Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
“Kids Aren’t Cars” blames self-serving adults — notably the teachers’ union — for the sad state of Detroit’s public schools. Only about a quarter of the city’s public high school students earn a diploma.
Education Action Group, which favors school choice, made the videos through EAG TV.
Education reformers seem to be winning the day, but two Education Next commentaries warn against declaring victory.
In A Battle Begun, Not Won, Paul Peterson, Checker Finn and Marci Kanstoroom warn that “nothing can be done at the national level” to transform education.
Most of the crucial decisions about how U.S. schools run and who teaches what to whom in which classrooms are still made in 14,000 semi-autonomous school districts, nearly all of them run by locally elected school boards, often with campaign dollars supplied by those with whom they negotiate collectively, and managed by professional superintendents, trained in colleges of education and socialized over the years into the prevailing culture of public education.
That culture is in no way reform-minded. It believes that educators know best, that elected school boards are the embodiment of democracy in action, that colleges of education are the path to true professionalism, that collective bargaining is necessary to protect teacher rights, and that any failings visible in today’s schools, teachers, and students are either the fault of heedless parents or the consequence of incompetent administrators and stingy taxpayers.
Teachers unions wield great power at the state level, where they’ve blocked or weakened reforms.
In Washington, reforms are limited to Race to the Top, “an executive-branch initiative lacking a clear legislative mandate.” In the new Congress, “more Republicans than ever are worshiping before the false god of local control.”
Union leaders may pose as agents of change, but local unions “almost always kill any but the mildest changes.”
Furthermore, the U.S. public is lukewarm on education reform. Many think other people’s schools are no good but their own children’s schools don’t need changes.
Pyrrhic Victories? by Frederick M. Hess, Michael J. Petrilli, and Martin R. West sees broad but shallow support for reform ideas. In polls, Americans say they support charter schools — but don’t know what they are. They want accountability but are reluctant to close low-performing schools or fire ineffective teachers.
Reformers push overly ambitious ideas, risking “Icarus syndrome,” the authors warn. No Child Left Behind’s mistakes could be repeated by Race to the Top, which pushes states to adopt “a very prescriptive set of policy reforms” to get federal funding.
Just as definitions of Adequate Yearly Progress, Highly Qualified Teachers, and other core elements of NCLB, circa 2001, soon grew obsolete and problematic, so too will today’s conventional wisdom around teacher evaluations, charter caps, and all the rest. Rather than encouraging problem solving and policy tinkering, these “shoot the moon” initiatives freeze reform in one moment in time. And they run the risk of backlash if and when early results prove disappointing.
Obsessed with “closing achievement gaps,” reformers “signal to the vast majority of American parents that school reform isn’t about helping their kids.” That’s not the way to build wide support.
We need less cheerleading and more humility, they conclude.
Across the country, teachers are taking charge of school turnarounds, reports Associated Press. Some charter schools have been run by teachers for years now; what’s new is that districts are letting teacher committees take over schools, usually schools in trouble.
Four years ago, Francis Parkman Middle School was spiraling downward with plummeting enrollment, abysmal test scores and notoriety for unruliness. Then teachers stepped out of the classroom and took charge of the school.
Today, the rechristened Woodland Hills Academy, named for the school’s suburban location north of Los Angeles, is run by a teacher-controlled committee where the principal carries the same weight as a teacher and the district has minimal say in operations.
Test scores are up 18 percent and enrollment has spiked more than 30 percent. The model works, teachers say, because everyone from the principal to the janitor is vested in the outcome.
Student achievement has been mixed in teacher-run schools, concludes a study by Charles Kerchner, a Claremont education professor. Only seven of 13 teacher-led schools in Minnesota achieved progress goals, the study found. In Milwaukee, teacher-led schools scored several points below the district average in reading and 12 points below in math.
Leadership by consensus often leads to slower decision-making, especially with people inexperienced in the substantial administrative work operating a school entails.
Still, the American Federation of Teachers and unions in Boston, Denver, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Los Angeles are backing teacher-led schools, reports AP.
In Los Angeles, union-backed teacher groups beat charters to win control of 30 out of 37 schools in the district’s first “public school choice” round last year. Most follow or build on the Woodland Hills blueprint.
Parkman Middle School was losing students to two nearby charter schools. Four teachers applied to turn Parkman into a teacher-led charter. To keep the school from going charter, district officials “allowed a 16-member leadership council, comprising eight elected teachers, the principal, and representatives of non-teaching staff and parents, to autonomously run the school,” which became Woodland Hills Academy.
The council tackled the building and grounds with fresh landscaping, fencing, and paint. It designed a schedule with 95-minute periods, rotating them so teachers see students at different times of the day. The curriculum now includes art, music, and electives such as cooking, photography and journalism, plus field trips.
Teachers decide their own professional development track and set the school’s goals for test scores and English as a second language placement. Parents and students are given satisfaction surveys.
Administrators and teachers who didn’t like the new set-up eventually left for other jobs. The council hired replacements who believed in the school’s mission.
Democrats don’t agree on school reform, writes RiShawn Biddle in his analysis of the mid-term elections. Republican infighting has just begun.
The fact that so many Democrats lost despite the $24 million spent by both unions on their behalf in the last week (and $40 million by the NEA alone this year) is one more sign that the NEA and AFT are no longer useful to the party. That President Obama’s school reform agenda remains the only popular aspect of an overall agenda that has been largely rejected by voters this year — along with the fact that reform-oriented candidates such as Joe Manchin and Chris Coons have won their respective races — also means that the two unions will have fewer supporters inside the party ranks.
Centrist and progressive Democrat school reformers see education as a civil rights issue, which makes improving teacher quality a civil rights issue. “But the NEA and the AFT are the biggest obstacles to the much-needed overhauls in teacher recruitment, training and compensation that are critical to the school reform agenda,” Biddle writes.
Republicans are split too. Rep. John Kline, the likely chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, opposes No Child Left Behind’s accountability provisions. In a statement, he called for local control.
Expect a clash within the congressional Republican camp as reform-minded conservatives of the standards-and-accountability bent (including soon-to-be speaker John Boehner, who helped usher in No Child when he was education committee chairman) battle over policy with the Kline camp (who represent suburban districts that have long-opposed reform efforts) and movement conservatives with small government leanings and a desire to dial back federal policy in all areas.
Boehner is a politically savvy education reformer, writes Andrew Rotherham in Time. But he won’t rule by fiat.
. . . many of Tuesday’s winners are coming to Washington set on cutting federal spending, which means that unlike in the past, big infusions of cash will not be available to help grease the wheels for political deals around education reform.
Don’t expect any big education bills, Rotherham writes. The Education Department doesn’t know how to work with Congress and the two parties are divided internally on education policy.
Guest-blogging on Rick Hess Straight Up, Andrew Kelly, an American Enterprise Institute research fellow, analyzes the state results. Ohio and Florida, recent Race to the Top winners, elected governors who could revamp state education policies and end union “buy-in,” Kelly writes.
In Oklahoma, 81 percent of voters rejected a proposition that would have required the state to maintain per-pupil funding levels comparable to the five neighboring states. Republican Janet Barresi, founder of two successful charter schools, was elected state superintendent. She promises to expand parental choice, including homeschooling.
On their way out the door in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty take credit for making “politically unpopular choices” in the Wall Street Journal.
Forced to lay off excess staff to save money, they “decided to allow principals to make the layoffs based on the quality, value and performance of their staffs” rather than seniority alone. It took 2½ years of bargaining with the union and millions of dollars from foundations to get teachers to approve the new contract.
• It rewards great teachers who accept a higher level of accountability with some of the highest teacher pay in the nation—up to twice as much as they were previously making.
• No longer do educators have a job guarantee for life. Ineffective teachers are immediately dismissed from the system. Minimally effective teachers do not receive a pay step increase and have one year to improve their performance. If that doesn’t happen, they are subject to termination.
• If layoffs are necessary, the decisions about whom to dismiss are based on quality and performance instead of seniority.
• We also instituted a comprehensive system for evaluating teachers, including growth in student achievement as measured by standardized tests (so that teachers who take on the toughest students aren’t unfairly penalized), observation of their classroom practices and assessment of their contributions to the school community.
Every student subgroup in D.C. has improved on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Rhee and Fenty write. Graduation rates have increased. SAT scores are up too.
So what went wrong?
We did not explain why we were doing what we were doing well enough. We did not do enough to engage the local leaders and neighborhood activists who needed to be at the forefront of the fight.
People who want change were overwhelmed by “special interests—unions, administrators and opportunistic politicians—who are vocal and committed,” Rhee and Fenty argue.
Education reformers should be happy campers, writes Jay P. Greene in We won! Instead, Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli are gloomy and Liam Julian fears the new crop of naive reformers are doomed to fail,
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.
These reform ideas are “broadly accepted across both parties and across the ideological spectrum,” Greene writes. That’s huge. “Our ideas for school reform are now the ones that elites and politicians are considering and they have soundly rejected the old ideas of more money, more money, and more money.”
Winning the war of ideas doesn’t mean winning the policy war, of course.
As I’ve written before, the teacher unions are becoming like the tobacco industry. No one accepts their primary claims anymore, but that doesn’t mean they don’t continue to be powerful and that people don’t continue to smoke.
The unions will try to block, dilute or co-opt the design and implementation of reforms, Greene writes. “But for a moment can’t we just bask in the glow of our intellectual victory — even if our allies are a new crop of naive reformers?”
Guess who’s not coming to speak at the National Education Association’s convention in New Orleans? President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, once welcome at the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers conventions, aren’t on the guest list this year “partly because union officials feared that administration speakers would face heckling,” reports the New York Times.
The largest union’s meeting opened here on Saturday to a drumbeat of heated rhetoric, with several speakers calling for Mr. Duncan’s resignation, hooting delegates voting for a resolution criticizing federal programs for “undermining public education,” and the union’s president summing up 18 months of Obama education policies by saying, “This is not the change I hoped for.”
“Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced,” Dennis Van Roekel, president of the union, the National Education Association, told thousands of members gathered at the convention center here.
Many teachers feel they are being blamed for problems that are beyond their control. Union leaders are angry that Obama and Duncan aren’t willing to cut Race to the Top reforms to fund a $10 billion education jobs bill.
The NEA spent $50 million in 2008 to help elect Democrats; the AFT spent millions more.
“If the teachers sit on their hands this fall, it would be a disaster for Obama and the Democrats,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has studied the teachers’ unions.
Duncan is trying to avoid confrontation. “Some state and local unions are very thoughtful and progressive and are embracing innovation,” Duncan told the Times. “Others are more entrenched in the status quo.”
One of my favourite education writers, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, writes about a Mr. Eric Hanushek, who in addition to being an economist, may very well be a real man of genius. Remember all that money that might be flowing to the schools?
I read about a school principal who disliked saying she was firing staff. She preferred the phrase “freeing up teachers’ futures.” That is sort of what Hoover Institution economist Eric A. Hanushek is saying we should do with any new school bailout: use it to pay severance packages for ineffective teachers so they can find their true calling elsewhere.
That’s not going to happen any time soon, of course.
Hanushek’s article actually has a much larger scope: he looks at different possibilities of what will happen to schools (with respect to the economy) and discusses multiple strategies. Still, the notion of paying teachers to leave has a certain amount of poetic justice to it; and really,who among you didn’t have an absolutely crappy high school teacher that really needed to be asked to go elsewhere to find their calling? How much better would schools be without much of that intellectual detritus?
Both Mathews and Hanushek see the obvious problem:
My first problem with his solution, as he recognizes, is that we are not really sure which teachers are effective and which are not. Most districts have no dependable way to find out.
That depends on what the meaning of “dependable” is. As I’ve said often before (here and elsewhere), there are very dependable ways to identify the ineffective teachers. Students know. Principals usually know. When people say that there aren’t dependable ways to find out, what they usually mean is one of three things: (1) There’s no way to prove that a teacher is ineffective, at least not with a strong enough basis to withstand a lawsuit or a union action; (2) A method might have some false positives and false negatives — some good teachers might accidentally get swept up and some bad teachers might be missed; (3) that they don’t want to fire any teachers anyway so they won’t accept any method as dependable.
I really don’t see either (2) or (3) as an actual problem. (3) is just institutional inertia. As for (2), when I clean a sticky spill from my counter — some counter molecules come off onto the scrub brush, and some spill molecules are left behind. So what? (1) is a thornier problem — for all the reasons that get discussed ad nauseam throughout the edublogosphere. When it takes half a million dollars and months of time and effort to fire a teacher, you can imagine what sorts of painstaking accuracy and relevance will be demanded by teachers and unions and what sort of holy hell will be raised if it isn’t. Still, hat’s off to Mr. Hanushek’s thinking outside the box.
A little more than a year ago, Congress passed and the President signed the “Stimulus” bill. At the time, we were told that one of its chief features was to save the jobs of public school teachers. There was, despite my general feelings of disapproval towards the Stimulus, some sense to doing this. As I’ve often argued, there’s no “playing catch up” with missed education. Once a child falls behind, he or she is pretty much screwed, both from a biological perspective (the brain becomes less adaptable as it ages) and on a social basis (our school system and our merit-tracking systems tend towards the chronologically-based). So if there aren’t any teachers — the scenario that proponents of the stimulus package averred would come to pass in its absence — it’s actually really bad for students.
Now we can argue back and forth about whether the feds actually should (or do) have this sort of authority, whether public school teachers really needed shoring up, and whether states and districts ultimately just needed to learn to tighten their belts and are being led down the garden path by the DoE and Congress. We can go back and forth all day on those issues. But it’s clear that the argument for keeping public school teachers in play is (at least as I’ve made it here) a plausible one.
Sometimes, though, when a person get’s a good argument in their head, the argument keeps getting made. Over, and over, and over. It’s like in Les Miserables, where Thenardier gets a plausible argument that he’s a hero. (It’s false, but it’s plausible.) The guy’s entire life becomes about leveraging that story over and over again for everything it’s worth.
I wonder…. how many more times are we going to see the feds saving state jobs in education?
The Obama administration on Thursday threw its support behind a $23 billion measure intended to avert large-scale teacher layoffs, urging Congress to include the effort in a spending bill lawmakers are drafting to fund wartime costs and other urgent needs.
“We are gravely concerned that ongoing state and local budget challenges are threatening hundreds of thousands of teacher jobs for the upcoming school year,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
Duncan added: “These budget cuts would also undermine the groundbreaking reform efforts under way in states and districts all across the country.”
It’s for the children. At least that’s what we can keep telling ourselves.
National Journal’s Education Experts answer the question: As states prepare their Race to the Top applications, what is more important: Obtaining union buy-in or implementing bold reform ideas? Education Secretary Arne Duncan says “only the best and boldest plans will win,” and he’s the guy who counts.
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