Edu Commentary

A concerned reader writes about Edu Commentary’s notes on the recent charter conference:

You sound like a crabby old coot!

Complaining about the location, complaining about the plenary sessions, complaining about the bags, complaining about baseball(?)!!! My Lord!

Hey, I got an idea for a story that would fit in well with the new, geriatric tone of Edu Commentary.

Edu Commentary Condemns Young Punks Running Through His Lawn

Last evening, while sitting on his front porch, Edu Commentary shook his cane and yelled at a bunch of kids with baggy pants and their hats on backwards. Said Edu Commentary, “We need fewer kids on lawns and less Rock-and-Roll and more early bird specials and reruns of Matlock.”

Afterthought: Fair enough, but about the purses, the Eduwife called them (unprompted) a handbag upon first glance, thereby confirming Edu Commentary’s observation that the Bush Administration was indeed passing out man purses at the conference.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board really likes Teach For America…and rightly so.

Conversely, in Pennsylvania they’re watering down the standards for teachers because of problems with the pass rates on tests of content knowledge reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. There are so many delicious lines in this one that it would be a copyright violation to relay them all here…but they include:

“We’re offering an alternative acceptable to the feds, but at a level of rigor we believe will keep ‘highly qualified’ and ‘fully certified’ synonymous.” Yes, they’re so synonymous now that generally you only hear them together in a sentence when separated by the words “does not mean”…

“The only members of the public to speak in favor of the new regulations were representatives of the teacher unions, the Pennsylvania State Education Association, and the Pennsylvania Federation of Teachers.” Surely this is just coincidence…

Read it yourself. It would actually be quite funny if the joke were not on Pennsylvania’s minority and poor kids.

Florida has signed on (PDF) to become the third state to employ ABCTE as an alternative credentialing route. Rumor has it other states on the horizon…cue, respectively, rejoicing and panicking from various partisans in this debate!

More Florida…A reader sent along this column from Florida to showcase the madness of NCLB. Mary Jo Melone bemoans the unfair labeling of a Florida “A” school as “needing improvement” under NCLB. She’s right that relative to other Florida schools the achievement gaps at this school are small and overall scores better than average. Still, average in Florida isn’t great and at this school only about one in three special ed students are proficient in reading and math, and there are some other problems too. You can see more data here and decide for yourself…There are some problems with AYP, but this isn’t one of them…

And yet more Florida…The Miami Herald reports on Secretary Paige’s speech at the national charter school conference. Two key grafs:

“Our main concern is that, while the administrations in both Washington and Tallahassee hold public schools to extreme accountability measures, it’s seemingly less for charter schools,” said Mark Pudlow, spokesman for the Florida Education Association, a statewide group of teachers unions. “If we’re going to expand charters, it ought to be on the same playing field.”

By and large, charters are already subject to the same measures under Gov. Jeb Bush’s A+ Education Plan and the federal No Child Left Behind law. Charter students must take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, and most receive grades from the state.

Hmmm…if the second graf is true, which it is, then why waste space and ink on the first one, which isn’t? It’s “seemingly” pointless…

Two new new studies worth checking out. Natalie Lacireno-Paquet examines EMO run charter schools and comes up with some interesting findings here. Frederick Hess, Robert Maranto, Scott Milliman, and Kathleen Grammatico Ferraiolo (who is wonderful and should really be hanging out with better company…) examine teacher characteristics and attitudes toward school choice here (free reg. required).

The Education Consumers Clearinghouse says that the new NBPTS research by Dan Goldhaber and Emily Anthony really does not prove much at all. Their primary gripe is that the effect sizes in the study are small.* A more important criticism might be a cost-benefit analysis instead…via educationnews.org

*Didn’t TFA critics hail the NBPTS study and then deride the “small” effect sizes in the recent TFA study? They did!

In the Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes, “If teachers unions in Massachusetts spent as much time trying to improve the large number of public schools they control as they do trying to hurt the minuscule number of charter schools they don’t control, public education in the Bay State would be the pride of the Western world.” In case you couldn’t tell, he’s against the proposed moratorium on charters in MA.

In Maryland they’re rethinking service learning in the wake of some questionable activities…

The Washington Post editorial board is skeptical of a temporary superintendent and again tells city officials to get their act together about the schools.

Jay Mathews bemoans the lack of hate mail that a column saying fire a third of all teachers engendered…here is one solution, run Jay’s provocative (and usually excellent) columns in the paper rather than online, more readers = more hate mail.

The Star Tribune editorial board says reflect on public funding for education the next time a kid comes to your door selling things for their school. Good point.

USA Today reports that colleges are becoming more gay-friendly in response to an increasing number of incoming freshman who are out. But, superficial appeals will likely fall short. Notes one student, “I don’t care if the school has rainbow flags everywhere,” says Anthony Russell-Smith, 19, who graduates in June from Shepherd Hill High School in Dudley, Mass., and plans to take a year off before college. An active LGBT community is “not the most important thing, but I look for it,” he says.

NYT readers debate the intersection of liberal arts and work.

Here is a really nice story, please send more of these…

As this issue of the 21st Century Schools Project Bulletin noted, blaming the public schools for the offshoring of jobs is more than a little far-fetched. Earlier this year among others, AeA, a high tech sector advocacy group, had done just that. But now, as Dan Drezner notes in a recent post, data are pretty clear that the whole off-shoring issue is mostly more smoke than fire. We’re waiting for the headlines exculpating the public schools…probably will be a long wait though…Incidentally, we don’t need economic crisis mongering to engage the public’s interest in educational improvement. More respondents told a recent Business Roundtable poll that education reform should be a national priority for social justice reasons than said it’s an economic competitiveness issue…

We’re not going to turn Edu Commentary into Speaker’s Corner, but now and then a little guest blogging can’t hurt and can probably liven things up from time to time.

So today, in that spirit, education analysts Alex Medler, Bryan Hassel, and Todd Ziebarth respond to what they, pretty understandably, think was a hatchet job review of their important new report on collective bargaining and charter schools. The report, produced by Education Commission of the States, was the focus of a PPI Friday forum a few weeks back which is why we’re happy to give them a little real estate here on Edu Commentary.

Medler, a national charter school expert, runs Medler Consulting. He formerly directed the U.S. Department of Education’s Public Charter School Program. Hassel, also a national charter school expert and author and editor of several books on charter schools, runs Public Impact, a public policy consulting company. Ziebarth, (an expert too!) a longtime analyst for Education Commission of the States and director of their charter school work now works for Augenblick, Palaich and Associates.

So, Medler, Hassel, and Ziebarth…take it away…

The Center for Education Reform (CER) is a busy organization engaged in a lot of important work. Perhaps that explains why they didn’t have time to actually read our recent report about collective bargaining and charter schools before grossly misrepresenting it.

We expect, and in fact welcome, constructive criticism of the ideas in the report – which is entitled “Collective Bargaining and Teachers Unions in Charter Districts.” We are less welcoming, however, of criticism that greatly misstates the substance of the report as CER did in their June 15, 2004, Newswire.

Nowhere in our report do we predict that “future charter-school teachers will likely be union members who collectively bargain for rights, rather than the traditional charter school, which allows employment freedoms,” as CER writes. Likewise, nowhere do we conclude that “charter teachers will return to unions,” as CER also claims.

Here is what we actually said. States will (and should) continue to allow entities other than traditional school districts to grant charters. Such entities include independent boards, city councils, mayor’s offices, universities, colleges, nonprofit organizations, state boards of education and state commissioners of education. States will not (and should not) bind these systems of charter schools to collective bargaining agreements.

But more and more, school districts (like NYC) are becoming interested in chartering schools. For legal and political reasons, leaders in these districts often can’t completely sidestep union agreements when they create charter schools. If you don’t believe us, just ask the folks in Buffalo.

The most obvious and desirable solution, in our opinion, is to change state laws so that charter schools, including those chartered by districts, are not bound to collective bargaining agreements. But we’re not going to hold our breath waiting for that to happen. We wrote our paper to give leaders some viable options now for moving forward with chartering.

The heart of the report lays out policy options in the areas of work rules, compensation, job security and benefits. These options are primarily focused on creating autonomous and accountable schools that operated under significant exemptions from provisions of collective bargaining frameworks, while still helping these schools attract and keep great teachers within a competitive labor market.

Now, you may think that these ideas are rubbish. You may say charter schools that are still linked in any way to district and union structures aren’t “real” charter schools, and should be discouraged. We’re inclined to regard them as (potentially) important cracks in the mortar. With all the appropriate cautions and caveats, we think they can provide a way to create new options for children and teachers.

So let’s have that debate. But let’s base our conversation on the real issues, not the misrepresentations in the CER Newswire. Don’t take our word on all this, though. Read the report yourself. It is at the ECS website and you can get it here (PDF).

The CSM recently reported on graduation from the SEED school, a public charter school in Washington, DC that is the nation’s only public boarding school. It’s a college prep school, serving students from Washington’s most underserved neighborhoods, and its students are attaining great results and heading off to top colleges. It’s a great example of what’s possible in public education yet an NEA analyst still manages to find fault as both Gadfly and Joanne Jacobs note. Ridiculous…there is no other word. A Jacobs reader sums it up saying, “I find it interesting that a teachers union is bitching about how much it costs — aren’t they the ones who keep saying that throwing more money at the problem will fix it?”

Also in Gadfly, Checker Finn rises to the defense of the Sunshine State and says lay off Florida. He thinks the FL is being unfairly maligned in the press. He makes some good points about some steps the state is taking and notes problems with the choice programs. Still, Florida’s schools have a long way to go for poor and minority students and the state’s accountability system was ignoring this prior to NCLB.

Important new bill proposed by Senator Kennedy and Rep. George Miller. It would make the recent NCLB accountability changes retroactive if schools apply for a change. This seems commonsensical but, of course, the Bush Administration is resisting. In the current climate with a lot of pressure to gut NCLB’s accountability provisions a legislative battle is not a great idea but it’s the only option when the Administration pointlessly digs its heels in on issues like this. By the way, the bill would not nullify transfers or supplemental services that students are now being offered so there really isn’t much reason for Bush Administration foot-dragging here.

In Sunday’s NYT Julia Mead looks at the story of a valedictorian who can’t go to college because she’s an illegal immigrant and is not eligible for public aid. Fortunately, she has public school officials in her community who are lobbying private colleges to help her. As an aside, a few charter schools are exploring ways to leverage private aid to help such students and institutionalize support for them. And, as the article notes, bills to help these students are bogged down in Congress right now.

Clarence Page discusses the “talented 10” plan in Texas.

Garnett Coleman, a Texas state senator and chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus responds to last week’s NYT story on the talented 10 plan.

Cox’s Bob Kemper reports that the Bush Administration is going squishy on their pledge to help historically black colleges. Via Educationnews.org.

Thomas Keane writes in the Boston Herald that charter opponents are getting the upper hand in Massachusetts. Via Joanne Jacobs.

Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman looks at new graduation requirements in Virginia and the story of one student. A very balanced piece showing where the student and the system went awry. Everything she writes seems (a) interesting and (b) balanced and in-depth…Draft Helderman!

Finally, if you still have not read James Hunt’s excellent Education Week commentary, as Ben Stiller said in Starsky and Hutch, “Do it”.

Former Democratic North Carolina Governor and Hunt Institute founder James Hunt has a very important must-read commentary in the current Education Week. [Reg. required but worth it]

Hunt echoes many of the recommendations of the recent Teaching Commission report, but a few lines jump out as particularly significant in the evolution of this debate.

He uses the dreaded pay-for-performance line:

We need a new pay-for-performance system of compensation based on student achievement and expertise. We need a system that rewards teachers who mentor others, or teach in difficult schools or in shortage specialties such as math or science, and we need a system that recognizes the less concrete, measurable determinants that affect teaching, such as collaboration and classroom reality.

He does not have kind words for education schools:

Higher education leaders must share responsibility for improving public education. They have allowed our colleges of education to become sleepy backwaters on university campuses. The contrast between our nation’s rigorous and academically challenging colleges of medicine and engineering and our colleges of education could not be more striking.

He says that a “steps and lanes” compensation system is archaic:

Lockstep salary schemes based on time in the classroom and level of education simply can’t compete when measured against today’s many career options.

And, he cites as authoritative favorite liberal villain economist Eric Hanushek! That alone is enough to get you thrown out of a lot of rooms…

Why does this matter? Because it’s a good essay for starters, but also because Hunt is a credible and moderate voice on this issue with a record of accomplishments on education. A lot in here that is important on several levels.

Edu Commentary is in Miami for the National Charter Schools Conference that the Department of Education is putting on. A couple of quick thoughts:

(a) The political folks at the Department of Education seem to have planned the conference to ensure that in the big sessions nothing interesting is said at all. The plenary sessions were predictable. Considering all the big issues charter schools are facing some actual discussion (or God forbid debate) might have been useful. What about the breakout sessions, you say? Most were too short to allow the discussion to get interesting.

(b) Miami Beach seems an odd choice of locales for a national conference about expanding educational opportunity for disadvantaged students. Reformers with results or reformers with resorts? More Versace than KIPP… Besides, since the theme of the conference was getting to 50, as in getting all 50 states to pass charter legislation, why not go to a state that is trying to get to 50 or one that is on the ropes like Washington State? Or anywhere that is not in the 90’s every day and humid…

(c) In the bad old days these trips also used to include visits to schools. Sure, an hour or two visit is not enough time to really get a sense of a school, but the visits were still a chance to learn something new. And yes, sure, this is in conflict with (b), but at least do one or the other…

(d) The Florida Marlins are an embarrassment to baseball. They can’t even fill the lower level of Pro Player Stadium, while Washington still can’t get a team [but they have won two more World Series in the past decade than the Red Sox have in the past eight decades—ed.] Right, you had to bring that up…

Update! Howard Fuller breaks the taboo and says something very interesting by noting at a breakout session that too many charter proponents are starting to resemble the very problems they set out to tackle when they complain about accountability in light of dysfunctional families, poverty, etc…Fuller says, “hell, you knew about all these things when you got into this…”

Also, Edu Commentary shouldn’t be too hard on the Department of Ed, they did give all attendees very nice black handbags, sort of man purses. Edu Commentary suspects it’s some sort of below the radar Bush Administration outreach attempt to meterosexual swing voters…

The CSM sees important implications in the Hibbs v. Winn case. Not so sure, the tax credit and voucher questions are largely settled. The new variety of tax credits that Arizona and some other states are trying may be constitutionally suspect but the court seems unlikely to revisit the underlying issues.

Yesterday’s USA Today story about how school affluence relates to athletic success is well worth reading because as Virginia Tech professor Roland Lazenby notes, “The problem is the funding mechanism for schools in this country,” he says, meaning the use of property taxes to pay for local schools. “Sports is a highly visible way to see the inequities. But if the football field is in bad shape, I wonder what kind of shape the chemistry lab is in.”

The ed schools are asking, who lost the governors?

Important Wash Post story on the politics of education in Florida this election year. It notes the collision between Florida’s previous accountability plan, which focused only on overall scores, and No Child Left Behind’s requirements that states use disaggregated scores to measure progress for student subgroups, including minorities and special needs students.

Although the Bush on Bush accountability smackdown is too good a storyline to lay off, a few facts are worth mentioning. First, as this Herald Tribune article notes, to make adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind this year, schools in Florida need only have about one-third of students proficient in reading and math (as well as writing, which Florida chose to incorporate into the accountability system). That’s worth remembering when schools that were highly rated under Florida’s accountability system get labeled as needing improvement under NCLB. In this case the problem is not NCLB but Florida’s system, which ignored achievement gaps. Perhaps one-third students proficient is just too rigorous a goal. But for Edu Commentary’s money, if you were shipwrecked on a desert island where your life depended on solving an education problem you’d want George not Jeb to wash up with you (though you’d of course rather a whole slew of others washed up first…).

The Post article has some of the usual silliness about NCLB as a stalking horse for vouchers, but it also offers this gem of subtext about the through the looking glass politics surrounding this issue. The authors, Terry Neal and John Poole, write that the organized opposition, “consists mostly of educated, affluent whites who are alarmed at what they see as the undermining of a well-rounded education.” Umm…although Florida’s schools could certainly be better overall, it’s generally not white students who are most seriously shortchanged by the system right now.

All this aside, as the article notes, Jeb Bush was reelected despite a campaign against him that focused overwhelmingly on education. The lessons are pretty clear and very worth heeding this year: a.) Don’t mistake interest group discontentment for broad-based discontentment, and b.) Just because voters say they care a lot about education doesn’t mean they vote the issue. Florida’s state system has real problems, but if even those issues couldn’t turn voters out against the incumbent it seems unlikely that the less discernable NCLB standards will. Besides, if education issues offer the best grounds for criticism of George or Jeb Bush that any campaign can find they’re not looking very hard…

The Center for Education Policy reports that some school districts will get less Title I funding (the primary federal funds for poor students) even though overall funding has gone up. CEP reports that Title I funding has increased 41 percent overall since 2001. (That chortling sound you hear is the Bush – Cheney campaign, which has been trying to make that point for a while and must be thrilled to have some validation…) But because No Child Left Behind included provisions to better target federal funding to poor children, many school districts and some states stand to lose funding under updated data. CEP rightly notes that the best way to deal with this problem is to fully fund Title I, which still does not reach all eligible children or even all children in some high poverty communities.

Yet, in the meantime, it’s a good idea to target the money as much as possible and resist the obvious political temptation to spread it far and wide but thin. Remember, the poorest school districts are most likely to have trouble raising money on their own to fund schools, and state finance systems often shortchange these districts as well. While highlighting the overall Title I funding shortfall, the CEP report unfortunately gives cover to the far and wide camp and efforts to dilute targeting. (That’s the other chortling sound you may be hearing…)

Reality Check Afterthought: CEP notes that two states that stand to lose under the new formulas are Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Hmmm…MA Senator Ted Kennedy and PA Senator Arlen Specter, who chairs the Senate subcommittee in charge of education spending…unlikely they’ll end up feeling much pain in the end…

Flashback Afterthought: Yes, this is basically the same data the Center for American Progress released a few months ago to make the same point.

Flashback Afterthought II: By the way, this isn’t some right wing plot. During NCLB debate Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) was a key champion of better targeting federal education dollars…