Change the incentives and watch schools embrace change, I would have argued. Hold superintendents, principals, and teachers to account for raising test scores. Subject them to real competition. Then voila: They would spend night and day looking for promising innovations to improve achievement and better serve families.
Well, we know how that’s turned out. We’ve put a lot of those incentives in place, and schools (and educators) still don’t seem to embrace good ideas, even the non-controversial, inexpensive kind. Take, for instance, the following:
To be fair, there has been some good news lately, most notably Tom Loveless’s recent finding that ability grouping, after being shunned in the 1980s and 90s, is back in vogue. Since this is a commonsense way to “differentiate instruction” and help all students get the classroom challenges that they need and that will do them the most good, I would count it as a win. (Loveless speculates that NCLB-style accountability might have prodded schools to use this approach, since it works. Incentives!)
Still, on the whole, the picture isn’t pretty. What gives? Surely some economists would argue that the incentives we’ve put in place to date aren’t strong enough. Even now, few educators lose their jobs if test scores don’t rise. Principals and teachers don’t generally stand to make much more money if they achieve breakthrough results (or attract gobs more customers). And competition, at least in most cities, is still quite limited.
All true. But there could be something simpler at work: Perhaps many educators have never even encountered these ideas. Principals and teachers are so busy with the day-to-day struggle of their jobs—and now with new demands brought on by Common Core, new evaluation systems, and more—that they just keep their heads down and try to survive. They don’t have the time—or take the time—to read journals or blogs, to look for new innovations, to talk to colleagues, or to wonder about better ways of doing things. In this view, we have an “innovation-dissemination” (or “research-to-practice”) challenge.
I’ll admit, that sounds like a bit of a cop-out, especially for principals. The leader of any organization knows that part of his or her job is to look for better ways to do things and to stay current on trends in the field. We should expect no less from our school leaders, and those without an innate curiosity and drive for continuous improvement should be screened out of the profession.
But these principals do face an avalanche of information and advocacy from the government, from think tanks, and especially from vendors. Sifting through it all and turning the best bits and pieces into a coherent approach is no easy task. (And this has been a problem forever.)
Could we make that task more manageable? Could we help principals and superintendents to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of the ideas that come across their desks on a given day? Stay tuned for my thoughts on that. In the meantime, I’d love to hear yours.
Some of the lessons being bandied about include the following:
So can we make a plausible education analogy? I think it’s a stretch, and not just because ed reformers love to appear on magazine covers. Gay marriage is fundamentally a moral issue. Legalizing it doesn’t cost taxpayers any serious money; it won’t balloon the deficit; there are no “vested interests” in terms of employee unions protecting their pensions or rapacious corporations seeking to make a fast buck. It’s simply a matter of inclusion and freedom on one side, tradition and gut feelings on the other. It’s a classic social issue.
Not so with education reform. Though all sides of its debates try to claim the moral high ground and use moralistic rhetoric, making schools work better is largely a management/service/governance challenge.
Take the question of “picking one issue” to rally around. Which would it be? Teacher evaluations? Tenure? Common Core? School choice? Funding? While any of these can be framed as an issue of right or wrong, once you get serious about specifics, a world of complexity unveils itself. Sure, bad teachers should be fired. But who decides if they are bad? Using what metric? What safeguards do you put in place? Yes, children should have a right to go to the school of their choice. But what if the schools don’t want them? What if their parents don’t pay property taxes where the school is located? What if parents choose poorly?
In fact, education reform is more akin to health care reform. In both cases, we’re talking about big chunks of the economy, much of it paid for with tax dollars; wrestling with issues of quality and equity; and trying to ascertain the appropriate role of government versus the private sector.
Even in the aftermath of the Affordable Healthcare Act, you don’t hear people asking what ed reformers might learn from health-care reform. But we should. And the answer? It’s complicated.
*Which, yes, I support.
Originally published on the Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.
]]>My greatest frustration, though, has been his unwillingness to offer full-throated support for school vouchers.
Maybe he’s finally ready. In a blog post yesterday, he predicted that if current reform efforts stall, the future will bring a “low-accountability environment coupled with much more choice” and pointed to the Indiana voucher program (recently upheld by that state’s Supreme Court and hailed by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post) as a sign of things to come.
What Andy may not fully appreciate is that Indiana’s voucher program has accountability in spades. As David Stuit and Sy Doan explain in their recent report for Fordham, School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring? , the Hoosier State has an “annual performance-accountability rating system” for participating private schools that is based on the results of state assessments—the same tests that public school pupils take. Indeed, the fact that private schools will soon be held accountable under Common Core standards and assessments has become a major issue in the Hoosier State—because it gives palpitations to the right, not the left! (Other recently enacted private-school-choice programs, including those in Louisiana and Alabama, also include significant testing and accountability requirements.)
So if the lack of accountability is Andy’s (and other reformers’) beef with voucher programs, that concern has been alleviated, at least in several states.
To be sure, I can spot at least two other plausible reasons to oppose vouchers. One is that the schools aren’t required (outside of Milwaukee) to be publicly “accessible.” (Andy, many years ago, wrote a piece saying that “accountability and accessibility” should be demanded of any voucher program.) In other words, private schools can still practice selective admissions. That’s a deal-breaker for many on the left. (And impinging on admissions policies is a deal-breaker for many private schools, the Stuit study found.) But we already have selective-admissions magnet schools (of the sort profiled recently by Checker Finn and Jessica Hockett in Exam Schools) and I don’t remember many reformers calling for their abolition.
The other argument against vouchers is on church/state grounds—a concern that the current Supreme Court doesn’t share, and one that I’ve always found utterly irrational. (Why can public funds help a poor kid attend Notre Dame University but not Notre Dame High School?)
So reformers on the left: Unite! (With those of us on the right who already support the entire range of parental choice.)
Originally published on the Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.
]]>As you probably know, the teachers of Seattle’s Garfield High School are “boycotting” the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment, which is required by the district. Ostensibly, their protest is about the overuse of tests, the instructional time that those tests devour, and the culture of soulless data-driven instruction that animates today’s brand of school reform.
Yet it’s hard to square their complaints with the actual test they decry, for the MAP is precisely the type of “good” assessment that many educators claim to favor. It’s instructionally useful; it provides instantaneous feedback to teachers and students alike; and it’s not used for high-stakes decisions on issues pertaining to students and schools.
The real reason the Garfield teachers attack the MAP, one must presume, is because it’s a small part of Seattle’s new teacher-evaluation system. (If students show low growth on the MAP for two years in a row, it triggers a “closer look” at their teacher by the principal -- pretty benign by national standards.) That’s a smart move on behalf of district officials; because the test is “computer adaptive,” it can pinpoint precisely where students are on the achievement spectrum and can give teachers full credit for any progress they help their charges achieve over the course of the school year. (If a ninth grader moves from the sixth-grade level to the eighth-grade level, the MAP can detect it, while most state assessments cannot.)
What the teachers are really protesting, it seems to me, is the use of student test scores in educator evaluations. And to be sure, there’s a legitimate case to be made that we are rushing too rapidly into such evaluations. But of course, that's not what the teachers say they are worried about.
It’s hard not to hear the echoes of this fall’s teacher strike in Chicago, in which educators insisted that the walk-out was about “air conditioning” and “working conditions” when everyone knew it was really about jobs -- namely, what would happen to the thousands of tenured teachers whose schools are likely to close in coming years.
I don’t doubt that some Garfield teachers have personal reservations about the overuse of tests in today’s education system. I can also believe that the MAP, on top of the state tests, creates a heavy testing burden on teachers and students alike. And I would never blame teachers for crying foul about evaluation systems designed on the fly.
But how about a little honesty and perspective, people? To compare this episode to Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts, as the Seattle teachers union president did the other day, is to cheapen the historic battle for true civil rights. This is a skirmish about teacher work protections as our system lurches toward greater accountability. It’s no heroic effort to overcome the forces of evil. And it’s certainly not just a flap about the MAP.
Originally published on the Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.
]]>Yet it boggles my mind that the Obama Administration, without an ounce of public debate or deliberation, without an iota of Congressional authorization or approval, could declare by fiat that public schools nationwide must provide such programs or risk their federal education funding. Talk about executive overreach! Talk about a regulatory rampage! Talk about an enormous unfunded mandate!
At issue is the 1973 Rehabilitation Act’s insistence that public schools not discriminate against students with disabilities. Longstanding regulations clarify that this requirement applies to extracurricular activities, too. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report highlighted confusion in the field about what exactly was expected of schools, particularly with regards to participation in sports, and urged the Department of Education to clarify the issue by publishing new “guidance.”
This is what’s happened today. And some of that guidance (still not on the Department’s website, as far as I can tell) is pragmatic enough. Schools must allow “reasonable” accommodations for student-athletes with disabilities, such as providing a “visual cue” to sprinters with hearing impairments. I’ve got no argument there.
But the Department’s Office of Civil Rights went much further, finding a “right” to separate sports programs in cases when accommodations are impractical. In other words, a right to wheelchair basketball. Read it yourself:
Students with disabilities who cannot participate in the school district’s existing extracurricular athletics program — even with reasonable modifications or aids and services — should still have an equal opportunity to receive the benefits of extracurricular athletics. When the interests and abilities of some students with disabilities cannot be as fully and effectively met by the school district’s existing extracurricular athletic program, the school district should create additional opportunities for those students with disabilities.
In those circumstances, a school district should offer students with disabilities opportunities for athletic activities that are separate or different from those offered to students without disabilities. These athletic opportunities provided by school districts should be supported equally, as with a school district’s other athletic activities.
Note especially the phrase “should be supported equally.” What might that mean? Must districts spend the same amounts on their disability-sports programs as on their regular sports program? Is it enough to offer wheelchair basketball, or must schools also offer wheelchair tennis, wheelchair volleyball, and wheelchair track and field, too? How would this be applied to other extra-curricular activities? Must schools offer special chess programs for students with cognitive disabilities? Special debate programs for students with speech challenges?
And, of course, how are districts supposed to pay for all of this?
Surely there are good answers to these and other questions and workable solutions that can be found. Trade-offs can be considered, priorities identified, compromises made. But the right place to hash out these concerns is in school-board meetings, not in Washington. And if the federal government insists on creating a “right” to these types of programs, the correct place to do that is on the floor of the House and Senate — not in the bowels of the U.S. Department of Education.
The step that federal officials are taking today will have wide-ranging consequences for decades to come. It potentially puts school districts on the hook for billions of dollars in new spending. At the very least, the changes should be subject to the regular regulatory process, which allows for public input, demands an accounting of potential costs, and gives all sides to voice their concerns. A better solution is to let legislators take up this question — and appropriate funds if they decide that wheelchair basketball and the like is a key priority.
The American people are a compassionate lot. I have no doubt that they will support the notion that kids with disabilities should get to play sports, too. But let’s put it to their elected representatives to decide how it might work and how far a federal mandate should go, not the faceless bureaucrats in the Office of Civil Rights.
Originally published on the Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.
]]>Lewis dominated the education news in 2012. First there were the skirmishes over an extended day in the Second City (resulting in a longer day for the students, not the teachers). A lengthy run-up to the strike ensued, followed by the strike itself -- which, as others have noted, surprised many of us by being a public relations success for the union and a galvanizing event for teachers nationwide.
Lewis ended the year with in-your-face comments about the Newtown tragedy and a fresh lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in the shuttering of Chicago schools.
While Lewis appears unlikely to be able to challenge Randi Weingarten as leader of the AFT anytime soon, she is giving voice to many educators who feel frustrated by Weingarten’s reform-y talk and rhetorical concessions. We should expect a more strident unionism, especially in the cities, in the years to come.
This creates challenges and opportunities for reformers. The key will be seeing, with eyes wide open, what we’re up against (an interest group that is built to protect its members) while working hard not to demonize its members -- the vast majority of whom are America’s heroes. Are we up to the task? I think so.
Bring on 2013!
If you just set an arbitrary target without regard for what’s achievable and where they’re starting from, you’re just shooting in the dark. That was the whole problem with No Child Left Behind. It made no sense to say that by an arbitrary year... every child everywhere in this vast country would pass every math and reading test. We made a joke of the process that way.
In other words, No Child Left Behind’s aspirational aims were more effective as rhetoric than as an accountability regime. As Rick Hess has argued persuasively, if the law’s objectives, carrots, and sticks are to actually motivate educators, and not just demoralize them, they must been seen as achievable. So why is it so “stunning” that Virginia wouldn’t expect the achievement gap to evaporate in just five years?
To be sure, even Virginia officials have agreed that the goals put into their ESEA application weren’t ambitious enough; they will come back later this month with more challenging targets for their poor and minority students. That’s fair; groups that are further behind should be expected to make greater progress over time.
But to follow Rotherham’s advice and demand “common targets” is to doom the next phase of NCLB implementation to the same fate as the last: It will fail, because it will lose credibility with the very people expected to make it succeed—the educators.
America’s schools aren’t doing nearly well enough, especially for our neediest children. We need accountability systems that create urgency and push for significant gains every year. Ideological arguments and utopian objectives don’t help.
Will’s argument is straightforward: The market is more than capable of providing children’s programming on its own — just look at Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. But there’s the rub: Stack those commercial stations up against PBS Kids and there’s no contest when it comes to academic content and quality. Nick Jr. and Disney Jr. offer mostly burgers and fries; PBS provides a tasty spinach salad.
The best PBS shows in my view — and my elder son’s! — actually teach something. Not something vague like “reasoning skills” but something concrete like science! Yes, his favorite shows are Sid the Science Kid and Wild Kratts, a very clever program about wildlife. At four and a half, he can’t read yet, but he can learn a ton about our world — and with his curiosity on overdrive, he’s eager to learn and learn and learn.
Other PBS shows are strong on content knowledge too, especially Dinosaur Trains and The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot about That. Others focus on teaching decoding and comprehension strategies — these stem from the early 2000s and reflect the Bush administration’s obsession with early reading — namely Word World, Super Why, and Word Girl. And the line-up is rounded out with several pleasant if content-free offerings that aim to teach character and the like (Arthur, Caillou, Clifford, and so forth).
Contrast that with Nick Jr. and Disney Jr. Yes, there are a few decent offerings. The Backyardigans, on Nick Jr., is brilliant; it features cute animated characters dancing and singing in beautiful fashion. A friend tells me that Disney’s Gaspard and Lisa is fabulous and packed with great vocabulary. Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues was also a landmark show, educationally speaking. But Nick is also responsible for the poisonous Sponge Bob Square Pants and the hugely annoying Dora the Explorer — the crack cocaine of children’s television. (If you don’t know what I mean, you don’t have a toddler in your house.)
Back to the role of government. The reason the PBS shows are more educationally sound is that one of their major investors—Uncle Sam — demands that they be so. The Department of Education’s Ready to Learn program provides upwards of $30 million a year to develop high-quality programs, as well as related content (web sites, games, etc.). Unlike most federal initiatives — which must work through the states, local school districts, and local schools before getting to actual kids — this one has a much shorter line to the end product: Good stuff for kids to watch. It’s an easy way for the federal government to make a positive contribution.
Originally published on the Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog.]]>Those assertions are still compelling, but they have their limitations. Namely: What about kids who aren’t poor; attend schools that aren’t failing; and live in school districts that, by some measures at least, aren’t in dire need of improvement? I’m talking, of course, about our affluent, leafy suburbs. Do their residents deserve school choice too?
Set aside, for a moment, the fact that many suburban communities are diversifying, with low-income and otherwise disadvantaged children moving into them in greater numbers than ever before. Forget, too, that even our best suburban districts are no great shakes when judged by international comparison. Focus just on the most affluent, high-achieving, homogeneous communities you can picture: Say, Scarsdale (New York) or Bethesda (Maryland) or McLean (Virginia) or most of Marin County (California). Does school choice also have a place in these “super zip codes”?
Many people believe it doesn’t — witness recent debates about suburban charter schools in New Jersey, Tennessee, and the Washington, D.C.-metro area. If people in those communities want choice, goes the argument, they can purchase it via the private-school market.
Perhaps. But as Andy Rotherham points out, forcing people to “go private” in order to get a customized education for their kids is not a great political strategy for building broad support for the public schools. When school levies come up for a vote, don’t districts want as many taxpayers as possible to have a direct stake in the outcome?
And “customization” is the real issue. Even in upper-middle-class communities, not all parents want the same things for their kids. From my own personal experience (Fordham is working on collecting more rigorous, non-anecdotal data — stay tuned for that), affluent parents break down into at least three groups:
Now imagine you’re the superintendent of schools in an affluent community that contains members of all three groups. How are you going to satisfy their differing demands? Elementary school is particularly challenging; does everyone do “Mandarin immersion”? Doubtful. Does everyone do a Waldorf-style “don’t read till your adult teeth come in” program? Double-doubtful. Instead, you provide a standard-issue curriculum, perhaps with a gifted-and-talented option, and maybe Mandarin and Spanish electives at select campuses. The Tiger Parents are relatively satisfied; the Cosmopolitans and Koala Dads, less so.
The challenges continue in middle school and high school, though the smorgasbord nature of the latter makes customization a little more feasible. The Tiger Parents get honors and AP tracks for their kids (plus orchestra, etc.); the Cosmopolitans get bona fide foreign-language programs and maybe IB; the Koala Dads get … well, some sympathetic hippy art teachers, perhaps.
Is this the best we can do? Maybe taxpayers footing the bill, many of them without school-age kids of their own, don’t much care if the district fails to satisfy the whims of every parent; what good is a warm-and-fuzzy Waldorf kid to the economy, anyway? What the public wants is likely more practical: Young people who will go on to make a good living, be good citizens, and not be a permanent drain on the public. If parents want more than that for their kids, they can pay for it themselves! Public education is a public good, not just a private good. If parents want a niche education, they can spend their own damn money.
Understood and in its way understandable. There are limits on what the public should be asked to support financially; schools that don’t help students reach basic proficiency in math and reading, in particular, don’t deserve public subsidies.
But in the leafy suburbs, where children come to Kindergarten with all manner of advantages, schools could teach yoga all day and their students would still probably ace the state tests. There’s more margin for error there — and arguably more room for innovation and experimentation. The stakes just aren’t as high as they are in the urban core, where education is a matter of life or death.
Perhaps the best case for customization and choice in the 'burbs is that it will result in better schools — those that are more vibrant and effective because they are allowed to be true communities with clear values, places that don’t have to be all things to all people. If one-size-fits-all doesn’t work in the city, why does it work in the suburbs?
This was my reaction last month when Murray visited the Fordham Institute to talk about his latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Among his many interesting and provocative comments about the rise of a “new upper class” — one inhabited by the winners of America’s meritocracy — he made this rather disturbing statement: “The better the meritocracy, the faster social mobility will decline.” Checker Finn, our president and moderator, did a double-take. “Say it again?” So Murray did. “The better the meritocracy, the more efficiently you identify and reward talent, the faster that social mobility will decline over time.”
As it turns out, this wasn’t the first time Murray has made that argument. An earlier version can be found in his controversial book, The Bell Curve, written with Richard Hernnstein, and then restated in a 2010 Washington Post op-ed:
The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite — the "cognitive elite" that Herrnstein and I described — becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama's example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent ("Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.
Which is why, Murray argues, that the children of the New Elite dominate the campuses of top-tier universities.
The student bodies of the elite colleges are still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper middle class. According to sociologist Joseph Soares's book "The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges," about four out of five students in the top tier of colleges have parents whose income, education and occupations put them in the top quarter of American families, according to Soares's measure of socioeconomic status. Only about one out of 20 such students come from the bottom half of families.
The discomfiting explanation is that despite need-blind admissions policies, the stellar applicants still hail overwhelmingly from the upper middle class and above. Students who have a parent with a college degree accounted for only 55 percent of SAT-takers this year but got 87 percent of all the verbal and math scores above 700, according to unpublished data provided to me by the College Board. This is not a function of SAT prep courses available to the affluent — such coaching buys only a few dozen points — but of the ability of these students to do well in a challenging academic setting.
Read that again. Just one in 20 students at top universities comes from the bottom half of the socio-economic strata. The number coming from the bottom quintile — children growing up in poverty — is even smaller — miniscule really. Are we reformers kidding ourselves when we think that better schools will catapult low-income children into the ranks of this New Elite?
Our argument, as it goes, is that we’ve never really tried. Because of low expectations, mediocre teachers, a lack of options, ill-designed curricula — name your poison — poor kids have never had a chance to see their talents flourish. Put them into the right educational environment, surround them with supportive adults, and (if you’re of the broader/bolder persuasion) provide them with all kinds of social supports too, and we’ll see our elite college campuses — gateways to the new Upper Class — democratize before our eyes.
But this assumes that academic ability — whether defined as intelligence, or non-cognitive skills and character traits, or whatever else — is randomly distributed across the population. Which, Murray argues, was probably once true but is no longer. Because of the ferocious sorting of the meritocratic machine, talented people have been finding and marrying one another, and giving birth to a super-class of highly gifted children. (Murray said at our event that it “doesn’t matter” whether these gifts are bequeathed by nature or nurture. What matters is the strong link between the talents of parents and the talents of their offspring.) And, as David Brooks pointed out today, after years of bedtime stories, trips to the zoo, vocabulary-packed conversations, and other “enrichment” activities, these children enter school miles ahead of the rest of their peers — including the poor kids that are the focus of so many education reforms.
Of course, as Murray says, this phenomenon plays out in terms of group averages. If we live in a meritocracy where intelligence and other talents lead to success,* then the children of the highly successful (the Elite) will, on average, be more talented than the children of the somewhat successful, who will, on average, be more talented that the children of the not successful (i.e., the children of the poor). On average.
Understandably, we don’t much like to discuss this possibility. It gives cover to educators who look at a classroom of low-income children and diminish their expectations — thinking that “these kids” aren’t capable of much, educators who don’t buy the mantra that “all children can learn.” But would we be shocked to find that the average intelligence level of such a classroom is lower than a classroom in an elite, affluent suburb?
Yes, intelligence is malleable, not innate. Yes, an exceptional school/teacher/curriculum may boost that average intelligence level. But can those factors boost it enough to overcome the disparities Murray describes? If not, what can educators do?
I see two possible strategies. The first is to be fanatical about identifying talented children from low-income (and middle-income) communities and then provide the challenge and support to launch them into the New Elite via top-tier universities. Murray, for one, thinks this is already happening. “If you are a really smart kid in a backwater town in Mississippi — I don’t care if you’re white or black — this has never been a better time for you,” he said at our event. “It’s never been easier for you, no matter how poor your family is, to get a full ride to a really good college if you’re really, if you’ve got a lot of talent. We’ve gotten really, really good at identifying talent wherever it is and I’m delighted about that.”
He may well be right. It’s true that many communities have various “talent search” initiatives, scholarship programs for poor kids to attend elite private schools and top colleges, science fairs, spelling bees, selective magnet schools, and other approaches for ferreting out these diamonds in the rough. (Some of the best charter schools might be playing this role too, though they don’t want to admit it.) Still, I worry that, in the current policy environment, most schools serving poor kids have little incentive to offer gifted-and-talented programs and other mechanisms whereby to boost the prospects of poor but brilliant kids. (Online learning could be a big help here.)
The second strategy is to be more realistic about the kind of social mobility we hope to spur. Getting a big chunk of America’s poor kids into the New Elite in one generation might be a fool’s errand — our meritocracy has put them at too great a disadvantage. But getting them into working -class or middle-class jobs isn’t so impossible. Here’s a question for the KIPPs and YES Preps of the world: Would you be happy if, ten years from now, your middle schoolers were working as cops, firefighters, teachers, plumbers, electricians, and nurses? This would be a huge accomplishment, it seems to me, as most poor kids will go on to work in low-paid service jobs a decade hence. It may not make for as inspiring a Hollywood story, but it’s a crucial version of social mobility all the same.
Maybe Murray’s wrong. I sort of hope that he is. But we should be talking about these issues all the same.
* The Left sees the same social sorting as Murray but concludes that our meritocracy isn’t efficient, it’s rigged. See, for example, Christopher Hayes’ The Twilight of the Elites, as excerpted in this Nation article.
So I was amazed, befuddled, dumbstruck, bemused (choose your own adjective) to learn that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has rejected a request from Iowa for flexibility under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. What political courage! What political suicide! Did Duncan and the White House politicos not understand that he’s handing Mitt Romney a handy campaign issue in up-for-grabs Iowa?
What’s most remarkable is the reason the Administration is turning down Iowa’s waiver request: Because the state legislature refuses to enact a statewide teacher evaluation plan. As you may recall, such evaluations were one of the mandates (er, conditions) placed on states that want flexibility from ESEA’s broken accountability requirements. And as many of us have argued, such conditions are patently illegal. There’s nothing in the ESEA that indicates that the Secretary has the authority to demand such conditions be met in order for waiver requests to be approved.
Iowa’s state superintendent, Jason Glass, was discouraged but polite as he took his marbles and went home — putting the blame on Iowa’s state legislators. “We've been negotiating with the U.S. Department of Education to try to find a way through this. It's just not possible. We are very disappointed that our state is [still] under the onerous shame and blame policies of NCLB for another year.”
Republican Governor Terry Branstad blamed his own legislators, too, saying in a statement that “Responsibility for the denial of this request lies squarely at the feet of the Iowa Legislature, which did too little to improve our schools despite repeated warnings. The education reform plan Lt. Gov. (Kim) Reynolds and I proposed would have ensured a waiver from the onerous federal No Child Left Behind law.”
Don’t be shocked, however, if Branstad, who was just named co-chairman of Romney’s Iowa campaign, changes his tune, and starts to point at least one finger at the president. I wouldn’t be surprised if he calls for a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education, forcing it to defend its decision and its questionable conditions.
As for Governor Romney, expect him to talk up this issue the next time he’s in the Hawkeye State, as yet another example of executive overreach and federal micromanagement. Iowans love their schools and their teachers; it’s not going to be hard to paint this as a classic case of Washington bureaucrats gone wild.
Who said that education wouldn’t play a role in the election?
Everyone already knows, as Eva Moskowitz told the Wall Street Journal, that the best charter schools try to help students with mild disabilities shed their labels (and Individual Education Plans) by improving their math and reading abilities. That could explain a significant part of the discrepancy.
But there’s another point that’s overlooked entirely: No single public school is expected to serve students with every single type of disability. In fact, traditional public schools regularly “counsel out” students with severe disabilities because they don’t have the resources and expertise to serve them. Many school districts operate separate schools (or programs) precisely for those kids.
To test this argument, I just spent 30 minutes on the Office of Civil Right’s Data Collection website. I pulled up the special education data for Montgomery County, Maryland — where I happen to live, and a system that’s widely considered one of the best large districts in the country.
I wanted to see the degree to which schools in the county are serving their fair share of students with severe disabilities. (I counted all of the disability groups except for Emotional Disturbances, Specific Learning Disorders, and Speech or Language Impairments.) In total, Montgomery County serves 4,765 such students (with disabilities including Autism, Intellectual Disabilities, Traumatic Brain Injury, etc.) — or 3.4 percent of its total student population.
By the GAO’s reckoning, then, and maybe that of Congressman Miller, every school in Montgomery County should come close to hitting that mark. Yet see what I found:
Students with Severe Disabilities:
Share of Student Population in Each Montgomery County (MD) School
| Number of Schools | Percentage of Schools |
< 1% | 26 | 13% |
1-2% | 52 | 26% |
2-3% | 36 | 18% |
3-4% | 31 | 15.5% |
4-5% | 14 | 7% |
5-6% | 14 | 7% |
≥ 6% | 27 | 13.5% |
TOTAL | 200 | 100% |
So are the 26 schools that serve virtually no students with severe disabilities “discriminating” against such children? Are they out of compliance with federal law? What about the 52 additional schools whose students with severe disabilities amount to fewer than 2 percent of their totals? Should the GAO put out a report blasting Montgomery County for skirting its responsibilities? Has George Miller yet spoken about this outrage with his colleague, Chris Van Hollen, who represents Montgomery County in Congress?
Of course not. What Montgomery County is doing — what every school district of any size does — is to create special programs at particular schools that can better meet the needs of students with particular disabilities. (Five of its schools enroll 40 percent-plus students with severe disabilities.) Because, again, No single public school is expected to serve students with every single type of disability.
Scratch that: Except for charter schools, which are somehow expected to do the impossible.
As President, I will give the parents of every low-income and special needs student the chance to choose where their child goes to school. For the first time in history, federal education funds will be linked to a student, so that parents can send their child to any public or charter school, or to a private school, where permitted. And I will make that choice meaningful by ensuring there are sufficient options to exercise it.
To receive the full complement of federal education dollars, states must provide students with ample school choice. In addition, digital learning options must not be prohibited. And charter schools or similar education choices must be scaled up to meet student demand.
To expand the supply of high-performing schools in and around districts serving low-income and special-needs students, states accepting Title I and IDEA funds will be required to take a series of steps to encourage the development of quality options: First, adopt open-enrollment policies that permit eligible students to attend public schools outside of their school district that have the capacity to serve them. Second, provide access to and appropriate funding levels for digital courses and schools, which are increasingly able to offer materials tailored to the capabilities and progress of each student when used with the careful guidance of effective teachers. And third, ensure that charter school programs can expand to meet demand, receive funding under the same formula that applies to all other publicly-supported schools, and access capital funds.
The State Board of Education may not adopt, and the State Department of Education may not implement, the Common Core State Standards developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Any actions taken to adopt or implement the Common Core State Standards as of the effective date of this section are void ab initio. Neither this nor any other statewide education standards may be adopted or implemented without the approval of the Legislature.
BE IT RESOLVED, that the {legislative body} vigorously opposes any effort by the federal government to deny the authority of any state to set its own education academic content standards or to attempt to overturn decisions made duly by a state regarding any education standards deemed by the constitutionally-designated authorities in that state to be in the best interest of that state's children.
Unrealistic and ever-increasing performance targets have forced us to label 63 percent of Title I schools and 47 percent of districts receiving Title I funds as needing improvement, and to apply sanctions that do not necessarily lead to improved learning for the students in those schools. This practice has confused the public, demoralized teachers, and tied up funds that could have been more precisely targeted on the schools and districts that are most in need of improvement.
Why? The cash-strapped state just doesn't have the funds to help school districts cover the cost of a new evaluation plan, as state law requires, Kirst said.
"We're saying we just can't pay for it," Kirst said. Other states that have applied for the flexibility "must be rich," he joked.
And, in Kirst's view, the waiver request is consistent with what's actually in the NCLB law. "We do not see anything in the law about state mandates for teacher evaluation," he said.