Happy Birthday to Milton Friedman, who would have been 100 today. A great way to understand Friedman's contribution to the field of education can be summed up in the following series of videos associated with his renowned Free to Choose series on PBS. This series of six YouTube segments covers (in the first three) the actual documentary/commentary of the Free to Choose on the idea of scholarship vouchers for students to attend K-12 schools, as well as a fantastic roundtable debate on the then controversial idea.

The FTC special on education opens up with a look at a Hyde Park school that was in the 1980s already plagued by the need for uniformed police, metal detectors, and other safety features.

The series on education then moves to a focus on Harlem Prep -- a school that initially embodied many of the virtues Friedman had hoped to see in urban school choice.

In the final part of the documentary, Friedman makes a full-throated case for school choice:

Parts 4-6 are an informative debate including legendary leaders of the American federation of Teachers Al Shanker, former Massachusetts Commissioner of Education Gregory Anrig, and an official from the National School Boards Association, as well as Milton Friedman debating school choice. What's most interesting is how few of the arguments have changed since the filming of the Free to Choose program and the subsequent debate.

That's a great line-up of participants in the debate. Happy viewing.

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

Neil Swidey had a wonderful article (N.Y. vs. Boston: The endgame) in the Boston Globe Magazine on the fabled Boston-NY (or is that NY-Boston) rivalry delving into the ever-timely question: “Where did all this nonsense begin?”

What most intrigued me was his reference to New York’s plan to take “Roosevelt Island and a decrepit hospital that offers priceless views of the United Nations and the Chrysler Building” and turn it into “a new tech-focused graduate school that, in many ways, will be built in the image of MIT.”

Swidey’s set-up is pitch-perfect in noting the pride Greater Boston takes “in our identity as College Town, USA, the egghead capital of the nation, anchored by Harvard and MIT and fortified with a host of other competitive universities that would dominate their regions if they were located anywhere but here.” And the mayoral aide that tells Swidey that “New York has more college students than Boston has people” is sure to drive local university professors and development directors to take up Red Sox banners, even in this disastrous year.

Already a study is suggesting that New York has seen good growth in venture capital deals supporting new tech startups (see New Tech City) whereas other parts of the country, including New England have seen declines in recent years.

Enter New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan, as cited by Swidey, to create New York's version of MIT. Just what is New York planning and can they get it done?

The goal is clear: David Skorton, the president of Cornell, one of the partners to win the city’s competition for proposals noted that “New York City is positioned to become the new technology capital of the world.”

As the Times’ Richard Perez-Pena noted:

That has long been a goal for Mr. Bloomberg, who noted that the city had only recently surpassed much-smaller Boston in attracting venture capital for high-tech start-ups, and that such businesses here face a chronic shortage of engineers.

With their $2 billion project, which covers 10 acres of Roosevelt Island, Cornell and its partner, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel,

promise to start offering classes next September in temporary space, and to complete 300,000 square feet of space on Roosevelt Island by 2017 and more than 2 million square feet by 2037. Plans call for about 280 faculty members and 2,500 students in master’s and doctoral programs, a larger contingent than the universities had proposed a few months ago.

The schools have also committed to training at least 200 teachers each year in science education.

The universities plan to organize the campus around three overlapping, shifting “hubs”: technologies for “connective media,” applicable to everything from finance to social media; health care industries; and sustainable development, chosen in part to mesh with the city’s existing strengths.

The Cornell-Technion plan seeks to create a “linkage” between business start-ups and a “major applied-sciences institution” in New York, similar to what we’ve seen sprout up around Cambridge.

That plan includes

a $150 million venture capital fund for start-up companies that agree to remain in New York for three years, as well as math and science education support for 10,000 city children.

With deep pockets and already a lead gift of $350 million from a Cornell-associated philanthropist, New York's project of creating a new institute of technology is going to move fast. One more challenge for the Greater Boston area.

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

The recent deal brokered by Stand for Children with the Massachusetts Teachers Association (and at the end supported by the AFL-CIO and the Massachusetts chapter of the American Federation for Teachers) made some progress in making student performance a larger consideration in evaluating teachers and lessened the role of seniority.

The Globe editorial board put it this way:

Stand for Children was plowing ahead with a tough ballot initiative that would have eliminated nearly all aspects of teacher seniority in the state’s public school systems. It went so far as to put non-tenured teachers with three years or less experience — so-called provisionals — on par with the most senior teachers during layoffs.

With the 107,000-member Massachusetts Teachers Association gearing up for a fight—and also thinking that it wanted to avoid a protracted battle and a diversion of funds away from political causes in an important Senatorial election year, the unions sought compromise. Back to the Globe:

The union gave up less. Under the compromise legislation, for example, provisional teachers — no matter how promising — will continue to be laid off before senior teachers. The union also eludes the ballot question’s requirement that every school district adopt a model teacher-evaluation method or state-approved alternative. Under the compromise legislation, school districts retain more leeway, and the emphasis shifts to more comprehensive reporting of teacher-evaluation data.

But there is real reform in the compromise bill. Unlike now, teacher performance — and not seniority — becomes the new touchstone for reassignments, transfers, and other staffing decisions.

I am not sure I’d go as far as that, but the Globe is absolutely right that

The compromise bill makes a huge course correction by giving principals significantly more power to build their faculties through the teacher-evaluation process. A cynic might also note that the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s president Paul Toner did also negotiate a delay in the implementation of the legislation to 2016, meaning that the MTA and its allies will still have two legislative cycles to undo what was done.

All that said, Toner’s piece in the summer MTA newsletter gives good reason to think there is a shift underway in his membership. He starts by underscoring his total opposition to the Stand referendum:

We met with Stand’s leaders repeatedly and urged them not to proceed. We also asked major education and parent groups and leading policymakers to press them to stop. Dozens of them did, including Governor Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray, House Speaker Robert DeLeo, Secretary of Education Paul Reville, the Massachusetts PTA and John Walsh, the head of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. Undeterred, Stand easily collected the first round of signatures needed to qualify the question for the ballot.

We challenged the attorney general’s decision to certify the initiative. When we didn’t prevail in that effort, we filed a complaint with the Supreme Judicial Court on behalf of seven plaintiffs contending that the question was not appropriate for the ballot. Many labor and education groups filed briefs supporting our complaint.

More important than Toner’s views and views, though, are what he learned by listening to his members.

We assessed our odds of prevailing on the ballot and determined that it would be an enormous challenge. The initiative was very complicated, but easily reduced to an oversimplified sound bite: Every child deserves a great teacher; therefore, performance should be more important than seniority in personnel decisions. Our polling found that a vast majority of Massachusetts voters agreed with this proposition. Significantly, so did a majority of our members, who were polled on the issue in three separate random sample surveys. (my italics)

Put that data point together with this survey just released by Education Sector, and a picture begins to emerge where teachers are beginning to embrace some reforms focused on the profession such as "evaluation, pay, and tenure, and the role of unions in pushing for or against these reforms." From the press release of the sample of 1,100 K-12 public school teachers included in Trending Toward Reform: Teachers Speak on Unions and the Future of the Profession:

The 2011 survey repeats questions from Education Sector’s 2007 survey Waiting to Be Won Over and a 2003 Public Agenda survey on these same issues. So Trending Toward Reform shows how teachers’ thinking has evolved on some reform issues. The findings show continued strong support for teachers unions. Compared with earlier years, teachers say their union plays an important role in protecting jobs and addressing working conditions. But teachers want more from their unions. In 2007, 52 percent of teachers said their union should “stick to bread and butter issues” rather than focusing on reform; today, just 42 percent of teachers feel that way. At the same time, the number of teachers who want their union to put more focus on reform has risen from 32 percent to 43 percent. As one example, 75 percent of teachers surveyed said that unions should play a role in simplifying the process to remove ineffective teachers—up from 63 percent in 2007.

The Ed Sector survey also finds that teachers “support differentiated pay for teachers who work in tough neighborhoods with low-performing schools” and “those who teach hard-to-fill subjects.”

The survey shows that teachers, however, still oppose the use of student test scores to reward performance. No questions on broader reforms (charters, standards and curricula, etc.) were included in the Ed Sector survey.

Is this change? For now, it's small change. Let's hope the teachers themselves begin yearning for more.

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

Two-and-a-half years have passed since the passage of the reform law ("An Act Relative to the Achievement Gap") that will, over time, double the number of charter school students and established a new category of in-district reform called innovation schools.

(The law also made virtual schools possible, but the state’s department of education decided two years ago to tie a few regulatory double-knots on that type of reform, as I’ve blogged here and here.)

In districts where MCAS scores lagged in the bottom 10 percent statewide, the cap on the number of number of students who could attend charter schools was doubled from 9 percent to 18 percent. We saw an increase of 16 charter schools in year one and 3 charters in year two.

What about “innovation schools”? That is the reform that most interests the state ed department. Anecdotally, a number of localities have shared that the state’s ed department has reached out to them talking about how they could either see a charter established outside the district’s control or, if they wanted to avoid that eventuality, well, they could start an innovation school.

Given that districts are almost maniacally concerned about keeping education funds under the control of the district (rather than focusing on what will give kids the best outcomes), the calculus for them is pretty clear.

But will innovation schools work? And, more importantly, what happens if they don’t?

That’s not a negative spin on the innovation schools, but rather the right question to ask. After all, innovation school plans, like charter plans, like any effort started with the best of will to change a school, are not guaranteed success. But in the case of charter schools, there is a clear path to shutting the ones down that are not working. Even somewhat early in its five-year charter, a poorly performing charter school can be put on probation. If the charter proves unworthy of renewal by the end of its five-year term, the charter will be shut down.

It’s an especially good question to ask because there are empirical and common sense reasons to wonder about the efficacy of in-district reform models.

Empirically, we’ve seen a number of charter-lite “new school” reforms, from pilot schools to Commonwealth pilot schools to the unionized Horace Mann charter schools, all of which are in-district reform efforts. They have not even come close to the performance of Commonwealth charter schools in Massachusetts.

Then there’s common sense. The Achievement Gap statute spends an inordinate number of words and provisions (in Section 92 of the law, subsections (a) through (m) all define the various processes that innovation schools have to go through in order to constitute a school. Even proposals that truly are innovative will have lost any tinge of “cutting-edge” intent by the time they make their way through the gauntlet of community, special interest, constituent, and status quo-lover groups that have to give an innovation school its blessing. Common sense also suggests very strongly that when a statute spends page after page describing just what “innovation” is, it’s not innovation.

Then there is Section 92 (n), which provides the only real input on assessing and holding accountable these new “innovation” schools. And what kind of accountability system does it call for? Basically, there is a requirement that the superintendent must perform an annual evaluation and follow-up with the school committee to share the results of the evaluation. If the school committee then finds that 1 or more goals have not been met, they proceed with an amendment process to “reasonably modify” the original innovation plan (the original proposal with statement of purpose, discussion of budget/admin/curriculum, etc.).

So what happens if, still, student outcomes have not improved substantially? If the superintendent and school committee conclude that there are multiple failures to deliver on the innovation plan, there are three degrees of action.

(i) limit 1 or more components of the innovation plan;
(ii) suspend 1 or more components of the innovation plan; or
(iii) terminate the authorization of the school; provided, however, that the limitation or suspension shall not take place before the completion of the second full year of the operation of the school and the termination shall not take place before the completion of the third full year of the operation of the school.

OK, so the school is "terminated." But what does that mean in practice? Does the principal or do the teachers put their jobs at risk? Does the school get put out as a charter school?

Not at all. What will happen is that the school loses its status as an “innovation school” and reverts to being a district school. That’s not what happens to charters and it’s not enough to create a sense of urgency.

Section 92 starts out with much promise noting that “An Innovation School shall be a public school, operating within a public school district,that is established for the purpose of improving school performance and student achievement through increased autonomy and flexibility.”

While it is leading to a number of experiments, I fear that without an explicit hard-nosed accountability component to the law, there is little reason to believe that the level of urgency to deliver reform will not come to fruition. The state legislature should put in place the same accountability measures for innovation schools as exist for charter schools – essentially, if the schools don’t work, shut them down.

Twenty years ago, when the Education Reform Act was passed, one of the basic ideas was that district schools would draw lessons from charter schools and incorporate them into their own reforms. Why is it that no one ever talks about having district schools emulate the accountability piece of charters’ success?

I know. It was a rhetorical question.

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