The Education Reform Act of 1993 was a complex piece of legislation but its principal components are four:

• High academic standards for K-12 schools;
• Accountability through the MCAS test and a state office that performs audits on schools and districts;
• Improved teacher quality through rigorous testing of teacher’s mastery of the content in the state’s academic standards; and
• Expanded public school choices for parents through charter schools.

The subsequent history of education reform in Massachusetts has been an ebb and flow of implementation of these elements. It took until 1996 for the state to truly embark on any of the first three reforms listed above (and it took a long time and lots of public debate to move them ahead--one example). After 2001 charter expansions slowed to a trickle until the 2010 education law doubled the number of charters. After 2007, our academic standards were first injected with greater emphasis on “soft skills” rather than academic content and then switched for lower quality national standards; and the state’s school auditing office has been all but shuttered.

Two things are a constant throughout the history of two-decades-old reform effort. First, charter schools have proven over and over again in Massachusetts a high level of consistent performance and markedly higher performance than their district peers. Nothing has changed since a 2006 Massachusetts Department of Education report concluded that

In both English Language Arts and Mathematics, at least 30 percent of the charter schools performed statistically significantly higher than their CSD [ed. note: charter sending districts--i.e., district systems sending kids to charters] in each year with the exception of 2001.

That report goes on to observe that another 60 percent of charters were either as good or better than their district peers. As I’ve noted elsewhere:

A January 2009 Boston Foundation report shows Boston charters blowing the doors off of Boston district schools. To show you just how good their performance is, you might think about the impact of charters over middle school years as akin to bridging the gap between Boston public school performance and Brookline public school performance.

Not a bad outcome for people who cannot afford, or don't want, to move to Brookline.

That’s important as we see the effects of the 2010 education law doubling the number of charters. Boston will benefit greatly with up to 18 percent of its students in charter schools by 2016. We have thus far seen far less expansion outside of Boston, notwithstanding the fact that the 2010 law also increases the potential for charter growth to 18 percent in most major Massachusetts cities. (More on that another day.)

There is an additional constant in the state's history of education reforms, and that is choice options have been expanded beyond Commonwealth charter schools (CCS), which are highly flexible schools that operate without the requirement of teachers unions and oversight of local school committees. In additional to the CCS, we have seen a series of in-district efforts to gain the benefits of charters without sacrificing the interests of the adults in the system. Were it so simple…

We have seen pilot schools championed by teachers unions, Horace Mann (unionized, in-district) charter schools, Commonwealth pilot schools, and more recently innovation schools and extended learning time (ELT). The first three charter-lite options have not borne significant fruit. We are at the experimental stage with innovation schools and will know more within a year or two.

ELT is right about at the stage of development where we have to look ourselves in the face and make some hard choices. I understand the adults’ push for the charter-lite solutions. It keeps all the usual political alliances and interests intact; no difficult political decisions are necessary; and we can continue going to the same cocktail parties and cookouts. That’s important with the weather getting nicer just about this time.

As I wrote in a 2010 post,

I understand the political impulse to push ELT -- just more money and more time will solve the problem. Nothing against more time. If kids in Japan go to school more like 240 days a year, and we go 180, sure, there is no way we can keep up.

Intuitively, it makes sense, right? Reporters and radio journalists like Anthony Brooks of RadioBoston suggest that, in fact, charter schools have longer days, so longer days must be what makes them work.

But, before we jump to conclusions, let's ask the question: Do Massachusetts' ELT work? And are the results we are getting from these programs worth the $14 million a year we are currently spending on it. Roll the data. In 2010 the data, the data on ELT provided in Abt Associates' "Year 3" report suggested that

• ELT had a significant, positive effect on 5th grade science MCAS scores in year two, but no statistically significant effects on other MCAS outcomes in year one or two.
• ELT had a statistically significant, negative effect on school attendance in both year one and two.
• While very few students received suspensions or were truant, ELT schools had slightly higher rates of out-of-school suspensions in both years.
• 8th-grade students in ELT schools were more likely to use a school computer for school work at least once a month in year one, but not year two. ELT students were no more likely to spend > 3 hours a week on homework in year one, and less likely in year two. 8th grade students in ELT were no more likely to use a home computer for school work at least once a month, or two or more hours per week.
• 5th grade ELT students were less likely to participate in non-academic clubs at school (no other significant effects).
• ELT had no effect on 5th grade students’ perceptions about their relationships with teachers. ELT had no effect on 5th grades students’ perceptions of the learning environment offered at their school or level of school engagement.

That was an interim assessment admittedly covering only the first three years of implementation of ELT programs. Has anything changed in the two years since? Happily, Abt Associates has continued to update its reports. Unhappily, many of the key findings remain negligible. Consider, for example, page XVII of the "Year 5" assessment from Abt:

On average, there were no statistically significant effects of ELT after one, two, three, or four years of implementation on MCAS student achievement test outcomes for 3rd, 4th, or 7th grade ELA, 4th, 6th, or 8th grade math, or 8th grade science.

and

There was a statistically significant positive effect of ELT after four years of implementation on the MCAS 5th grade science test.

Those are quotes, folks. For all the activity and all the spending, there are few positive effects, save for the 5th grade science test. And, ahem, the positive effects on the 5th grade science test seem to disappear by the 8th grade.

Then there are negative effects. Both staff and students report higher levels of fatigue; students were less enthusiastic about school.

The Abt study design in the "Year 5" assessment is impacted by the involvement of both Mass 20/20 and Focus on Results, two organizations that are the state's biggest advocates of ELT. Some of the impact is helpful. The qualitative survey work with teachers notes high teacher satisfaction with ELT because it "allows them to accomplish their teaching goals and cover the amount of instructional material their students need to learn than would be expected in the absence of ELT." While that is almost tautological, it is also a fact that allowing the time to go more in-depth or cover more material, as determined by the teacher, is a good thing.

The influence of these advocates, however, may have led to some self-interested conflation between ELT as implemented by the state and other programs that are categorized as 'extended.' For example, the study often folds charter schools into the discussion as examples of places that have longer days on average. But the fact is that charters (especially Commonwealth charters) are so much more than that: they have a different approach to achieving teacher quality, different approaches to culture-setting and expectations, a more entrepreneurial bent, and a level of urgency that is unique given the "high-stakes" accountability they have for results. If they don't work, they get shut down.

ELT has some encouraging results in a few schools, but on an overall basis the results are not terribly encouraging. Are the results described above worth $14 million? Should we continue to fund it? Those are tough questions, I know. Let me pose the question in an even harder way: Given the success of charter schools and the less-than-inspiring results of ELT, would it be better to spend the $14 million funding 800-1,000 additional charter school students rather than spend the money on ELT? (Note: charter school students are funded at about $10,000 per student, with another slug of money going to pay districts for the loss of students.)

In the public sphere, choices to do one thing are often decisions not to do something else. It's decision time on ELT.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

In a previous job, I spent a lot of time in major Massachusetts cities outside of Boston. Cities like New Bedford and Fall River, with their stunning coastal views, and cities at the edge of Boston with so much potential like Lynn and Brockton, always intrigued me. But I have to admit to two favorites--Springfield and Lawrence. They are indeed among the most troubled, but they are both architecturally unique, with strong neighborhoods and muscular industrial histories.

Whenever in Lawrence, I would try to make it to Saint Anthony's Maronite Church or eat at Cafe Azteca. The smells in each place are enough to keep you going for days. A sensation similar to the "beignet haze" you get walking within 50 feet of New Orleans' Cafe Du Monde.

With the Lawrence Public Schools now in state receivership, a few recent posts have focused on what could and should be done there. I am decidedly against the idea of waiting for Superman and seeking a centralized solution from the new school receiver Jeff Riley, no matter how many good things I hear about him. We've seen that movie before with Michelle Rhee and other heroic reformers. They quickly get ahead of the local population and the embedded interests, and politically their attempts are pretty certain to meet resistance and failure. I've written extensively about the need to move away from that model of the heroic reformer who fixes all of the schools from the central office.

So, what to do?
#1. Recognize the problem
I have made it a point in recent posts to draw a direct parallel to Katrina, calling the Lawrence school receivership Massachusetts' "Katrina moment."

A few folks challenged that parallel, with, for example, Kevin Franck, communications director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, tweeting this:

KevinFranck May 08, 2:13pm via TweetDeck

1,800+ people killed? RT @JimStergios: Lawrence district schools = Massachusetts’ Katrina #mapoli #edchat

So, Kev, let's run the numbers.

The unemployment rate in Lawrence is a whopping 15.8 percent. The unemployed/Underemployment percentage is almost certain to be 1 of 5 people, and the number of those who have dropped out of the workforce completely only makes the number more alarming.

The unemployment problem in Lawrence precedes the recession and is structural. In 2005 the unemployment rate stood at 9.8 percent. (See page 11 of this report.)

Median household income in Lawrence stands at less than half the average in Massachusetts (in 2009, $31,000 vs. $64,000), and household income for Hispanics in Lawrence, by far the largest ethnic group in the city, has been flat since 2000.

Poverty is deep and broad in Lawrence. Fully 37 percent of households in Lawrence earn less than $20,000 a year (vs. 16 percent for Massachusetts). That embedded poverty, just like the embedded unemployment, feels a lot like the structural poverty "discovered" in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina.

In fact, New Orleans' unemployment rate prior to Katrina was only 5.6 percent. Median household income in New Orleans prior to Katrina was $31,369; the percentage of individuals earning less than $20,000 was far lower than in Lawrence.

As is well known, the poor student achievement data and outrageous dropout data lead to poverty, embedded poverty, poor health outcomes and high crime levels, which can lead to death, physical and mental impairment, and the demise of a once-great city.

The toll in terms of crime has been enormous since 2000. There have been over 50 murders, 228 rapes (which are routinely underreported), 1,642 robberies, 4,080 assaults, 5,885 burglaries, and almost 10,000 thefts (not including the largest category of thefts, car thefts).

Take all of these factors and then remember that our Lawrence is a small, small city covering only 7 square miles and with only 76,000. New Orleans (the city and the parish) extends a massive 350 square miles; and boasted 450,000 residents just prior to the hurricane. Truth be told, Katrina affected the entire metro region (1.4 million residents prior to the hurricane) and well beyond.

The comparison stands. Perhaps people like Kevin would like to compare the state of Lawrence schools with those in New Orleans? Happy to have that conversation.

In Lawrence we have had dropout rates north of 30 percent for some time now.

And a lot of the above statistics are related to the fact that over 40 percent of Lawrence's population has less than a high school diploma. Another 30 percent have only a high school diploma, which, if it is from the Lawrence Public School system, is not likely to have provided strong grounding for later learning. So you have nearly 80 percent of the population of Lawrence with either no high school diploma or no more than a high school diploma.

Education is the driver for unemployment, crime and the inability of the city to attract or grow businesses or jobs. Lawrence's schools are as bad as anything in NOLA before the deluge.

#2. Think big but not centralizing

The solutions are there if we simply have the courage to avail ourselves of them. In places where the state chips in well below 50 percent of the local school budget, I can understand the pushback from local mayors, who complain about dollars lost to their big central school bureaucracies. I don't agree with it for a minute, but I understand the (backwards) logic that the dollars belong to the adults in the system rather than to the students and parents.

But in Lawrence, the state is paying for almost the entire $135 million (soon to be $150 million) school budget. Moving to the New Orleans solution (with nearly all of its schools now public charter schools) has raised student scores and improved a number of key academic and school-based metrics. Doing the same in Lawrence is a no-brainer. There is little, if any, local money being put into the Lawrence schools and therefore no reason for the state to hold back on charterizing the entire district.

The blueprint is here -- and the results for Lawrence's kids would, over time, change not only their lives, but the trajectory of a once-great city.

It's all possible, but our political and education leaders need to have the brass to choose that course.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

The 2010 Achievement Gap bill that was passed by both the House and the Senate and signed into law by Governor Patrick lifted the limits on charter schools and the number of students in them in districts that were failing to see improvements in student achievement. Rather than limiting the number of students to 9% in these largely urban districts, the law allowed up to 18% of students to attend charter schools.

The six-year period for the expansion up to 18 percent of students was not coincidental. It aligns with the six-year reimbursement schedule for districts, by which districts:

• receive 100% of the per-pupil funding for in the first year after a student leaves for a public charter;


• continues to be reimbursed for the “phantom” student in years 2 through 6 at 25% of the student’s per-pupil funding.

That’s a lot of extra state funding, which is in part why many parents and district educators in Lowell feared negative impacts from the closure of a charter school in the city a couple of years back.

So, what to make of today’s front page Globe story ballyhooing the state's decision to release 1,000 charter seats in Boston and 360 in Lawrence as a "charter school cap lift?

Is that good news and something to be pleased about? Yes, on the practical impact, but not so much on the politics and policy of the decision.

On the practical impact, there is plenty of evidence of the strength of Massachusetts’ public charter schools, and even greater evidence of the strength of public charters in Boston. Massachusetts' and Boston’s charters are in fact pretty unique in the level of consistency they have, which is testimony to the good vetting process in place for many years (something that needs closer scrutiny given reason to believe that political considerations have played a fairly significant role in charter approvals and rejections in Gloucester and Brockton).

So applaud the practical impact, with proven schools likely to expand in Boston and also in Lawrence.

On the politics, I can’t say that the release of the seats was a story for any reason except that the Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester complied with the 2010 law. I am not grateful for that. He is expected to do that – it’s called the public trust.

The fact that he held up seats in the initial expansion was altogether understandable – but when the Department would make those seats available should never have been in question. It’s the law, and the fact is that the commissioner should have given a time certain for the release of the additional seats from the beginning.

Policy-wise, there is not much here. Lawrence has some of the worst-performing schools in the state—low student achievement in math, English, and science; scores that are not moving to anywhere close to acceptable levels; it has 30+% dropout rates. We know that’s not sustainable – and those facts affect most people and make them want to take real action, not just temporize and avoid responsibility.
But even from a purely financial perspective, the right policy is to take actions that have been proven successful. As Mark Vogler of the Lawrence Eagle Tribune recently reported:

Lawrence Public Schools' annual payroll will go over $100 million for the first time in the city's history in fiscal 2013.

A $4.8 million hike in overall salaries for the city's 2,000 School Department employees — due to step increases negotiated before the state placed the district in receivership — accounts for more than half of the $8.3 million increase in the proposed education budget for the 2013 fiscal year that begins July 1.

Nearly that entire eye-popping amount is paid for by the state. In addition, the state Board of Education stripped the local school committee of most of its powers and put the district in receivership, naming former Boston Public Schools official Jeffrey C. Riley Superintendent/Receiver. We own the problems of the Lawrence public school district.

Lawrence has some great charter schools, including the Lawrence Family Development Charter School and the Lawrence Community Day School. Given that, why are we just expanding 360 seats when there are 13,000 kids in the district?

Lawrence is Massachusetts' "Katrina moment." Let me put it another way to Massachusetts’ education officials: How would you respond to this crisis if your kids were in the Lawrence district schools?

They would respond just as the country did after Katrina, insisting on a new path for New Orleans schools – and one that has served the kids well, giving parents real choices and expanding charters to encompass nearly all the schools in the city. So here's the question I asked a couple of weeks ago – and it's a good one:

Lawrence has very good charter schools and could line up more charter operators very quickly. It also has the advantage of an existing network of high-quality parochial schools that could play a key role in changing the prospects of kids -- not after the successful execution of a five- or ten-year improvement plan but immediately.

Do we really have to wait for an act of god before we act?

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Massachusetts is a wealthy place. We are among the wealthiest states in the country, and the educational attainment of Massachusetts parents is well beyond that of parents in every other state. All this should point to high-powered students and schools in the Bay State.

In fact, “big thinkers” in education policy often point to those factors to explain why Massachusetts does so well on national and international assessments. In part, that’s true.

But what these big thinkers fail to see is that Massachusetts not only has risen from around 11th in the country on the national assessments to No. 1, but also that the performance of all Massachusetts student groups has gone up.

In fact, Massachusetts’ improvement in performance among Hispanic students is very much in line improvements in the states that have most concentrated on this issue, such as Florida (Florida’s improvement among Hispanics is a hair better and, ironically, they end up higher today in part because they started out ahead of Massachusetts due to pockets of highly educated immigrants).

However, the search for bragging rights is misplaced.

FULL ENTRY

So let the games begin. Finally, the presidential candidates may get to education. For the greater part of a month, the presidential candidates have been sizing each other up, jabbing each other on jobs and the economy, who's more in touch with the average voter, and all sorts of distractions like who is waging that war on women and whether the president should play politics with foreign policy (as if that's anything new).

Given that education is a key factor affecting the country's ability to create jobs--and that it is one of the key sectors of public employment--you would have thought that education would have made the dance card a little earlier in the process. But no.

FULL ENTRY

I’m conflicted about how to say this. Getting stuff done is about building relationships and trying to find ways to get along and in fact pulling the right people together toward a goal. But it is also about saying things straight and pulling no punches when what’s being debated matters a lot.

FULL ENTRY

“No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.”

- James Madison, Federalist #10

In this season of US Supreme Court decisions we’re reminded that independent and objective judgment on key legal and public policy matters has been an aspiration in Anglo-America law and justice (not to mention scientific inquiry) for centuries. In America, it was John Adams in Massachusetts and James Madison of Virginia who were best at articulating the importance of independent judgment.

The push for national education standards has brought to light a variety of troubling questions about the legality, cost, and academic quality that has been discussed here and here.

Perhaps none are more disturbing than the conflict-ridden and ethically challenged circumstances by which the Patrick administration, its handpicked board of education, and national standards proponents and lobbyists in DC and MA encouraged the BOE to dump Massachusetts' nation-leading and proven academic standards and MCAS.

FULL ENTRY

For all the talk about a big national education agenda, the fact is that little implementation of the national standards is actually going on. Lots of talk, lots of money being spent, but business as usual on the federal front.

FULL ENTRY

Published on April 1, 1857, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was Herman Melville’s last novel and one in which he coined a new term for American hucksters. Melville’s satirical tale has some relevance for better understanding the drive for national education standards, testing, and curricula, as well as the major players behind this movement.

Here’s the Wikipedia plot summary of Melville's book:

The novel's title refers to its central character, an ambiguous figure who sneaks aboard a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day. This stranger attempts to test the confidence of the passengers, whose varied reactions constitute the bulk of the text.

In this work Melville is at his best illustrating the human masquerade. Each person including the reader is forced to confront that in which he places his trust. The Confidence-Man uses the Mississippi River as a metaphor for those broader aspects of American and human identity that unify the otherwise disparate characters. Melville also employs the river's fluidity as a reflection and backdrop of the shifting identities of his "confidence man."

As many know, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) came onto the scene between 2006 and 2009, but got greater momentum when adopting the still-under-development standards became a criterion for states seeking grant funding under the US DOE’s Race to the Top contest in 2009-10.

Similar pushes for national standards, driven by various DC-based trade organizations, including Marc Tucker’s National Center on Education and the Economy, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, and Clinton administration education officials who later migrated to Achieve, Inc., had been attempted in the 1990s and failed.

This recent drive for national standards reinvigorated a collection of unsuccessful DC-based players; and was fueled by more than $100 million from the Gates Foundation. A few years ago, I blogged on the Common Core convergence. Since then, it’s become increasingly clear that the push for national standards is an illegal, costly, and academically weak effort by D.C. trade groups, the Gates Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education to impose a one-size-fits-all set of standards and tests on the country. And the effort goes beyond that: With the tests come curricular materials and instructional practice guides.

Despite evidence to the contrary, the CCSSI advocates keep trotting out that these national standards are “state-led” and “voluntary.” My organization has done research on the key elements of national standards—academic quality, cost, and legality.

In our report, The Road to a National Curriculum, Kent Talbert and Bob Eitel summarize how Arne Duncan’s US DOE used Gates money and DC trade groups to circumvent federal laws that prohibit national standards:

The Department has simply paid others to do that which it is forbidden to do. This tactic should not inoculate the Department against the curriculum prohibitions imposed by Congress.

Since the 1990s, Massachusetts, California, Texas, Indiana, and Minnesota, to name a few, developed high-quality standards, state assessments, and reforms, which led to education improvements. The most noted of which was Massachusetts with its historic 1993 education reform law, nation-leading state academic standards and assessments, and the unprecedented gains on national and international testing.

Sadly, even though literature was 80-90 percent of the basis for MA’s historic success on National Assessment of Educational Progress testing in 2005, 2007, 2009, and 2011 (the test is administered bi-annually), CCSSIers too often disparage literature’s central use in ELA standards. What’s interesting is that the reading portion of NAEP tests “informational texts,” as CCSSI will, while MA’s former ELA standards/MCAS were based on literature. Yet, the Bay State students still tore the cover off the NAEP.

So, it being April Fools Day and Melville’s Confidence Man being a nice point of departure for appreciating literature and flim-flam artists, let’s compare the average and combined NAEP scores of the states from which the major CCSSI players hail. To make it simpler and because performance in the early grades, especially in reading, is a strong predictor of future academic achievement, we’ll take a look at combined 4th grade reading and math scores.

First up, Kentucky, which was the first state to adopt the national standards after the thoroughly mediocre first drafts were released. Kentucky is the former home of Gene Wilhoit, who served as the Bluegrass State’s education commissioner before heading up the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). The CCSSO is one of the lead DC trade organizations behind national standards. Kentucky has moved from a below average state to a slightly above average state on the NAEP. Glad to see it, but is that justification for entrusting our nation’s education future to the Kentucky model? Seems to me that it is a recipe for seeing the country plug along at the nation’s woefully inadequate performance level.

Even that level of standing and improvement is not to be found among other fellow leaders of the national standards effort. Take West Virginia. WVA is ground zero of the agenda of “softy” 21st century skills and the home of Dane Linn, head of education policy for the National Governors Association (NGA), another leader of the push for national standards. Other noted national standards boosters hailing from WVA include former Governor Bob Wise, now of the Alliance for “Excellent” Education, and Steven Paine, former state superintendent of schools for West Virginia, and CCSSO's former Board President. Twelve years into the 21st century, WVA’s NAEP scores make you wonder what Linn, Wise and Paine were doing in WVA. They started below the national average and 21st century skills later they perched right where they started.

Then there’s North Carolina, home to former Governor Jim Hunt, a national standards backer since the late 1980s. Hunt is especially close to the Massachusetts education community given that the Hunt Institute (via the Gates Foundation) commissioned the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education to evaluate the Massachusetts standards vs. CCSSI’s. Not surprisingly, the report said that CCSS were superior. Again, North Carolina’s NAEP scores are slightly above the national average, with improvements only in line with the country.

Next up, Ohio, original home to the two Chesters—Chester “Checker” Finn and Mitchell Chester (once Ohio’s deputy commissioner). Finn’s Fordham Institute has been in the Buckeye state for 20 years; today Mitch Chester is Massachusetts Education Commissioner and heads up the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), one of the national testing consortia. Ohio, like North Carolina, is slightly above the national average, with virtually no improvement over the 2005 to 2011 period. Even the nation as a whole improved over that time. Yikes.

But then let’s look at Achieve, Inc., which has served as weigh station for national standards advocates for the greater part of its existence. Its America Diploma Project (ADP), launched with Fordham at the start of the last decade and working in 35 states, was the stalking horse, err… model, for Common Core. How do the average NAEP scores of the 35 states in the ADP fare in comparison from 2005 to 2011? Below are the US scores, the scores of the full slate of states in the ADP, and then the ADP states minus Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut (three states that were performing already at a high level in 2001, and no one I’ve ever talked to has suggested that ADP led to raising their NAEP scores).

Of course the mother ship of national standards is the Gates Foundation. Chapter 10 “The Billionaire Boy’s Club” in Diane Ravitch’s recent book maps out in careful detail how the Gates folks have spent billions on ed reform in the last decade and with little, or no results, to offer. So, I’d encourage you to read Diane’s chapter on Gates to learn who they fund and why little that they ever support works.

So, here’s the summary graph: Massachusetts vs. the states where national standards advocates have worked in. Given the historic success of Massachusetts on NAEP and TIMSS testing and the very average performance of the states that have worked with national standards players, unless national standards weren’t a “a race to the middle” why didn’t other states just adopt the Massachusetts standards, as 2010 Pioneer and Diane Ravitch recommended:

Ravitch goes so far as to say that the Obama administration is wasting its time trying to establish national standards in English and math. “I wish they had just adopted the Massachusetts standards,’’ she said. “They could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.’’

Melville’s The Confidence-Man never commanded much popular acclaim during his lifetime, but, then again, neither did Moby-Dick. And the literature-lite Common Core ELA standards don’t include Moby-Dick, which some regard as America’s greatest novel.

Given the very average and in some cases below average performance of these players and their inability to move the needle on NAEP over decades, one can understand why in desperation they would try national standards. What you would not expect is that people and organizations with zero record over 20 years of improving either academic standards, or student achievement, would be entrusted to set standards for 40-50 million schoolchildren. Nor would you expect that they would create the Leviathan of testing systems, curricular materials and instructional practices to guide the nation's teachers.

In addition to Common Core’s academic weaknesses, questions about illegality, and prohibitive costs, the reform records of Common Core’s players certainly do not instill much confidence.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Yesterday, the Globe’s Deirdre Fernandes reported on the spat between Newton North High School’s food contractor and the student-run Tiger’s Loft Bistro. The contractor, Whitsons Culinary Group, was sore about the school allowing a competitor to serve food in the building. After all was said and done, the school and the contractor made up, and the student-run bistro will re-open and be able to serve students once again.

There are two lessons to learn:

Businesses may like to talk about the need for competition, but they never like it when there is a direct competitor. That’s why for over a year, Whitsons sought a clause in its contract that barred competition. Not much of a news flash there, but it is always worth reminding ourselves that businesses are frequently not friends to free markets and competition.

As there is little news there, let’s move on to the second point. Outsourcing non-educational functions saves a lot of money for educational activities. In Fernandes’ piece there are a couple of paragraphs worth highlighting:

In the past, district officials have stressed that the contract with Whitson is saving Newton schools money. The district used to operate its own food services program and had to traditionally subsidized it at about $1 million annually. But since the program was privatized last year, costs have declined and by the 2014 fiscal year, the district won’t have to put any additional money into food services, Guryan said.

Newton is pleased with the number of meals being served by Whitsons and both the schools and the company are at least breaking even on the venture, Guryan said.

A million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, especially for the services rendered in a single (large) school. Makes me wonder how many school districts contract out food services. Ask your local officials what they are doing. It could save serious money that can go to the core work of schools—teaching and learning.

(But if you get your food services contracted out, make sure the firm in question does not get to bar the door for competitors.)

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

We all want high-quality teachers, right? What are we doing about it? The state has started to push teacher evaluations across the state, and that is great. Especially great because for far too long school managers and supervisors did not perform regular evaluations, which at the very least are useful for professional feedback and growth.

I do have my doubts that a bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all evaluation system is terribly useful besides the obvious fact that it will require more people to fill out paper. My doubts are practical ones. If you are running a school and seeking to peg its performance at a very high level, there are times when you want your teachers to focus on improving their individual performance; and there are times when you want to build the sense of team. No bureaucratic rule is going to get you there. In addition, any performance pay scheme has to start at the top. At the very least, this new system has to be implemented for superintendents, administrative professionals, principals and supervisors first; if not, it will again feel like something that is being done to teachers.

So, if we want high-quality teachers, let's start with some basic, well-known facts:

1. The intellectual capacity of individuals seeking to join the state's and the nation's teacher corps is too low. We've known this for a long while, but the 2006 report Educating School Teachers led by Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, does a pretty good job of making the case. The report notes that not only are teachers unprepared in technology, curriculum development and assessments, and dealing with ELL and special needs students, but "the SAT and GRE scores of aspiring secondary school teachers are comparable to the national average, the scores of future elementary school teachers fall near the bottom of all test takers, with GRE scores 100 points below the national average."


2. Teacher quality is the one of the most important elements in improving the quality of our schools.


3. There is no way to attract aspirants to the profession if starting salaries are not higher. Starting salaries can often be in the $30,000+ range. That's not enough to attract the top tier of young, ambitious and smart graduates, which is what we need in our classrooms. That is especially so for math and science graduates, who have many more high-paying prospects in the private market.


4. We are arguably investing a lot of money for teacher compensation but have the compensation built in a way that is not attracting high-quality teachers. The current compensation system maintains low initial salaries and rewards "system" people. The average teacher in Massachusetts now makes $70,000, a good salary (especially given that many pursue summer work in July and August) which is part of an extraordinarily rich benefits package well beyond the reach of mere private sector mortals. In 2010, Wisconsin teachers were estimated to have an average salary of $56,000, but when their benefits were included the average annual compensation package calculated out at just over $100,000. I'll look up the Massachusetts benefits overall later and share, but the WI numbers are likely not terribly richer (perhaps 20-25% richer if that?) than our own. Then there is the fact that the benefits schedule truly kicks in around 20 years of service, when the proverbial hockey-stick effect is observed and future benefits skyrocket in value.

So here's a question: Why can't we "frontload" some of the overall compensation by reducing the richness of the benefits package in order to make room for salaries for starting teachers?

One objection is that surveys of current teachers suggests that they like the make-up of their compensation package. Yep. I get that, but the objection misses the point. The point is not to ask the current teacher corps what got them into the business and how they like it. The point is to attract a significantly different group with different career options into the profession. Why not survey graduating students who are significantly above average in terms of SATs, GREs, and collegiate accomplishments? That would be more meaningful.

Another objection is that teachers self-fund their pensions and therefore it is up to the current teacher corps to do whatever the heck it wants with their pensions. OK. Two things I would like to bring out: (1) That ducks the question of how to attract high-quality teachers to the profession, and (2) it is absolutely untrue. On the first point, even if teachers did self-fund their pensions, the current compensation schedule stinks as a way to recruit high-quality teachers to the profession. On the second point, teachers don't self-fund their pensions.

The state has a multi-billion dollar unfunded pension liability for a reason, which is that teacher pensions are not self-funded. Here are the figures from the state’s Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission report for 2011. Please see the chart on page 11 (Section 5, labeled 'Audit Information: Part B / GASB Statement No. 27') showing the Massachusetts and Boston Teachers’ share of the ‘state pension fund payment;’ i.e., the annual required contribution by the state to ensure that pensions are whole.

Of the state’s annual obligation of $1.35 billion for state and certain local pensions, the Massachusetts and Boston Teachers make up the lion’s share of the total. In the chart, teacher pensions are broken out into "normal cost" and "amortization cost."

• The “normal cost” of $107 million is what the state’s pays into the pension fund this year to properly fund what is expected to be paid out in future pensions to Massachusetts Teachers. For Boston Teachers the number is $8.5 million. So in 2011, the state is paying over $115 million to make the Massachusetts and Boston Teachers’ pensions whole. That’s not fully-funded.


• The “amortization cost” is this year’s payment to pay down the unfunded liability. For Massachusetts teachers the number is $661 million; for the Boston Teachers it is $86.2 million. That’s a total of $747.2 million that the state, again, is paying in.

All tallied up, payments on teachers’ pensions make up $862.7 million of the annual $1.35 billion the state pays down on pensions.

That’s quite a bit short of “self-funded.”

What I am arguing for is decidedly not a 401(K) plan for teachers. Teachers should be treated fairly, and attractive retirement benefits are (like any portion of compensation) helpful in attracting high-quality people to the profession. What I'd suggest is that we create a defined benefit package that is more in line with what Social Security provides and then when a teacher makes above a certain salary, s/he can additionally buy into a 401(K) with matches from the state. That's what we do in the private sector -- and it would allow greater ability to flow to and from the teaching profession.

It would also allow us to pay starting teachers quite a bit more. I think that's a good thing. How to do it? For now, here are some things you might want to read to get some perspective on the issue. This piece by Jacob Vigdor in EducationNext is a great overview on the topic. This EdWeek piece from 2009 points at many of the challenges and the thinking of some superintendents and unions. This study tries to take a look at both backloading (current system) and frontloading. More to come on the topic.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Periodically, over at the Fordham blog, Checker Finn does his best imitation of the cop waving traffic through at the scene of the car crash we like to call Common Core. In a post last week ("The war against the Common Core”), he morphs into good ol’ Sergeant Finn, crabbing at any observers, “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.” The mishaps around Common Core national standards are simple driver misjudgment, he explains. Steering mistakes. Nobody’s breaking the law. And don’t worry, because even though there have been lots of accidents, the road ahead is not dangerous.

This is classic Checker handwaving, passing off politics as policy. Let’s look at the four arguments he makes.

1. Don’t worry about the quality of the standards, amending them, etc. Checker starts in his usual way by calling people who disagree “zealous assailants” (we were kvetchers a few handwaves back) who have mounted “ceaseless attacks” creating a “tempest in a highly visible teapot.” I suppose he is referring to Pioneer’s four studies (1, 2, 3, 4) on the quality (or lack thereof) of the national standards. Checker argues that

[O]ther states could simply copy the best of those that already exist. But that’s more or less what the Common Core is: an amalgam of good standards put together by people who know a lot—and care a lot—about both content and skills.

No matter how many times Checker and Fordham say this does not matter. It is factually untrue. The experts who conducted our four comparisons of the national standards to specific state standards were the best in the business, far more qualified to make judgments than the ones employed by Fordham. And they found not only that there are a few flaws related to algebra, but that the math standards are a significant step down on algebra; that they have numerous problems with basic arithmetic; they impose an experimental (and not likely to succeed) pedagogical method for teaching geometry; and they aim at community college level math. On the English language arts side of the ledger, they found that the national standards markedly de-emphasize literature, which will slow the acquisition of a rich vocabulary; they put English teachers in the position of teaching technical readings (good luck with that); and they, again, aim far too low.

Checker’s handwaving on the significance of these flaws is a sign of an impractical, overly theoretical approach to education policy, and nothing short of irresponsible:

Insofar as such criticisms are warranted, the Common Core can be revised, states can add standards of their own, and jurisdictions that find the common version truly unsatisfactory can change their minds about using it at all.

The two assertions made here are just wrong. Yes, states can add standards of their own (up to 15% of content), which for places like Massachusetts does little to get us to the same level of expectations we had set before. In addition, content added by specific states will not be included in the national tests, so few schools will teach the add-ons. Finally, the idea that it is oh-so-easy to change the national standards is overindulgent daydreaming. Any state desiring to change a strand of the standards will have to negotiate with 40+ jurisdictions, the non-profits involved in this effort, and of course the federal government. To date, there has been no process established for amending the standards. Just think about that for a second.

On whether states can pull out, well, more below.

2. We the DC People working on the national standards are all of good will and working hard to implement these things. Yup, OK. I do have reservations about the intentions of some, but let’s not go there. What is worth stating clearly though is that Checker and the folks in DC pushing this aren’t serious about upholding the public trust and in devising policy in a responsible and publicly accountable way. Big words, I know. Here are the facts to back my view up.

• We know very well that there is a lack of settlement around the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and that is due in part to the way it was forced through Congress and the perceived costs of implementing it. (Clearly control of your own health care matters to a large portion of the US population as well.) Including the adoption of national standards in grant program requirements and then having the federal government fund the development of curricular materials and instructional practice guides directly, well, these actions were never even approved by Congress. The reason there has never been a Congressional Budget Office scoring of the cost to states is because, again, it was never approved by Congress. So the lack of settlement around Common Core is even more to be expected than what we've seen to date regarding the PPACA.

• Checker holds himself up as working to “cost it all out.” Shouldn’t that have been done before moving ahead? Have we grown so irresponsible as to adopt blank check policy making? That’s ridiculous, and that’s why Pioneer Institute is the only research outfit in the U.S. to have performed an actual cost accounting of the implementation of national standards and tests. Ted Rebarber of AccountabilityWorks conducted a fair and empirical analysis of the cost of implementation, and found that it will cost $16 billion.

That’s almost assuredly going to be an unfunded mandate. Fordham’s working on it? The fact is that when our report came out, they assigned someone with no ability to review the study. Kathleen Porter-Magee’s criticisms of the report for Fordham are flimsy in the extreme. For example, KP-M wants the study’s author Ted Rebarber to build into his cost estimates something outside of empirical data—an assumption that as yet unheard of reforms by the feds will lead to big cost reductions. It is worth nothing that this is just more evidence that the quality of Fordham’s work has fallen quickly these past years as the good Sergeant and his troops have taken up handwaving and pom-poms for the national standards. We’re supposed to skip empirical evidence and assume reforms in order to make the numbers work?

We saw the same thing with the Fordham Institute’s review of the Massachusetts state standards prior to our state board’s vote to adopt Common Core. Then, Fordham's researcher(s) did not include key aspects of the Bay State’s revisions to its English standards.

Sloppy stuff. Reason #4212 why DC players, who don’t know what they’re talking about, should stay out of state education policy.

• While the Fordham Institute and its friends who are supporting the Common Core might find it a pesky reality, the advancement of standards, tests, curricular materials and instructional practice guides is illegal. Go back and read that sentence. Perhaps the view of two former counsels general doesn’t matter to Checker and his fellow travelers, but you are breaking three federal laws—the General Education Provisions Act, the Department of Education Organization Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The three laws prohibit the direction, supervision or control in any way of standards, curricula and curricular materials and instructional practice. For example, the GEPA clearly states:

No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, or to require the assignment or transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance.

If I were Checker, I would think hard on this one, especially with attorneys general not shy in taking on expansions of federal power (at the end of March the Supreme Court of the United States will be hearing oral arguments on the PPACA presented by state AGs).

3. States can pull out of the Common Core and go it alone any time they want. For rhetorical reasons, Checker has separated his argument on this issue into two points (#4 and #6) but they all are closely related. Yes, Texas and Virginia and a handful of states have not adopted the Common Core. Checker admits that the likelihood (not fear) that

Uncle Sam won’t be able to keep his hands off the Common Core—which means the whole enterprise will be politicized, corrupted and turned from national/voluntary into federal/coercive … is probably the strongest objection to the Common Core.

I say this is likely because this has been the march of the Department since 1979. It is the reason why the Department (and supporters like Checker) thinks that breaking three federal laws is the acceptable price of progress. They know their intentions are good, so breaking the law is in the interests of the country, and therefore the right thing to do. That mindset makes what Checker calls fears and suspicions a likely outcome. But it's not fear telling us that but rather judgment based on past experience. It’s an incontrovertible fact that Democrats and Republicans have grown the Department’s reach and budget enormously in the past three decades.

In Checker's telling, all opposition is related to “suspicion” and “lingering fears” about past attempts. Conveniently, he then pivots to his political exercise of pointing fingers at an “over-zealous Education Secretary and the President he serves.” You know, it’s a simple steering error.

The problem is that Checker has no more standing on this issue. He didn’t fight back when remarks by the Secretary and President made their intentions clear. He did not fight back when the administration created a “fiscal ‘incentive’ in Race to the Top for states to adopt the Common Core.” Calling the department out now for that is just political posturing on Checker’s part.

Then, of course, there’s the “incentive” built into the NCLB waiver process for states to adopt the Common Core. When Arne Duncan announced his decision to move ahead with waivers that posed conditions on the states that had never been approved by Congress (and which violated the aforementioned three federal laws), Fordham’s Mike Petrilli was reduced in his blog to begging Sec. Duncan not to overreach:

Walk away from this one, Mr. Secretary. Please, those of us who support the Common Core are begging you.

That's a rather unbecoming act for a citizen in a free republic: Americans don't generally like begging our federal officials. Yet that is what we all will be doing forward. And that was made clear to South Carolina, which recently debated leaving the Common Core. That earned a press release directly from Secretary Duncan’s mouth, “lambasting” lawmakers and the governor for even considering such a thing.

Checker downplays the feds’ funding of national assessments, admitting that it is a “third federal entanglement.” Conveniently, while he notes some requirements that come with the national tests, he skips over the fact that these assessments come with curricular materials and instructional practice guides—which are again illegal.

4. “National” is the right way to go. Let me be as kind as I can (at least to start).

• It’s illegal. We are a nation of laws, not megalomaniacs.


• Just as many nations with national standards score below as above the United States on international tests.


• Most of the nations with national standards are much smaller and often more homogeneous than the United States.


• Did I mention that it’s illegal? (I’d love to see your argument on that one, Checker.)


• The U.S. Department of Education has no track record of improving schools.

I would also note that I bristle at the thought that Massachusetts or other states should follow the advice of the Fordham Institute, which has a limited record of improving schools. I would invite readers to take a look at Ohio’s NAEP scores, as well as the performance of Ohio’s charter schools, an issue on which Fordham has been very active.

Once again, Checker gives us so many good reasons and so many good opportunities to demonstrate that he is wrong, and it’s largely because he is playing politics not policy. Obviously, he is a smart man and someone, to be honest, that has done important work in the past. But right now everything he is writing ostensibly on standards policy smacks of political positioning. He’s always looking to angle for what he thinks observers will read as the mid-range, reasonable position. Checker's latest schtick of being for national standards but harboring thoughtful concerns about the people in power just doesn't pass the laugh test.

Sarge, I have a couple of constructive suggestions to help you deal with that incessant handwaving tick you have.

The above Providence, RI, traffic cop has taken to dancing in the middle of the street to entertain rush hour. Such a set of moves would allow you to take people’s minds off of the Common Core crash-up and do it redirecting your handwaving to productive ends.

Or perhaps we could celebrate good ol’ Sergeant Finn’s retirement in style, as was done for this fine officer on his last day of service, marked by a box of donuts.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

The last decade has seen an explosion in the number of middle and high schools mandating volunteerism. I am not a fan of forcing volunteerism, and “mandatory volunteerism” offends those who treasure meaningful language. But within a set of courses and activities aimed at rounding out children so that they will become effective participants in civil society, such requirements may make sense. That is especially so if students can choose the volunteer program and not be restricted to school-approved activities. Choosing what you are passionate about is critical to being a good citizen.

Clearly, such mandates are not things we impose on adults. Which is why it is so disconcerting to see the federal department of education treat state and local education leaders like children.

Way back in 2009, when U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top competition, it was couched in closely scripted remarks about how this was a voluntary competition that would not upend 200 years of history around state and local primacy in education policy. Even as he saluted former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt in June 2009 for supporting "common national standards when it wasn't politically popular," Sec. Duncan extolled the federalist system:

I am continually struck by the profound wisdom underlying the American political experiment. The genius of our system is that much of the power to shape our future has, wisely, been distributed to the states instead of being confined to Washington.

Our best ideas have always come from state and local governments, which are the real hothouses of innovation in America.

That hymnal was clearly distributed to national and local partners, with the National School Boards Association, Achieve, Inc., the National Governors Association's lobby and other fellow travelers who made a point of employing words like “state-led,” “voluntary,” and “partnership” to counter suggestions that the feds were driving the effort. Anyone who questioned how long this representation of intent would last was relegated to the realm of overly dramatic, a kvetcher, or a conspiracy theorist.

We are now on the second and perhaps third act of this piece of theater. In round one, legislatures made affirmative choices to expand charter schools. In round two, states only got funding if they complied with federal definitions of reform and innovation; and in all but five cases without legislative action and, frankly, without legislative awareness. Round three has the federal government directly funding the development of national assessments that explicitly come with curricular materials and instructional practice guides.

And now a number of states are getting antsy. The photo-op public announcements of federal grants long past, we are now into implementation—and state legislators are facing a rude awakening. Only now are they hearing about the mediocre quality of the national standards, the as-yet-undefined assessments, the imposition of curricular materials, the never stated costs, and the possibility that this whole effort actually breaks three federal laws. Only now are they recognizing the potential political mess to come with the feds' establishment of definitions of proficiency.

The great innovators inside the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building did not take kindly to the barrage of reports on the mediocre quality of the national education standards (1, 2, 3, 4). Nor did they take kindly to reports showing that they are breaking three federal laws by directing and funding the development of national tests, curricular materials and instructional practice guides. A recent report that implementation of the national standards and tests will cost $16-plus billion (90% of which will come from states and localities) didn't sit well with them either.

In addition to the lagging time to grasp the real policy questions before them, the past three years have brought a sea-change in the political landscape. The 2010 elections changed the make-up of state legislatures dramatically, with a greater number of fiscal conservatives who look warily at unfunded federal mandates and overreach. With the new conditions, never approved by Congress, that Sec. Duncan is advancing, there is a growing realization among state legislators that the national standards are not truly voluntary. Even a stalwart supporter of a big USDOE like Mike Petrilli of the DC-based Fordham Institute recognizes that with the No Child Left Behind waivers Sec. Duncan:

seems compelled to attach mandates to his forthcoming NCLB waivers that will require adoption of the Common Core standards.

No, his team won’t mention the Common Core, but everybody knows that’s what he’s talking about when he calls for “college and career-ready standards.”

Fearful of stoking a backlash that will "lose many of the states that have already signed on," Petrilli in his blog is reduced to begging Sec. Duncan not to overreach:

Walk away from this one, Mr. Secretary. Please, those of us who support the Common Core are begging you.

That's a rather unbecoming act for a citizen in a free republic: We don't generally like begging our federal officials. That is in fact something state legislators abhor.

Unsurprisingly, there are state officials who are running for the exits. Hearings have been held in Indiana and South Carolina on bills that would prohibit implementation of the national standards and tests. More bills are working their way toward hearings in other states, as a number of state legislators and governors are showing the audacity to question whether national standards and assessments are actually a good idea.

In Indiana, notwithstanding former Bush budgetmaster and sitting Governor Mitch Daniels' support for Common Core, the legislature is insisting on a study of the cost of implementation:

Members of the Senate Committee on Education today unanimously approved a resolution authored by Sen. Scott Schneider (R-Indianapolis) urging a more in-depth study on Common Core State Standards and the impact on Indiana's nationally recognized education benchmarks.

In some states, both governors and legislators are asking questions--and even reaching a position of opposition. For example, in South Carolina, prior to an education subcommittee hearing on S.604, a bill that would prohibit the state from implementing the national standards and tests, Governor Nikki Haley took the bold step of calling for the state to pull out.

My testimony to the subcommittee drew on reports on the lack of quality, the cost and the illegality of the national standards and assessment project. But I also made one additional important argument, which is built off of the fact that South Carolina has been recognized as having the best U.S. History standards in the country. South Carolina and other states that choose to exit the national standards should not simply say no. They could draw from Texas’ efforts:

Consulting with top academicians in the U.S. and taking note of Singapore’s much-vaunted standards, Texas re-designed its state standards. Today, Texas not only has excellent English standards but also has among the best math standards in the country—far stronger than the Common Core.

South Carolina has rigorous US history standards and high-quality state standards. Saying “no” to Common Core is a matter of good judgment—but I would urge you additionally to use the opportunity of this debate to move forward with positive improvements to the Palmetto State’s standards and assessments.

States must aim higher than Common Core. Common Core aims at community college readiness, and that is not good enough for Massachusetts--and not going to make the U.S. internationally competitive.

As Catherine Gewertz of EdWeek noted, the bill "got voted down in a state Senate subcommittee, but was still going to move on to the full education committee."

But US Ed Secretary’s reaction to the South Carolina legislature’s and the governor’s actions was instructive. The day after the subcommittee vote, Sec. Duncan issued a formal statement on the happenings in South Carolina, which Gewertz described as "swipe" at the Palmetto State and "designed to dismantle support for the proposed legislation":

The idea that the Common Core standards are nationally-imposed is a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy. The Common Core academic standards were both developed and adopted by the states, and they have widespread bipartisan support.

Noting that states must stop “dummying down academic standards and lying about the performance of children and schools,” he accused the Palmetto State of “lower[ing] the bar for proficiency in English and mathematics faster than any state in the country from 2005 to 2009."

You could analyze the secretary's formal statement for style points, such as

1. Why didn’t Sec. Duncan ask a surrogate to make such a statement rather than personally get involved? Previous secretaries would certainly not have been so heavy-handed.


2. Who writes the secretary’s releases? “Dummying down”? They don’t teach that at Harvard, so I am going to guess it’s a Chicago-ism. And does the secretary hope to convince state legislators toward a course of action by berating them as if they were little children?

But there are two important, substantive conclusions to draw from the secretary’s broadside.

1. The secretary is, in essence, accusing South Carolina of cooking the books on student performance. As Jay Greene notes, that is factually inaccurate, and the secretary is either ignorant of state practice or his is shading the truth to suit his argument:



South Carolina did significantly lower its performance standards between 2005 and 2009. But they did so because they had earlier raised those performance standards to well-above the national average. In the end, South Carolina had math and reading performance standards that were close to the national average and close to the NAEP standard for Basic.



2. It’s unseemly for the secretary of education of the federal government to make a formal statement about a legislative proposal related to education standards in the state of South Carolina. That is especially true if Common Core is truly a state-led effort. More directly: if all this talk about state-led standards is true, why is the U.S. Secretary of Education flying off the handle when a single state expresses interest in pulling out? As CATO’s Neal McCluskey put it, "Apparently, if you try to undo something the feds want you to do, they’ll slap you around until you confess they’ve never threatened you."

The feds want Common Core really bad. This is mandatory volunteerism of the worst kind. It is a power play that is advancing a mediocre product, with high undisclosed and unfunded costs for states and localities, and it is illegal. Those are three really big strikes against it.

But worst of all, it treats states like children. However critical I can be of education leaders in our and other states, I cannot see a record of any accomplishment by the so-called adults in Washington that compares with the demonstrated gains in Massachusetts, Florida and many other states.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

The waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind Act will, as noted yesterday, have a number of effects, with three big ones being:

• It moves the goalposts for accountability back years (at least 2017, more likely 2024) and weakens the accountability goal (from proficiency for all students to making progress on the achievement gap)
• It gets rid of all of the law's school choice and parental options, which were to kick in after a number of years of continued school failure
• It centralizes innovation and change strategies in Malden (the world HQ of the state department of education)

The first effect listed above is a simple punt on accountability. But the last two bullets mark a move away from empowering parents and reinvigoration of the state's education bureaucracy. It also lots of questions:

If parents are not empowered in the process, where will accountability come from? After all, if the state is the great innovator and also the keeper of accountability (the accountability office now directly reports to the education commissioner), why would the bureaucracy feel any pressure? They define the terms of the debate and the solutions.

There is also the question about whether central bureaucracies can ever really "innovate." Innovation comes from competition and new ideas that often take on conventional wisdom. Digital was unable to innovate from the inside and therefore it was replaced by other computer companies, etc. There is a lot written on the topic, and I guess the educrats are too busy to look at such research.

US Secretary Arne Duncan has ignored this as well, considering DC as the driver of innovation in the states, on standards, testing, instructional practice, curricula, and teacher evaluations. He has staked his claim to be an innovator on his work in Chicago, when he was Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools.

And for the most part, he and the state education bureaucracies who are working with him, have advanced the view that they can "turn around" schools and districts from central offices. I've noted the research on the absolute paucity of successful turnarounds before, but if thought it is worth sharing recent research that is focused on Duncan's own home town and its record with school turnarounds:

One day before Chicago School Board members vote on whether to “turn around” a record number of flagging schools, a new study emerged Tuesday that dumped on the results of the city’s major turnaround vendor.

About 33 neighborhood schools with at least 95 percent low-income students not only outscored equally poor schools cleared out of all staff and “turned around’’ by the Academy for Urban School Leadership, but even beat the city test score average, the study by Designs for Change indicated.

And the neighborhood schools did so without the average $7 million per school in funds and facility improvements over five years given the typical AUSL school — and with far less teacher turnover, the study said.

As the Chicago Sun-Times notes:

The analysis ranked 210 city neighborhood schools with at least 95 percent low-income students, based on the percent of students passing their 2011 state reading tests. It found that AUSL placed only three schools among the top 100 — Howe (53rd), Morton (84th) and Johnson (88th). AUSL’s lowest scorer was Bethune, at 199th. Two CPS-run turnaround schools — Langford and Fulton — came in 150 and 206th, respectively.

Often, the study found, neighborhood schools outperformed equally-poor AUSL turnaround schools located only a few miles away. For example, in the South Shore neighborhood, Powell came in No. 14, while AUSL’s Bradwell was No. 194.

Massachusetts will see in Lawrence Public Schools if somehow we will prove the exception and find a way to get the schools there on a strong path toward improvement. The state has taken over the schools in Lawrence and is crafting a central plan for lots of turnaround activity. Will it work? I really hope so, but given the data so far, and there's lots of it, the turnaround supporters frankly are just spewing a lot of spin.

It would be far smarter for the state to give parents more charter options, create an additional vocational-technical schools that operates autonomous of the district structure, and interdistrict choice options.

Funny how empowering parents has, unlike turnaround strategies, a very good empirical record.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Massachusetts and nine other states made news last week by seeking and receiving waivers from major provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The law was never a favorite of mine but I think the way it was upended and why says a lot about the centralizing worldview of federal and state policymakers.

First thing is to separate process and substance. The process on the waivers is wrongheaded—and likely illegal. Stay tuned for more on that. On the substance, US Department of Ed Secretary Arne Duncan outlined the key requirements he wanted Massachusetts to fulfill, on standards (what Sec. Duncan calls college- and career-readiness standards), instruction and leadership, and accountability.

On standards, Massachusetts met the feds’ requirement by adopting new national standards and national assessments in July 2010. No news there, and not good news given the mediocrity of the Common Core national standards (if you’re interested in a good pro and con conversation on Common Core, read this.) Massachusetts met the feds’ requirement on teacher evaluations by adopting statewide regulations on evaluations in June 2011.

The real story on the waivers is about accountability and the education establishment’s antipathy to school choice in any form. NCLB touched on a number of aspects of school life including school safety, communication with parent and teacher qualifications, but at its core was accountability. It never changed state standards, nor did it focus on input requirements (how much to spend, how specifically to teach, etc.). Instead, it relied on accountability to drive its ambitious goal that ALL children would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. It required testing students in reading and math in grades 3-8 and one high school grade.

Here’s a short list of why the waivers are not a great step forward for schoolkids and parents when it comes to education and accountability:

Will the new accountability system work? We have no idea.
With the waiver in hand, Massachusetts will now unify state and federal requirements regarding school and district accountability and assistance through a new five-tier system. The state’s education department will from summer 2012 classify schools and districts

in one of five accountability and assistance levels. Schools meeting their proficiency gap closing goals will be placed in Level 1, schools not meeting their gap closing goals will be placed in Level 2, schools with the largest proficiency gaps for student subgroups and for all students will be placed in Level 3. The state’s lowest performing schools will be placed in Level 4 or 5. Districts will be placed in a level based on the performance of their lowest performing schools.

Will it work? The new Massachusetts accountability system is at best a work in progress. The Bay State used to have a tough state accountability office for schools, but that was shuttered for all intents and purposes in 2008. There’s not been a full-blown district accountability report (covering teacher evaluation, curriculum development, professional development, building upkeep and maintenance, use of data to inform decision-making, student performance by subgroup, etc.) since 2009.

Proficiency for all students is not the same as making progress in closing the proficiency gap.
AYP was a problematic construct but its goal was clear and its provisions were clear. AYP required that ALL (100%) schoolkids be “proficient” (by state definition) by 2014. Each year until 2014, district and charter public schools had to make improvement toward that goal. AYP looked at overall school outcomes, but it also forced districts to break out performance and meet AYP targets for subgroups: Asian & Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, American Indian, White, Free/Reduced Lunch, Special education, and Limited English proficiency. (The subgroups had to have 30 or more students to be included.)

The Massachusetts waiver sets a different bar – and it is lower. In its application, Massachusetts promises that it will give districts 6 years to cut the number of students not at grade level in half. Not only does that move the goalposts back time-wise but the state’s press announcement states:

Targets will be differentiated for each school, district, and subgroup based on its starting point in 2010-11.

In lay terms, that means that some districts get treated differently from others.

AYP was a tool that sought to change how schools did business, but schools don’t want to change how they do business.
Schools not meeting NCLB’s AYP goals for

• two consecutive years were to give students an opportunity to transfer to a higher-performing district school


• three years were to offer students tutoring and other supplemental services, as well as school choice options


• five years had to take tougher steps like replacing school personnel or extending the school year

And since the start of NCLB, districts and schools have been very reticent (and in most cases hostile) toward any of these actions. Most of the outside sought by districts has been focused on central office-driven solutions.

Moving away from clear consequences for schools has put the state education department in the driver’s seat, but do they have any destination in mind?
Massachusetts DESE insists that the change will allow it to focus its “most dramatic interventions where they are most needed.” I’m not sure the department is any good at this. In fact, as noted in this blog before, few interventions across the country have actually made a longterm difference. We are about to find out very fast, with the state’s takeover of the Lawrence Public Schools, whether something has magically changed.

The state’s menu of interventions (expanded learning time, fixing long-broken professional development, and wrap-around social services) is not very promising in terms of empirical record. And its process-heavy description of why it needed a waiver does not bode well either.

At one time NCLB provided useful feedback on district and school performance

But

Under NCLB's original goal – 100 percent proficiency for all students by 2014 – rising federal targets resulted in far too many schools and districts being identified as in need of improvement to enable the state to effectively identify those in greatest need of assistance or intervention.

You could read that last sentence as stating for the umpteenth time that NCLB was okay until it started to bite. But it also underscores that the state believes that its own technical interventions are what will fix our schools. That is a very different mindset from what I consider a strength of NCLB. Rather than thinking that bureaucrats (the state department of ed) will reform bureaucratic systems (our districts), NCLB gave safety valve choices to parents who were in districts that were failing to meet the law’s goals. The idea behind that was to ensure that we adults don’t simply push back the goal posts whenever big goals promised at big press conferences get pushed back.

It is no surprise that the department’s press release clearly states that “Massachusetts will no longer mandate NCLB school choice and supplemental educational services.” I get that NCLB was not working, but I also get that this waiver is not a step forward.

It’s the usual goal-post shifting we have come to expect in education.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

At 6'5", U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is known for being up to a foot taller than most policymakers and bureaucrats. I am sure you've all read of his close friendship and basketball sessions with the president.

Jon Stewart on tiptoes is 5'7" (have it from a reputable site!). But in Duncan's Thursday night appearance on the Daily Show, Stewart was like junior sumo sized wrestler Mainoumi running rings around Kotonishiki. Stewart clings to lots of old nostrums, but he was by turns more practical, grounded and uplifting in his conversation with Arne Duncan about education policy, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the nationalization of decision-making in education.

Stewart clearly hears a lot from his mom. She's a teacher and her much doted upon son delivers his jabs at Duncan with the cunning of Macaulay Culkin protecting hearth and home from (dumb) interlopers in Home Alone. She doesn't like NCLB, RttT and standardized testing, and the conversation deliciously exposes just how wooden and worn the former Australia league pro's talking points are.

The Washington Post's Valerie Straus noted how disjointed and stiff Duncan was in responding to Stewart:

Jon Stewart tried to engage Education Secretary Arne Duncan on “The Daily Show” Thursday night, but the effort was an exercise in the futility of conversing with someone who won’t deviate from his talking points.

Calling him programmed is kind. Look - I am a supporter of high quality academic standards and testing, but they are accountability tools that were meant to leave teachers broad range in how they got the results. Secretary Duncan is trying to pull all power to the center, not just on accountability but also in evaluations and teaching practice. If you think I am kidding consider the instructional practice guides and curricular materials being developed by the two national consortia in charge of creating national tests.

Duncan suggests that his one-size-fits-all-states strategy will foster creativity and innovation. He claims he wants to stop teaching to the test. Hmmm.

File under dorky, disconnected, and in need of a teleprompter. I don't know how Duncan did in Australia, but right now the only points he's scoring are talking points. He seems to have no idea what impact his policies are having and will have well into the future.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Arne Duncan
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Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

You know you’re in for trouble when a school district with major graduation and dropout rates problems announces a new budget and leads with the hiring of five new nurses. That is not the definition of urgency.

The big new Boston budget of $856 million came with big headlines about more nurses and an overhaul of Roxbury’s Madison Park Vocational Technical High School. $856 million for about 54,000 students. That breaks down to almost $16,000. Of course it does not include additional funding sources and is not the complete picture. Last year’s NCES estimates pegged Boston as the most expensive urban school district in the country, clocking in at around $21,000 per student.

There is an obvious problem with the results we are getting. You don’t have to believe that “everyone has to be a college graduate” to see that a system that gets less than a third of its students to be truly college ready and that graduates 64 percent of its freshman class is in trouble. A study in 2008 showed that among 50 urban districts Boston was well behind many of its peers. San Jose and Nashville had graduation rates of 77 percent, Virginia Beach and even Sacramento outpaced Boston. We were clumped together with districts like Fort Worth and Houston (two districts whose numbers reflected the admittance of New Orleans transplants after Katrina.

Since 2008, when our graduation rate stood at 57 percent, we have seen steady but very slow progress. 2011 data shows that

Of the students who entered high school in the 2006/2007 school year, 63.2% graduated within four years. This 2010 data is an increase of 1.8 percentage points from 2009 and more than 5 percentage points since 2007. BPS calculates the dropout rate fell from 6.4% in 2009 to 5.7% in 2010.

That’s good news but hardly anything to crow about. It means Boston, Massachusetts’ district schools rank right up there with Memphis district schools on graduation and that we’ve gone from a 26 percent dropout rate to a 23 percent dropout rate.

So here are my takeaways on the new budget:

1. It still does not reflect a change in the school selection zones and therefore expends far too much money on transportation rather than actually educating kids.


2. More nurses can be helpful but their presence has little impact on improving students’ academic outcomes. And the simple fact is that when your budget announcement underscores the hiring of five nurses as a major victory, the real story is a lack of vision and leadership.


3. The overhaul of Madison Park Vocational Technical High School strikes me as falling in the “as yet undefined” category. On the face of it, it is tepid. A strong proposal would have allowed Madison Park to function as an autonomous school, much like the regional vocational technical schools that have performed tremendously since the early 2000s (and have incredibly low dropout rates). But superintendents are by definition incapable of giving up control of portions of their fiefdom.


4. The emphasis on turning around underperforming schools will allow a few gems to shine, like Up Academy, which really seems to have turned the school in a new direction. But the ability to replicate that level of focus is extremely limited. The charter model, which does not require the same level of involvement from all the institutional players and, you know, is by now proven on a consistent basis, is a far better way to go. I am not mentioning here the less interesting turnaround efforts—which do not bring the level of talent seen at Up Academy.


5. The superintendent’s plan includes extended day at two middle schools, funded by foundations and driven by Chris Gabrieli’s work at Mass 2020. In writing about this, the Globe’s Jamie Vaznis notes that “The schools hope to replicate the success of the Edwards Middle School in Charlestown, where an extended day has helped boost test scores and has offered students more enrichment opportunities.” That is devoutly to be wished for. What Vaznis and others often don’t mention because Chris Gabrieli is a terrific person and of really good will is that the data on Extended Learning Time is that the record of success is not that great. (A recent Abt Associates three-year review of ELT noted "no statistically significant effects of ELT after one, two, or three years of implementation on MCAS student achievement test outcomes for 3rd, 4th, or 7th grade ELA; 4th, 6th, or 8th grade math; or 5th or 8th grade science.")

The pace of improvement is faster in many other cities, including Washington DC and New Orleans. You can note that they started out below Boston, but Boston, Massachusetts has to aim higher. There are three big things that we could do to amp up our progress:

1. Go back and expand charter schools from 18 percent to 25 percent of the student body. This is good for the kids in the charters and also good for the larger system. We are now in the five millionth month of teacher contract negotiations. The fact is that once charters wrest a 25 percent market share of the total public schools from the district schools, the teacher contract negotiations will change drastically. Look at the change in other cities when that happened.
2. Expand METCO on the basis of socio-economic status, from the 3,000 Boston kids in it to even 5,000 kids. While certain Boston suburban districts have experienced significant student growth in the past few years, others can accommodate METCO students—as long as the state fully funds the program.
3. Set Madison Park Vocational Technical free from the superintendent’s control. Carol Johnson and Mayor Menino have to know that the regional VTEs have demonstrated striking success on student achievement, graduation and dropout rates. They have long waiting lists now, and it is because they have the flexibility that comes with control at the school level. The Superintendent and Mayor could assemble a crack team of advisors from the heads of the state’s regional VTEs to create a plan that is practical and effective.

There is data to back up each of these recommendations. And embracing them would demonstrate the kind of urgency we need for kids in public schools today. Not some ephemeral tomorrow that we've been hearing about for decades.

The exciting thing is that these are reforms that are within reach. The frustrating thing is that theses are reforms that are within reach.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Charter school approvals are granted in February. They shouldn't be.

They should have been granted on January 16th this year--Martin Luther King Day--for one simple reason: No education policy change has done more in Massachusetts to alleviate achievement gaps than charters. None.

We too often hear about how education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. The fact is that education was the Civil Rights issue of the 20th century, starting with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling and the battle to ensure that all kids, regardless of race or creed, had equal access to good schools.

Today, the face of Civil Rights has many colors, and the principal battleground is in inner cities, places like Lawrence, Massachusetts, where district schools have failed the city's children. Failure's not a word that the education world likes to hear. But when 10 percent of the district's largely Hispanic students drop out each year, and when only 30 and 40 percent reaching proficiency in math and reading, respectively, I think we are on safe ground in using the term. That's precisely what is going on in Lawrence today.

So with approvals to be announced in February, how is implementation of the 1993 Education Reform Act's charter provisions and the 1997 and 2010 expansions of charter schools going?

The 1993 education reform act articulated two broad goals for charter schools:

1. by giving schools greater autonomy while holding them accountable for results, stimulate innovations in public education, and
2. provide kids high-quality learning environments as demonstrated by state assessments

In 2010, the legislature, Governor Patrick, and Mayor Menino lifted several caps (and imposed some new restrictions) on charters, allowing them to serve up to 18 percent of the total number of students in urban districts where test scores continued to be low.

In 2011, the largest crop of charters was approved. So far so good. But pop the hood and there are some troubling cracks in the charter engine.

First, the charter school process, and the Commissioner of Education's role, has grown cloudy. When David Driscoll was commissioner (1997-2006), he was hired by the Board of Education, which jealously guarded its independence from political interference. Strong leaders in the Senate (Senate President Birmingham) and the House (Speaker Finneran) agreed with Governors Weld, Cellucci, Swift, and Romney to let the Board act with independence. In part they were seeking to shield themselves from the day-to-day battles in implementing academic standards and testing.

The departure of strong educational leaders in the State House left a void, which Governor Patrick, in particular, filled by getting the legislature to dramatically change governance of education policy. In 2008 laws were changed to create a new Secretary of Education position and give the governor the ability to truncate terms and add new Board members (translation: to pack the board).

The current commissioner of education, Mitchell Chester, serves at the pleasure of the governor's Board of Education. His budget is set by the Secretary, Paul Reville, also appointed by the governor.

On charter policy that puts the commissioner between a rock and a hard place, as seen in the infamous midnight email from the secretary to the commissioner urging him to approve the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School's application.

The secretary asked for the commissioner's help in order to keep the Boston Globe and the Boston Foundation on his side politically. The fact is that there are several other recent examples where interference is likely, including charter decisions in Lowell and Lynn.

One-offs? The fact is that the current approval process is much sloppier and harder to understand than before. Do the charter school office's criteria stand as the source of decisions? Is it the commissioner who's calling the shots? The secretary--and therefore the governor?

How does one read the commissioner's announcement, made without any previous communication, that a decade-old charter in Fitchburg (the North Central Charter Essential School) was being placed on "probation"? How is that possible after, as the Fitchburg Sentinel notes, the school

had been lauded by state officials for the school's academic improvements as recently as last fall.

How to make sense of the earthquake that occurred in the education department's charter school office (CSO), where seasoned staff simply got up and left last year? Dramatic shifts in personnel always occur for reasons. And the state's history of having a highly professional CSO has done a lot to distinguish Massachusetts charters from those in other states.

We will have to see how this plays out. The new head of the charter school office, Marlon Davis, brings real-life experience from the Benjamin Banneker Charter School, but he and new staff members will have to get up to speed fast--and demonstrate the quality and independence of their analyses.

And what to make of the governor and the secretary of education's push to direct which specific city districts to target for charter applications? The 2010 education law lifted the caps for all lower-performing, poorer districts. But in implementing the law, they have unilaterally decided to focus last year on Boston charter applications, and this year on cities outside Boston.

Their political impulse is to package charter approvals for maximum press, but that's not what the law says. Short term, what about kids in districts that don't fall into "target" areas chosen by the administration?

Long term, it's hard to see a more opaque, personality (and politically) driven process helping advance the Massachusetts brand of consistently strong charters. After all, here's what we know:

• Charter schools in some states have a mixed record, often because the state approval and closure processes lack rigor, and state standards and testing are weak.
• Charters work where state public policy works.
• Massachusetts charter schools have a far better batting average than those in many other states. By far the majority of Massachusetts charters outperform their sending districts; moreover, a large percentage of our charters perform at the highest levels in the state.
• For a very long time, Massachusetts boasted an approval and accountability system that was a national model, with objectively determined approvals and closures.

This administration has changed course on key elements in the original 1993 education reform, including accountability, standards, and (soon) testing. Now it is chipping away at our charter school model.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Back in July, I wrote a series of posts on teacher evaluations, outlining why the Massachusetts law that was passed, with much fanfare a “bold, pioneering teacher-evaluation system,” was not likely to lead to much improvement for teachers or for students.

There are many other reasons to doubt the boldness or pioneering-ness of the new Massachusetts teacher evaluation system. There’s the small ball criticisms like

• The law required evaluations 18 years ago, and few school districts have fulfilled their requirements for that time – so what makes this different?
• By the time the evaluations go into effect (three years hence), the MCAS will be a thing of the past, with the state having promised to move to an unknown national test by then. So, forget the apples-to-apples comparisons on data you were hoping for, at least for a number of years.
• Why spend enormous gobs of time on implementing complex end-of-pipe regulations when we could get it right from the start by increasingly slowly but deliberately the difficulty of the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure?
• Starting the focus on evaluations with teachers is misguided. It is always best in any organizational setting to evaluate managers—in this case, principals, central office personnel, and superintendents.

In one less than creatively titled post, Will the new teacher evaluation system improve instruction?, I noted that

The fact that the Massachusetts Teachers Association is supportive of the state’s new teacher evaluation system is not in and of itself a criticism—but when it is hard to get any grasp whatsoever as to the percentage of the evaluation to be based on improvements in students' academic achievement, well, that should give us pause. And the fact that the National Education Association, the MTA’s parent organization, has maintained its opposition to the use of student standardized tests for the purpose of evaluating teachers should at least raise one's suspicions.

The Lowell Sun picked up the same theme:

While the new rules are positive, they leave it up to individual school committees to decide just how much emphasis will be placed on the tests when it comes to judging a teacher's performance. This serves to make teacher evaluations an open question from district to district. We suspect there will be some foot-dragging, especially where teachers' unions remain a powerful force in electing school-board members and affecting policy…

As did the Worcester Telegram & Gazette:

[T]he regulations lay out 16 “indicators” for teacher standards in the areas of Curriculum and Planning, Teaching All Students, Family and Community Engagement, and Professional Culture. There are 20 such “indicators” for administrators, reaching into every conceivable area of day-to-day school management.

From their performance on these many indicators, educators are to be classified and graded, assigned one of four overall ratings — Exemplary, Proficient, Needs Improvement, or Unsatisfactory — and then placed on an action plan, or, in the case of competent educators, largely left alone.

It isn’t clear to us how any of this will help districts rid themselves of bad teachers... or, on the positive side, facilitate the recruitment, promotion and rewarding of excellent teachers.

We were hoping for a far more succinct, specific and clear set of expectations that would promote accountability and excellence... [T]hese new educator evaluation regulations strike us as an excellent way to create more work and worry for administrators and teachers, while ensuring plenty of new grist for the wheels of bureaucracy that revolve at the state Department of Education.

And, yet, I hear repeatedly that evaluations using multiple measures are the way to go, because single-measure approaches (especially ones based on standardized tests) are not reliable, don’t give the whole picture, etc. This multiple measure approach comes from teachers, which I understand, but it is also coming from the Gates Foundation and other folks who consider themselves in the reform camp. (That’s a discussion for another day.)

What does the data say about the use of multiple measures to evaluate teachers?

As Jay Greene notes at his blog,

The Gates Foundation has released the next installment of reports in their Measuring Effective Teachers Project.

When the last report was released, I found myself in a tussle with the Gates folks and Sam Dillon at the New York Times because I noted that the study’s results didn’t actually support the finding attributed to it. Vicki Phillips, the education chief at Gates, told the NYT and LA Times that the study showed that “drill and kill” and “teaching to the test” hurt student achievement when the study actually found no such thing.

With the latest round of reports, the Gates folks are back to their old game of spinning their results to push policy recommendations that are actually unsupported by the data. The main message emphasized in the new round of reports is that we need multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, not just value-added measures derived from student test scores, to make reliable and valid predictions about how effective different teachers are at improving student learning.

This is the clear thrust of the newly released Policy and Practice Brief and Research Paper and is obviously what the reporters are being told by the Gates media people

given that sources like Education Week and Ed Sector insist that the "findings demonstrate the importance of multiple measures of teacher evaluation." Greene then looks at the research rather than just the Gates Foundation press releases.

But buried away on p. 51 of the Research Paper in Table 16 we see that value-added measures based on student test results — by themselves — are essentially as good or better than the much more expensive and cumbersome method of combining them with student surveys and classroom observations when it comes to predicting the effectiveness of teachers. That is, the new Gates study actually finds that multiple measures are largely a waste of time and money when it comes to predicting the effectiveness of teachers at raising student scores in math and reading. (My emphasis)

For the wonks among you, click here to read the details on the reliability of using criteria other than test scores to evaluate teachers. Greene notes that the Gates' study actually says quite the opposite of what their press releases suggest:

Adding the student surveys and classroom observation measures to test scores yields almost no benefits, but it adds an enormous amount of cost and effort to a system for measuring teacher effectiveness...

Greene calls "this pattern of presentation" across the two Gates reports on teacher evaluations simply "spinning."

So, why are the Gates folks saying that their research shows the benefits of multiple measures of teacher effectiveness when their research actually suggests virtually no benefits to combining other measures with test scores and when there are significant costs to adding those other measures? The simple answer is politics. Large numbers of educators and a segment of the population find relying solely on test scores for measuring teacher effectiveness to be unpalatable, but they might tolerate a system that combined test scores with classroom observations and other measures. Rather than using their research to explain that these common preferences for multiple measures are inconsistent with the evidence, the Gates folks want to appease this constituency so that they can put a formal system of systematically measuring teacher effectiveness in place. The research is being spun to serve a policy agenda...

Gates' pattern of presentation

suggests the importance of multiple measures, since the classroom observations are strengthened when other measures are added. The only place you find the reliability and validity of test scores by themselves is at the bottom of the Research Paper in Tables 16 and 20. If both the lay-version and technical reports had always shown how little test scores are improved by adding student surveys and classroom observations, it would be plain that test scores alone are just about as good as multiple measures.

That's a remarkable finding given that the usual take is that only complex, expensive systems of accountability will do good teachers justice. The researchers who undertook this latest Measuring Effective Teachers Project report deserve credit for assembling the data and analyzing it. The Gates Foundation deserves a Pinocchio Award for saying quite the opposite--and reporters parroting the press releases need to acquire some new skills. Spitting out what you've been spoonfed is stuff any toddler can do.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

BNA, a subsidiary of Bloomberg L.P., is a great source of reporting on legal and regulatory issues that matter to businesses. In mid-December BNA shared the following item, which will be a shocker to most employers:

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, an employer's requirement that applicants have a high school diploma must be job-related and consistent with business necessity, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stated in an “informal discussion letter” posted on its website Dec. 2.

I don't know of many employers who think twice about requiring a high school diploma. The EEOC letter "does not constitute an official opinion of the commission," but rather is an indication that at a date not too far in to the future the EEOC will take up this question and make a ruling on whether requiring all job applicants to have graduated from high school is a violation of the ADA.

The letter goes on to note that

if a high school diploma requirement is job-related and consistent with business necessity, but effectively screens out a disabled applicant, the employer still may have to determine whether an individual applicant can perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation.

The EEOC further suggests that the onus will be on the employer to show that job applicants

cannot perform the job's essential functions with or without a reasonable accommodation, even if he or she does not meet a standard that is job-related and consistent with business necessity, the commission added.

We will have to see how the federal commission will move ahead, but the ramifications of prohibiting such "milestone" job requirements will be many:

• Perhaps the inclusion in the workplace of disabled individuals who may either sense a barrier or who are excluded because of the requirement;
• An unhelpful signal to those who are struggling in high school that the effort may not be necessary; and
• An entirely new industry for lawyers to expand into.

What do you see as the impact?

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

A number of readers of recent posts on virtual (or digital) learning have asked for some definitions around jargon used by proponents and experts. I wanted to share a brief video on "blended learning," a term that you hear increasingly, especially in states where charter public schools and district schools are attempting to integrate online tools into the classroom.

Blended learning is, if you will, that broad area between the traditional classroom, where you have a teacher lecturing and teaching a class of kids, and exclusive use by a student of online resources to drive their learning. The video embedded below was written by Anthony Kim and Michael Thompson of Education Elements. It is a bit dry and a tad jargony itself (e.g., "unleashing learning velocity"), but it does a nice job of laying out the four principal models emerging in the blended learning area.

The Fundamentals of Blended Learning from Education Elements on Vimeo.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Back at the start of December, I blogged on the need for both an open door to online learning and also a greater focus on accountability for those who would operate in that space.

Understanding the quality of the choices in the marketplace will have to be informed by more than giddy passion about the promise of virtual learning. A cursory look at the research done on virtual learning suggests that there has been to date more energy than light on the impact of VL on sustained student achievement. …

We are just at the start of the virtual learning movement, and there is so much promise in the short term regarding access to high-quality content, targeted instruction, peer tutoring and resulting stronger socialization around academics (rather than who’s cool and who’s not). …

The fault lines around how best to teach kids how to read, conceptual understanding, and what should be in the standards and curriculum are all important topics well into a virtual future.

And politics will come. It is unavoidable. The NY Times was to run an expose by Stephanie Saul, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent much of her career at the Times on the pharmaceutical industry and fertility treatments, on the well-known digital learning company K12. Many in the school choice movement see the article as a likely hatchet job…

All I can say to school reformers who support digital learning is: Such articles and such scrutiny are going to come. It is inevitable and ultimately it is good.

Ms. Saul’s piece on online learning – or really on one company involved in the online space, K12 Inc. – came out five days after my blog. The title of her piece was provocative -- Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools – though not nearly as provocative as the url of the article (which may suggest that it was the original title): “Online Schools Score Better on Wall Street Than in Classrooms.”

It’s important simply because it’s an long investigative piece in the New York Times. And while I am going to stick with my take that criticism is a good thing because it helps you improve, the article has been roundly criticized with good reason.

Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation is right to lament Saul’s failure

to interview, for example, the student with disabilities who can work at his own pace or the student in a rural state who would never have had access to AP physics or Mandarin Chinese if it weren’t for online options. Instead, Saul dismisses the benefits that virtual education holds for so many students.

The article does interview Ronald Packard, the CEO of K12 Inc., but the rest of the quotes are from opponents of the school. I get that you need to interview unions folks and superintendents for a full picture, but when the scholar you approach for a comment compares the company and digital learning to “what the banks did with home mortgages” and when Saul herself suggests that the company is acting like “military contractors [that] have capitalized on Pentagon spending,” well, it’s just not credible. Consider just how un-journalistic the tone is in these sentences:

With K12 estimating the market for its schools as high as $15 billion, the company’s manifest destiny is to expand across the United States. Its newest conquest is Tennessee, where the company got legislative approval last May… [my italics]

Other problems with the piece are:

1) The article draws conclusions from an investigation of one company and applies them broadly to digital learning. As Burke notes:

Rocketship Academy, a blended learning school that leverages online learning in combination with the traditional classroom. Out of 3,000 low-income schools in California, Rocketship is the fifth-highest-performing.

Rocketship’s performance is consistent with findings released in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Education. In a meta-analysis of more than 1,000 empirical studies on virtual learning, it found that “online learning has been modestly more effective, on average, than the traditional face-to-face instruction with which it has been compared.”

There are also public virtual schools, including the rightly much-applauded Florida’s Virtual School, which have demonstrated records of success and also provide lessons for the kind of accountability that states like Pennsylvania, which Saul's focuses on, should insist upon.

2) Saul is clearly unfamiliar with the field she is writing about. After citing upcoming research from Western Michigan University and the National Education Policy Center to the effect that

only a third of K12’s schools achieved adequate yearly progress, the measurement mandated by federal No Child Left Behind legislation

Saul quotes a school official from Memphis Public Schools to support her point that children need academic and social skills. The problem is that

According to Superintendent Kriner Cash, only about 16% of Memphis City Schools made its ‘Adequate Yearly Progress,’ or AYP. He said about 50 schools made improvements but it wasn't enough.

A FoxMemphis news segment, Memphis City Schools Fall Short on Progress Report, notes the same.

Then there is the section of the article where Saul seeks to taint K12 Inc., and the entire digital learning space, with the scarlet letter of lobbying. Taking the Pennsylvania state auditor’s criticism of K12’s use of funds on advertising and lobbying without questioning, Saul shows either naivete or a lack of curiosity surprising because of her profession when she writes that charter schools and digital learning entities

have formed a lobbying juggernaut in state capitals. In Pennsylvania, the company has spent $681,000 on lobbying since 2007.

Juggernaut? It’s not my intention to defend lobbyists, but can Saul really be unaware that taxpayer funds go to teachers’ union lobbying and also that of the superintendents—and that these funds flow through private organizations? If K12’s spending $170,000 a year on lobbying is offensive, then what about these numbers for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, which she quotes throughout her article:

The Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA), an affiliate of the NEA, siphoned over $55 million out of its 191,000 members' and 5,600 agency-fee payers' wallets in 2010, with help from school districts who deduct the payments.

A number of members and fee-payers would gladly keep their money, if given the choice. National Education Association (NEA) general counsel Robert Chanin acknowledged that fact: "It is well recognized that if you take away the mechanism of payroll deduction, you won't collect a penny from these people."

More than $2.5 million of that paid for political fundraising, a gubernatorial debate video, political calling, lobbying, and other political activity...

While dues cannot be used to directly fund candidates' campaigns, unions also have PACs. Union war chests contributed more than $23 million to campaigns in 2009-2010 — much more than the often vilified natural gas industry. PACE, the PSEA's political action committee, contributed $2.3 million to state election campaigns in 2009-2010, including $310,000 to Dan Onorato for Governor.

Another example of Saul's lack of understanding of the field is her broad and unfortunately uninformed assumptions about the kinds of students that may benefit from digital opportunities—suggesting that they are simply those kids with “strong parental commitment and self-motivated students.”

Then there is her lack of understanding of homeschoolers. Citing critics who “argue that states are essentially subsidizing home schooling,” Saul is oblivious to the counter-argument made for decades by homeschoolers that they are the ones who have long subsidized public schools by paying for their kids’ education out of pocket even as they pay taxes for traditional public schools that their kids do not attend.

All that said, there is no reason to go overboard criticizing Saul's intentions or lack of detailed knowledge with the subject matter. That's hardly rare in journalism these days, though it is equally clear that the Times' Sam Dillon is a far more experienced hand in the education space. Saul's piece is helpful when it underscores an issue that states interested in expanding digital learning have to get their arms around: How payments and incentives are structured to online vendors is crucial to ensuring accountability for recruitment and retention, as well as student achievement.

For example, Saul writes that

The constant cycle of enrollment and withdrawal, called the churn rate, appears to be a problem at many schools. Records Agora filed with Pennsylvania reveal that 2,688 students withdrew during the 2009-10 school year. At the same time, K12 continued to sign up new students. Enrollment at the end of the year — 4,890 — was 170 students more than at the beginning, obscuring the high number of withdrawals.

A 50 percent “churn” rate is unacceptable, and that Pennsylvania is not insisting on answers suggests that they need to improve their public policy. And while Saul’s wrong on the kinds of students who may benefit from digital learning, we would be wise to listen to disgruntled K12 Inc. staff members when they

say problems begin with intense recruitment efforts that fail to filter out students who are not suited for the program[.]

As the Massachusetts legislature thinks through this issue, it has to pay special attention to the fee structure and timing. Here the public model in Florida may provide important lessons in as much as there is no payment made to the Florida Virtual School until the student completes the course with a satisfactory grade.

Such a payment system would alleviate the pressures of some teachers at K12 who

questioned why some students who did no class work were allowed to remain on school rosters, potentially allowing the company to continue receiving public money for them.

Which still leaves the issue of accountability for performance. Saul describes the experiences of two Tennessee families to underscore the observation that

[S]ome teachers said they were under pressure to pass students with marginal performance and attendance.

She also uses their experiences to ask if K12 Inc. is doing enough to ensure that the student is really doing the work.

Some teachers have complained that it can be difficult to determine whether students are actually doing the work, or getting help from their parents or others. “Virtual schools offer much greater opportunity for students to obtain credit for work they did not do themselves,” said a report in October from the National Education Policy Center, which receives financing from the National Education Association.

There are a number of options here, including more frequent online visual contact, periodic meetings, and requirements for testing to occur in public spaces with sign-ins. These are precisely the topics of discussion that Massachusetts has to take on seriously as it decides how to exploit technology in a way that advances access to AP courses, specialized courses, customized individual learning, and full schooling online.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

With a wondrous display of British understatement, the state’s education commissioner recently announced his "concern" about Lawrence schools. Commissioner Mitch Chester noticed that the Lawrence Public Schools might have “a potential leadership gap” and that “[o]verall, the district is not yet where we expect it to be and want it to be.”

Noted "for his work in accountability and assessment,” one could complain (and I have) that the Commissioner should not have waited 3 ½ years to come to that conclusion. Especially with the financial and political missteps made by the previous superintendent.

So applause for the Commissioner's decision to put into receivership city schools where, as I noted in the Lawrence Eagle Tribune,

10 percent of [the students] drop out each year, and only 30 and 40 percent of [students] are proficient or advanced in math and reading, respectively.

Unfortunately, the fact is that the state’s plan to appoint a single person to drive the Lawrence receivership operation is a one-size-fits-all strategy that has almost not chance of success. That’s because there is little evidence that state-driven, command and control efforts yield to anything but marginal improvements. And that is certainly not enough for the kids or even for the state, which currently picks up 95 percent of the education tab in Lawrence.

(Fact is, the state has owned this mess for a long time.)

As noted in the Eagle Tribune, researchers have ample evidence to work from in evaluating the possibility of a successful state-driven turnaround:

Andrew Smarick, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of education, has conducted research and concluded that "turnaround efforts have for the most part resulted in only marginal improvements." He further notes that "turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America's troubled urban school systems."

A few years ago, California targeted the lowest-performing 20 percent of its schools for intervention. Three years later, one of the 394 targeted high schools was categorized as having made "exemplary process."

Rather than a receiver who will have "all the powers of the superintendent and school committee" to right Lawrence's schools, what Lawrence families need is access to good options. Options with a proven track record of success.

Instead of the "Superman" strategy, which “has failed repeatedly across the country,” the best way forward is for state leaders (governor, his appointees in the ed bureaucracy, and state legislators from the Greater Lawrence area) need to sit down and craft a comprehensive plan that gives these four options to kids:

• More charters, faster. Charters in Lawrence are doing a great job, and parents need more of them. Opening failed urban districts to many more charters has worked quite well in New Orleans and Washington, DC, where 70 and 30 percent of kids are now attending charter schools. The state should go out of its way to invite networks like KIPP, SABIS, and so many others to come in with bold expansion proposals.
• Boston and Springfield have access to the METCO interdistrict choice program. Why not Lawrence?
• While the Greater Lawrence Vocational Technical School has shown some improvement, it could do better. Regional voc-techs around the state have improved significantly over the past decade (much higher MCAS scores and super low drop out rates). A team of voc-tech peers should be brought in to advise GLVT on how to make even more progress.
• Finally, give Lawrence families private options they can’t currently afford. Lawrence’s schools spend well beyond double the amount of tuition needed to attend good area private schools, many of which are Catholic. Archdiocesan schools are high-quality options academically, as well as in terms of teaching good social skills and safety.

Creating a tax credit for businesses that give to create scholarships for Lawrence’s kids would likely pass constitutional muster and it would show that our leaders are serious in trying everything possible to give these kids a chance. Now. Not in five or 10 years. They don't have that luxury.

If the state sticks with the same old playbook of top-down reforms, somewhere approaching half the kids in the Lawrence public schools don’t have a prayer of a chance of making it into the middle class. It’s time to have the courage to try things that are politically hard but actually work.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

"Understand, I am not for monopoly when we can help it,” Louis Brandeis said in 1912. “We intend to restore competition. We intend to do away with the conditions that make for monopoly.” (Wikipedia)

Brandeis had some inkling of what hare-brained schemes philanthropists could come up with. Remember the Simple Spelling Board Andrew Carnegie set up in 1906?

The New York Times noted that Carnegie was convinced that "English might be made the world language of the future" and an influence leading to universal peace, but that this role was obstructed by its "contradictory and difficult spelling."

105 years later, Sam Dillon of The New York Times produced a terrific piece of journalism in a May 2011 Sunday article on the overweening ambitions of the Gates Foundation and its list of DC-based clients, vendors and trade organizations like the National Governors Association; the Chief State School Officers; the Fordham Institute; Achieve, Inc.; as well as the Gates Foundation’s strategy to leverage, really to drive, federal policy in the Obama Administration’s US Department of Education. In the May article, Dillon wrote:

For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies…In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups…[The Gates Foundation] is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

Dillon continued:

The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy…Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency.

Yup. The Gates Foundation and the enormous financial interests associated with the Washington education lobby have decided that the U.S., despite its 222-year history to the contrary, needs a nationalized K-12 education system. No matter that the arguments for it are flimsy:

1. Nations with national curricula do better than ones without on international tests. Not true.
2. The national standards raise the bar set by states. For some, for some it’s a wash, and for some it is a step backwards. Prominent researchers and subject experts (Stotsky, Wurman, Milgram, Porter and others) find the standards lacking in comparison to international benchmarks. Basically the Gates folks are setting up a community college readiness set of standards.
3. The new national standards will give us the ability to craft better tests. No one knows. They are not complete. And we have no idea where proficiency levels will be set, whether they will build off of Massachusetts’ content frame or the frame of other state tests, which are more skills-based.
4. The new national standards will be serious content-based standards. Uh, no. The fact that one of the Gates Foundation allies, the Council of Chief State School Officers, absorbed the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is more than a whiff of evidence to the contrary.
5. The new national standards will save money. Implementation of the standards, through textbook purchases and professional developments, as well as technology and other actions necessary to implement the tests will cost tens of billions of dollars. States and localities will pay for 90 percent of this if history is any guide.
6. The new national standards will improve accountability. The reset of state standards means a loss of longitudinal data on student performance and will take at least half a decade to amass. Again, without the knowledge of where proficiency will be set and what the tests look like, this is fanciful thinking.
7. The new national standards will help improve teacher quality. Huh? Not sure how they came up with this one. Perhaps it will cure the common cold as well. The fact for Massachusetts is that the new national test and standards will undermine one of the “secret sauces” of the Bay State’s success: the teacher test (MTEL) is aligned with student tests and the standards to ensure that teachers are able to teach the materials required in the state test. We will now have to refight that battle with the unions based on the new national standards – and it will be a tough battle drawing in national lobby groups. That’s going to be hard to win.
8. The new national standards will drive innovation. Yeesh. I hear this from virtual learning providers all the time. Of course, if you set one set of standards, then your product development is easier and less costly in the short run. But this is the Zune argument (see below) and it’s stupid. Think about this: Most of the countries with national standards (think Finland) are the size of a state in the U.S. and often relatively homogeneous. Instead we are forging standards for 53 million kids from very diverse backgrounds.

We need one set of standards as much as we need one exclusive operating software, one keyboard for the world, and one Zune. You remember the Zune, right?

Thankfully, because consumers have the freedom to choose the products they buy, it got killed by the iPod. Curtis Cartier of The Seattle Weekly blog noted even this past March that

The Zune, Microsoft’s signature paperweight, hasn’t seen a significant upgrade, or really anything in the way of marketing or promotion, in almost two years . . . No, really, they still make the Zune. I know, right? Microsoft bloodhound Mary Jo Foley writes at ZDNet about “Project Ventura,” a music- and video-based service that seems to be exactly what Zune and the Zune Store is, but thankfully, not the Zune.

Ventura, from what my tipsters tell me, is the name of a set of services being developed by Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices (E&D) unit. These services are focused on music and video discovery and consumption.

Wikipedia notes:

On October 3, 2011, Microsoft announced that it has discontinued all Zune hardware, encouraging users to transition to Windows Phone.

Aw, shucks. And I was waiting for the new and improved Zune. Just holding my breath. And I know we all have such high expectations for Ventura.

Then there is # 9. Experts creating the standards have built off state successes. That’s hardly the case with the Massachusetts standards or the California standards, which were among the best in the country. So, maybe they built off Bob Wise’s West Virginia standards, Gene Wilhoit’s Kentucky standards, Jeb Bush’s Florida, and Checker Finn’s Ohio state standards. These are all people who promote national standards. And their state standards were mediocre and worse. No wonder they look at the community college readiness standards as a step forward.

Make no mistake about it, this is an effort built from the mainframe developed in 1992 by Marc Tucker, then president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, who in his famous 18-page “Dear Hillary” letter called for

a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone," coordinated by "a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels" where curriculum and "job matching" will be handled by counselors "accessing the integrated computer-based program.

Such words may please Bill Gates, given his less than warm view of the liberal arts. The drive to nationalize education is so important to the DC lobbying crowd and the Gates Foundation that they are willing to overlook some “niceties,” such as the fact that it violates provisions in three federal laws (including the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the US Department of Education’s 1979 enabling legislation, and No Child Left Behind). Perhaps understanding the rule of law is a 20th-century skill.

Only this time, the DC advocates for this sort of educational lobotomy (which places workforce development above the formation of free citizens) have learned lessons from the past, when national standards efforts died off because they were done in the light of day. As Pioneer’s Jamie Gass noted a year ago in The Providence Journal:

When it comes to the national standards, the line dividing public officials and trade organizations has become so murky that Pioneer Institute recently submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for correspondence between state education officials and organizations like NGA, CCSSO, the Gates Foundation and the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It’s particularly unfortunate that public education is the setting for this circumvention of democracy and the public trust. Even as we teach our children about the sanctity of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, they watch adults develop ever-more-clever ways to brush aside the principles those documents exemplify.

Those comments are based on experience. A year after Pioneer submitted a basic Freedom of Information Act search of the national standards in Massachusetts we’ve received more delays and stonewalling than any concrete FOIA results.

What I want is a debate on the merits of this effort before we call the game over. And when we have that argument, the national standards folks lose. Consider the fact that in August the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an association of conservative legislators, debated the merits of model legislation to pull out of the national standards at their quarterly meeting in New Orleans. Given the fact that most state legislatures and legislators are Republican, this is an influential group.

At the last minute, as Kris Amundson of Education Sector noted, Jeb Bush wrote “to the ALEC delegates urging them to table the resolution.”

They did and instead set up a series of sessions debating the issue at the end of November in Scottsdale, Arizona. The debate was open and frank. And as Catherine Gewertz of EdWeek reported, and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation notes in her blog, the ALEC Education Task Force debated model legislation that would aid states seeking to “exit the national standards project and regain control over what is taught in local schools.”

The day after the ALEC conference in Arizona ended, Diane Ravitch tweeted that the Gates Foundation, for the first time in ALEC’s history, gave the Council a grant for $377,000.

Philanthropy is a wonderful American tradition. I wonder when the Gates Foundation is able to flood the education ideas market with dollars whether we have the institutional fortitude to withstand the stupid ideas GF is generating. The national standards effort is slightly more plausible than the Simple Spelling Board, but not by much. And worse, it is illegal.

A century ago, the “People’s Lawyer” Louis Brandeis took on monopolistic industries in order to ennoble democratic principles articulated in the Constitution. Today, no one in DC has the courage to stand up to our era’s education Robber Baron. That’s hardly a surprise. But do the states?

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

There is so much energy in the virtual learning space right now, with a number of products that are maturing and others that are continuing to grow exponentially. The free Khan Academy has provided almost 100 million exercises, now boasts about 3.5 million discrete users, and is growing at a rate of about 300,000 users a month (with the pace of growth increasing). That opens up all kinds of possibilities in terms of partnerships, branding and funding. That product is going worldwide fast, and branching out into many new academic areas.

Getting the promise of digital learning right is going to be a challenge on a number of fronts. One challenge is that the two tons of money going into building and marketing product are not necessarily focused on high-quality academics. The general public has gotten so used to a low-quality public education product that their expectations may not be altogether high. I am willing to bet my best necktie that a look at the American users of Khan Academy, for example, will tell you that most of the users are from wealthier homes. These are homes that are more used to high-quality academics, homes where hard work and self-direction are more the norm, or wealthier homes where kids just are not fitting into the rubric of the traditional school.

That's still a great thing, because it means that Khan Academy can help address the high-end achievement gap (wealthier underachievers relative to other countries). The data from Khan Academy shows that, with self-paced learning, a lot of kids who would have otherwise been relegated to slow-learner status actually catch up to and outpace the supposed smarty-pants in the class.

Khan Academy is also collecting reams of data on how users interact with the site and how they learn. Sal Khan noted in Boston a couple of weeks ago that the enormous amount of data the Academy collects is astounding. As Khan pithily put it, the Academy probably collects more data in a week than any PhD candidate in education has ever used in his or her dissertation.

Understanding the quality of the choices in the marketplace will have to be informed by more than giddy passion about the promise of virtual learning. A cursory look at the research done on virtual learning suggests that there has been to date more energy than light on the impact of VL on sustained student achievement. Some of that is simply because it is relatively new and that the products are very different. The Florida Virtual School, for example, has a very different public system from other private market products. There are products that work from specific curricular requirements, others that seek only to achieve a specific goal (say, proficiency in French) and so on.

One thing I would urge reformers to do, though, is to avoid filling this as yet undefined area of innovation with particular wish lists. I hear so many people tell me that VL is going to decimate teachers unions, address low- (poor, underachievers) and high-end achievement gaps, fix budget problems, make testing a thing of the past, make learning student-centered (some see this as an end in itself), make students creative and give access to global learning opportunities, cure the common cold and cancer in one fell swoop, and alleviate cavities, hang nails and acne.

We are just at the start of the virtual learning movement, and there is so much promise in the short term regarding access to high-quality content, targeted instruction, peer tutoring and resulting stronger socialization around academics (rather than who’s cool and who’s not). Long term, virtual learning has more muscle to grow organically than other reforms in the past, given that a large group of virtual learning vendors are aiming to meet the needs of the individual market. As a result, VL is not subject to the whims of policymaking (and the politics behind it).

But policy will rear its head. The fault lines around how best to teach kids how to read, conceptual understanding, and what should be in the standards and curriculum are all important topic well into a virtual future.

And politics will come. It is unavoidable. The NY Times was to run an expose by Stephanie Saul, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent much of her career at the Times on the pharmaceutical industry and fertility treatments, on the well-known digital learning company K12. Many in the school choice movement saw the article as a likely hatchet job.

All I can say to school reformers who support digital learning is: Such articles and such scrutiny are going to come. It is inevitable and ultimately it is good.

Even if the Edison charter model in the 90s had not come under close scrutiny for business practices and impact on achievement, there would have been articles on charters that failed to live up to their fiduciary responsibility. And the resulting frameworks set up around charter schools have been beneficial to the quality of the schools. The state requirement that edu-entrepreneurs who want to start a charter school in Massachusetts must submit a detailed business plan that is reviewed and must be approved by the state's charter school office is good for the quality of our charters.

Political shenanigans can come into play, as we saw in Gloucester and also in Brockton recently, but we do have human beings in public office and they sometimes fail to do their duty. That stuff comes out too, and we need to be vigilant. But, over the years, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the rigorous approval and closure processes have given Massachusetts' charters a level of consistency that is not found across the country.

Once any reform touches the public realm, a higher level of scrutiny is required, because we are talking about tax dollars and the public trust. If reformers embrace virtual technology as holding out the promise “to transform” education (in quotes because it is such a worn phrase in ed circles), they will need to understand that the policy and political battles have to be won. And won on the merits. Once these products move from individual purchases (or in the case of the free Khan Academy, individual users) to the public domain, there will necessarily be the need for accountability.

Already some states have found their own path forward. Florida has chosen to set up a single statewide virtual school, which ensures accountability by only receiving funding on the basis of a successful course completion. But even with such a system, the Florida Virtual School has all kinds of standards and accountability measures to ensure that there is no cheating, that teachers are well-prepared, and that kids across the state have access to their product.

Recent changes allowing new entrants into the Florida public virtual market will challenge the Sunshine State's model. Other states have taken very different paths. Massachusetts needs to catch up with other states and attempt to craft its own way to do virtual learning. Right now, we aren't getting it right; in fact, after the 2010 education law allowed for the expansion of virtual learning, the state department of education has promulgated some pretty stupid regulations, setting numerical and geographic requirements on virtual schools.

Massachusetts has a lot going for it, including many lessons learned about what works in its 20 years of education reform. In recent years, we have not been the state all other states wanted to learn from. With virtual learning expanding across the country, can we catch up again provide the kind of thought leadership needed to make sure we and other states get it right?

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.