The Education Gadfly Weekly

Forget federal politics for a minute. There is one area where Washington deserves kudos for its leadership: school choice. As this Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) brief explains, D.C. has one of the most extensive choice programs in the nation. During the 2008-09 year, only 35 percent of District students attended their traditional neighborhood school. The others could be found attending “out-of-boundary” publics (31 percent) or charter schools (34 percent). Furthermore, choice programs seem to be reaching those who need them most—poor and minority youngsters are significantly more likely to exercise choice than their affluent and white peers. Data also show a willingness to add several miles to the daily commute in order to attend the school of their choice. Of course, D.C.’s choice initiative isn’t flawless. This study finds evidence of “cream-skimming”—whereby relatively high-scoring students (still poor and minority, mind you) are likelier to take advantage of choice. In D.C., students who opted into out-of-boundary public schools entered their new school one-sixth of a standard deviation ahead of their “staying” peers in reading and one-fifth of a standard deviation ahead in math. (Students opting into charters significantly outperformed their “staying” peers, as well.) A difficult issue indeed, but surely not a decisive argument against school-choice programs, since the alternative—keeping everybody padlocked to failing schools—is hardly preferable.

This comprehensive look at learning disabilities (LD), neurologically based disorders that include diagnoses like dyslexia, exposes two truths. First, confusion about and misidentification of LD—a problem we described over a decade ago—persists, though improved instruction and intervention have helped curb the number of identifications over the last ten years (also illustrated in a more recent Fordham study). Second, there’s still a dearth of up-to-date research on how to support students with bona fide LD and improve their educational outcomes. The paper reports some familiar facts—boys are more likely to be identified as having LD, as are minority students, and those in poverty or unemployed (the study also collected data on the adult LD population). Further, students with LD are, on average, 3.4 years behind their grade level in reading and 3.2 years behind in math. The biennial report also furnishes many less-familiar stats. Notably, while the percentage of students with LD receiving a high school diploma increased from 52 to 64 percent from 2000 to 2009 (and dropouts fell from 40 to 22 percent), only 10 percent of all students with LD enroll in a four-year college. In addition, students with LD rarely use technologies to help moderate their disabilities: Just 6 percent learn with computers more frequently than their classmates and a mere 1 percent use software designed for students like themselves. Better and more targeted hardware and software may hold one key to further improving graduation and college-going rates—and doing so in a cost-effective manner.

This survey report from Emily Feistritzer’s National Center for Education Information (NCEI) shows the changing face of America’s teacher workforce—and offers glimmers of hope to reformers looking for allies in the teacher ranks. (Are you watching, Steve Brill?) Of the large group of teachers who have been on the job five years or less, a third received their training through alternative programs. Such educators, in addition to being more racially diverse and STEM-oriented than their colleagues, are decidedly more supportive of ed-reform initiatives. Seventy percent of alt-cert teachers favor performance-based pay (compared to 58 percent of those traditionally trained), 52 percent say “yea” to axing teacher tenure (versus 31 percent), and 27 percent note that the unions need to go (compared to 19 percent). Reformers ought to enlist these non-traditional teachers—and thinkers—in the larger policy battles ASAP.

This report from the University of Georgia and Kronley and Associates analyzes the evolution of philanthropic giving to teachers and teaching over the past 150 years (with a focus on the 2000s). While the dollar amounts doled out to these types of programs pale in comparison to overall K-12 spending, there is much about their directional flow that is worth noting. From 2000 to 2008, national and regional philanthropies donated over $680 million to improve K-12 teachers and teaching—with close to a third of that money going to Teach For America. And it’s not just because of TFA’s strong track record or stellar fundraising team (though these reasons play a part)—funders have prioritized teacher-recruitment efforts over the last decade and have targeted investment in organizations they feel have strong leadership. Moreover, funders are becoming much more hands-on about the money they hand out. They’re learning lessons from ineffective philanthropic giving and targeting their resources to policies they feel bring about change, like alternative-certification pathways and performance-based evaluations and pay. It’s hard to say whether all of this money has added up to improved teacher effectiveness, but the direction in which it is going is certainly promising.

Jay Mathews isn’t the only smart person to rave about Steve Brill’s new book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools. Tiger-mom Amy Chua, Governor Chris Christie, Mayor Cory Booker, and Tom Brokaw are all pumped about it, too, or so they say on the dust jacket.

Brill is relatively new to the ed-reform wars—which may have been one of his prime assets while penning this volume; he doesn’t appear to have any particular ax to grind or ideology to advance. Though a neophyte in this realm, he’s a veteran journalist, and a fine one at that, who first passed through the ed-reform looking glass when reporting on New York’s notorious (thanks to Brill) “rubber rooms” for The New Yorker. He’s Gotham-based, himself, and many of the battle scenes in this long but compelling tome are situated there. (Joel Klein and Randi Weingarten get the most mentions in a fifteen-page index.)

His approach resembles Bob Woodward’s recent volumes on the real wars of the Bush and Obama eras: plenty of inside scoops, vivid quotes, extensive reportage, evocative vignettes and telling examples, lots of short chapters, a fast-paced narrative, and an ample supply of couldn’t-invent-‘em characters.

Not many ed-reform books are like this (Joe Williams's came close) and Brill’s repays attention, not just because it’s a rollicking romp but because it works through many issues, conflicts, interests, episodes, and people and comes to a measured set of conclusions that won’t please anyone in particular but deserve serious reflection. If you want just the conclusions, you could limit yourself to Brill’s final chapter (“A marathon, not a sprint”), but then you’d miss all the evidence that leads up to it.

Still, a few wee excerpts from that chapter will give you both the flavor, some of the wisdom, and at least a couple of ideas that seem totally harebrained at the start but, in the context of his overall examination, may not be so crazy after all.

* “Dave Levin…was giving me a tour one afternoon of KIPP Infinity in upper Manhattan…. ‘So you must feel pretty good,’ I said. ‘Well, that’s it, I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I’m still failing 60 percent of the time.’”

* “Levin acknowledged that he was at least free to try because he was not straitjacketed by a union contract.…Then he stopped, looked up, and delivered a dose of reality: ‘If you tore up every union contract in the country…then you would have to train and motivate not 70,000 or 80,000 teachers…but 3 million teachers.”

* “In the summer of 2010, when I heard Arne Duncan remark that ‘you can’t fire your way to the top,’ I thought it a clever turn of phrase intended to mollify the unions. Duncan was actually making an important point. For, as Levin explained, the bigger hurdle is that ‘you can’t expect 3 million people, or even a half million, to be as talented as our [KIPP] teachers are, or as willing to work these kinds of hours and do this as intensely as they do. You have to devise support systems…to make moderately talented people better. You can’t do this by depending only on the kinds of exceptional people we have around here.’”

* “‘I feel overwhelmed, underappreciated, and underpaid,’ one Harlem Success teacher told me. ‘I work from 7:30 to 5:30 in the building and then go home and work some more….I think we are doing a great job so I keep at it. But there is no way I can do this beyond another year or two….This model just cannot scale.’”

* “[Geoffrey] Canada is an extraordinary person. So is Dave Levin. And Wendy Kopp. And Jessica Reid. So are thousands of spectacular, equally driven teachers in traditional public schools across the country. We can be led and inspired by extraordinary men and women….But they will lead us to the right place only if we can figure out a realistic way to motivate and enable the less than extraordinary in the rank and file….”

* “In fact, if Michael Bloomberg really wanted to go for a touchdown in education reform…he could try the ultimate Nixon-to-China play: He would…make Randi Weingarten the schools chancellor….As chancellor, Weingarten would have to shed her habit of making offhand overstatements than can easily be disproved…but…I can see her now standing with Bloomberg…declaring that the times have changed….Only now her constituency would be the children.”

* “This Weingarten-as-chancellor fantasy aside, the fact is that unions and their leaders can and should be enlisted to help stand up those in the rank and file who are well-motivated and able but are not extraordinary. That doesn’t mean yielding to the unions’ narrow interests; it means continuing to enhance the political climate and, with it, the backbone of the political leaders who negotiate with the unions, so that the unions will yield to the interests of the children their members are supposed to serve.”

And on he goes. Is the whole thing a naïve, wishful-thinking fantasy? Or is Brill precisely correct to suggest that the only way to bring reform to scale is to figure out how to enlist—and enable—the mass of educators who teach the mass of U.S. kids? “Waiting for the scalable solution, as the hedge funders would call it,” he observes, “is no better than waiting for Superman.”

Yes, he wants it both ways: “Tough legislation to trump the unions, such as that pushed by Johnston in Colorado, is necessary. But taking the next step and eliminating the unions is not likely to improve schools….If the country has to sign up the platoons that Dave Levin says are needed, then giving teachers some say, through their representatives, about their professional lives…is a long-term positive, not a negative.”

Still, we’ve come a considerable distance, he concludes: “Looked at from the perspective of how far they’ve come from Wendy Kopp’s college thesis, from Jon Schnur’s fruitless drafting of speeches for Al Gore and John Kerry, from Congressman George Miller’s losing a 434-1 vote on teacher certification and performance pay, from Bill and Melinda Gates’s or Eli Broad’s early missteps in education philanthropy, from Joel Klein’s inability to order his own human resources department to produce data on teacher effectiveness…they should all be taking bows.”

“But this is only the first mile of the marathon.”

How much endurance do you have?

Don't look so surprised 
(Photo by Victor Bezrukov 19)

Though the specifics are still unclear, the debt-ceiling compromise will—at base—spell big cuts to federal spending. And that will, in turn, mean less money for the states—education or otherwise. Bleak? Perhaps. But district leaders (and parents and the public): Pick your chins up off the floor. We’ve been sitting under the shadow of this “new normal” in education spending for some time now—and shouldn’t expect simply to wait out the eclipse. Instead, smart adjustments can yield the savings needed. Don’t slash teacher jobs; think about lifting class-size ratios or rethinking Cadillac benefits packages. Don’t eliminate art and music; think about more efficient ways of delivering them instead. As someone named Rahm said not so long ago, you never want to waste a serious crisis.

One oft overlooked consequence of the current financial situation is that many newly minted teachers, straight out of the nation’s 1,200-odd ed schools, are finding it hard to get work. In comes former-Teachers College president (and ed-school critic) Art Levine with an interesting notion: If we need fewer teachers at present, we presumably need fewer programs through which to train them. Which is an opportunity, he explains, for states to shutter some of their lower-quality programs (more on this from NCTQ next year)—and allow those still in operation to be much more selective. But then he stumbles. Going further, he writes “It is also expensive to operate multiple systems for educating teachers, especially if the reason is that one system is not working well,” essentially calling for a clamp down on promising new models of teacher certification, like Teach For America—that themselves have very high standards and selectiveness. So read Levine’s article—but take his advice selectively.

Forget federal politics for a minute. There is one area where Washington deserves kudos for its leadership: school choice. As this Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) brief explains, D.C. has one of the most extensive choice programs in the nation. During the 2008-09 year, only 35 percent of District students attended their traditional neighborhood school. The others could be found attending “out-of-boundary” publics (31 percent) or charter schools (34 percent). Furthermore, choice programs seem to be reaching those who need them most—poor and minority youngsters are significantly more likely to exercise choice than their affluent and white peers. Data also show a willingness to add several miles to the daily commute in order to attend the school of their choice. Of course, D.C.’s choice initiative isn’t flawless. This study finds evidence of “cream-skimming”—whereby relatively high-scoring students (still poor and minority, mind you) are likelier to take advantage of choice. In D.C., students who opted into out-of-boundary public schools entered their new school one-sixth of a standard deviation ahead of their “staying” peers in reading and one-fifth of a standard deviation ahead in math. (Students opting into charters significantly outperformed their “staying” peers, as well.) A difficult issue indeed, but surely not a decisive argument against school-choice programs, since the alternative—keeping everybody padlocked to failing schools—is hardly preferable.

This comprehensive look at learning disabilities (LD), neurologically based disorders that include diagnoses like dyslexia, exposes two truths. First, confusion about and misidentification of LD—a problem we described over a decade ago—persists, though improved instruction and intervention have helped curb the number of identifications over the last ten years (also illustrated in a more recent Fordham study). Second, there’s still a dearth of up-to-date research on how to support students with bona fide LD and improve their educational outcomes. The paper reports some familiar facts—boys are more likely to be identified as having LD, as are minority students, and those in poverty or unemployed (the study also collected data on the adult LD population). Further, students with LD are, on average, 3.4 years behind their grade level in reading and 3.2 years behind in math. The biennial report also furnishes many less-familiar stats. Notably, while the percentage of students with LD receiving a high school diploma increased from 52 to 64 percent from 2000 to 2009 (and dropouts fell from 40 to 22 percent), only 10 percent of all students with LD enroll in a four-year college. In addition, students with LD rarely use technologies to help moderate their disabilities: Just 6 percent learn with computers more frequently than their classmates and a mere 1 percent use software designed for students like themselves. Better and more targeted hardware and software may hold one key to further improving graduation and college-going rates—and doing so in a cost-effective manner.

This survey report from Emily Feistritzer’s National Center for Education Information (NCEI) shows the changing face of America’s teacher workforce—and offers glimmers of hope to reformers looking for allies in the teacher ranks. (Are you watching, Steve Brill?) Of the large group of teachers who have been on the job five years or less, a third received their training through alternative programs. Such educators, in addition to being more racially diverse and STEM-oriented than their colleagues, are decidedly more supportive of ed-reform initiatives. Seventy percent of alt-cert teachers favor performance-based pay (compared to 58 percent of those traditionally trained), 52 percent say “yea” to axing teacher tenure (versus 31 percent), and 27 percent note that the unions need to go (compared to 19 percent). Reformers ought to enlist these non-traditional teachers—and thinkers—in the larger policy battles ASAP.

This report from the University of Georgia and Kronley and Associates analyzes the evolution of philanthropic giving to teachers and teaching over the past 150 years (with a focus on the 2000s). While the dollar amounts doled out to these types of programs pale in comparison to overall K-12 spending, there is much about their directional flow that is worth noting. From 2000 to 2008, national and regional philanthropies donated over $680 million to improve K-12 teachers and teaching—with close to a third of that money going to Teach For America. And it’s not just because of TFA’s strong track record or stellar fundraising team (though these reasons play a part)—funders have prioritized teacher-recruitment efforts over the last decade and have targeted investment in organizations they feel have strong leadership. Moreover, funders are becoming much more hands-on about the money they hand out. They’re learning lessons from ineffective philanthropic giving and targeting their resources to policies they feel bring about change, like alternative-certification pathways and performance-based evaluations and pay. It’s hard to say whether all of this money has added up to improved teacher effectiveness, but the direction in which it is going is certainly promising.