The Education Gadfly Weekly

Phil Gonring, Paul Teske, and Brad Jupp
Harvard Education Press
2007

This book will tell you all you could want to know about ProComp, Denver's pioneering pay-for-performance (PFP) system for teachers. The spark for ProComp came in 1996, when NCTAF's What Matters Most report inspired Phil Gonring of Denver's Rose Community Foundation to explore possible teacher compensation reforms in the Mile High City. Over the next decade or so, Gonring (who co-authors this book with then-chief union negotiator Brad Jupp and University of Colorado Professor Paul Teske) would play a central role in bringing together union, district, state, and city leaders, as well as a big-time national donor or two, to create one of the most intriguing PFP systems in the nation. The book chronicles this period in great detail, highlighting important battles fought by a diverse cast of characters. Among these battles are a 72-hour negotiation to hammer out the details of a two-year pilot; a crafty, Rose-led effort to extend the pilot to four years; a come-from-behind organizing push to win the union's approval for ProComp; and a politically masterful campaign to pass the $25 million mill-levy that currently funds ProComp. These accounts give valuable insights into the dynamics of city education politics for reformers nationwide. The authors imply that the success of ProComp relied largely on the leadership and perseverance of entrepreneurial individuals (including many others than the authors themselves). Of course, they note, policy victories alone won't make ProComp a success; there are immense technical challenges to implementing the plan. Subsequent sections on such issues are less gripping than the earlier chapters of political drama and intrigue, but they're equally important. If you're an educator, a policymaker, or just a freelance rabble-rouser interested in teacher-pay reforms, you will not want to miss this book. You can get it at Amazon now.

We provoked a bit of a stir with last week's piece, featured in the Wall Street Journal and Gadfly, titled (by the Journal's editors) "Not By Geeks Alone." Most of that stir was intentional. We sincerely believe that today's STEM mania, combined with NCLB's narrow focus on basic reading and math (and test-taking) skills, combined with the newly enacted "competitiveness" bill that President Bush signed the other day, are having a deleterious effect on the American K-12 school curriculum--and very likely the college curriculum as well.

They are giving schools, teachers and students more reasons than ever--there were already too many--to neglect the humanities, to marginalize the arts, and to skimp on the social sciences. Moreover, they miss at least half of the true wellsprings of American competitiveness, which are not just skills but also knowledge, habits of mind, modes of inquiry, traits of character, among others. (For a longer exposition of this point, see our original essay and the longer Fordham volume that we edited, Beyond the Basics.)

The stir we did not anticipate came from friends worried that we had abandoned results-based accountability, turned against testing, and even declared war on standards.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. We support those important education reforms as ardently as ever. But we're also more mindful than ever of the truism that "what gets tested gets taught" and are alarmed that too narrow a conception of what schools are accountable for, by way of results, yields too narrow a definition of what teachers are responsible for imparting to their pupils. Good tests are efficient ways to determine how well students have learned what the curriculum sets forth. (That's why we admire the Advanced Placement exams, for example.) But bad tests, and an over-emphasis on test results at the expense of solid instruction across a balanced curriculum, can lead to damaging ends. There we stand.

In 2005, Demarcus Bolton learned that he was one of 20 Atlanta high-schoolers who would receive a $1,000 scholarship from City Councilman H. Lamar Willis's charitable foundation. Two years later, Bolton remains scholarship-less. After calling Willis's office repeatedly, he finally gave up. "I just let it go because I was tired of being lied to," he said. Bolton is also waiting on a Palm hand-held computer he was supposed to receive. Nikita Head, one of the 2005 winners, said, "It was like Oprah. ‘Everyone's getting a Palm Pilot!' We never got a Palm Pilot." Willis may have his hands full with more than angry 20-year-olds, though; he never registered his foundation as a charity, and the IRS never gave his organization a nonprofit designation. Investigations are underway. Willis's public relations manager quit last week, too, and issued a statement saying his boss "misrepresented facts." Which is flack-speak for "lied." Meanwhile, Bolton is doing fine, about to enter his third year at Savannah State University. Were he only able to check his email while talking to his girlfriend while planning a road trip to Poughkeepsie, he'd probably have already graduated.  

"Student never received scholarship from city councilman's charity," by Cameron McWhirter, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 10, 2007

It's tough to know what to make of them, those who cling to the idea that social engineering will cure the ailments of public education's sickest parts. John Edwards belongs in that camp. His solution to academic torpor includes forced socioeconomic integration of classrooms and the creation of "a million housing vouchers over five years to help low-income families move to better neighborhoods."

The latest blow to the assumptions of Edwards and his ilk comes from a pair of reports, featured in the forthcoming issue of Education Next. The reports illustrate, among other things, that children of low-income families who moved from high-poverty neighborhoods to areas where they had "substantially fewer poor and substantially more educated neighbors" showed no academic improvement.

This reinforces two points. First: Socioeconomic integration is not a panacea for educational ills. Second: As professor Stefanie DeLuca writes in Ed Next, "poor families are not just wealthy families without a bankbook." A move to the suburbs may have many positive consequences for low-income children--indeed, it may be a necessary condition for certain individuals to emerge from poverty--but it is surely not sufficient to improve their educational performance.

If we want to see low-income students do better in school, we need to focus our efforts on schools, not on moving kids from Baltic Avenue to Boardwalk and everywhere in between. Poor parents need information about the good schools in their midst (information they're not currently receiving), and they need to understand that quality classrooms will make a positive impact on their children.

Authors of one of the Ed Next articles examined 1994-1997 data from the Moving to Opportunity program (MTO), which awarded housing vouchers to low-income families in five American cities: Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Only those families who lived in a public-housing development where the poverty rate was at least 40 percent were eligible to enter the MTO lottery (during the program's first year, each family who won an MTO voucher could use it to move only into neighborhoods where the poverty rate was lower than 10 percent).

During MTO's first four years, 4,248 families entered the lottery for vouchers. About 1,209 of them were offered unrestricted vouchers, which could be used anywhere, even in another high-poverty neighborhood. About 1,729 families were offered MTO vouchers, and 1,310 were offered no voucher (they became the control group).

MTO families moved to areas with poverty rates averaging 12.6 percent lower than those of the control families (not as dramatic a difference as the program's designers might have hoped). And MTO families sent their children to schools which, on average, scored only slightly higher on state exams but were more socioeconomically integrated than schools attended by control group students.

Did the MTO kids improve academically? No. The researchers put "the impact of moving with a restricted voucher at four-hundredths of a standard deviation increase in combined reading and math test scores, and the estimate is not statistically significant." Plopping kids into classrooms (and neighborhoods) that are socioeconomically integrated is not the way to boost academic achievement.

Between July 2003 and June 2004, DeLuca and colleagues interviewed MTO parents about their children's educational experiences, in part to determine why some parents who could've sent their students to decent suburban schools did not.

The responses suggest that many MTO parents simply underestimate the educational differences between quality schools and lousy ones. A respondent told DeLuca, "...you can send a hard head to a private school and it's not gonna make a bit of difference. You can send a good child to what you might think a not-so-good school and as long as they focus and pay attention it'll benefit them."

DeLuca concludes: "While neighborhood change could be a necessary condition to protect children and improve their schooling, it is not sufficient in light of the deep morass of issues that characterize the lives of the urban poor."

That's why all parents--urban poor or suburban wealthy--need information about the quality of their local schools, and they need it delivered in a simple, non-muddled way. Inner-city parents should especially be targeted by disseminators of such information. Such parents must be shown that despite their years of enduring mostly nasty neighborhood schools, quality classrooms are possible and do make a difference.

The ongoing social shuffle is a dance whose steps grow tiresome. Time to stop the music and get down to business.

As Gadfly recently noted , prospects for Congressional bi-partisanship for the renewal of NCLB are eroding. George Miller and Buck McKeon appear to hold very different views--this month, anyway--as to what's wrong, what's right, and what needs fixing, and how NCLB 2.0 should differ from the first iteration. This despite Miller's stated intention to bring an NCLB reauthorization bill to the House floor next month.

Conventional wisdom holds that this landmark law cannot be revamped--though it could probably be extended as is, just to keep the money flowing--absent a fairly broad consensus. Miller and Pelosi could indeed bring a bill before the House and possibly ram it through on a near-straight party line vote (though such a move would likely provoke more Democratic defections than GOP supporters) but it would come unglued in the Senate, where it's essential nowadays to have 60 firm votes for anything controversial. Which this would surely be.

The United States Congress these days is a near-to-dysfunctional institution. It accomplishes little of anything and less of importance. Call me cynical after too many years inside the Beltway but it appears to me that, on any but the most routine matters, lawmakers now act only when at least one of three (overlapping) conditions is met-and not always then. (1) There's a bona fide national crisis (e.g., 9/11, Katrina). (2) There's a huge public outcry. Or (3) there's a full-fledged Washington-style scandal needing to be redressed.

NCLB satisfies none of those conditions. Yes, a flock of educators, a pride of politicians, and a bestiary of policy wonks are unhappy with it, but nobody could claim that a crisis exists. Most people still have scant awareness of it, and there's surely no clamor from the public at large. And it has no Washington-style scandal associated with it. Sure, one could argue that the variability and slackness of state standards is an education scandal, that the unkept promise of public-school choice is a scandal, etc., but that's not the same as saying that someone has walked off with the payroll or is profiteering at children's expense. (To see a true, action-forcing scandal at work, observe what's been happening--and what's been revealed--about college student loans, which may finally lead to reauthorization--four years late--of the Higher Education Act.)

But Congressional dysfunction isn't the whole story. There's also perilously little agreement on what ails NCLB and how to cure it. Indeed, I submit that today there is near-consensus on precisely one point: the desirability of some sort of "growth model" for determining AYP, i.e. the proposition that schools' performance should be judged by examining the additional academic "value" that they add to their pupils rather than (or in addition to) the absolute number of kids reaching a single fixed standard. Here, too, however, even if there's rough agreement at the conceptual level, widespread discord still prevails on just about every element of how growth models should be designed and implemented--and how many places are capable of doing it.

Regarding other aspects of NCLB, there's no shortage of advice. A five foot shelf of books, studies, reports, commission recommendations, etc. is rapidly accumulating. (I plead guilty to having helped contribute half a linear foot or so.) Its very amplitude attests not only to the length and complexity of the law but also to the disputed nature of what, exactly, is awry in NCLB 1.0 and what are the essential attributes of version 2.0. Even more important, underlying all the technical specifics are four immense (my granddaughter would say "hunormous") dilemmas that go to the heart of the matter.

1. Is NCLB's goal itself naïve and unrealistic? Politicians pledge that no child will be left behind, yet I don't know a single educator who seriously thinks 100 percent of U.S. children can become "proficient" (according to any reasonable definition of that term) by 2014 in reading and math. Indeed, exemptions have already been made for seriously disabled youngsters. In truth, getting American kids from their current 30 percent or so proficient level (using NAEP standards) to 70 or 80 percent would be a remarkable, nation-changing achievement. Yet I can't imagine a lawmaker conceding that this would be worth doing. The first thing hurled back at him would be "which 20 percent of the kids don't matter to you?"
   

2. Is the program upside down? It's no surprise that we at Fordham think NCLB 1.0 inverted a fundamental design principle: Congress opted to be tight with regard to means and loose with regard to ends--trusting every state to set its own standards while micro-managing any number of measurement systems and highly prescriptive sequences of school and district interventions. Far better to promulgate a single national standard and assessment system, then trust states, districts and educators to devise their own means of getting there on their own timetables. But half of Congress will recoil in horror from the freedom and flexibility implied therein while the other half will be put off by uniform standards.
   

3. Is the architecture usable for this purpose? As Gadfly has noted before, in 1965 it made sense, indeed was practically inevitable, for Uncle Sam to distribute his new education dollars via the traditional structures of state education departments and local school systems. Four decades later, however, the main focus of federal policy is altering the behavior and performance of those very institutions in ways they don't want to be altered (while also still distributing dollars to and through them). It's beyond imagining that the old multi-tiered architecture can satisfactorily handle the new challenges. Yet nobody is thinking creatively about alternative structures by which NCLB's goals might more effectively be pursued.
   

4. Can the federal government successfully pull off anything as complex and ambitious as NCLB in so vast and loosely coupled a system as American k-12 education? Unfortunately, the executive branch is as dysfunctional as the legislative. It can't keep our levees strong, our bridges standing, or our airplanes on schedule, much less provide health care to the needy or root out terrorists in our midst. Sure, we ask it to do too much and we're terrible at prioritizing. That said, however, let's face the reality that education is even harder to change because it's so decentralized and so many of its street-level bureaucrats can ignore, veto, or undermine the plans of distant rulemakers.

So long as these monster questions lack agreed-upon answers, I don't see much hope for an NCLB 2.0 that's markedly better than NCLB 1.0.

Call it double-time, academic style. In March, the Pennsylvania National Guard launched a three-week GED prep class, completed in basic training, for those who signed up to serve but didn't finish high school. The program isn't easy (students are in class nine hours a day, and rise at 4:45 a.m. for physical training) but seems to be working. Of the 120 enrolled so far, 85 have received GEDs. The Army also has a national program, Education Plus, which promises GED training to past dropouts who enlist. Education Plus has helped 13,000 earn high their school equivalency diplomas. Critics say such programs erode the quality of troops. Gadfly doesn't know much about soldiering, but he does know something about the country's dropout crisis. Perhaps our high school leaders should spend some time on base to learn what the Army is doing right. Anything that can do in three weeks what high schools can't do in four years deserves attention.

"Strained Military Widens Doors for High School Dropouts," by Kimberly Hefling, Associated Press, August 13, 2007

Phil Gonring, Paul Teske, and Brad Jupp
Harvard Education Press
2007

This book will tell you all you could want to know about ProComp, Denver's pioneering pay-for-performance (PFP) system for teachers. The spark for ProComp came in 1996, when NCTAF's What Matters Most report inspired Phil Gonring of Denver's Rose Community Foundation to explore possible teacher compensation reforms in the Mile High City. Over the next decade or so, Gonring (who co-authors this book with then-chief union negotiator Brad Jupp and University of Colorado Professor Paul Teske) would play a central role in bringing together union, district, state, and city leaders, as well as a big-time national donor or two, to create one of the most intriguing PFP systems in the nation. The book chronicles this period in great detail, highlighting important battles fought by a diverse cast of characters. Among these battles are a 72-hour negotiation to hammer out the details of a two-year pilot; a crafty, Rose-led effort to extend the pilot to four years; a come-from-behind organizing push to win the union's approval for ProComp; and a politically masterful campaign to pass the $25 million mill-levy that currently funds ProComp. These accounts give valuable insights into the dynamics of city education politics for reformers nationwide. The authors imply that the success of ProComp relied largely on the leadership and perseverance of entrepreneurial individuals (including many others than the authors themselves). Of course, they note, policy victories alone won't make ProComp a success; there are immense technical challenges to implementing the plan. Subsequent sections on such issues are less gripping than the earlier chapters of political drama and intrigue, but they're equally important. If you're an educator, a policymaker, or just a freelance rabble-rouser interested in teacher-pay reforms, you will not want to miss this book. You can get it at Amazon now.