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New Spider-Man awaits Superman

August 16, 2011 By

The new alternative Spider-Man, a black-Hispanic youth named Miles Morales, apparently will back education reform, including charter schools, notes Education Intelligence Agency. That’s causing angst for those who see education reform as a plot by the Sinister Syndicate.

In an interview with Comic Book Resources, Joe Quesada, the chief creative officer at Marvel Comics, explained the back story for the new alter ego, who replaces Peter Parker in the Ultimate Spider-Man alternative comic universe. A fan of Geoffrey Canada, who created the Harlem Children’s Zone, Quesada urged colleagues to watch “Waiting For Superman.” Art pages released so far show Morales as a child at a charter school lottery.

Will the new Spider-Man smash teachers’ unions? asks Joe Macaré of In These Times. Peter Parker was a struggling science teacher, he observes.

. . . he’s exactly the kind of person vilified by the steadfastedly anti-union Geoffrey Canada, by Waiting For Superman and by the so-called education reformers for whom the movie is a touchstone.

…Faced with this PR onslaught, vigilance is demanded of those of us who’d like to see popular culture not become further contaminated by anti-union sentiment and the insane belief that the private sector will save us all.

Elana Levin, co-host of the Graphic Policy podcast, thinks “teachers’ unions are like the X-Men,” not the Sinister Six, while “the business interests trying to privatize our education system through money and manipulation are just like the new incarnation of the Hellfire Club (as written by Kieron Gillen in Uncanny X-Men).”

Marvel Comics and Joe Quesada aren’t exactly right-wingers, responds EIA. Of course, that makes it worse.

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Duncan waives NCLB

August 8, 2011 By

With Congress stalled on revising No Child Left Behind, Education Secretary Arne Duncan will do it himself. Duncan will waive NCLB requirements, such as achieving 100 percent proficiency by 2014, if states adopt Duncan-approved school reforms. It’s a huge expansion of executive power, notes the New York Times.

Under the current law, every school is given the equivalent of a pass-fail report card each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve, and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.

Expect suburban schools to get a pass, even if minority or low-income subgroups do poorly.

To receive a waiver, states must adopt “college- and career-ready” standards (just Common Core Standards?), work to improve teacher effectiveness, develop evaluation systems based on student test scores and other measures, turn around the lowest-performing schools and adopt  accountability systems to replace No Child’s pass-fail system.

“It sounds like they’re trying to do a backdoor Round 3 of Race to the Top, and that’s astonishing,” said Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. He called Mr. Duncan’s plan “a dramatically broad reading of executive authority.”

If Republicans take the White House in the next election, the administration’s power play will set a dangerous precedent, adds Hess.

NCLB identifies too many schools as needing intervention, writes Russ Whitehurst at Brookings. Duncan should waive impossible goals — but not abuse the waiver authority to make federal law.

It is one thing for an administration to grant waivers to states to respond to unrealistic conditions on the ground or to allow experimentation and innovation. Similar waiver authority has been used to advance welfare and Medicaid reform going back to the Reagan administration, and to allow a few districts and states to experiment at the margins of NCLB in the Bush administration. It is quite another thing to grant state waivers conditional on compliance with a particular reform agenda that is dramatically different from existing law.

Duncan will create a backlash against Common Core Standards, if he forces all states to adopt them, writes Mike Petrilli on Flypaper.

Politics K-12 has a round-up of reactions. States are very eager to get out from under NCLB’s expectations, but not so eager to sign up for the administration’s version of education reform.

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Dastardly philanthropists

August 6, 2011 By

“Corporate foundation” and “corporate” were used as a catch-all insult at the Save Our Schools rally, writes Kevin Carey. For opponents of school reform “corporate” appears to be a synonym for “dastardly” or “scum-sucking.”

A “corporate foundation” is accountable to owners and shareholders, he points out. ExxonMobil Foundation justifies its underwriting of  “Masterpiece Theatre” by the public relations benefits that “help mitigate some of the less popular aspects of being a gigantic energy conglomerate.”

By contrast, the Carnegie Corporation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Century Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and many others are independent non-profit foundations that got their money from rich people who founded large corporations. There’s a difference. The politics of Henry Ford and the interests of the Ford Motor Company are by no means aligned with the strategies put forth by the Ford Foundation.

Education reform’s enemies are “corporate” in nature, argues RiShawn Biddle on Dropout Nation.

The two teachers’ unions are “billion-dollar organizations” with well-paid staffs and CEOs.  The AFT’s Randi earned $428,284 in 2010,while the NEA’s DennisVan Roekel was paid $397,721.

Like their peers in the corporate world, the two unions devote countless hours developing strategies aimed at maximizing their core mission — serving their shareholders and customers, who, given that they are teachers, are one and the same.

Like their corporate peers, the unions use marketing, branding, public relations, lobbying and political contributions, Biddle writes.

Billionaire philanthropists should build new institutions and stop trying to fix old ones, advises Jay Greene. “In general, existing institutions don’t want to be fixed.”

 

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Public, teachers’ views split on reform

August 5, 2011 By

Teachers’ views on education issues have diverged from public opinion in the last year, concludes a Harvard survey. Take the survey here.

The public splits on whether teachers’ unions have a positive or negative influence; teachers defend their unions more strongly.

Public opposition to teacher tenure edged upward; teachers support tenure more than ever. Public support for basing tenure on student academic progress increased from 49 percent to 55 percent, but only 30 percent of teachers agreed.

The public supports merit pay by a 47 to 27 percent margin. Only 18 percent of teachers favor merit pay and 72 percent oppose it.

The public agrees with teachers on one issue: 55 percent of the public and 82 percent of teachers favor higher pay. Only 7 percent of the public would cut teacher pay.

However, public support for higher teacher pay falls to 42 percent when those surveyed are told how much the average teacher in their state is currently paid.

Given a choice between increasing teacher salaries and reducing class sizes, the public opted for smaller classes. Told that “reducing average class sizes by three students would cost roughly the same amount as increasing teacher salaries by $10,000,” 44 percent chose class-size reduction and 28 percent selected increasing teacher salaries.

Teachers split on whether to opt for higher pay or smaller classes.

By a strong margin, the public favored teachers paying a percentage of their benefit costs, while teachers overwhelmingly reject this cost-cutting measure.

Public support for vouchers increased: 47 percent backed “a proposal to give families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition.”

Forty-three percent of the public — and 45 percent of teachers — supported charter schools; a minority are anti-charter and many are undecided.

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It’s not about the teachers

August 3, 2011 By

“It happened to them, not to you,” said the social studies teacher when colleagues were topping each others’ classroom horror stories.  ” You tell the stories like it’s some kind of entertainment, but it happened to them — the kids. They are the ones who 30 years from now will remember these stories with tears in their eyes.”

In her first post on Ed Week‘s new Charting My Own Course, Marilyn Rhames, a reporter turned science teacher, recalls the words that have haunted her for eight years.

I am only glad that I got set straight early in my teaching career. Some teachers never seem to get it. You know this when their debates about education reform are centered around teacher rights, and not student rights. Teachers’ needs are important — I have a mortgage; I have a family; I would like to retire one day — but they are not the core issue. The mission is bigger than us. Educators and policymakers must boil the chatter down to two essential questions: To what degree will this policy enhance student learning and how will we know?

Her own children attend the charter school where she teaches, so that keeps her aware that “it” — good or bad — is happening to them.

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Gates: Was the $5 billion worth it?

July 25, 2011 By

After spending $5 billion on education grants and scholarships, Bill Gates tells the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley,  “It’s been about a decade of learning.”

The Microsoft co-founder’s foundation is worth $34 billion, more than the next three largest foundations (Ford, Getty and Robert Wood Johnson) combined.

Small schools, an early Gates Foundation initiative, didn’t improve achievement. I was impressed by the foundation’s willingness to admit that.

Small schools improved students’ attendance and behavior, but “didn’t move the needle much” on college attendance, which is a foundation priority, Bill Gates told Riley.  “We didn’t see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that.”

The foundation decided to focus on curriculum — Gates strongly backs a core curriculum — and teacher quality — the foundation is researching what makes good teachers effective.

Many worry that a multi-billionaire has too much power, even if his intentions are noble. (And not everyone thinks they are.) And Gates tells Riley he’s trying to use his money to influence how public money is spent.

 Instead of trying to buy systemic reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent.

However, the foundation’s approach is scientific, not political, Gates say.

“I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.” Compared with R&D spending in the pharmaceutical or information-technology sectors, he says, next to nothing is spent on education research. “That’s partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don’t think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research.”

Gates supports charters — he’s a KIPP fan — but not school vouchers.

. . .  the politics, he says, are just too tough right now. “We haven’t chosen to get behind [vouchers] in a big way, as we have with personnel systems or charters, because the negativity about them is very, very high.”

Gates’ approach is doomed to fail, responds Jay Greene. While trying to influence education policy is sensible, “education does not lend itself to a single ‘best’ approach.” The foundation invokes science “to advance practices and policies they prefer for which they have no scientific support,” Greene charges.

Attempting to impose particular practices on the nation’s education system is generating more political resistance than even the Gates Foundation can overcome, despite their focus on political influence and their devotion of significant resources to that effort.

Greene’s part 2 on the Gates Foundation is here.

In a new mini-book, Greene advocates school choice as the way to create incentives for school improvement.  Here’s his interview with Jason Riley.

Community College Spotlight, which I write for the Hechinger Institute, is funded, in part, by Gates money. Gates is funding almost every innovative idea involving community colleges, notably research on how to improve remediation and boost graduation rates. I think it’s money well spent, though the research isn’t likely to find a silver bullet.

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If not 100% proficiency, then what?

June 8, 2011 By

Fifteen years ago, more or less, I was asked to speak to a graduate class for teachers seeking an administrative credential. A teacher talked about all the kids growing up in poverty and in dysfunctional families and said San Jose Unified’s slogan, “All children can learn,” was unrealistic. The teacher asked me what percentage of students the public expected the schools to educate.

I said, “Ninety percent?” The teachers laughed. Derisively. I wish I’d made them come up with a number.

Education reformers are accusing Diane Ravitch of defeatism when it comes to educating poor children, notes Mike Petrilli on Flypaper.  But it’s time to clarify what reformers think they can achieve, he writes. If we can’t bring 100 percent of students to proficiency — and we can’t –  what can education reform achieve?

This fall, about 1 million poor children will enroll in U.S. kindergartens, he writes. Most are the children of poorly educated single mothers. Should school accountability systems expect all these children to be prepared to attend four-year colleges? Is it enough for them to do no worse than their mothers?

I would bet that your own views fall somewhere in between. You acknowledge–privately at least–that it’s unrealistic to expect all kids growing up in poverty to be able to “beat the odds” and graduate from college. (That’s why we call them odds.) You recognize that for most middle-class families, the path from poverty to prosperity was a multi-generational journey.

But you also believe in the promise of social mobility, and can point to examples of schools–even mediocre ones–that have helped some kids escape the ghetto or the barrio or the reservation. To accept the status quo is to accept perpetual injustice for decades to come.

A stretch goal, writes Petrilli, would be to move the high school graduation rate in poor districts from 50 percent to 60 percent, perhaps to shift the reading proficiency rate for 12th graders with parents who dropped out of high school from 17 percent up to 25 percent, or math proficiency from 8 percent to 15 percent.

That would turn 400,000 of our million poor kids into drop-outs; only 90,000 would be proficient in math. But it’s an improvement.

There could be less ambitious goals, Petrilli writes:

Getting more of them to the “basic” level on NAEP? Preparing them for decent-paying jobs instead of the lowest-paid jobs? Driving down the teen pregnancy rate? Lowering the incarceration rate?

. . . If we are to get beyond the “100 percent proficiency” or “all students college and career ready” rhetoric, these are the conversations we need to have. And if we’re not willing to do so, don’t complain when Diane Ravitch and her armies of angry teachers complain that we are asking them to perform miracles.

President Obama wants all young Americans to have at least a year of postsecondary education. But only 71.7 percent complete high school: The rate drops to 57 percent for blacks, 58 percent for Latinos.

Update: Dropout Nation prefers irrational exuberance to low expectations.

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Alter v. Ravitch

June 6, 2011 By

Diane Ravitch is wrong about education reform, writes Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Alter.  Schools are improving.

In New York Times op-ed, Ravitch described progress as mere “public relations.”

Bruce Randolph School, a middle and high school in inner-city Denver is graduating 97 percent of students, about twice the norm of typical inner-city schools. Yes, ACT scores are below the state average, Alter writes. But the school is improving at an impressive rate in most areas.

“This was a very cynical statement that she doesn’t believe teachers and schools can make a difference in high-poverty areas,” says Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston, a former teacher and principal whose sweeping tenure-reform law is a national model. “We can debate facts at particular schools but you just can’t deny that some places are getting phenomenal results — results that should be celebrated, not called out as fraudulent.”

Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s normally mild- mannered education secretary, has finally had enough. “Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day,” he said when I asked about Ravitch this week.

It’s a straw man to claim reformers think “poverty doesn’t matter,” Alter writes. “They merely insist that such conditions not be used as an excuse for inaction.”

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Enter your edu-combination code

May 25, 2011 By

I meant to post something much earlier today but have been wrapped up in final edits of my book manuscript (before it goes to copyediting), final preparations for a presentation tomorrow, and final gazes at the trees and rooftops out my window before I move back to Brooklyn on Saturday.

I am so wrapped up in these things that I’m not sure what’s going on in education at the present hour. I gather there have been premieres of a new film, American Teacher, by Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari. I gather Mark Zuckerberg wants kids under 13 to have Facebook access for education purposes. But I don’t know enough about either of these things to write about them.

Then an op-ed by Rick Hess caught my eye: “Common Core: Giving Happy Lie to the ‘Reform Consensus.’” Hess states that many “reformy types” assume a consensus that just isn’t there, and that the small-government conservatives are finally speaking up and making this clear.

For several years now, would-be reformers have gotten away with claiming that there’s a goopy, groupthink “reform consensus.” They depict the edu-debates as a simple-minded morality play between a “reform” phalanx and “adult interests.” This line has been sold most assiduously by Democrat for Ed Reform-types and NCLB enthusiasts who think conservatives are supposed to quietly, cheerfully sign on to the grand schemes crafted by their betters.

I’m not in a position to evaluate Hess’s larger argument. But the imagined “goopy, groupthink ‘reform consensus’” has bugged me, no matter where it comes from. Many people have combinations of views that don’t align with a particular platform. And hooray for that. Without such variation, there would be no reason for an education discussion at all. You would have a set of views, you’d fight those holding the opposite views, and that would be that.

One thing that keeps me interested in education policy is the perplexing nature of almost every issue. If it weren’t perplexing, it would be just something to get done. Instead, it’s something to think about, fight for, learn more about, question oneself about, and so on. Yes, one needs to get things done at the same time; one can’t just dwell in perplexity. But the doing of the things also casts them in new perspective, as do reading, thinking, and discussion.

One doesn’t necessarily feel perplexed about everything in education; one may be sure about many things. But a hundred years ago, or a hundred days ago, one might have taken a different stance, even an opposite one. These matters change in meaning over time.

Nor does the lack of “consensus” preclude alliances of various kinds. But they are stronger if they make room for differences among the members, as long as the differences don’t render the alliance meaningless. For instance, two people working together on a curriculum may have very different ideas about school governance, but as long as school governance doesn’t figure large in their work together, they can disagree cordially and keep the work going.

There may be education groups and organizations whose members agree on most points. That has its place too. Many fine schools have a very cohesive staff who agree on the school’s goals and curriculum. The danger occurs only when the agreement gets smug–when those outside the circle are written off automatically or put under pressure to conform.

In-fighting and squabbling are sad things. Imaginary consensus is just as sad, if not sadder. What, then, is left? Hearty agreement, hearty disagreement, without shame or scorn. That, and the recognition that even the most well-considered views are approximations and that anyone can be wrong.

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Old Ravitch v. New Ravitch

May 7, 2011 By

Old Diane Ravitch Debates New Diane Ravitch in this animation.

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