The Education Gadfly Weekly

Chad Aldeman and Andrew J. Rotherham
Education Sector
July 2010

Alderman and Rotherham mince no words: Teacher pensions are a huge problem. First, they drain state and district budgets: The total public pension liability—much of which is owed to teachers—facing the states approaches $500 billion under the most conservative assumptions. In other words, the average American owes nearly $1,500 to his state’s public sector retirees, and each Alaskan owes a whopping $5,133. Second, the “defined benefit” structure of most pension plans was designed for a workf orce that stayed in one job for a career; today, however, employees often switch careers, which means old-style pensions may actually deter high-quality teachers from entering and staying in education. By comparison, the private sector mostly uses “defined contribution” plans. The names say it all: In the former, the benefit—i.e., the payout in the unknown future—is defined, based on a formula that factors in things like years on the job; in the latter, the contribution—i.e., how much the employer pays into the fund now—is what’s set, with no guarantees for future value. This short-term/long-term disconnect undergirds pension politics, too: Politicians have a natural incentive to reward teachers with improved benefits when times are flush, while state laws, even constitutions, often prevent them from ever decreasing benefits when times are scarce. So what to do? The most interesting suggestion here is the little known “cash balance” plan, in which employees have portable accounts that grow based on annual contributions (à la defined contribution), but annual returns are guaranteed so that investment risk is borne by the employer (à la defined benefit). This paper is short and simple, maybe too simple, but an excellent entrée into a complex and critical issue. Read it here.

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus has some choice words for the civil rights crowd: “I know Kanye West said the George W. Bush didn’t like black people, but are civil rights groups really insinuating that Barack Obama doesn’t care about black children?” As it turns out, there is something more “galling” than teachers unions lobbying against school reforms that are good for kids. It’s civil rights groups complaining that Race to the Top dollars aren’t being funneled adequately to minority students, and that some of Obama’s other pushes, such as charter schools, are bad for minority neighborhoods. “At least the teachers unions are, presumably, acting in the economic self-interest of their members,” she says. In a letter released last week by the NAACP, the National Urban League, and five other big organizations, they alleged just these things. Obama was scheduled to speak to the Urban League a few days later and he pushed right back. But there’s more to Marcus’s observations than this tiff between the Oval Office and the Civil Rights lobby. By focusing on the lowest-performing schools—through i3, School Improvement Grants, Race to the Top, the ESEA blueprint, and the bully pulpit—one could argue that Obama is not only not ignoring minority students, but focusing on them. After all, they are disproportionately enrolled in the very schools that are the focus of these programs, policies, and dollars.

“Opinion: Civil rights groups on wrong side of education fight,” by Ruth Marcus, Washington Post, July 31, 2010

Open-source technology has been slow to break into education. It’s not hard to see why: The purveyors of the tools and content that technology would revolutionize—textbook publishers, in particular—are keen to guard their distribution channels and their profits. Virtual charter schools have been the primary users so far; since their instruction is conducted online, making/using online content that is editable and free is the obvious next step. So what happens when a tech exec declares war on the publishers? Watch Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, as his new venture, Oracle, takes online, open-source textbooks to the nation’s school systems. Those systems, he points out, spend $8-15 billion every year on textbooks. What if we could lower that cost to…zero? The biggest roadblock is in Sacramento and Austin, where legislators of the two biggest textbook markets choose and approve texts for use in their states’ public schools. But California, at least, seems to be coming around. It’s no simple matter, though. What happens to quality control? Accuracy? Do we really want students learning from the, ostensibly, “collective” knowledge of the internet (think: Wikipedia)? Then again, done right, breaking down the textbook monopoly would likely improve the quality, lessen the bias, and lower the exorbitant cost of K-12 materials. That would be a win for everyone except, of course, the publishers.

“$200 Textbook vs Free. You Do the Math,” by Ashlee Vance, New York Times, July 31, 2010

If given the option, would you live, work, sleep, and socialize all in the same place? According to Ron Beit, the answer is yes. That’s the choice he’ll be presenting to a cadre of teachers who will staff Teachers Village in Newark’s historic but blighted Four Corners District. Approved by the city a few months ago, and set to break ground this summer, the $120 million complex is to include three charter schools serving 1,000 students and 221 residential units for their teachers, and presumably others. Nearby, a complementary retail corridor would be installed, and down the road, a hotel, condos, and a parking garage. The purpose is multifold: Rejuvenate a dying neighborhood, boost a flagging economy, attract young professionals looking for an urban lifestyle, and present (presumably) more good charter options to Newark’s low-achieving population. We hope the accompanying charter operators are as top-notch as this plan is ambitious.

“Charter School Teacher Villages being constructed in New Jersey,” by Danny Weil, The Daily Censored, July 31, 2010

“Summer learning loss” is well documented and distressing. Millions of kids laze around during the long summer vacation and forget chunks of what they had learned by June. This problem is most acute among those that can least afford it: low-income students without the resources or opportunity to attend summer camp or enrichment programs, and whose parents may not push hard on out-of-school reading. That’s one reason many high-performing charter schools operate virtually year round. (By contrast, states would rather cut the already-too-short school year—remember the Hawaii debacle?—to save money.) But extending the regular school year may not be right for everyone. So say some education entrepreneurs who see summer as an opportunity to experiment with innovative new curricula, hire excellent but unconventional teaching staff, and execute programs not allowed under traditional public-school protocols.  Why keep kids longer in schools that are failing them for 180 days a year? Summer vacation may be an archaic relic of our agrarian past, but it’s also an opportunity for all sorts of learning.

“The Case Against Summer Vacation,” by David von Drehle, TIME Magazine, August 2, 2010

In a July 21 New York Times cover story, reporter Tamar Lewin rightfully noted “the surprise of many in education circles…” that 27 states had already committed to adopting the new Common Core academic standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Lewin goes on to attribute this surprise to “states’ long tradition of insisting on retaining local control over curriculum” (emphasis added). With this simple statement—the equating of standards with curriculum—the author perpetuates an egregious error in the understanding of education policy. Though the politics of local control touches both standards and curriculum, educators and the public will never get policy right as long as too many conflate the two.

The creation, promotion and acceptance of the Common Core Standards does represent a sea change in the way this country is coming to think about its education system. These advances follow from “wave one” of reforms, begun during the Clinton years with the passage of Goals 2000, as well as acceptance of the idea that states should develop high academic standards. “Wave two” was a distorted follow-up, characterized by pumped up federal intervention enshrined in the test-based accountability of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Now comes Obama with another mix of “reforms,” the most promising of which take up, yet again, the standards agenda. As a recent Thomas B. Fordham Institute report suggests, the clarity, rigor, and coherence of the new Common Core Standards for mathematics and English language arts represent a significant improvement over most states’ existing standards. So, hats off to the states which have come so far as to adopt them.

But, aside from a few enlightened souls, most of education’s brains trust still fail to recognize that curriculum is where the rubber hits the road. The road is about implementation and implementation requires curriculum—that is, the selection and sequencing of essential content knowledge so that teachers can produce a sensible year’s worth of expected learning in the core domains of math, literature, science, history, civics, the arts, foreign languages, and health and physical education.

More detailed than even the most thorough state standards, but less detailed than textbooks and daily lesson plans, a high-quality common core curriculum would clearly define what teachers should teach and when students should learn it.

Over the years, a number of high-profile education leaders have made the case for a common curriculum. The list includes: Albert Shanker (see tp://reuther.wayne.edu/files/65.41.pdf">here, here, and here); E.D. Hirsch, of course (here, here, here, here); Diane Ravitch (here, here, here); Bill Schmidt (here, here); David Cohen (here, here, here); Marshall Smith (here); Randi Weingarten (here); Grover Whitehurst (here); Lynne Munson (here); Checker Finn (here); and others.

But somehow, the argument has failed to take hold. Why? For one thing, because of continuing (and often irrational) preoccupations about local control. But also because—and this is likely an elephant in the room—aligning education around a common core curriculum the way most developed nations do (see here and here, for example) means a virtual overhaul of the way American education operates.

But think about what doing this might actually mean for all the pop solutions currently on the table—good teacher preparation (education schools might have to acknowledge that student curriculum actually matters), good teacher evaluation (we might even consider the fairness of having a consistent set of expectations for what students should know), good research (imagine research not plagued by an inability to truly control for the variation in what students are expected to learn), performance pay, targeting low performing schools, assessments to measure defined accomplishment rather than to differentiate students, and on and on.

Hopefully, the curriculum issue is starting to emerge from the shadows. Two efforts have more promise than most: E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation is plugging away at aligning its successful curriculum sequence to the new Common Core Standards. Also, the Common Core organization (no relation to the Common Core Standards effort) is developing curriculum maps aligned with the new Common Core English language arts standards. (Full disclosure: E.D. Hirsh is a board member of the Albert Shanker Institute. Barbara Byrd Bennett and Diane Ravitch, who are also our board members, and Toni Cortese, our secretary treasurer, are Trustees of Common Core.)

These players, and others like them who listen to teachers and think seriously about effective implementation, will eventually determine whether or not standards get the curriculum foundation they need to make a difference. Education reporters and others who speak policy to practice need to parse the agenda’s vocabulary, draw informed distinctions about policies, and keep a foot on school grounds once in awhile.

This piece first appeared as a blog post on the Albert Shanker Institute’s Shanker Blog. 

Kemble is the Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute.

You know it’s an election year when the Democratic Speaker of the House recalls her comrades from summer break to Washington for an emergency vote to bail out the nation’s schools. This action might be wrapped in the garb of “economic stimulus” but its true intention is to stimulate the party’s base—the teachers’ unions—whose enthusiasm is sorely needed if catastrophic losses are to be avoided in November. Gadfly understands that the $10 billion edujobs fund—to be offset, so they claim, by future cuts in food stamps!—will have the beneficial effect of keeping some very good—and young—teachers from getting pink slips. Hooray for that. But it will also further kick down the road the inevitable belt-tightening that awaits our bloated education system—starting with the removal of America’s ineffective teachers, a step that Eric Hanushek says will actually improve student achievement. For almost two years, President Obama has been calling for an “Era of Responsibility.” This is more evidence that such an epoch has not yet arrived.

“US Senate clears way for 26 billion dollar spending bill,” Associated Press, August 4, 2010

Chad Aldeman and Andrew J. Rotherham
Education Sector
July 2010

Alderman and Rotherham mince no words: Teacher pensions are a huge problem. First, they drain state and district budgets: The total public pension liability—much of which is owed to teachers—facing the states approaches $500 billion under the most conservative assumptions. In other words, the average American owes nearly $1,500 to his state’s public sector retirees, and each Alaskan owes a whopping $5,133. Second, the “defined benefit” structure of most pension plans was designed for a workf orce that stayed in one job for a career; today, however, employees often switch careers, which means old-style pensions may actually deter high-quality teachers from entering and staying in education. By comparison, the private sector mostly uses “defined contribution” plans. The names say it all: In the former, the benefit—i.e., the payout in the unknown future—is defined, based on a formula that factors in things like years on the job; in the latter, the contribution—i.e., how much the employer pays into the fund now—is what’s set, with no guarantees for future value. This short-term/long-term disconnect undergirds pension politics, too: Politicians have a natural incentive to reward teachers with improved benefits when times are flush, while state laws, even constitutions, often prevent them from ever decreasing benefits when times are scarce. So what to do? The most interesting suggestion here is the little known “cash balance” plan, in which employees have portable accounts that grow based on annual contributions (à la defined contribution), but annual returns are guaranteed so that investment risk is borne by the employer (à la defined benefit). This paper is short and simple, maybe too simple, but an excellent entrée into a complex and critical issue. Read it here.