and minority students, the Columbus Dispatch reports that suburban and rural students are making up an increasing percentage of charter school rolls in the Buckeye State. Non-district sponsored charters, which are limited by Ohio state law to urban and/or low performing districts, are trying to respond to the demand, moving away from the inner city and relocating on district boundaries to improve access for this new student population. But the Dispatch's presentation of the figures makes it sound like this is an exodus we ought to lament, since the suburban and rural districts that are losing pupils are also losing the dollars that go with them. But what's not mentioned is that the districts losing the most students are also some of the lowest performing and that many of the receiving charters are actually district-sponsored, meaning dollars stay in traditional public-school district coffers (just not the coffers of the suburban and rural districts). Groveport Madison school district, for example, whose charter-exiting student population has increased to 1,100 from 400 a few years ago, failed to meet minimum proficiency standards last year in fifteen of the state's twenty-three state assessments administered in grades 3 through 10. Instead of the hand-wringing over lost students and lost dollars, smart districts will try to figure out why they're leaving in the first place.

"Charters reach farther out," by Jennifer Smith Richards, Columbus Dispatch, August 10, 2009

If you ask education experts to name cutting-edge spots for reform, they are likely to list Washington; New York; New Orleans; and maybe Denver. These are certainly the cities whose systems and superintendents have gotten the lion's share of press attention recently.

But let me suggest an alternative group: Montgomery County, MD; Fairfax County, VA; and Wake County, NC. There are good reasons to believe that these county-wide systems and their peers south of the Mason-Dixon Line are going to be the first to show the break-through progress that has eluded the big urban districts to date.

That hopeful forecast comes from reading Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County Schools, by Stacey M. Childress, Denis P. Doyle, and David A. Thomas. The book admits to being a "celebration" of the progress made in this 140,000-pupil system in the DC suburbs under the decade-long leadership of superintendent Jerry Weast, including rising test scores and dramatic increases in the number of students (particularly poor and minority students) taking and passing Advanced Placement courses.

Much of the story comes down to smart implementation of reform ideas that have been around forever, such as boosting teachers' "instructional capacity," and rethinking the use of time; it helps that this mostly-wealthy district is reasonably well managed and staffed. But what's most provocative is its approach to equity: It unabashedly embraced a Robin Hood strategy of taking resources from the richest parts of the county and driving them to the poorest. (About a quarter of the system's students are poor; close to half are African-American or Hispanic.) In the affluent "Green Zone," Montgomery County mostly left its mostly-successful schools alone, but in the struggling "Red Zone"--where the county's booming population of poor, minority, and immigrant children lives--system leaders poured in extra money, staff, and programs like full-day kindergarten.

The obvious question is how did Weast get away with it? After all, most superintendents would get killed by affluent parents and their school-board representatives for trying such a "steal from the rich" approach. It's evident that Weast is a smart, savvy, down-to-earth executive and communicator, and wise, ensuring that the district's reforms included something for everyone. (He was obsessed with gap closing, but also talked about raising achievement for all students, including those who were already high-performing.) And he wasn't afraid to talk about the need for poor kids to have extra resources in order to catch up, or to take flack from angry parents. As Jay Mathews relays in his review of the book, "A father asked at a tense school board meeting, 'Why can't my child have full-day kindergarten?' Weast replied: 'He can if you move to the Red Zone.'"

But there's another factor that the book only touches on that's crucial to the viability of the Robin Hood approach: Montgomery County's politics. Simply stated, the strategy works because the county has lots of wealthy liberals. (It went 71-28 for Obama.)

Montgomery County is a great example of what political analysts like Bill Bishop and Richard Florida might call the "new Blue" suburbs: It's chocked-full of prosperous, well-educated voters, many of whom work in "creative class" fields such as bio-tech and non-profit management, and who enjoy living in proximity to a big city with all of its cultural amenities. These are exactly the kinds of voters who would be willing to tax themselves at higher rates in order to improve the schools of the less fortunate--while also being politically active enough to ensure that the school system does right by their kids, too.

For those who would like to replicate this approach elsewhere, there's good news and bad news. If you agree with the likes of Bishop and Florida, the inner-ring suburbs of most big cities are going to continue to get bluer, dominated by progressive voters who would be open to a "Red Zone/Green Zone" strategy. (In part that's because conservatives continue to move further out to the exurbs and beyond.) As in Montgomery County, these wealthy liberals might not live right next door to poor families, and their kids might not actually go to school with many children living in poverty, but they are in relatively close proximity and they're certainly served by the same large system.

The bad news is that, in most metropolitan areas, "relatively close proximity" isn't enough. What makes the Montgomery County strategy work is that the district is countywide. In most places of America, on the other hand, it would be chopped up into dozens of smaller districts, delineated at least in part by race and class. Ritzy Potomac would have its own school system while working-class Silver Spring would have another. There'd be no chance to play the Robin Hood game, because no one jurisdiction would be large or diverse enough to spread the wealth around. And that's the case for most inner-ring suburbs in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, from Boston to Philly, Chicago to the Bay Area, and on and on.

Which brings us back to places like Fairfax County, Virginia and Wake County, North Carolina. These, too, are huge districts with diversity, wealth, and progressive voters, making them likely candidates for Montgomery County-style reform. One irony, then, is that the most fertile ground for progressive school reform might turn out to be the Bluer parts of the Red South--thanks to that region's tradition of countywide school systems. And that's hardly insignificant; more than a third of America's hundred largest districts are these Southern countywide systems (13 of them in Florida alone).

And what about those of you who live in other parts of the country and want this sort of strategy to come to your community? Here's my suggestion: Root for gentrification. It's not crazy to think that some big urban systems, particularly in "hip" cities like Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, and D.C., could someday enjoy a more balanced mix of rich and poor that would make the Montgomery County approach feasible there, too.

The South and gentrification, two key drivers of education reform? You heard it here first.

If America's elementary and high schools laid a sounder educational foundation for more of their students, America's colleges would be far more successful at constructing a solid and artful edifice atop it. For millions of today's young people, however, the first task of postsecondary education is to impart the skills, knowledge and habits of mind that our secondary schools neglected because they were consumed by the challenge of backfilling for grades K-8.

Some colleges and universities do a decent job of this. And some--by and large the most selective and prestigious among them--don't need to because they're blessed with students who, thanks to some fortunate combination of good schools, attentive parents and personal drive, emerged from the K-12 gauntlet with a good-to-excellent education.

Yes, despite all the shortcomings, criticisms and nation-at-risk grumbling, tens of thousands of young Americans do well in school, and hundreds of schools do a praiseworthy job, at least for a substantial fraction of their pupils. For these students, college should--and can--be an intellectual feast of substantial entrees, exotic side dishes, novel condiments, and scrumptious desserts.

The educational risks they face, meanwhile, are three: premature vocationalism (too many accounting or teaching-methods courses; not enough art, literature, history and philosophy); being swept up in trendy academic ephemera (gender studies, oppression studies, etc.); and the temptations of personal freedom (partying rather than studying). Their universities could do far more to advise them and structure their campus experience--expecting students to work through all this alone is a major source of higher education's woeful dropout rate--but those who survive are apt to emerge as resourceful if not necessarily superbly educated adults.

At the same time, millions of entering freshmen aren't really ready for "higher" education. (Veteran Boston University president John Silber was known for asking "higher than what?") Besides the on-campus challenges they will encounter, they begin with the handicap of a high-school diploma that signifies "time spent" and "courses taken" but not "skills and knowledge acquired." Studies by ACT have shown that fewer than one-fourth of high-school graduates who take that organization's tests--presumably because they intend to go to college--are academically prepared for college-level work in English, math and science.

That means three-quarters of them bought a lemon of a K-12 education--another big reason why so many of those who do start college subsequently falter. (Less than 60 percent of students in four-year colleges complete degrees within six years. The community-college attrition rate is far worse.)

And that's pretty much what all the school-reforming of recent years has been about, which is culminating in today's push to align K-12's academic standards with the expectations of college professors and employers. Any number of heavy hitters--the National Governors Association, the Gates Foundation, the Obama administration and more--are pressing in this direction. One result, due any day now, will be publication, for the first time in U.S. history, of something akin to "national standards" for high-school completion, at least in the core skills of reading and math.

They'll be voluntary, to be sure, and not every state will embrace them. Nor does adopting them necessarily mean that tomorrow's schools will succeed better than yesterday's at actually readying their pupils to attain those standards--or that states will actually deny diplomas to students who don't reach them.

Indeed, it's not even clear yet whether these new standards will represent an improvement on the motley collection of K-12 expectations that states (and communities and individual schools) have devised on their own. Today's authors of "common" standards must navigate treacherous political shoals--how many young people dare elected officials force to repeat grades or not graduate?--and such academic reefs as the campaign to trade in traditional content knowledge--multiplication tables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Macbeth, etc.--for "21st century skills" like creativity and working well together.

Yet America's long-term well-being depends in no small part on successful navigation through these hazardous waterways. Once upon a time, we could reply to critics that our education system made up in quantity whatever it lacked in quality. Back then, we graduated the world's largest fraction of young people from secondary school and sent them on to higher education.

We had more college degrees in proportion to our population than any other major country. We also boasted more than our share of the world's most esteemed universities.

The last of those claims is probably still true, though major strides are being made by India, China, and other nations, including long-complacent Europe. But several other lands now surpass America in high school and college completion rates; their numbers are rising, while ours are flat.

We need to focus simultaneously on quality and quantity, not trade one off for the other. And doing this right means focusing simultaneously on K-12 and higher education, on ensuring that the former does better at preparing many more young people to succeed in the latter and that our colleges then erect a world-class structure on the foundation that the high schools have built. America can no longer afford to bestow a first-rate education on just a fraction of its population.

This piece originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Marguerite Roza
Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington
July 2009

If you want to avoid sharp increases in class size, you have to pick your poison when it comes to budget slashing, according to a hypothetical analysis done by Marguerite Roza. On average, the teacher pay schedule increases three percent per year of work; that's in addition to a three percent average annual cost of living increase. Together, this means the typical public-school teacher will make six percent more each year. But with district budgets squeezed by the economy, most districts cannot afford those increases without laying off teachers, too. So she runs the numbers through five scenarios, from maintaining the pay increases and the cost of living adjustments to rolling back salaries 5 percent and abandoning the 3 percent salary step increase. Keeping the salary scale as is will result in 17 percent class size increase and laying off 14 percent of the teacher work force. Freezing salaries completely (no step increase; no cost of living increase) still means 7 percent of the teacher work force must be laid off and class sizes will increase by a corresponding 8 percent. But abandoning the step scale all together and slashing salaries by 5 percent will keep both layoffs and class size increases at bay. All options are presented in a handy and easy-to-understand table. This analysis brings to the fore the debate over "last-hired, first-fired" policies and dishes out an unavoidable truth: You can't have it all when you're faced with a down economy--even if you're unionized.