The Education Gadfly Weekly

One might fairly wonder why the Council on Foreign Relations, of all outfits, would wade into school reform, but in fact the task force that CFR convened on this topic has made a valuable contribution.

We’re accustomed to reformers arguing that America’s international economic competitiveness hinges on a better-educated workforce; we’re used to parallel (and equally justified) assertions that our civic future and cultural vitality depend on kids learning a great deal more in school. What the CFR team has done is remind us that revitalizing our education system is also essential for the defense of the nation itself. In their words, “America’s failure to educate is affecting its national security….In the defense and aerospace industries, many executives fear this problem [dearth of adequately skilled people] will accelerate in the coming decade….Most young people do not qualify for military service….The U.S. State Department and intelligence agencies are facing critical language shortfalls in areas of strategic interest….”

They’re not exactly saying that nuclear warheads will rain onto our population centers the day after tomorrow unless our schools become more effective but they are reminding us that the intersection of national wellbeing and education has many dimensions. One may usefully recall the post-Sputnik angst that led to the National Defense Education Act and a flurry of other efforts to strengthen the U.S. education system as well as the stirring and alarmist rhetoric of A Nation at Risk—now almost three decades ago.

CFR’s thirty-member task force consisted of all manner of luminaries from education, business, government, and more. (In England, they would say it’s a roster of “the great and the good.”) Its co-chairs were veteran education reformer Joel Klein and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Its analysis of what’s wrong in K-12 education is exemplary, wide-ranging without kitchen-sink-ism, data-filled without exhaustion. Its summary of “current policies and reform efforts” is clear-eyed, perceptive, and hits the key elements, although maybe nothing you haven’t seen before.

The most interesting and valuable parts of the report are its eleven pages of recommendations (followed by almost as many pages of “additional and dissenting views” from individual task force members, mainly Randi Weingarten and Linda Darling-Hammond).

What the CFR team has done is remind us that revitalizing our education system is also essential for the defense of the nation itself.

The recommendations come under three headings: (1) expand the Common Core and kindred efforts to span more of the essential curriculum; (2) enhance school choice and competition, with an eye to quality, too; and (3) launch what they call a “national security readiness audit.”

Let’s take these up in turn. And keep in mind as we go that the Task Force report has produced palpitations among some of our conservative pals, especially my friend Bill Evers, who sees a “federally-supported curriculum” lurking in its pages.

The curricular recommendations per se involve Uncle Sam not at all. The panel calls upon “governors to collectively create expectations for language learning and world culture and history” as well as science, technology, civics, and a slightly disguised version of twenty-first century skills (e.g. “imaginative problem solving”). Then they turn to “meaningful [ugh] assessments” that would minimize multiple choice testing and maximize “more technologically advanced assessments that simulate real-world applications of skills and knowledge.” On, then, to a complicated set of suggestions for implementation that does involve several federal incentives and entanglements, including the thought-provoking recommendation that the “Defense Policy Board, which advises the secretary of defense…should evaluate the learning standards of education in America.”

Hmm. It’s easy to understand the antennae that this one would quiver—and not just Bill Evers’s. Because the military is so top-down, so accustomed to a chain-of-command that pays scant heed to state borders or local idiosyncrasies, it’s hard to picture a group that is accustomed to defense policy adjusting to the bottom-up nature and federalist structure of K-12 education. Which is to say, entangling the Defense Policy Board in academic standards might well point toward excessive curricular control by Washington over the long haul.

On the other hand, the Task Force’s excellent advice regarding school choice should warm the hearts not only of conservatives but of everyone interested in conferring more quality educational options on kids who need them most. The panel even goes beyond the usual bounds of public education to encourage vouchers and similar means of accessing good private schools. Which is, of course, why this set of policy recommendations prompted the most dissents by individual task force members, beginning (naturally) with Ms. Weingarten.

The most original suggestion in the report is the proposed “national security readiness audit,” an ambitious plan to gather, analyze, and release comprehensive school-level data in a single national report (including international comparisons) that is intended to prod educators to use such data, to trigger accountability-style interventions, and to keep the public better informed about the performance of U.S. schools. The task force “believes that a targeted, annual campaign, led by the Department of Education in collaboration with the U.S. states, the Departments of Defense and State and the intelligence agencies, could have this impact.”

Well, maybe. Or maybe it would just yield the sort of brief-flurry-of-interest-followed-by-big-yawn that we associated with annual reports by the National Education Goals Panel during the 1990’s. In reality, the annual Condition of Education report from NCES already contains much of the relevant information. It’s just that nobody says much about it or does much with it. (C’mon, Arne Duncan and Leon Panetta and James Clapper [director of national intelligence], show what you can do with data!)

On balance, this is a solid, imaginative, well-written report from smart, knowledgeable folks gathered under an unexpected umbrella, and a timely, worthy reminder that education goes well beyond domestic policy. It’s certainly no cause for alarm on the right. Indeed, the task force’s own dissenting members signal the heartburn it creates on the left side of the education establishment.

Independent Task Force report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security, U.S. Education Reform and National Security, (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, March 2012).

Arne Duncan may be excited about the potential of his School Improvement Grant (SIG) initiative to turn around our nation’s lowest-performing schools, but the folks at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) aren’t convinced. This qualitative report from CRPE examines the progress of Washington State’s SIG-funded school districts between December 2009 and June 2011. (More background on SIG here.) Forty-four interviews at the school, district, and state levels five months after SIG implementation began reveal signs of incremental changes in schools, but no sweeping shifts in achievement or culture. According to the report, the hindrances to bold reforms were timing, communication, and an aversion to risk taking. SIG’s constricted timeline (just two months between program announcement and application due date) negatively impacted the initial SIG application, the planning phase, negotiations with unions, and the hiring process, thus impairing implementation. Additionally, vague communication from districts left schools unaware of the SIG program’s expectations. Finally, most of the schools that did adopt changes opted for the least disruptive interventions (replacing the school leader only, rather than the whole staff, for example). To spur more fundamental reform, CRPE offers recommendations for players at each level: The feds should make SIG more competitive and allow time for a planning phase as part of the application process; states should clearly communicate the program’s goals to districts and schools; districts should open a turnaround-specific office to work with schools; and schools should reject the transformation option as it requires a lot of time and money with arguably little results. Before the next round of SIG, all stakeholders would be wise to follow these recommendations.

Sarah Yatsko, Robin Lake, Elizabeth Cooley Nelson, and Melissa Bowen, Tinkering Toward Transformation: A Look at Federal School Improvement Grant Implementation (Seattle, WA: Center on Reinventing Public Education, March 2012).

In November, we learned from the National Study of CMO Effectiveness (a joint initiative by Mathematica and the Center on Reinventing Public Education) that the quality of charter-management organizations varies dramatically. (These findings were confirmed in second report released by the pair in January.) This latest from Mathematica and CRPE probes some of the common practices of high-quality CMOs. Based on data from the middle schools of twenty-two CMOs, we now learn that consistently applied school-wide behavior programs (which outline clear rewards and demerits for specific actions, hold “zero tolerance” for violence, and promote a strong culture of learning) and regular teacher coaching are the strategies most strongly linked to higher student achievement. Interestingly, other popular (and reformy) approaches didn’t correlate with better performance, including boosting instructional time, adopting performance-based teacher evaluation and compensation schemes, and using formative-assessment data frequently. To illustrate further how the two successful strategies work on the ground, the report then profiles five CMOs that utilize them—Aspire Public Schools, Inner City Education Foundation, KIPP DC, Uncommon Schools, and Yes Prep Public Schools. Uncommon Schools, for example, pushes a school culture based on its MAPP (Mindful, Achieving, Professional, and Prepared) and SLANT (Sit up straight, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod for understand, and Track the speaker) tenets. (Pioneered by KIPP’s founders, KIPP DC also uses the SLANT technique.) On the teacher-coaching front, Aspire, Yes Prep, and KIPP DC observe their teachers weekly—Uncommon Schools observes teachers more frequently than that. Novice teachers receive intense classroom-management training while experienced teachers’ coaching is more instructional “fine tuning.” Both types of teachers see quick feedback from observations. While these are correlated and not causal trends, the showcasing of what works for high-quality CMOs should be welcome insight to all school leaders.

Lake, Robin, Melissa Bowen, Allison Demeritt, Moira McCullough, Joshua Haimson, and Brian Gill, Learning from Charter School Management Organizations: Strategies for Student Behavior and Teacher Coaching (Princeton, NJ: Mathematica Policy Research; Seattle, WA: Center on Reinventing Public Education, 2012).

A great many education-policy types, mainly defenders of the status quo, are smitten with Finland. There, kids have little homework, high-stakes tests are rare, and teachers get lots of money and respect. This self-congratulatory but wide-ranging and informative book by Finnish Ministry of Education Director General Pasi Sahlberg gives such folks aid and comfort, but it also probes key elements of the Finnish system that have gotten less attention on our shores. The most important: Finland’s uber-competitive teacher-training programs, which ensure quality on the front end and allow Finnish schools to confer greater autonomy on teachers in their classrooms. Emulating Finland in that respect would be good for American education. But are the defenders of the status quo ready to embrace TFA-level standards for all entrants to ed schools? Even if that means slaughtering the ed-school cash cow? Finland-lovers, we await your reply.

Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from the Educational Change in Finland? (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2011).

On the podcast’s iron anniversary, Rick and Mike reflect on the highs and lows of education policy since 2006. Rick also provides a glimpse into the future (of the Common Core) while Amber explains what exactly can be learned from charter school management organizations.

Amber's Research Minute

Learning from Charter School Management Organizations: Strategies for Student Behavior and Teacher Coaching

Implementation, Implementation, Implementation

As of April 5, 2012, forty-five states plus the District of Columbia had adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). While they deserve plaudits for strengthening their previously lackluster expectations for students, nobody should expect standards-adoption alone to drive academic gains. Nor will the development of curriculum, adoption of new textbooks, and ramped up professional development—some of the “stuff” that folks refer to when they talk about “implementing” the CCSS—mean much unless accompanied by means of holding individuals and buildings accountable for progress. To get real traction from new standards, states must also install robust accountability systems that incentivize, support, reward, and sanction districts, schools, students, teachers, and other adults.

This is the perfect time for states to reboot their accountability systems, not only because of the opportunity presented by CCSS, but also due to the availability of waivers from some of the accountability shackles and oddities of No Child Left Behind. Moreover, most of the ESEA reauthorization bills now creaking through Congress would give states even wider latitude to design their own approaches to accountability.

But what do strong state accountability systems look like? And how strong are they today?

The time is ripe for states to revamp their approaches to accountability.

To examine those questions, Fordham probed the accountability systems of seven states as part of our new pilot study, “Defining Strong State Accountability Systems: How Can Better Standards Gain Greater Traction?” Our investigation revealed three key strengths in their present accountability systems and three worrisome weaknesses. First, the strengths:

1. Several states have developed clear and comprehensive means for rating district and school performance. Robust accountability systems turn multiple data points into user-friendly labels. For instance, Florida and (more recently) Indiana use A-to-F grades to denote performance. These identifiers are informed by a basket of achievement measures, including student proficiency and growth—but also by such other indicators as graduation rates, attendance, AP/IB course-taking, achievement gaps, and performance on college entrance tests.

2. States are collecting more and better data and making progress toward user-friendliness. Well-functioning accountability systems provide data on state, district, school, and student performance to help educators, parents, and taxpayers understand and evaluate school results. Making these data user-friendly is a continuing challenge, but states such as Ohio are making strides. In addition to its school report card, Ohio also issues a web-based interactive Local Report Card (iLRC) that allows easy comparison among schools and districts.

3. Teacher accountability is improving. More states, such as Florida, Indiana, and Colorado, are incorporating student achievement measures into teacher evaluations, which then (sometimes) inform employment decisions. More states are also questioning automatic tenure after two or three years and experimenting with performance-pay options.

Now, the weaknesses:

1. States still struggle to meld their own accountability systems with federal requirements. Since enactment of NCLB, they’ve tried to integrate state and federal requirements so as to avoid conflicting messages. The ESEA waivers will likely help but so far few jurisdictions have managed this synthesis. Massachusetts, for example, has designed a unified system that allows it to report one marker of school performance based on both state and federal measures, and to set individual-group improvement targets that also meet federal requirements for each school and district.

2. Few states employ strong incentives to drive school, district, principal, and student performance. Many have policies that seek to intervene in instances of weak performance but few incentivize or reward superior performers. Recent budget reductions have diminished such incentives for schools, teachers, and principals. States do a tad better rewarding students; a couple of them offer high flyers automatic college admission or financial aid.  

3. Sanctions are non-existent or ineffective. Transparent data must be coupled with meaningful actions that address low performance. Previous research has shown that NCLB’s cascade of interventions was unsuccessful, in part because districts took the road of least resistance. Of course, the federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) are intended to address this problem, but many districts are struggling to remove ineffective teachers and recruit high-quality leaders. If school sanctions such as replacement of staff, building closures, and charter conversions—and student sanctions such as “third-grade reading guarantees” and “no pass, no play” policies—are to succeed we need courageous leaders willing to champion  them and meaningful incentives that reward such behavior.

The insights drawn from those in-depth analyses led us to posit that strong state accountability systems share six essential elements:

On reflection, developing and adopting the Common Core was the easy part.

1. Challenging, clear, and specific standards in all core content areas, and rigorous assessment of those standards;
2. Accessible, actionable data, including summative outcome information as well as formative data to drive continuous improvement;
3. Annual designations for each school and district that differentiate—and underscore–their performance;
4. Rewards and consequences to drive improvement at the school and district levels;
5. Rewards and consequences to drive improvement at the individual student level; and
6. Rewards and consequences to drive improvement at the teacher and administrator level.

With all six elements in place, policymakers will boost the odds that their schools will deliver more learning and that their students will absorb it.

On reflection, developing and adopting the Common Core was the easy part. Developing aligned and rigorous assessments is trickier—and the consortia now working on that project have so far revealed very little about their progress. Yet accountability remains the greatest challenge because few people relish playing tough and elected officials who do so almost never get thanked. While waivers and the Common Core represent a golden opportunity to improve the odds for kids, without that commitment to doing the dirty work of holding everyone in education accountable, the first two steps may prove fruitless.

Will states make the most of the opportunities before them? Or will they recoil and renege on their responsibility to students, parents, and communities? We at Fordham will follow this unfolding story over the next several years and let you decide.

Photo by Alberto G.

Direct from America’s cheating capital comes an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article describing suspicious test score patterns in lots of districts around the country. According to the analysts, who looked at scores from 69,000 schools, 196 districts had swings so extreme that the odds of them occurring by chance alone were less than one in a thousand. While the newspaper acknowledged that its analysis is not proof of cheating, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel wrote that it should trigger a thorough review. The union boss’s support of transparency on this issue is heartening: Wide-spread cheating undermines the foundations of standards-based reform and further investigation is indeed warranted. Accountability based on objective measures of student knowledge demands that those measures be accurate and trustworthy, else myriad efforts that rely on a clear understanding of performance—merit pay, tenure reform, VAM—are damned. But, of course, those are things that Van Roekel and his crew abhor, so he spoiled his message about cheating by also bemoaning the “corruptive influence high-stakes tests have had on our students, teachers and schools.” As Checker noted in July when the Atlanta cheating scandal first broke, the appropriate response to testing improprieties is increased transparency and test security, not abandonment of test-based accountability on grounds that educators are unable to resist the temptation to bend or break the rules. Such arguments disrespect the integrity and professionalism of millions of educators who work to improve their students’ performance through quality instruction and honest evaluation—educators like the ones Mr. Van Roekel’s organization should be representing.

“Cheating our children: Suspicious school test scores across the nation,” by Heather Vogell, John Perry, Alan Judd, and M.B. Bell, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 25, 2012

“High Stakes Testing: Who's Cheating Whom?” by Dennis Van Roekel, Huffington Post, March 28, 2012

A recent piece in the American Journalism Review ripped mainstream education journalism, especially the televised variety, for fostering a false sense of crisis. It contains a shred of truth. “The sky is falling!” is no longer a fair assessment of American education, as witness modest gains on NAEP and high-school graduation rates. But the author, hell bent to attack “reform,” doesn’t appear willing to give reform any credit for any of that, either.

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled ed school objections to the National Council on Teacher Quality's ongoing efforts to appraise America's teacher preparation programs. The more attention their resistance to transparency gets the better: It just makes more obvious how self-serving their complaints on this issue are.

A new poll shows Cleveland residents support Mayor Frank Jackson's school reform plan. Here’s hoping that leaders in Cleveland and across Ohio will keep in mind that it's the community, not special interests, that should be driving the education agenda.

Reformers bemoan specific bureaucratic hurdles to improving schools, but perhaps the real issue is American education’s basic tendency towards bureaucracy, argues Philip Howard in a recent Atlantic essay.  Howard’s observation that “the organizational flaw in America's schools is that they are too organized” is an axiom worth remembering when considering how to fix our byzantine approach to education governance.

Implementation, Implementation, Implementation

Implementation, Implementation, Implementation

One might fairly wonder why the Council on Foreign Relations, of all outfits, would wade into school reform, but in fact the task force that CFR convened on this topic has made a valuable contribution.

We’re accustomed to reformers arguing that America’s international economic competitiveness hinges on a better-educated workforce; we’re used to parallel (and equally justified) assertions that our civic future and cultural vitality depend on kids learning a great deal more in school. What the CFR team has done is remind us that revitalizing our education system is also essential for the defense of the nation itself. In their words, “America’s failure to educate is affecting its national security….In the defense and aerospace industries, many executives fear this problem [dearth of adequately skilled people] will accelerate in the coming decade….Most young people do not qualify for military service….The U.S. State Department and intelligence agencies are facing critical language shortfalls in areas of strategic interest….”

They’re not exactly saying that nuclear warheads will rain onto our population centers the day after tomorrow unless our schools become more effective but they are reminding us that the intersection of national wellbeing and education has many dimensions. One may usefully recall the post-Sputnik angst that led to the National Defense Education Act and a flurry of other efforts to strengthen the U.S. education system as well as the stirring and alarmist rhetoric of A Nation at Risk—now almost three decades ago.

CFR’s thirty-member task force consisted of all manner of luminaries from education, business, government, and more. (In England, they would say it’s a roster of “the great and the good.”) Its co-chairs were veteran education reformer Joel Klein and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Its analysis of what’s wrong in K-12 education is exemplary, wide-ranging without kitchen-sink-ism, data-filled without exhaustion. Its summary of “current policies and reform efforts” is clear-eyed, perceptive, and hits the key elements, although maybe nothing you haven’t seen before.

The most interesting and valuable parts of the report are its eleven pages of recommendations (followed by almost as many pages of “additional and dissenting views” from individual task force members, mainly Randi Weingarten and Linda Darling-Hammond).

What the CFR team has done is remind us that revitalizing our education system is also essential for the defense of the nation itself.

The recommendations come under three headings: (1) expand the Common Core and kindred efforts to span more of the essential curriculum; (2) enhance school choice and competition, with an eye to quality, too; and (3) launch what they call a “national security readiness audit.”

Let’s take these up in turn. And keep in mind as we go that the Task Force report has produced palpitations among some of our conservative pals, especially my friend Bill Evers, who sees a “federally-supported curriculum” lurking in its pages.

The curricular recommendations per se involve Uncle Sam not at all. The panel calls upon “governors to collectively create expectations for language learning and world culture and history” as well as science, technology, civics, and a slightly disguised version of twenty-first century skills (e.g. “imaginative problem solving”). Then they turn to “meaningful [ugh] assessments” that would minimize multiple choice testing and maximize “more technologically advanced assessments that simulate real-world applications of skills and knowledge.” On, then, to a complicated set of suggestions for implementation that does involve several federal incentives and entanglements, including the thought-provoking recommendation that the “Defense Policy Board, which advises the secretary of defense…should evaluate the learning standards of education in America.”

Hmm. It’s easy to understand the antennae that this one would quiver—and not just Bill Evers’s. Because the military is so top-down, so accustomed to a chain-of-command that pays scant heed to state borders or local idiosyncrasies, it’s hard to picture a group that is accustomed to defense policy adjusting to the bottom-up nature and federalist structure of K-12 education. Which is to say, entangling the Defense Policy Board in academic standards might well point toward excessive curricular control by Washington over the long haul.

On the other hand, the Task Force’s excellent advice regarding school choice should warm the hearts not only of conservatives but of everyone interested in conferring more quality educational options on kids who need them most. The panel even goes beyond the usual bounds of public education to encourage vouchers and similar means of accessing good private schools. Which is, of course, why this set of policy recommendations prompted the most dissents by individual task force members, beginning (naturally) with Ms. Weingarten.

The most original suggestion in the report is the proposed “national security readiness audit,” an ambitious plan to gather, analyze, and release comprehensive school-level data in a single national report (including international comparisons) that is intended to prod educators to use such data, to trigger accountability-style interventions, and to keep the public better informed about the performance of U.S. schools. The task force “believes that a targeted, annual campaign, led by the Department of Education in collaboration with the U.S. states, the Departments of Defense and State and the intelligence agencies, could have this impact.”

Well, maybe. Or maybe it would just yield the sort of brief-flurry-of-interest-followed-by-big-yawn that we associated with annual reports by the National Education Goals Panel during the 1990’s. In reality, the annual Condition of Education report from NCES already contains much of the relevant information. It’s just that nobody says much about it or does much with it. (C’mon, Arne Duncan and Leon Panetta and James Clapper [director of national intelligence], show what you can do with data!)

On balance, this is a solid, imaginative, well-written report from smart, knowledgeable folks gathered under an unexpected umbrella, and a timely, worthy reminder that education goes well beyond domestic policy. It’s certainly no cause for alarm on the right. Indeed, the task force’s own dissenting members signal the heartburn it creates on the left side of the education establishment.

Independent Task Force report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security, U.S. Education Reform and National Security, (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, March 2012).

Arne Duncan may be excited about the potential of his School Improvement Grant (SIG) initiative to turn around our nation’s lowest-performing schools, but the folks at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) aren’t convinced. This qualitative report from CRPE examines the progress of Washington State’s SIG-funded school districts between December 2009 and June 2011. (More background on SIG here.) Forty-four interviews at the school, district, and state levels five months after SIG implementation began reveal signs of incremental changes in schools, but no sweeping shifts in achievement or culture. According to the report, the hindrances to bold reforms were timing, communication, and an aversion to risk taking. SIG’s constricted timeline (just two months between program announcement and application due date) negatively impacted the initial SIG application, the planning phase, negotiations with unions, and the hiring process, thus impairing implementation. Additionally, vague communication from districts left schools unaware of the SIG program’s expectations. Finally, most of the schools that did adopt changes opted for the least disruptive interventions (replacing the school leader only, rather than the whole staff, for example). To spur more fundamental reform, CRPE offers recommendations for players at each level: The feds should make SIG more competitive and allow time for a planning phase as part of the application process; states should clearly communicate the program’s goals to districts and schools; districts should open a turnaround-specific office to work with schools; and schools should reject the transformation option as it requires a lot of time and money with arguably little results. Before the next round of SIG, all stakeholders would be wise to follow these recommendations.

Sarah Yatsko, Robin Lake, Elizabeth Cooley Nelson, and Melissa Bowen, Tinkering Toward Transformation: A Look at Federal School Improvement Grant Implementation (Seattle, WA: Center on Reinventing Public Education, March 2012).

In November, we learned from the National Study of CMO Effectiveness (a joint initiative by Mathematica and the Center on Reinventing Public Education) that the quality of charter-management organizations varies dramatically. (These findings were confirmed in second report released by the pair in January.) This latest from Mathematica and CRPE probes some of the common practices of high-quality CMOs. Based on data from the middle schools of twenty-two CMOs, we now learn that consistently applied school-wide behavior programs (which outline clear rewards and demerits for specific actions, hold “zero tolerance” for violence, and promote a strong culture of learning) and regular teacher coaching are the strategies most strongly linked to higher student achievement. Interestingly, other popular (and reformy) approaches didn’t correlate with better performance, including boosting instructional time, adopting performance-based teacher evaluation and compensation schemes, and using formative-assessment data frequently. To illustrate further how the two successful strategies work on the ground, the report then profiles five CMOs that utilize them—Aspire Public Schools, Inner City Education Foundation, KIPP DC, Uncommon Schools, and Yes Prep Public Schools. Uncommon Schools, for example, pushes a school culture based on its MAPP (Mindful, Achieving, Professional, and Prepared) and SLANT (Sit up straight, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod for understand, and Track the speaker) tenets. (Pioneered by KIPP’s founders, KIPP DC also uses the SLANT technique.) On the teacher-coaching front, Aspire, Yes Prep, and KIPP DC observe their teachers weekly—Uncommon Schools observes teachers more frequently than that. Novice teachers receive intense classroom-management training while experienced teachers’ coaching is more instructional “fine tuning.” Both types of teachers see quick feedback from observations. While these are correlated and not causal trends, the showcasing of what works for high-quality CMOs should be welcome insight to all school leaders.

Lake, Robin, Melissa Bowen, Allison Demeritt, Moira McCullough, Joshua Haimson, and Brian Gill, Learning from Charter School Management Organizations: Strategies for Student Behavior and Teacher Coaching (Princeton, NJ: Mathematica Policy Research; Seattle, WA: Center on Reinventing Public Education, 2012).

A great many education-policy types, mainly defenders of the status quo, are smitten with Finland. There, kids have little homework, high-stakes tests are rare, and teachers get lots of money and respect. This self-congratulatory but wide-ranging and informative book by Finnish Ministry of Education Director General Pasi Sahlberg gives such folks aid and comfort, but it also probes key elements of the Finnish system that have gotten less attention on our shores. The most important: Finland’s uber-competitive teacher-training programs, which ensure quality on the front end and allow Finnish schools to confer greater autonomy on teachers in their classrooms. Emulating Finland in that respect would be good for American education. But are the defenders of the status quo ready to embrace TFA-level standards for all entrants to ed schools? Even if that means slaughtering the ed-school cash cow? Finland-lovers, we await your reply.

Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from the Educational Change in Finland? (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2011).