Chester E. Finn, Jr. President, Fordham Foundation Academic Questions, Spring 1998e:

What’s going on in the college curriculum cannot be laid entirely at the doorstep of the K-12 system. Indeed, as Allan Bloom figured out a decade or more ago, it has as much to do with our educational culture, indeed with our culture per se, as with our schools. Cultural meltdown afflicts both sets of institutions. But each also inflames the other.

What is the crisis in K-12 education? There is, of course, a faction within the profession that insists there is no crisis, that the schools are getting a bum rap, that they’re doing a good enough job, or as good a job as they ever did, or as good a job as our nasty, Philistine society deserves, or as good a job as they can, given the decay of parents and families, or as good a job as the money we are giving them will buy, and so on. There is a popular book in educator-land called The Manufactured Crisis which trots out all these arguments and adds that the unwarranted criticism of U.S. schools is the result of a Machiavellian rightwing plot to discredit public education in order to replace it with vouchers, for-profit schools, home schooling, and other variations.

Most Americans, though, agree that we have a crisis in K-12 education. Employers say so. College admissions officers and professors say so. Elected officials at every level say so. A number of honest educators say so. And lots and lots of surveys make plain that most of the public believes this to be the case and, incidentally, is out there busily seeking alternatives to mediocre schools for their own kids.

People highlight various aspects of the crisis. For some, discipline, violence, and drug issues are paramount. For some, it is the collapse of big city school systems. This critique is usually brought by people who (wrongly, in my view) suppose that rural and suburban schools are doing a good enough job. For some, it is character issues like cheating. For some it is dropouts and other forms of non-completion. All of these are genuine problems and they all affect the colleges. But the core of the K-12 crisis is the weak academic skills and knowledge of a huge fraction of high school graduates, the tiny fraction who are truly well educated, and the sizable fraction who are more or less illiterate at the end of twelve or thirteen years of schooling.

That is the first of ten elements of the K-12 crisis with special salience for the college curriculum. What does it mean to enroll a freshman who does not know when or why the [U.S.] Civil War was fought, who has never written a paper longer than a couple of pages, whose math goes only to algebra, whose acquaintance with literature is more apt to involve Maya Angelou and maybe Hemingway than Dickens, Faulkner, or Milton, who cannot distinguish Dred Scott from F. Scott Fitzgerald, and who could not accurately locate more than six countries if handed a blank map of the world?

What does it mean for the college curriculum? Not to put too fine a point on it, I think it means that the college curriculum is forced—like it or not—to become more like what the high school curriculum ought to be. College becomes the place to get a secondary education just as, for many young people, high school is the place for a primary education. Is it any surprise that many employers, wanting to hire people with a bona fide tertiary education, are insisting on postgraduate degrees?

Second, young people entering our colleges are unaccustomed, by virtue of their K-12 education, to serious intellectual standards. They are well accustomed to praise, deserved or not. Middle school classrooms dripping with self-esteem, something called “emotional intelligence,” and other forms of affective learning turn into grade inflation in college. Try giving these students a C or D—or even a B—and see what reaction you get. Not only have they been allowed to get by with slovenly academic work, they have also been told they’re fantastic. Which is, of course, why, in all those international comparisons our kids do so much better on the self-regard measures than on actual performance.

Third, they are not used to working hard. They got through school without rewriting papers, without doing long division by hand (they had calculators), without wrestling with difficult texts, or without burning the midnight oil at the library. Lots of them had jobs, they had boyfriends, they were on athletic teams, they partied a lot. They may have been busy as can be, but many of them minored in academics while in high school. They are used to coasting—and getting by.

Fourth, school has not nurtured their character, their virtues, their values, or their moral fiber. Lots of schooling is still self-consciously value-neutral and lots of teachers are still self-conscious about “imposing values” on their students. The curriculum encourages relativism, too. So concepts of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, noble and villainous—these distinctions may be a little murky to arriving college students, unless they picked them up in church or at home.

Fifth, they do not have good study habits. They did not need them to make a go of high school. Often they could avoid homework, cram at the last minute for tests, avoid participating in class discussions, borrow term papers from the Internet, and use plot summaries and other short cuts rather than wrestling with the textbook, much less an original text. If, like many schools, theirs emphasized group work and cooperative learning, and minimized competition and individual attainment, then they are accustomed to sharing the work, not doing it themselves and being held accountable.

Sixth, they have received an ample dose, if not an overdose, of political correctness, multiculturalism, and other ideologies before they’ve even reached the ivy-covered walls. They learned to be nice, to be sensitive, to be inclusive, and not to say anything offensive or provocative. They did not learn it only from high school, of course. As Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia made painfully clear in a brilliant Harper’s essay, much of this worldview comes from television. But today’s schooling contributes its fair share and more.

Seventh, if they went to a typical U.S. high school, they are used to a curricular smorgasbord and are probably unacquainted, or minimally acquainted, with some core subjects. They may have taken bachelor living instead of civics, consumer math instead of geometry, black history instead of ancient history, and psychology instead of physics. They very likely took some technical or vocational or “school to work” classes instead of a comprehensive program in the liberal arts. Yes, they had to satisfy certain graduation requirements, but if psychology counts as science and journalism counts as English, why take the real stuff?

Eighth, they’re accustomed to mediocre teaching. They may have had a favorite teacher, perhaps a great, inspiring, deeply knowledgeable teacher. Jaime Escalante is not the only such, after all, among 2.7 million teachers in U.S. schools. But the odds are that a number of their teachers were time-servers, not terribly sophisticated about their own fields, and perhaps more interested in whether kids are properly entertained, enjoyed the class, and were feeling good about themselves, than in how much they learned from it.

Ninth, college-bound students are not accustomed to many consequences. They are not used to feeling that it really matters in their lives whether they study hard, learn a lot, and get top marks in hard subjects, or coast along with so-so grades in fluffy courses. They know that results count in some domains—like sports—but not in class.

I have turned into something of a behaviorist. I do not believe that anything has really been taught unless it was learned, nor do I think that educational reform is real until and unless it actually boosts student achievement. And I do not expect that to happen until young people actually alter their behavior: take different courses, study harder, and rise to higher standards. But what is going to alter their behavior if their real world continues to signal that it does not make any difference, that there are few tangible rewards for learning more, and practically no unpleasant consequences for learning very little? What does that say to a sixteen-year-old faced with a choice between rewriting his lab report and studying for his history test, or going out with his friends. Sixteen-year-olds, in their own peculiar way, are rational beings. They are forever going through a crude calculus that boils down to “does it really matter?” The answer we keep giving them is no, it doesn’t, not unless they’re part of that small sub-set of the sixteen-year-old population that is gunning for admission to our handful of truly competitive colleges and universities.

This may not be well understood by intellectuals, so many of whom have kids in that little pool of aspirants to Princeton and Stanford and Amherst. For those young people, yes, it makes a difference how they spend their Tuesday evenings, and most of them know it. But what about everyone else?

Third grade teachers can fake it with eight-year-olds by handing out gold stars and threatening them with summer school. To some extent, school systems can even fake it with teenagers by telling them that they are not going to graduate unless they pass certain tests or take certain courses. More and more of that is happening around the K-12 system. But it is all a bit unreal—a bit fake—because the sprawling U.S. higher education complex keeps whispering in kids’ ears, “Never mind, we’ll be glad to have you anyway.”

Tenth, finally, our young people are thoroughly accustomed, long before they reach the university classroom, to the educational regimen that E.D. Hirsch calls romantic naturalism—a product of Rousseau and Dewey and the rest of the Teachers College faculty of eighty years ago, but still the regnant intellectual theology of the education profession. Let us abjure a long excursion into this “thoughtworld,” as Hirsch terms it, and not rehash its lack of any serious scientific moorings. Its immediate relevance is that kids are coming out of school having been told that all they need to learn is what they feel like learning, that their teachers are escorts or facilitators, not instructors, that knowledge is pretty much whatever they’d like it to be, and that their feelings and sentiments are as valid as anything that might be termed successive approximations of objective truth, if indeed there is any such thing as truth.

What are the implications of all this for the college curriculum? To reduce it to a sentence, our universities are having to build a house atop a cracked and incomplete foundation.

How much repouring of the foundation does the university undertake? At whose expense? Instead of what? Does the remedial work count for credit? If so, does it subtract from the amount of so-called college level work that is expected, or does it add to the total, thus taking more time and demanding additional resources? Or does the college give up? Or try to do something altogether different, not repairing the foundation but, let’s say, pouring a slab and proceeding to build?

I have my own view of all this, but I know it is naive, my own form of romantic utopianism. My view is that the colleges should leverage the K-12 system to make the kinds of changes that both systems (not to mention the larger society) urgently need.

Shoulder-to-shoulder the nation’s universities should stand, proclaiming as with a single voice that, starting some reasonable number of years in the future, none will admit any student (under the age of, say, thirty) who cannot demonstrate mastery of certain specified skills and knowledge. If that demand were honestly enforced, it would have a dramatic, catalytic effect on the nation’s high schools, one that would reverberate back through the elementary schools. And if major employers were to make common cause with the institutions of higher education, the effect would be more dramatic still. The second-order effects on our colleges and universities would be striking as well.

But it is not going to happen. Employers would cite legal reasons, civil rights reasons, business reasons. Interest groups and editorialists will talk about equal opportunity. As for the colleges—well, their need for students is greater than their need for standards. So the higher education system is apt instead to persist in its peculiar love-hate relationship with the K-12 system, complaining about the system’s products while contributing to and exacerbating in myriad ways the bad habits and fallacies that produced them.

The worst of higher education’s crimes against the K-12 system is the abandonment of entry standards, which of course is a corollary of the universalization of access to higher education within the United States.

Let me be clear. I am not opposed to everyone’s having a shot at a college education. I do not begrudge financial aid measures that make it possible for many people to enroll. What I oppose is the devastation that is wrought on high school standards—and thereby, on primary school standards—by the widespread understanding that all can go to college even if they do not learn a doggone thing in school. The greatest tragedy of open admissions is not what it does to the colleges but what it does to the schools and to efforts to reform them. By holding the schools harmless from their own shortcomings, and signaling that young people are welcome in our colleges—well, some colleges—regardless of what they took or how much they learned or how hard they worked in high school, the endless expansion of higher education fatally undermines the prospects of doing anything about our schools. Moreover, it contributes to what we might term the “highschoolization” of colleges themselves. (Of course, it we come to count on our colleges to provide secondary education, then it is not unreasonable to expect access to them to be universal. I think President Clinton, among others, has figured that out, though of course he never says it that way.)

Admissions standards, or their absence, have a profound effect on the schools, and are the first of five ways in which the crisis of the college curriculum adversely affects the K-12 system.

Second, the university’s intellectual and curricular fashions have a trickle down effect. Every idea that seeps down through the academic limestone eventually creates stalactites within the K-12 curriculum. The whole postmodern intellectual enterprise has infected what is taught in grade schools. Deconstructionism in the university become constructivism in fourth grade—both progeny of the same ancestors. Where do “fuzzy” math, cooperative learning, whole language reading, and “history from the victim’s standpoint” come from? Where did those wretched national history standards come from? Whence cometh the emphasis on so-called higher order thinking skills and the scorn for specific knowledge and facts? They are all gifts that higher education has bestowed on the schools.

Third, there is the disaster area of teacher training. Upwards of a hundred thousand education degrees are awarded by U.S. colleges and universities. People in the arts and sciences sometimes delude themselves into believing that the dreadful, wrong-headed content and low standards built into most of these degrees are the problem of some other wing of the university. Perhaps so. But I do not see how any serious discussion of the college curriculum can proceed to cloture without at least pondering the intellectual carnage of our education schools. Somebody in higher education has got to be responsible for that!

Consider that a new first grade teacher with twenty-five kids in her class, if she remains in the profession for thirty years, will profoundly affect the lives and educational futures of 750 youngsters. If she is a high school teacher with, say, 100 students a year, the number whose lives she will touch over the course of a classroom career rises to 3,000. Where did she get her own education? Who decided what she needs to know before being turned loose on children? Who decided when she had learned enough of it? Who trained the principals and department heads who will supervise her? Who supplies the “in service” training and “professional development” that will salt her career? Who writes the textbooks that she will use and the professional journals that she will read? These are all the responsibility of the university and its faculty. The K-12 virus that has sickened and will infect generations of future students in the university can be traced right back to the university campus itself.

Fourth, permissiveness with respect to behavior and morality also trickles down. If it is taken for granted on the college campus that it is fine for eighteen-year-olds to indulge in drugs, sex, binge drinking, class-cutting, over-sleeping, and all the rest, it is naive to think that seventeen-year-olds on the high school campus will not adopt the same practices. Which means that fifteen-year-olds, and thirteen-year-olds, and eleven-year-olds, and so on down through the grades, will do their version of the same things. If the college winks at state drinking laws, why shouldn’t the high school? If the college sophomore in the family boasts about his exploits, what do you suppose will be the effect on the high school sophomore who is his younger sister or brother? What are the effects on parents trying to bring their kids up properly?

Fifth, and finally, the university is the wellspring of such social and political values of the K-12 curriculum as multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, scorn for patriotism, affection for governmental solutions to all problems, and so forth. These creep into fourth-grade textbooks, into the videos and television programs that teachers show, into the magazines and newspapers and workbooks that they assign, and into the belief structure of the teachers themselves. Indeed, the activist groups that seek to propagate those values throughout the society are especially eager to target the young and vulnerable. Thus “peace education” has evolved into conflict-resolution courses and science and geography classes are awash in radical environmentalism. I do not say that this is entirely the fault of our colleges and universities, but if these beliefs were not firmly grounded there, their position in our schools would be a lot shakier.

Entropy describes a closed system in which everything deteriorates. Webster’s refers to “the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity.” That is how I have come to see the all-but-sealed world in which the schools and the colleges deteriorate together, each worsening the condition of the other.

Is anything to be done? I see small signs of hope on the K-12 front: the movement toward standards, tests, and accountability; the spread of “charter” schools and other new institutional forms; the growth of school choice and the concomitant transfer of some authority from producers to consumers. But it is a slow process and so far not one that has yielded palpable results in terms of student achievement.

One can also point to new islands of excellence in the postsecondary seas and to other modest indicators of progress.

Perhaps it will all come together. Certainly there is evidence of mounting discontent on the part of governors and legislators and of greater willingness to take such obvious policy steps as yoking college admission standards to high school exit requirements.

But what we need most is a renaissance of the will and the spirit, a rebirth of the concept of educational quality. As Roger Shattuck put it in a grand essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “[W]e need to reexamine our fundamental beliefs about educational excellence. If we do not confront these assumptions, we shall never be able to change the ways in which our two levels conspire to lower standards.”

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

The 2017 scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been released, and the news is not good for Wisconsin. All the data is available in the NAEP Data Explorer at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/landing.

We will do a detailed analysis soon, but here are some important takeaways from the 4th grade reading test:

• Wisconsin ranked 34th nationally, our lowest ranking to date
• The Wisconsin average score is 220 (down 4 points from two years ago, and 2 points lower than the national average)
• Our black students ranked 49th (3rd from last)
• Our white students ranked 41st (lower than white students in Alabama and Mississippi)
• Our black-white gap was tied for 5th largest in the country
• 65% of Wisconsin students were not proficient in reading: 34% were below basic, 31% basic, 27% proficient, and 8% advanced
• All of our racial sub-groups, as well as low SES students and students with disabilities performed below the national average for their particular sub-group

Charts from the Urban Institute:

Wisconsin ranks 22nd amongst the States in per student spending at $11,375.

Madison currently spends nearly $20,000 per student, far more than most school districts. Yet, we’ve long tolerated disastrous reading results.

www.stretchtargets.org

Matthew Ladner on charters and the “lost decade”.

Matthew Ladner:

I believe that open enrollment is a big reason that Arizona has been leading the nation in NAEP gains, and that charter and private choice programs deserve some credit the eagerness with which districts participate. Take a look at Columbus on the above map- a large urban district literally surrounded by districts choosing not to allow open enrollment transfers. Now take a look at the school district map of Pima County. The Tucson Unified School District is surrounded by districts that do participate in open-enrollment- actively.

Much more on open enrollment, here.

Molly Beck:

The state’s largest teachers union has blasted a new proposal from three lawmakers to give grants to advanced learners who live in low-income households, saying the proposal is another way to send public money to private education providers.

Christina Brey, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, on Friday blasted a bill proposed this week by Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, Rep. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, and Rep. Jason Fields, D-Milwaukee, to give $1,000 grants to 2,000 low-income students in public, charter and private schools who are considered to be “gifted and talented.” Brey said the bill lacks measures of accountability and does not specify where funding will come from.

Molly Beck:

Kitchens said the formula could be improved for school districts with declining enrollment, increasing enrollment and small, rural school districts with spending levels capped at below $10,000 per student. Olsen also funding for open enrollment and charter and private voucher schools also could be examined.

“Over the years we’ve continually changed little pieces of the formula and often times it’s just to affect a problem in one or two school districts, but too many times when you fix one problem in one place it causes a problem somewhere else,” he said, adding he wants to start with a blank slate and go “in any direction that the evidence leads us.”

But he also noted Wisconsin’s school funding formula is well-regarded “so it may well be in the end we decide to stick with the basic framework and build around that.”

In Wisconsin, school districts are funded through local property taxes, state aid and federal funding. Schools receive the largest amount of their state funding through a general fund that distributes money through a formula that gives more to districts with more students with challenges, including those who live in poverty. Districts also receive money from several funding streams including through a certain amount per pupil, currently set at $450 per student.

Rather interesting to see the $10,000 per student mentioned in the article.

Madison spends far more, now nearly $20,000 per student.

Jacob Carpenter:

L eaders of KIPP Houston and BBVA Compass on Monday celebrated a $1.8 million naming-rights agreement that will help fund the charter network’s newest campus.

Under the deal, which has been in the works for more than a year, the campus of KIPP Nexus on Houston’s northwest side will be called BBVA Compass Opportunity Campus. The agreement marks the first time a KIPP network has sold naming rights to a campus, continuing a slow-moving trend of schools selling naming rights to facilities as a way to generate revenue.

Chris Perf:

But more significantly, every family is now empowered to choose the public school that will serve them best (district, charter or magnet) through a centralized, equitable and politically neutral system called Newark Enrolls.

Interestingly, the recent growth in charters has not resulted in a corresponding reduction in traditional schools. In fact, energized by family choice and increasing academic performance, total public school enrollment in Newark has increased over time, and is higher than at any point in recent history.

More importantly, this focus on a unitary, governance-indifferent approach to public school options in the city corresponds with (and I believe contributed materially to) significant improvements in all sectors. For example, 36 percent of our high school students now attend a non-charter public school that exceeds the state average in reading and math—and let me proudly say that New Jersey always ranks among the top two or three states in the nation.

In elementary and middle school, the following chart says it all. Combining district and charter public schools, during this period Newark’s standing relative to comparable districts in the state leapt from the 33rd percentile to the 83rd percentile in math and from the 44th to the 81st in reading.

Sohrab Ahmari:

Has the most celebrated education-reform organization in the U.S. transformed itself into an arm of the progressive movement? Teach for America, or TFA, the national corps of recent graduates who commit two years to teaching in underserved classrooms across the country, was founded to help close the achievement gap between rich and poor students. But now it increasingly functions as a platform for radical identity politics and the anti-Trump “resistance.”

In remaking itself, TFA has subtly downgraded the principles that had won it allies across the spectrum. George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Chris Christie, and Meg Whitman are a few of the Republicans who championed TFA. The group attracted such boldface names, and hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the largest American firms and philanthropies, because it stood for a simple but powerful idea: that teacher quality is the decisive factor in the educational outcomes produced by schools.

Judging by its interventions in recent debates, it isn’t all that clear that senior TFA executives still believe this. These days, TFA’s voice on charters, accountability, and curricular rigor is decidedly muffled. Such education-reform essentials have been eclipsed in TFA’s discourse by immigration, policing, “queer” and transgender-identity issues, and other left-wing causes. TFA’s message seems to be that until numerous other social ills are cured—until immigration is less restricted, policing becomes more gentle, and poverty is eliminated—an excellent education will elude the poor. That was the status-quo defeatism TFA originally set out to challenge.

Wendy Kopp conceived TFA when she was a senior at Princeton in 1989. Unable to get a New York City teaching job without a graduate degree and state certification, Kopp wrote a thesis calling for the creation of a nontraditional recruitment pipeline that would bring America’s most promising young people to its neediest classrooms. TFA members would teach for two years, applying their energy and ambition to drive achievement at the classroom level. She speculated that some would stay in education, while others would go on to careers in law, medicine, business, journalism, etc. But all would remain “lifelong leaders in the effort to end educational inequity.”

Jay Greene:

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation is impressive for its intellectual honesty and curiosity. They have an education reform strategy with which I have some important differences, but they are nevertheless interested in hearing criticism of their approach, so they invited me to present my critique to their board. Below is the essence of what I prepared for that meeting. I don’t expect that this will cause them to alter course, nor should it. It’s their money and they should do whatever they think best. But the amazing thing about the Arnolds and the head of their education effort, Neerav Kingsland, is that they are at least open to the possibility of being wrong and want to hear criticism in case they would like to reconsider any aspects of their strategy.

The heart of the Arnold reform strategy is Portfolio Management, which is a term with which they are not enamored, but is essentially a rapid expansion of choices across different sectors with a centralized and muscular system for engaging in quality control. The Portfolio Manager would govern schools of all types in a location — traditional, charter, and perhaps private — and select which schools should be allowed to operate, which should be closed, and police certain aspects of their operations, including admissions, transportation, and perhaps special education, discipline, and other issues. I’m a fan of the rapid expansion of choices, but I believe that the centralized and muscular quality control system produces significant educational and political damage. I am not suggesting that the Arnold Foundation (or the charter movement in general ) abandon all quality control efforts, but I think quality is best promoted by relying heavily on parent judgement and otherwise relying on a decentralized system of authorizers with the most contextual information to make decisions about opening and closing schools if parents seem to have difficulty assessing quality on their own. The problem with Portfolio Management is the centralized and overly-active nature of a single quality-control entity. Here is my case in 7 points:

Mike Antunucci:

Rachel M. Cohen has written a piece in The American Prospect titled “Under Trump, Liberals Rediscover School Segregation” that almost seems designed to rile both sides of the education policy debate.

These kinds of articles always get my attention, because it’s the easiest thing in the world to tell people exactly what they want to hear. The next easiest thing is to tell your opponents what they don’t want to hear.

Telling your allies what they don’t want to hear gets really awkward, at best.

Cohen applauds the newfound focus on school segregation, but thinks “the timing sometimes seems politically convenient.” She notes a previous lack of liberal interest in the segregation found not only in traditional schools, but in charters when supported by a charter-friendly Obama Administration.

Charter advocates aren’t going to love the notion that they, as well as voucher advocates, are contributing to segregation. But unions aren’t going to love Cohen’s implication that they tend to fight segregation only when they don’t have to sacrifice anything:

Robert Pondiscio:

Slowly, slowly, a small but persuasive body of work is emerging which raises curriculum to an object of pressing concern for educators, and expresses long overdue appreciation for the idea that the instructional materials we put in front of children actually matter to student outcomes. A welcome addition to this emerging corpus is a new Aspen Institute paper by Ross Wiener and Susan Pimentel, which makes a compelling case—equally overdue—that professional development and teacher training ought to be connected to curriculum. A primary role of school systems, states, districts, and charter-management organizations, the pair write, “is to create the conditions in schools through which teachers can become experts at teaching the curriculum they are using and adapting instruction to the needs of their particular students.”

Note the italics, which are Weiner’s and Pimental’s, not mine. It underscores that regardless of how unremarkable this may sound to lay readers (“Wait. Teachers should be expert at teaching their curriculum? Aren’t they already!?”), what the duo are suggesting is something new, even revolutionary. Sadly, it is.

Practice What You Teach begins with a discussion of research demonstrating the frustrating state of teacher “PD,” which, like the sitcom Seinfeld, is a show about nothing. Next, they discuss curriculum materials, which “have a profound effect on what happens in classrooms and on how much students learn.” When average teachers use excellent materials, Weiner and Pimental note, “student learning results improve significantly.” The general disregard for curriculum as a means to improve teacher effectiveness and student outcomes is reflected in the observation that “many teachers do not have access to strong, standards-aligned curriculum; in fact, most teachers spend hours every week searching for materials that haven’t been vetted and aren’t connected to ongoing, professional learning activities in their schools.”

This is a state of affairs that would be a national scandal if an analogous situation existed in healthcare or any other critical public service (Help Wanted: Firemen. Bring your own hose). Many school districts have nothing that would meet a reasonable definition for a curriculum. Local “scope and sequence” documents are suggestions; the subjects they list may or may not be taught. When USC professor Morgan Polikoff wanted school-level data on what textbooks were in use in several states, he had to file hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests to find out. The issue wasn’t secrecy. States and districts seem to think it’s just not worth keeping track of.

Wisconsin has adopted only one such requirement (Massachussetts far more, via MTEL).

“Foundations of reading results“

WILL:

“Our study compared outcomes between all K-12 schools in Wisconsin – traditional public, public charter, and private schools in the choice programs. In doing so, it controlled for a variety of socioeconomic factors such as race, poverty, etc. As we acknowledged, we did not control for special needs or learning disabilities because the data simply do not exist for an accurate comparison of the two populations. An academic study found that reported disability rates in MPCP schools were lower than actual disability rates because MPCP schools lack the financial incentives to report disabilities that are available to public schools. Our study does control for socioeconomic status – something which may be correlated with special needs status, but we cannot control for what we cannot measure.

“We hope that someday it will be possible to do such a comparison and we have made a request to DPI for such data. This request has, thus far, been ignored. There are reforms that could enhance the likelihood that special needs students will participate in the choice program – such as expanding access to the Special Needs Scholarship Program and increased voucher funding – but, unfortunately Superintendent Evers is not an advocate for that.

Neerav Kingsland:

In 44 cities charters serve over 20% of students.

These 44 cities, as well as many others in the future, will have to evolve their educational systems to govern a mixed portfolio of school types.

What options are available to these cities? Here’s five, some of which will be much better for children than others.

Annysa Johnson:

“Wisconsin is the worst in the nation for achievement gaps and graduation gaps,” said Holtz, who believes public charter and private voucher schools could do a better job than some public schools. “We’re leaving a generation of students behind.”

Evers says Wisconsin schools have raised standards, increased graduation rates and expanded career and technical education programs during his tenure. He characterized Holtz as a political opportunist who would expand the state’s voucher program at the expense of public schools and shepherd in the massive cuts proposed by President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that would eliminate before- and after-school programs, teacher training grants and a host of other programs that benefit Wisconsin students.

Scott Adams:

Speaking of jobs, if Trump’s job-creation hype evolves from anecdotal to real, that’s a great way to reduce income inequality too. As I have often said, economies run on psychology, and Trump is a master of psychology. He proved that already by injecting enough optimism into the system that it goosed the stock market, and business confidence in general. That should translate into more investments and a better economy.

The Trump administration also recently tightened their connection to historically black colleges to see how they can help. The best way to reduce income inequality is to address the hardest cases first, to get the most bang for the buck. And the African-American community is coming from the deepest hole. We see no results there yet, but the move makes sense from the perspective of addressing income inequality.

Locally, Madison has continued with its long-term nondiverse governance model, this, despite decades long disastrous reading results.

We spend more than most, now around $18,000 per student!

Josh Kenworthy :

But today, Lawrence is home to one of the most remarkable turnaround stories in the country, thanks in no small part to a program that got high school dropouts like Difo reengaged.

Now in its sixth year, that turnaround approach is seen by some as a first of its kind – both for its academic results and, education experts say, for the inclusive and pragmatic way it got traditional public schools, charters, nonprofits, and families to work together. During that time, Lawrence – once the third-worst ranked district in the state – has climbed out of the bottom 10 percent.

“When you look at the annals of state intervention in local school districts across the country … there’s virtually no track record, nor extant examples of states effectively turning around academic performance in local school districts until Lawrence arrived on the scene,” says Paul Reville, a professor of education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Kristina Rizga:

It’s Christmastime in Holland, Michigan, and the northerly winds from Lake Macatawa bring a merciless chill to the small city covered in deep snow. The sparkly lights on the trees in downtown luxury storefronts illuminate seasonal delicacies from the Netherlands, photos and paintings of windmills and tulips, wooden shoes, and occasional “Welkom Vrienden” (Welcome Friends) signs.
Meet the New Kochs: The DeVos Clan’s Plan to Defund the Left

Dutch immigrants from a conservative Protestant sect chose this “little Holland” in western Michigan more than 150 years ago in part for its isolation. They wanted to keep “American” influences away from their people and their orthodox ways of running their community. Many of their traditions have lasted generations. Until recently, Holland restaurants couldn’t sell alcohol on Sundays. Residents are not allowed to yell or whistle between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. If city officials decide that a fence or a shed signals decay, they might tear it down, and mail the owner a bill. Grass clippings longer than eight inches have to be removed and composted, and snow must be shoveled as soon as it lands on the streets. Most people say rules like these help keep Holland prosperous, with low unemployment, low crime rates, good city services, excellent schools, and Republicans at almost every government post. It’s also where President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary, billionaire philanthropist Betsy DeVos, grew up.

Sitting in his spacious downtown office suite, Arlyn Lanting is eager to talk about his longtime friend, who will begin confirmation hearings Tuesday to become the nation’s top-ranking education official. DeVos is married to Amway scion Dick DeVos (whose father, Richard DeVos, is worth more than $5 billion, according to Forbes) and is seen as a controversial choice because of her track record of supporting vouchers for private, religious schools; right-wing Christian groups like the Foundation for Traditional Values, which has pushed to soften the separation of church and state; and organizations like Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which has championed the privatization of the education system.

More, here.

Cory Koedel and Morgan Polikoff, via a kind Dan Dempsey email:

Textbooks are one of the most widely used educational inputs, but remarkably little is known about their effects on student learning. This report uses data collected from elementary schools in California to estimate the impacts of mathematics textbook choices on student achievement. We study four of the most popular books in the state from 2008-2013 and find that one—Houghton Mifflin California Math—consistently outperforms the other three. The superior performance of California Math persists up to four years after adoption and shows up in grades 3, 4, and 5.

The textbook impacts we identify are educationally meaningful and come at an extremely low cost. With regard to cost, textbooks are relatively inexpensive and tend to be similarly priced. The implication is that the marginal cost of choosing a more effective textbook over a less effective alternative is essentially zero. In terms of achievement impacts, our findings suggest non-trivial gains in student achievement are attainable simply by choosing more effective curriculum materials. The effect sizes we document are on par with what one could expect from a hypothetical policy that substantially increases the quality of the teaching workforce. But whereas there is much uncertainty about whether commensurate increases in teacher quality are attainable, and how they might be attained—at least in the near term—choosing a more effective textbook is a seemingly straightforward policy option for raising student achievement.

A critical factor limiting the capacity of school administrators to choose more effective textbooks is that there is virtually no evidence on how different textbooks affect student achievement. The fundamental problem limiting the development of an evidence base is that very few states track school and district textbook adoptions. This point bears repeating: most states do not know which curriculum materials are being used in which schools and districts. Without these data, it is not possible to perform evaluations of textbook efficacy. Thus, in most states, decisionmakers who wish to incorporate into their adoption decisions evidence on how textbooks affect student achievement are simply out of luck.

…..

Our work makes several important contributions. First, we have assembled a dataset of textbook adoptions in California, the largest U.S. state with the greatest number of schools. We have received funding to continue collecting these data moving forward. We will continue to analyze the data and go on to study other subjects and other grades. We also plan to make the data available to interested researchers so that others can pursue new lines of inquiry. There are many questions in this area of great import that do not have to do with impacts on student achievement—
for instance, is there equitable access to current curriculum materials? How do charter and traditional public schools differ in their adoption patterns? We hope these newly available data can spawn a new wave of data-driven research on textbook adoptions and their effects. The current research literature is sorely lacking in quantitative analyses of textbooks in schools.

Second, our work again demonstrates a method (previously demonstrated by Bhatt, Koedel, and Lehmannxiv) that can be applied in other states, grades, and subjects. We believe at this point that the method is suf ciently well developed that it can be widely applied. By doing this—studying textbook effects across multiple settings—we can begin to develop a better understanding of what is working, where, and for whom. In addition to California, we have collected data on textbook adoptions in Texas, Illinois, New York, and Florida. Whether the data we have are suf ciently complete to allow this kind of investigation in each setting is unclear, but we will try.

PDF Report link.

Related: Math Forum audio/video

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Madison’s 2009 (!) Math Task Force

21% OF UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SYSTEM FRESHMAN REQUIRE REMEDIAL MATH

DEJA VU: REPORT OF THE 1965 MADISON SCHOOL DISTRICT MATH 9 TEXTBOOK COMMITTEE.

Jared Bernstein & Ben Spielberg:

DeVos and other ideological enemies of teachers unions may well try to block that vision. But as most education policy gets hashed out at the local level, they will hopefully fail. The desire for cross-sector collaboration with a goal of promoting equity for all students is growing, and fostering that growth will deliver a big win for our children.

Choice schools often spend substantially less per student than traditional, no choice schools.

Rahm Emanuel:

Fight the toughest battle: The toughest nut for urban school districts to crack is high school, but again, investing in quality is the key. While we have backed quality charter options in Chicago, we have also invested in quality through magnet, military, IB and STEM schools to the point that 50 percent of our kids attend one of these models. IB and STEM programs in particular are proven to raise graduation and college enrollment rates for students of all racial and income backgrounds. In fact, our IB-enrolled students boast a nearly 100 percent graduation rate, and 81 percent enroll in college, a higher rate than their peers.

Failure is not an option: Children get only one chance at a good education. We closed failing charter and neighborhood schools and expanded those with higher quality. The incoming presidential administration should promote proven programs to turn around failing schools. In Chicago, in partnership with the Academy for Urban School Leadership, we worked to turn around 14 failing schools. Today, roughly 80 percent of these schools have attained high-performing quality ratings.

Propublica links on Rahm Emanuel.

Chris Arnade

Trump voters may not vote the way I want them to, but, after having spent the last five years working in (and having grown up in) parts of the US few visit, I know they are not dumb. They are doing what all voters do: Trying to use their vote to better their particular situation (however they define that).

Labeling them dumb is simply a way of not trying to understand their situation, or what they value.

Related, Madison, despite spending nearly $18k per student annually, has long tolerated disastrous reading results and perpetual resistance of K-12 diversity.

Kiah Collier:

The issues — scoring delays, in particular — prompted Morath to drop grade advancement consequences for fifth and eighth graders and exclude exams affected by the computer glitch from school accountability ratings. But despite pleas from school superintendents to throw out all scores for the purposes of rating schools, Morath has suggested the issues were not widespread or severe enough to do so.

“ETS apologizes for the operational shortcomings during this year’s STAAR program,” the test vendor said in a news release Tuesday. “Our most important goal is to deliver the high-quality program the students and educators of Texas deserve, and we will continue to improve programs and processes to achieve that objective.”

The company, which administers national exams including the SAT, spent an additional $20 million providing support to school districts and charters as they attempted to resolve testing issues, according to an education agency news release. It noted that those costs will be assumed by the company and are “above and beyond” its state contract, worth $280 million over four years.

Robin Lake, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Our center has taken the first systematic look at what implementing personalized learning schools costs, how school leaders are spending their funds, and what it might take to make personalized learning financially sustainable with public dollars. We studied 16 charter elementary and secondary schools with a wide range of personalized learning models from across the country (we hoped to include district schools, but the data were not available). All of these schools received financial support through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Next Generation Learning Challenges, the earliest and most significant philanthropic investment in personalized learning to date. (The Gates Foundation also funded our study.)

While we can’t make overly sweeping generalizations from our research (we looked at a particular set of schools with particular characteristics), this first analysis of personalized learning finances enables educators and policymakers to learn from these early frontrunners and, ideally, to more clearly understand potential fiscal implications.

Neerav Kingsland:

Not that America needs anything greater than a picture of a flag with *both* an eagle and some unnamed founding document superimposed across it.

But in case you’re hungry for more goodness, one of the great parts of my job is I get to travel the country and see innovative work, much of which doesn’t get a lot of national press.

So here’s some highlights, most of which are early stage, none of which are proven, but all of which give me a lot of hope.

Innovation Schools in Indianapolis

Indianapolis has built broad community support for a model that gives great educators autonomy, allow for new school entrepreneurship, and, perhaps most importantly, provides non-profit governance – all within a district construct that is still accountable to a publicly elected school board.

I once wrote a parable about this re: blacksmiths. What’s happening in Indianapolis is even better. This could be a breakthrough in both school site governance (a non-charter path for sustained entrepreneurship and autonomy) and system level governance (how a district reinvents itself as a public steward of great schools).

Kyndal Wilson:

Broome Street Academy, a tuition-free public charter high school in New York City, is doing big things. While 77 percent of the school is classified as economically disadvantaged, 82 percent of Broome Street’s first graduating class enrolled in a two-year or four-year college program in 2015.

Citizen Stewart:

Maybe I shouldn’t have tangled with people who have advanced education. These folks with acronyms before and after their names are sensitive about their scholarship and they want recognition for their expertise.

Since then I’ve met a stream of Doctors of education who see themselves as the producers of the tablets we should carry down from the mountain, into the hood. They want me to see that charters, choice, testing, and focus on teacher quality aren’t reforms aimed at improving education. Those reforms, they say, are merely vices of a malevolent upper class who design and fund neo-slavery.

Can’t I see the proposals I support are really disguised weapons against my own people?

Maybe I’m a cynical simpleton, but the most learned people are the most tiring for me. Especially those in higher education. Is there some secret room in the academy where their brains are rewired so they wander intellectually, permanently in nuance, without a return ticket to practicality?

“we know best“….

Maya Pope-Chappell:

At the center of the fight is Oakland Unified Public School Superintendent Antwan Wilson. Besides making school choices easier and more transparent, Wilson argues that a single form would provide valuable data that could be used to scale up more options that parents want. (There are currently 40 different enrollment processes in Oakland, says Wilson).

Denver—where Wilson worked as an assistant superintendent—and New Orleans were the first cities to implement common enrollment systems that included district and charter options. Similar systems have been launched in Washington D.C. and Newark.

Oakland’s school board is set to to vote on the common enrollment plan in June. I spoke to Wilson about the battle, the lessons he’s learned in Denver and what schools across the country can do to create more equity and access to quality education.

Edited excerpts:

Q: The New York Times recently wrote about you and the row over enrollment in Oakland. The article quoted Robert C. Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, as saying, “If he gets it right, it’s a model for moving past the polarized sense of reform that we have right now.” Would you agree with his statement about you?

I would agree with that. I find that the polarization in the arguing is distracting and it’s harmful. What we really need to focus on is quality and getting people access and equity. By moving away from arguing about district versus charter and moving towards giving parents the same opportunities that more affluent parents have to determine where their children go to school, puts parents and families in the driver’s seat.

Q: During your tenure in Denver, the city enacted its single-enrollment system. Similar concerns were raised there. Why is enrollment such a polarized issue and what have you learned?

There are some families who are concerned about the quote, unquote ‘competition’ and the drain of resources from schools. But to me, the issue isn’t around district-run or charter, it’s around monopoly, and monopolies are slow to innovate. What ends up happening is people begin to peel off and innovate. And when we as a district begin to innovate, then we will put ourselves in a position to offer parents more of what they want. What Denver has learned is that both district schools and charters benefit when the parents’ needs are put at the center. If arguing about school governance worked in terms of improving student achievement and increasing enrollment and parent/student satisfaction, I’d jump into that argument. It just doesn’t.

Q: Early results from Denver and New Orleans show some successes, but parents there have complained that there aren’t enough quality schools to choose from. An enrollment system can’t resolve that on its own, so what are some other ways to create more equity and access to quality education—especially among low-income families?

I think funding is a huge piece—giving more money to kids who need it most. Expanding school time, [which] benefits all children. Another strategy is mentoring and tutoring. These are strategies we know work. And then the last thing, you have to address access to rigorous programming in schools.

Laura Waters:

I’ve followed discourse about Newark’s public education system for years and, suddenly, there’s a shift. While education politics and policy is typically overheated in New Jersey’s largest school district – decades of corruption and nepotism, extreme poverty, failing schools – there’s a new momentum thrumming through a parent-driven crusade for public school options.

A new group called Hands Off Our Future Collective is drawing more and more families to meetings with legislators and school board members. Eric Dawson of “The Newark Report,” a Newark native is unabashedly exposing Mayor Ras Baraka’s duplicitous campaign tactics against school choice. A universal enrollment system that simplifies choice among traditional and charter public schools methodically quantifies parent desire for alternatives. Superintendent Chris Cerf has successfully smoothed some ragged edges from Cami Anderson’s tenure and restored leadership.

Peter Cunningham:

America’s teachers unions probably will not put reform leaders like Newark’s Chris Cerf, Philadelphia’s William Hite, D.C’s Kaya Henderson, or Denver’s Tom Boasberg at the top of their Christmas card mailing list. But they should, because no one is working harder to improve and preserve traditional, unionized, district-run schools.

Yes, these and other reform superintendents support creating new, high-quality schools, including public charters, and giving all parents the power to choose the right schools for their children. But they and their leadership teams are most deeply committed to investing in and strengthening the existing district-run schools. No one wants these schools to work for kids more than these district leaders.

Annysa Johnson:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ special Task Force on Urban Education will hold the first in a series of public hearings — this one on teacher recruitment, retention and training — at 1 p.m. Tuesday at the State Capitol, Room 412.

The panel will take testimony from the public after hearing from invited individuals and organizations. They include Jennifer Cheatham, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District; University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross; the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction; Teach for America; the Leadership for Educational Equity; and Pablo Muirhead, coordinator of teacher education for Milwaukee Area Technical College.

Vos created the task force in August to address numerous issues affecting urban schools, including retention and training, poor academic performance among some students and low graduation rates. Public school advocates have criticized the panel, saying it is dominated by Republicans with little or no experience with urban schools and, in some cases, have received significant campaign contributions from voucher- and charter-school proponents.

Task force Chairman, Rep. Jessie Rodriguez (R-Franklin), who worked previously for Hispanics for School Choice, said those concerns had not come up in her discussions with educators and lawmakers.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Douglas Harris:

What happened to the New Orleans public schools following the tragic levee breeches after Hurricane Katrina is truly unprecedented. Within the span of one year, all public-school employees were fired, the teacher contract expired and was not replaced, and most attendance zones were eliminated. The state took control of almost all public schools and began holding them to relatively strict standards of academic achievement. Over time, the state turned all the schools under its authority over to charter management organizations (CMOs) that, in turn, dramatically reshaped the teacher workforce.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email:

Governor Walker’s proposed Budget and the gamesmanship being played in the legislature has been compared to the game “whack-a-mole”. Representative Melissa Sargent, a champion for public education, teachers and progressive causes, said of the Budget proposals, “Just when you think we’ve averted one crisis, another initiative is introduced to threaten the progressive traditions of our state.” Sargent added, “The Budget process provides a look inside the corporate-driven policy agenda of the Republican party. Their goal is comprehensive privatization.”

That concept came through loud and clear last week, when the Republican majority on the Joint Finance Committee introduced a proposal which would enable even more funds to be diverted from money-starved public schools to private schools, by expanding the number of parents who can use a State-issued voucher to pay the cost of sending their child to a private school. The funds would come from that child’s area public school system. An investigation by One Wisconsin Now illustrates that a pro-voucher front group donated $122,000 to the campaigns of the Republicans on the Joint Finance Committee.

Senate Democratic Leader Jennifer Shilling said education must be the top Budget priority, that “the needs of children and schools must be addressed before tax breaks for the wealthy and giveaways to special interests (voucher supporters).” Shilling continued, “To fully restore the cuts our schools have seen over the past four years, we need to invest an additional $200 per student above what Walker has proposed.” While the Republican majority brags that they are adding $208 million in school aids, it amounts to only 1⁄2 of 1% over the two-year Budget, and more than 50% of that will not go to schools, but to reducing property taxes.

The Walker Budget would also enable State takeover of the Milwaukee Public Schools, and perhaps the Madison Metropolitan School District. The Budget proposal would enable a “commissioner to convert these schools to charter or voucher schools.” The “commissioner” would have the authority to fire all teachers and administrators in a school district taken over, given the provisions of the proposed law.

A recent amendment would enable anyone with any BA degree to teach English, social studies, math or science, and enable anyone – even without a degree – to teach business, art, music, agriculture or special education.

The Budget will be acted upon this month. It is time to let your objections be heard regarding the school funding crisis being created by the proposed Budget. Contact majority party members of the Joint Finance Committee:

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results, despite spending more than $15,000 per student, double the national average.

Michael Goldstein:

lighting the world on fire.

Some outliers exist. There’s a low tail, of course, and a battle over whether regulators can shut ’em down fast enough.

There’s a high tail, too—KIPP, Uncommon, AF, YES, Success, High Tech High, Collegiate, etc. Reformy non-profits and ed-tech ventures sometimes supply these exemplars with services, and are sometimes spun out of them.

A lot of the leaders from these top-performing schools show up the day before each New Schools Venture Fund Annual Summit for a smaller get-together. Education reform opponents might liken these meetings to a scene from The Godfather in which crime families gather to discuss how to more effectively commit crimes. My memories of these edu-meetings are less “consiglieres whispering advice to nattily attired bosses” and more “nerdy do-gooders meeting in hallways, excitedly trading tips about English curriculum while trying to keep up with emails from teachers back home (the real work).”

But I recall one gathering with a bit of mafioso feel. Katrina had recently wiped out New Orleans public schools. The big national reformers like TNTP, TFA, and NLNS were already planning big NOLA expansions. Now the smaller organizations, along with each charter “family,” was implored:

Lisa Friedman:

When educators blame low test scores on the high number of special-needs students in their school, or exempt special education kids from having to meet the same standards as their general-education peers, it makes me angry.

These actions are grounded in an educational approach that gives up on children with disabilities. As someone who was written off mistakenly as having a learning disability when I was a child, I know how damaging that attitude can be to the self-esteem and educational future of these children.

Disparities in expectations yield disparate results; lowering the bar for students rather than helping them reach the higher one denies them the learning all children are entitled to and robs them of their potential.

Gorman Lee, via Will Fitzhugh:

The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision to indefinitely suspend the History and Social Science MCAS in 2009 has placed social studies education in a high risk of marginalization in K-12 public school districts across the Commonwealth. The problem has only exacerbated with increased emphases of English language arts and mathematics in the Common Core State Standards that was adopted in 2010. Therefore it comes to no surprise that once school districts have started to face budgetary constraints, social studies is now among the subject areas first on the chopping block… and it’s already happening.

There have been recent concerning reports of K-12 school districts reducing social studies departments in order to secure support to “high stakes” subject areas, despite the promised commitments to uphold civic ideals and to prepare students to become active and productive adult citizens as described in their mission statements. Many school districts have begun to merge social studies and English language arts departments into a Humanities department, where the social studies curriculum takes a secondary role to support the English language arts curriculum. In some schools, teachers whose primary subject area is other than social studies have been assigned to teach one social studies class; it now appears that “highly qualified” is no longer applicable when it comes to social studies. In some elementary schools, social studies instruction has been reduced to no more than twenty minutes per week so that classes can spend more time for instructions in literature, mathematics, and science.

If we continue to allow social studies education become marginalized in our K-12 schools, our students will continue to graduate from high school with limited knowledge and understanding of their nation’s heritage, government, economy, and role in international affairs. The deterioration of a rigorous social studies curriculum will limit our students’ appreciation of community and national identity. The absence of a comprehensive K-12 social studies education will deny our students crucial learning opportunities to learn and apply higher-order critical thinking skills to address and find solutions to real world problems and issues.

We would like to hear the current status of the K-12 social studies program in your school district. Please go to our online survey and tell us what’s happening in your school district and building. The results of the survey will be collected on March 31, 2015. http://goo.gl/forms/UpJ0yFXOE6 or you can email me at president@masscouncil.org.

Social studies educators must unite and let our elected representatives know that social studies education is facing a serious civic crisis. As President of the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies, I am recommending that we coordinate a statewide Advocacy Day, where K-12 social studies educators schedule a meeting with their respective elected representatives at their local offices or at the Massachusetts State House in Boston.

If you are doing a special project with your students, I strongly encourage you to invite members of your school committee and your elected local representatives to your classroom and showcase what your students are learning in their social studies classes. It is our civic responsibility to express our collective concerns to our legislators and enlighten them on the importance and necessity to support and promote a strong K-12 social studies education in our public, charter, and private schools across the Commonwealth.

Please forward this letter to your colleagues and staff.

We need your help!
Sincerely,

Gorman Lee, Ed.D.
Mass Council President

Robin Lake:

here is a backlash against accountability. Critics have legitimate concerns about imperfect measurement and unintended consequences. But the demand to drop performance measurement and remedies in case of school failure is unrealistic: Americans can’t be compelled to send their children to schools that don’t have to demonstrate results. That’s why we (CRPE and Fordham) put together a group of people who agreed on the necessity of accountability but had different ideas on how it should work.

We landed on a pretty broad set of principles, which in my view imply that state agencies have to give up on the idea that they can regulate all schools into improvement. Instead, school districts and charter authorizers have critical roles to play and should be held accountable by the state for starting, overseeing, and closing schools based on performance. States should focus on providing good data and transparency for school staff, but keep testing to a minimum. And they should facilitate a healthy public school choice and parent information system to give parents options when government agencies fail to improve or close ineffective schools. Instead of trying to drive teacher evaluation from the state level, states should allow school principals to decide how to manage and staff their schools and hold the school accountable for results.

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Plan now to attend celebrated Professor Diane Ravitch’s presentation at the Monona Terrace on May 1. The program, commencing at 7:00 p.m., is part of The Progressive Magazine’s PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN (www.publicschoolshakedown.org) campaign which is designed to illustrate the negative impact on public school education, because of the financial drain caused by private/parochial charter and voucher schools. While admission is free, a suggested $5 donation is requested to support the project.

The Progressive is pulling together education experts including Ravitch (education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education), activists, bloggers, and concerned citizens from across the country.

PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN is dedicated to EXPOSING the behind-the-scenes effort to privatize public schools, and CONNECTING pro-public school activists nationwide.

“Public School Shakedown will be a fantastic addition to the debate”, says Ravitch. “The Progressive is performing a great public service by helping spread the word about the galloping privatization of our public schools.”
“Free public education, doors open to all, no lotteries, is a cornerstone of our democracy. If we allow large chunks of it to be handed over to private operators, religious schools, for-profit enterprises, and hucksters, we put our democracy at risk”, Ravitch adds.

Diane Ravitch:

Some critics of my book “Reign of Error” say that “reformers” are not privatizers. Who, me, they say, in all innocence?
I invite them to read this post by veteran reporter Bobby Tanzilo in Milwaukee. Here is a city with a thriving voucher program, a thriving charter sector, and a shrinking public school system (that contains disproportionate numbers of students with disabilities and English learners who are unwanted by the other two sectors).
All of this competition among the three sectors was to produce dramatic improvement, but it didn’t. Milwaukee has had school choice for 23 years. Today, it is one of the lowest performing urban districts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
But the business leaders of Milwaukee, Tanzilo writes, want more choice. They want more privatization. They want the entire city school district turned into a “Recovery School District,” to emulate those in New Orleans and Memphis.

Karl Tao Greenfield:

Memorization, not rationalization. That is the advice of my 13-year-old daughter, Esmee, as I struggle to make sense of a paragraph of notes for an upcoming Earth Science test on minerals. “Minerals have crystal systems which are defined by the # of axis and the length of the axis that intersect the crystal faces.” That’s how the notes start, and they only get murkier after that. When I ask Esmee what this actually means, she gives me her homework credo.
Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. There are standardized tests, and everyone–students, teachers, schools–is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep.

Erin Richards:

The union representing Kenosha teachers has been decertified and may not bargain base wages with the district.
Because unions are limited in what they can do even if they are certified, the new status of Kenosha’s teachers union — just like the decertification of many other teachers unions in the state that did not or could not pursue the steps necessary to maintain certification in the new era of Act 10 — may be a moral blow more than anything else.
Teachers in Milwaukee and Janesville met the state’s Aug. 30 deadline to apply for recertification, a state agency representative says. Peter Davis, general counsel for the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, said the Milwaukee and Janesville districts will hold recertification votes in November.
To continue as the recognized bargaining unit in the district, 51% of the union’s eligible membership must vote in favor of recertification, according to the controversial Act 10 legislation passed in 2011.
With contracts that were in place through the end of June, teachers in the three large southeastern Wisconsin districts were protected the longest from the new legislation, which limits collective bargaining, requires unions to hold annual votes to be recognized as official entities, and mandates that teachers and other public employees pay more out-of-pocket for their health care and retirement costs.
…..
“It seems like the majority of our affiliates in the state aren’t seeking recertification, so I don’t think the KEA is an outlier or unique in this,” Brey said.
She added that certification gives the union scant power over a limited number of issues they’d like a voice in.
Sheronda Glass, the director of business services in Kenosha, said it’s a new experience for the district to be under Act 10.

Terry Flores

Contrary to some published media reports, however, the union did not vote to decertify.
In fact, no such election was ever held, according to KEA Executive Director Joe Kiriaki, who responded to a report from the Conservative Badger blog, which published an article by Milwaukee radio talk show host Mark Belling, who said he had learned that just 37 percent of the teachers had voted to reauthorize the union.
In a prepared statement, Kiriaki criticized the district for “promoting untrue information” to Belling.
Union chose to focus on other issues
Kiriaki said the union opted not to “jump through the hoops,” such as the recertification requirement, created by Act 10, the state’s relatively new law on collective bargaining.
The law, among other things required the annual re-certification of unions if they want to serve as bargaining representatives for teachers and other public workers. It also prohibits most public employees from negotiating all but base wages, limiting them to the rate of inflation.
Kiriaki cited a ruling by a Dane County Circuit Court judge on the constitutionality of Act 10, saying he believed it would be upheld.

Interestingly, Madison School District & Madison Teachers to Commence Bargaining. Far more important is addressing Madison’s long standing, disastrous reading results.
In my view, the unions that wish to serve their membership effectively going forward would be much better off addressing new opportunities, including charters, virtual, and dual enrollment services. The Minneapolis Teachers Union can authorize charters, for example.
Much more on Act 10, here.
A conversation with retired WEAC executive Director Morris Andrews.
The Frederick Taylor inspired, agrarian K-12 model is changing, albeit at a glacial pace. Madison lags in many areas, from advanced opportunities to governance diversity, dual enrollment and online opportunities. Yet we spend double the national average per student, funded by ongoing property tax increases.
An elected official recently remarked to me that “it’s as if Madison schools have been stuck in a bubble for the past 40 years”.

Stephanie Banchero & Arian Campo-Flores:

Millions of students heading back to school are finding significant changes in the curriculum and battles over how teachers are evaluated, as the biggest revamps of U.S. public education in a decade work their way into classrooms.
Most states are implementing tougher math and reading standards known as Common Core, while teacher evaluations increasingly are linked to student test scores or other measures of achievement. Meantime, traditional public schools face unprecedented competition from charter and private schools.
Supporters say the overhauls will help make U.S. students more competitive with pupils abroad. But others worry that the sheer volume and far-reaching nature of the new policies is too much, too fast. Already, the changes have sparked pushback.

Doug Lemov:

Ultimately, every school is the same in one critical way: Rural, suburban or urban; private, public or charter; high-performing or in crisis, every school allocates about 75% to 80% of its resources to staff salaries and benefits. In the end, a school buys people’s time, effort and expertise and, you could argue, not much else. Every school is a collection of people with the shell of a building around it.
Which is why the current state of training and development for teachers is so important — and troublesome. Professional development is too often an afterthought.
This is costly in more ways than one. The Milwaukee Public Schools, which has just over 4,600 full-time-equivalent teachers, spent more than $3 million on “districtwide professional development” and more than $5 million on what the budget identifies as “teacher quality” programs in fiscal year 2011.
“It’s very ineffective if you ask me…It’s just a big huge room, a bunch of teachers in a room, one person up there trying to talk, and sometimes it’s nothing to do with nothing, talking about the reading that day. I hate to say it, it’s almost a waste of time; I’d rather be working in the classroom,” said one Milwaukee teacher who was part of a focus group put together by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute as part of its yearlong examination of education in the city.
The key to turning that around is a new commitment to practice that can improve teacher performance, build a positive school culture marked by collegiality, help make incentive systems more productive and result in higher rates of teacher retention. In short, though it is humble and may seem unspectacular at first, the idea of practice can improve teacher quality dramatically.
In using the word “practice,” I am referring to the word in a limited and (to some) mundane sense. Practice is a time when colleagues meet together and participate in exercises that encode core skills. That is, the thing you would see a basketball team or an orchestra do as a matter of course but that teachers are rarely asked to consider. Among teachers it might involve teaching parts of their lessons to one another, revising lesson plans in groups, or even role playing interactions with disruptive students. High-performing schools routinely approach training in this manner with outstanding results.

Luke Harding:

The number of Russians at British private schools is rising as the rarefied world of Harry Potter is increasingly seen as a fashionable passport to a better life.
It is summer term at Maidwell Hall prep school. The boys and girls are back from holidays. Among them, and fresh off the plane from St Petersburg, is a new Russian pupil, Gosha Nikolayev. “I’m a bit scared and a bit excited,” Gosha says. His father, Sergei, has come to the UK with his 11-year-old son to drop him off. If all goes well Gosha will spend two years here before moving to a top boarding school. Dad has ruled out Eton, so this could be Charterhouse or Stowe.
Gosha’s new school near Northampton is a vision of how foreigners must imagine the land of Harry Potter. The main building is a dreamy turreted mansion overlooking its own boating and fishing lake. Maidwell Hall’s website shows pupils reading on the lawn under a perfect blue sky, playing rounders, or sharing a mealtime joke. The ethos is old-fashioned: boys wear tweed jackets, corduroy trousers and ties. Good manners are encouraged; mobile phones banned.
“We are trying to create a country- house atmosphere,” says headmaster Robert Lankester. “It always existed in prep schools before but has been lost in many cases.” He adds: “Parents from abroad love the tradition. They want to buy into something British.” Gosha is the school’s second Russian; the first – “a lovely chap, loads of friends”, the head says, cheerfully – is happily settled at Stowe.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

The ACLU has filed a civil rights action on behalf of Michigan students who, despite not being proficient in reading, have not received the legally-required intervention intended to bring them to grade level within 12 months. Defendants in the lawsuit include the Highland Park School District, the charter operator to whom responsibility for HPSD was delegated, and other individuals and educational entities at the state and local level.
Under Michigan law, “Excluding special education pupils, pupils having a learning disability, and pupils with extenuating circumstances as determined by school officials, a pupil who does not score satisfactorily on the 4th or 7th grade [MEAP] reading test shall be provided special assistance reasonably expected to enable the pupil to bring his or her reading skills to grade level within 12 months.” [MCL 380.1278(8).]
In 2011-12, only 35% of 4th graders and 25% of 7th graders in HPSD scored proficient or better on the state reading test. According to the complaint, “There is no excuse for the deprivations of educational opportunity described in this Complaint. Consistent with the statutory and constitutional provisions cited, it has been repeatedly recognized that nearly all children can learn to read and achieve literacy skills and knowledge appropriate to their age and development with adequate intervention where necessary. Under the State’s own content standards, all students should be able to read fluently, accurately, and with appropriate intonation and expression by second grade. Education research has demonstrated the effectiveness of structured, systematic, direct and explicit teaching of the English language reading code to all children, including older students who are substantially behind in their reading ability and related skills.”

Read the complaint here [PDF].
Many links, here.
Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results.

Matthew DeFour’s tweets tell the unsurprising story (Wisconsin Schools Superintendent Tony Evers is testifying before the State’s “Joint Finance Committee”):

Evers: If we use it as a hammer it’s going to make all the other transformative efforts we’re doing more difficult. Teachers will back off.

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Olsen: What you’re saying is report card needs to be used as a flashlight and not a hammer. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Klemke: Efficiency is good, but what we need is transformation. Evers: I agree. That’s what report cards, new tests and teacher evals are.

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Evers: Increases over last decade are close to cost of living. Efficiency measures have been put in place. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Klemke: What are you going to do to bend cost curve? You need to help me believe why your cost model isn’t high. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

LeMahieu: “We don’t think doing same old-same old for another decade is going to make it. We’re looking for something different.”

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

LeMahieu: Test scores stable and achievement gap growing over past decade, while spending grows from $9,000 to $13,000 per student #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Shilling: Rural schools that don’t receive report card scores because of size worried they won’t be eligible for incentive grants. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

GOP Rep. Dean Knudson says “key issue” facing budget comm., Legislature is whether to allow public school spending to increase

— Scott Bauer (@sbauerAP) March 21, 2013

Knudson: Won’t districts be able to avoid cuts with referenda? Evers: if we’re going to rely on referenda, the disequity will be tremendous.

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Evers on incentive grants: We should be focused on best practices and not more money for wealthy school districts. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Evers on report cards: this last year was a pilot year. It’s just not ready for prime time. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Strachota on incentive grants: We’re putting money into schools in a different way. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Evers: report cards were never meant to make high-stakes decisions, they’re deficient in high school, but they will get better. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Evers: Budget could mean new curriculum, testing, teacher evaluations in public schools “won’t happen or won’t happen well.” #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Mason: GOP keeps defunding public education and then gives us this red herring of vouchers. A generation later, Milwaukee still struggles.

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Mason: GOP keeps defunding public education and then gives us this red herring of vouchers. A generation later, Milwaukee still struggles.

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Nygren: Voucher grad rate may be no better, but spending is less. Evers: I understand it’s cheaper, but that shouldn’t be our goal.

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Nygren: to say we’re continuing to defund education simply isn’t accurate. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Darling: Why do we spend more than states that are ranked higher in Ed Week? Evers: that ranking rewards states with less local control.

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Evers: The budget as proposed creates too many winners and losers. It pits public school kids against charter and voucher kids. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Evers: $130M in GPR for roads, $64M for school incentives and $73M for vouchers should go toward increasing school aids. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Joint Finance has begun to hear testimony from State Sup. Tony Evers. #wibudget

— Matthew DeFour (@WSJExtraCredit) March 21, 2013

Related:


Wisconsin State Tax Based K-12 Spending Growth Far Exceeds University Funding.
Madison’s per student spending is $14,547 for the 2012-2013 school year (the number ignores differences in pre-k per student costs – lower, vs “full time” students).
Watch the committee hearing.

Laura Waters:

The honeymoon’s over. After years of attacking Gov. Christie and his education agenda full throttle – and losing authority, gravitas, and public support – NJEA’s leadership had seemed to undergo a makeover, fully backing the bipartisan bill that reformed teacher evaluation and tenure in New Jersey. Heck: NJEA even backed the Urban Hope Act, which allows charter operators to take over some of our worst-performing schools in Trenton, Camden, and Newark.
Of course, the Legislature made a huge concession to NJEA in negotiations over TEACHNJ, the tenure reform bill, at the last minute deleting the section of the bill that would have eliminated seniority-based lay-offs. Nonetheless, the resulting resolution was a huge step in partnership and collaboration.
Judging by today’s NJ Spotlight story, however, NJEA’s leadership has suffered a relapse, reverting back to the reactionary stance that undermined its brand in the first days of the Christie Administration. The first symptom was NJEA President Barbara Keshishian’s screechy response to Gov. Christie budget proposal, which increases state school aid, although not to the unattainable levels of Corzine’s School Funding Reform Act. The second symptom is covered in the Spotlight story, which recounts the union leadership’s retro reaction to the DOE’s proposed regulations for implementing the new tenure law.

Pat Schneider:

It’s a painful irony for Ananda Mirilli that the School Board run she tried to use to call the community to come together to do better for Madison kids ended up embroiled in such controversy.
“I’m seeing an even bigger divide in the community, and I’m sad that we are in that place,” Mirilli told me Wednesday. “But I’m hoping to continue to work to find healing in our community. We really need to have a conversation about the achievement gap.”
Mirilli, a Latina who lost her bid for Seat 5 on the Madison School Board in the Feb. 18 primary, decided against a write-in campaign when primary winner Sarah Manski dropped out of the race just two days later. But Mirilli hasn’t given up hope that the election — despite Manski’s surprise withdrawal and the allegations of dirty politics and hypocrisy it incited — can yet be made an occasion to bring together people now sometimes working at odds to improve education in Madison schools.
And as the Restorative Justice Program manager at YWCA Madison, Mirilli is wondering if restorative justice principles might be the way to do it.
“I’m wondering if we could hold a circle — not to find out the truth, but to see how we can move forward on this,” Mirilli told me.
Mirilli says she was wrongly depicted by Manski as pro-voucher because of a supposed association with Kaleem Caire of the Urban League of Greater Madison. Caire on Wednesday resurrected allegations of double-dealing by leaders of Madison Teachers Inc. in negotiating his Madison Preparatory Academy charter proposal that was rejected by the School Board two years ago.

Much more on the 2013 Madison School Board elections, here.
I appreciate Schneider’s ability to add links to her articles. This continues to be a rare event in Madison’s traditional media circles.

Eugene Kane:

Sarah Carr, a former Milwaukee education reporter who moved to New Orleans in 2009 to cover schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sees some similarities in both troubled public education systems.
“I think they both have their strengths and their weaknesses,” Carr said in a recent interview.
“I think both places have great and awful schools.”
In her new book , titled “Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children,” Carr writes about the New Orleans school system by focusing on the personal lives of various figures struggling to educate students in a city still suffering from the aftermath of Katrina.
Her book reports the progress of three different New Orleans schools in a city where charter reform movement has brought about drastic change for poor minority students , administrators and teachers. Carr took a personal approach to interviewing her subjects in order to tell the greater story of the challenges involved in a community where social conditions have a large impact on the education of students.

Mike Ford:

McShane’s point is one I heard Howard Fuller, former MPS school board member John Gardner, and others make many years ago. It’s a point that initially attracted me to the cause of education reform in Milwaukee. However, it’s also a difficult point to make sense of if you are not familiar with Milwaukee’s education system.
Consider the experience of Teach for America. Naturally when they came to town they were only interested in public schools (defined as MPS and charter), because their mission is to serve primarily low-income children. However, when MPS layoffs left many of their teachers searching for a school they discovered that Milwaukee private schools, by virtue of their participation in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), serve an overwhelmingly low-income population. Today many Teach for America teachers are placed in private Milwaukee public schools.
So what are the differences between MPS and the charter and choice sectors? In recent op-ed a wide group of Milwaukee advocates argued that “MPS is the only educational institution in this city that has the capacity, commitment and legal obligation to serve all of Milwaukee’s children.”

Alan Borsuk, via a kind reader’s email:

“Organization of the Year: Schools That Can Milwaukee. Unfortunately, anything that even smells of voucher and charter issues is controversial. Can’t we set that aside and stick to the quality of the work these folks are doing? If a school is working with Schools That Can, I can be confident it is a school that is determined to be outstanding. The organization, a nonprofit that coaches and trains school staffs, includes some of the most talented educators in town. They are working with more than 20 schools – MPS, charters and vouchers – and building a track record of success.”

AnnaMaria Andriotis:

While $199 might cover just a single credit (or much less) at a typical college, the same fee buys a month of unlimited classes at New Charter University, one of two online schools by startup firm UniversityNow. The pricing structure is similar to online college course provider StraighterLine’s model, launched in 2008, which charges $99 per month of enrollment, plus $49 per class.
By creating the college version of unlimited data plans, experts say for-profit schools aim to get a leg up on the competition. In recent years, for-profit colleges have come under fire by students and Congress for their excessive tuition costs and the large number of students who drop out and default on their loans. After growing every year for the past decade, enrollment in private, for-profit colleges fell for the first time in 2011 by 3%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. As demand drops, so does “their ability to charge high tuition,” says Rob MacArthur, president of Alternative Research Services, which has tracked for-profit colleges. For their part, both the companies say their goals are to offer a quality higher education while lowering costs for families. “Our model isn’t to spend a lot of money on marketing and charge you on the back end,” says Gene Wade, co-founder and CEO of UniversityNow.

Rob Glass:

Editor’s note:
The following is excerpted from “an urgent call to action” the superintendent of Bloomfield Hills Schools dispatched to parents and residents in his public school district this week.)
A package of bills designed to corporatize and dismantle public education is being hastily pushed through this current lame-duck legislative session. If we do not take immediate action, I believe great damage will be done to public education, including our school system.
We have just three weeks to take action before it’s too late. The bills are:
House Bill 6004 and Senate Bill 1358: Would expand a separate and statewide school district (the Education Achievement Authority) overseen by a governor-appointed chancellor and functioning outside the authority of the State Board of Education or state school superintendent. These schools are exempt from the same laws and quality measures of community-governed public schools. The EAA can seize unused school buildings (built and financed by local taxpayers) and force sale or lease to charter, nonpublic or EAA schools.

Bloomfield Hills’ 2013 budget is $82,233,213 for 6,772 students, or $12,143/student. Madison plans to spend $15,132/student during the 2012-2013 school year.

Robert Maranto & Michael McShane:

MARK TWAIN observed that “it’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” After 15 years doing fieldwork in more than 100 public schools and interviewing more than 1,000 students, parents, and educators, we’re convinced that no area is more fraught with myths and misconceptions than education policy, especially during election seasons like this one. Indeed our friend Jay Greene wrote a whole book, “Education Myths,” devoted to debunking them.
With apologies to Jay here are our own favorite myths about public education.

The Pioneer Institute:

Pioneer Institute is thrilled to announce the second annual Ruth and Lovett Peters Fellowship, an opportunity for a current or recent graduate student with a passionate interest in education policy and strong entrepreneurial and analytic abilities.
The fellow, who carries the title of Ruth & Lovett Peters Fellow, will develop a broad range of research and public policy skills; he or she will also have an opportunity to devise and complete a “Lead” project, which can consist of research or a practical policy project. The Fellowship will commence in the spring/summer of 2013.
Forge Your Future in Public Policy
Click to download forms:
The Ruth and Lovett Peters Fellowship will commence in the spring/summer of 2013. A Peters Fellow at Pioneer Institute will:

• Enhance leadership skills
• Gain extensive training in research writing and the peer review process
• Apply statistical knowledge to research output
• Publish at least one research paper that may be sponsored by Pioneer
• Develop public speaking experience
• Procure grant-writing experience
• Develop wide-ranging social media communications experience
• Advance presentation skills
• Develop a broad network within the public policy community
• Participate in coordinating a policy event
• Interact with opinion writers
• Learn how to successfully market a research project

The Fellowship may span up to 15 months. During the first six months of the Fellowship, the fellow will receive training and research assistance as well as develop a thorough grounding in think tank and idea marketing. Staff and outside trainers will ensure skill acquisition in research project assistance, op-ed and press release writing, blogging, foundation grant management, event direction, and public speaking.
During the final nine months, the fellow will work on a self-directed “Lead” project and may continue to work out of Pioneer’s office in Boston or, if mutually agreed with Pioneer, work remotely. The “Lead” project, defined and managed by the fellow, can be oriented toward research or practice. Pioneer’s staff will continue to be available for the Fellow’s guidance during this project phase. The Lead project will be compatible with Pioneer’s mission and approved by Pioneer’s
Executive Director prior to this second phase of the fellowship.
The Institute’s education policy priorities are related to charter, vocational, and virtual schools; inter-district public and private school choice; standardized testing and assessments; and teacher quality. Applicants are encouraged to submit proposals for projects as part of the application process.
The Ruth & Lovett Peters Fellowship is available to applicants with Master’s level course completion; preferably those with an MBA, MPA, MPP, other Master’s programs or those currently enrolled in a doctoral program. The Fellow will report to James Stergios, Pioneer’s
Executive Director.
The Fellow will receive a stipend ranging from $45,000 to $56,000, depending on experience and other criteria, for the 15-month period. Doctoral students may be eligible for a higher stipend.
Mandatory Requirements for Application

• Reside in the Boston area during the initial six months of the program.
• Be a recent graduate or currently enrolled in an accredited Masters or PhD program.
• Possess a passion for public policy and goals consistent with Pioneer’s mission.
• Possess solid skills in quantitative analysis, evidenced by graduate-level statistics and methods courses.
• Be a U.S. citizen, have permanent residency, or possess Curricular Practical Training (CPT) authorization.
  Applications and Process

Applications must be submitted and received electronically by November 30, 2012. Selection of the fellow will be determined by a team consisting of both Pioneer Institute staff as well as external professionals.
No application will be considered unless all of the required information is submitted by the deadline. Please e-mail:

• Application form (attached).
• A copy of both undergraduate and graduate transcripts (if selected, an official copy will be requested).
• A recommendation from a faculty member using the form included above.
• An essay (no greater than 600 words) explaining why you chose your current field of study, why your goals are consistent with Pioneer’s mission and how this Fellowship would help you to achieve your goals. We encourage you to also include the nature of projects you would propose for the last nine months of the Fellowship (with an understanding that the projects are subject to refinement).
• If selected to proceed further, an interview will be conducted.

If you have questions about the fellowship, please contact:
Mary Z. Connaughton
Director of Finance and Administration
Pioneer Institute
85 Devonshire Street
Boston, MA 02109
E-mail: mconnaughton@pioneerinstitute.org

The Wall Street Journal, via a kind Rick Kiley email:

The U.S. is stress-testing Herbert Stein’s law like never before, but maybe the economist’s famous dictum–trends that can’t continue won’t–is being vindicated in education. Witness the support of America’s mayors for “parent trigger,” the public school reform that was denounced as radical only a few years ago but now is spreading across the country.
Over the weekend in Orlando, the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously approved a resolution endorsing new rules that give parents the running room to turn around rotten schools. At “persistently failing” institutions, a majority of parents can sign a petition that turns out the administrators and teachers in favor of more competent hires, or dissolves the school, or converts it to a charter. Teachers unions loathe this form of local accountability.

Elaine Yau:

Many parents hope to give their children Ivy League or Oxbridge educations. For some, such as Karen Leung, nothing else would do. A chartered accountant, Leung was far more upset than her son was when his teachers at Island School said that his academic record didn’t look strong enough to get him admitted into the law faculty at Oxford. Her son’s grades were just above average, and they had to be top-notch to get him in.
“I lost 5kg,” she says.
However, Leung refused to give up and enrolled her son in Arch Academy, a coaching centre that helps students get into top colleges in the US and Britain. She paid HK$15,000 to enrol him in a 10-session programme covering topics such as how to write a personal statement to go with his university application. It was money well spent: last year her son won a full scholarship to study law at Oxford.

Meagan Pant:

This just in from the University of Dayton…
The Dayton Early College Academy — on the University of Dayton campus — received a bronze medal from U.S. News & World Report in its annual ranking of America’s Best High Schools, released May 11.
The report analyzed academic and enrollment data from nearly 22,000 public high schools to find the best in the nation. A total of 4,850 schools received recognition in gold, silver and bronze categories.
DECA is one of four early college high schools in Ohio to receive recognition.
The University of Dayton founded DECA in 2003 in partnership with Dayton Public Schools with the singular focus of preparing urban students to succeed in college.

Sean Whaley:

Establishing school choice for parents and ending social promotion for students are two top priorities in Gov. Brian Sandoval’s education reform agenda for the 2013 legislative session, an administration official said.
Linking pay to performance and providing professional development to ensure students have the best possible classroom teachers is a third major priority, said Dale Erquiaga, senior adviser to Sandoval.
Erquiaga briefed the Nevada State Public School Charter Authority on the governor’s education reform agenda being readied for the next session.

Room for Debate:

As many as 20 states have considered enacting parent trigger laws, which would let parents who are dissatisfied with the way a school is being run, turn it into a charter, replace the staff, or even shut it down, if 51 percent of the school’s families agree. The laws — which have been passed in various forms in California, Connecticut, Mississippi and Texas — have generated controversy and even inspired a movie to be released this fall. Do these laws give parents the first real power over their children’s education? Or do they put public schools in private hands and impede real improvements?

J K Wall:

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard has appointed Jason Kloth as deputy mayor of education, a new cabinet-level position that reflects Ballard’s recent shift toward taking a more active role in education, even though his office gives him little direct influence over schools.
Kloth, whose appointment still requires approval of the City-County Council, is a veteran of Teach For America, the New York-based not-for-profit that puts recent college graduates through two-year teaching stints in urban and rural districts around the country.
Kloth taught sixth-grade language arts in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley for two years and was named teacher of the year by his colleagues.
He later became executive director of Teach For American when the program first came to Indianapolis in 2008. Most recently, Kloth has been Teach For America’s senior vice president of public affairs, overseeing the group’s federal government affairs, media and communications, federal policy, research and evaluations, and community relations.

Scott Elliot has more.

Melissa Westbrook

Three countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland — don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class. And in South Korea, they refer to their teachers as ‘nation builders.’ ”
Duncan’s view is that challenging teachers to rise to new levels — by using student achievement data in calculating salaries, by increasing competition through innovation and charters — is not anti-teacher. It’s taking the profession much more seriously and elevating it to where it should be. There are 3.2 million active teachers in America today. In the next decade, half (the baby boomers) will retire. How we recruit, train, support, evaluate and compensate their successors “is going to shape public education for the next 30 years,” said Duncan. We have to get this right.
BUT he ends saying we also need…better parents. Turn off the tv, restrict the video and the phone and most important “elevate learning as the most important life skill.” It’s funny because some people might say teaching children empathy or kindness or honesty is more important but really those all relate to learning.

Tom Friedman:

Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”
Duncan disputes the notion that teachers’ unions will always resist such changes. He points to the new “breakthrough” contracts in Washington, D.C., New Haven and Hillsborough County, Fla., where teachers have embraced higher performance standards in return for higher pay for the best performers.
“We have to reward excellence,” he said. “We’ve been scared in education to talk about excellence. We treated everyone like interchangeable widgets. Just throw a kid in a class and throw a teacher in a class.” This ignored the variation between teachers who were changing students’ lives, and those who were not. “If you’re doing a great job with students,” he said, “we can’t pay you enough.”

Judith Warner

Around the country, supporters of education reform — or at least of the test-scores-driven, tenure-busting, results-rewarding sort of reform epitomized by organizations like Teach for America and championed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan — gave a collective gasp of dismay last month when voters in a number of districts handed primary defeats to candidates closely associated with just this type of reform. In New York, three state-senate candidates who ran on pro-charter-school platforms each failed to garner more than 30 percent of the vote. In Washington, voters overwhelmingly rejected Mayor Adrian Fenty in favor of the City Council chairman, Vincent Gray, as the Democratic candidate in this year’s mayoral election. The Fenty defeat worried many people particularly because he was inextricably linked with his crusading, nationally celebrated schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee.
Rhee, who was appointed by Fenty in 2007 and given unprecedented power to shake up the ailing school system, fired hundreds of teachers and dozens of bureaucrats and principals, even removing the popular head of her daughters’ elementary school in the northwest part of the district. She demanded that the city’s tenure system be replaced with one that would reward teachers for producing measurable performance gains in their students. For her efforts, she became a heroine to some — gracing the cover of Time magazine, earning the praise of the Obama administration and an invitation to appear on “Oprah” — but she also received enormous enmity from teachers, their unions and, surprisingly enough to outside observers, many public-school parents, not a few of whom were profoundly offended when, the night after the mayoral primary, Rhee appeared at the Washington premiere of Davis Guggenheim’s much-talked-about education documentary, “Waiting for Superman,” and told an assemblage of prominent Washingtonians that the election results “were devastating, devastating. Not for me, I’ll be fine . . . but devastating for the school children of Washington, D.C.”

Jay Green:

I have no idea why a bunch of ed reformers are so gloomy.  Matt has already observed how Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli can’t seem to enjoy the moment when ed reform ideas go mainstream.  Now Liam Julian is joining the poopy parade, lamenting that the new crop of naive reformers are doomed to fail just as past ones have, and “it never works out.” And continuing the gloomy theme, Rick is worrying that school choice (in the form of vouchers) over-promised and under-delivered, losing the support of people like Sol Stern.  That may be, but as a graduate student observed to me today, choice (in the form of vouchers) may have lost Sol Stern, but choice (in the form of charters) just gained Oprah, the Today Show, and the Democratic Party platform.    Overall, he thought that was a pretty good trade, especially since he had to look up who Sol Stern was.
Let’s review.  It is now commonly accepted among mainstream elites — from Oprah to Matt Lauer to Arne Duncan — that simply pouring more money into the public school system will not produce the results we want.  It is now commonly accepted that the teacher unions have been a significant barrier to school improvement by protecting ineffective teachers and opposing meaningful reforms.  It is now commonly accepted that parents should have a say in where their children go to school and this choice will push traditional public schools to improve.  It is now commonly accepted that we have to address the incentives in the school system to recruit, retain, and motivate the best educators.

Jay Matthews

On Sunday, the All Opinions Are Local page of washingtonpost.com ran a commentary by former D.C. Council member Kevin P. Chavous. I am rerunning it because I think it has unusual importance as we look toward the future of D.C. schools under Vincent Gray. The piece doesn’t indicate ties to Gray. Nor does the identification of Chavous that ran with the piece. But Chavous is close to the presumptive mayor and the commentary provides many clues to what Gray might try to do.
I realize this is a throwback to my China-watching days, reading more into an editorial than it seems to say. But Gray has expressed his support for charters, a theme of Chavous’s piece, so there are clear links between Gray and this line of thought. Chavous is worth reading in any case, and it is important to note that he is probably the best-informed and best-connected person in the Gray camp on educational innovation and education policy issues.