Fenty's School Plan

Newly-inaugurated DC Mayor Adrian Fenty unveiled his plan to take over the D.C. Public Schools this morning. Key provisions include:

• Placing day-to-day operation of schools in the control of a NYC-style schools chancellor, who would report to Fenty and be a cabinet-level officer in his administration.
• Appointing a schools ombudsman.
• Creating a facilities management and construction authority to manage the district's school facilities and implement the School Modernization Financing Act of 2006.
• Stripping the elected school board of its day-to-day school oversight role and budgetary authority, but maintaining its responsibility for state level functions such as academic standards and teacher certification.
• Placing all charter schools under the oversight of the Public Charter School Board and requiring school charters to be reviewed every three years (instead of the current five year reviews).

FWIW, this plan--Fenty taking over day-to-day operations and the Board of Ed maintaining control over state-level roles--is the exact opposite of what I predicted will eventually happen and what several folks smarter than me have recommended.

Some of these steps could potentially be good ideas, but it's hard for me to say for sure until I see the text of the legislation. More importantly, no one should be tricked into thinking that just giving Fenty control of the schools, in and of itself, will translate into better learning for DC kids. After all, the District has had at least three different governance structures answering to both the electorate and various appointing entities over the past 10 years, but no one believes a lot of progress has been made as a result of these changes. Good governance is a prerequisite to reform, and putting the schools in the hands of someone who has the authority to act decisively to improve student achievement can produce good results, but it's what people do with their authority that really matters.

So far, Fenty's picked good people for his education team, and this makes me hopeful. (I recently learned that the excellent Abby Smith, who's been serving in Teach for America's DC office as their VP for Research and Public Policy, is joining Fenty's education team--this is good news.) But he said little about what he'll do in practice to improve the schools once he gets control. No one should be under the illusion that Mayoral control alone is a silver bullet.

The legislation needs to be approved by the DC Council. Fenty has a good moment of political support right now because of the desperation and urgency to improve DC schools, and a majority of the council members appeared with him today announcing the plan (although not all of those who appeared agreed to endorse it). But there is strong opposition from local activists on home rule grounds, as well as the DC education establishment. Newly elected school board president Robert Bobb has strongly criticized Fenty's plan. A lot of reform-minded people in DC who support Fenty's takeover idea also campaigned for Bobb as an education reformer, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out in practice. Finally, there's the wild card of Congress here. It appears that Fenty could technically do many of the things he wants to do without Congressional approval, but Congress still holds the purse strings and they could also bigfoot Fenty's plan if they wanted to or enact it themselves if it can't get local support to pass (as happened with the School Reform Act of 1996 and charter schools). This could produce all kinds of insanity. Stay tuned for more.

Is School the Fountain of Youth?

An interesting article in the New York Times today about the life-extending benefits of school. Apparently, spending time in the classroom may actually add years to your life. I’m not sure if I’m sold on it yet, but it’s worth checking out the article. If nothing else, it points out the difficulties and uncertainties of this kind of research.

Now it's time to get back to those graduate school applications...

Left-Right Fringe Convergence Rears its Ugly Head Again

So, I was feeling cranky with Joanne Jacobs and Ken DeRosa for giving any attention at all the this utterly crackpot John Derbyshire rant on education, when I got to his fourth bullet point and nearly choked to death on my Diet Coke:

There is the homework racket, exposed in Alfie Kohn's book The Homework Myth--basically, a device for getting parents to do teachers' work for them.

That John Derbyshire is endorsing that Alfie Kohn? Do we need any more evidence of a frightening convergence of the crazy right and crazy left fringes on education?

Boundaries

You can learn a lot from the things that people say go without saying.

For example, AFTie Michelle recently came across a teacher policy paper that my Quick+ED colleague Sara Mead wrote with Andrew Leigh a couple of years ago. Citing research from Caroline Hoxby, the paper posited that:

"collective bargaining agreements that compressed teacher pay scales and eliminated the possibility of performance-based pay for highly effective teachers might have reduced the returns to aptitude in teaching."

This apparently struck Michelle as so on-its-face ridiculous that she wrote a December 26th post with the very not-in-the-holiday-spirit title of "Dumb and Dumber," complaining that this is obviously absurd because...well, just because.

In refutation, she notes that unions helped to improve teacher salaries and working conditions, which is perfectly true, but doesn't address the actual issue at hand: wage compression. She also asserts that the Hoxby article Sara cites wasn't peer reviewed. The comments section suggests that this is wrong, but in any case it's a strange standard for the AFT to start throwing around, given that less than two weeks earlier Michelle was perfectly willing to cite AFT research director Howard Nelson's not-peer-reviewed research on teacher transfer provisions.

Finally, Michelle dismisses the research as "in keeping with Hoxby's dim view of unions," for which she provides a link to another Hoxby paper finding that teachers union policies have had a negative impact on student achievement. In other words, Hoxby's criticisms of union policy cannot be trusted, because she has a documented track record of criticizing union policy.

My point is not to hack on Michelle's sour post as yet another example of the frustrating tendency of teachers unions to characterize all criticisms of union policies as thinly veiled attempts to attack or otherwise undermine the very existence of unions themselves, to see all critiques through the lens of teachers unions' existential struggle...well, okay, that may be partially my point.

But the larger issue here is the way underlying shared assumptions have a huge impact on the way people talk to one another, take in information, and generally see the world. I'm routinely fascinated by the way two reasonable, well-meaning people can look at the same information in a policy debate and reaching diametrically opposite conclusions. The difference (usually) isn't that one person is just stupid or acting in bad faith. It's that they simply have a whole different way of seeing things, different baseline facts and modes of thinking that are very hard to shake.

Different boundaries, in other words. For people who live and breath unionism, the idea that the rise of unions could have been in any way a bad thing is literally beyond the pale. They resent even having to address the issue. The idea--which I personally believe-- that unionism was on balance a big improvement, but came with both pluses and minuses, is outside the confines of polite conversation.

The lesson for advocates and policy entrepreneurs is that if you want to make a real difference in the world, try to figure out where the boundaries are, and move them. It's hard, because people don't like to have their baseline assumptions shaken. It's nice to walk out the door in the morning knowing that some things are true and some things are not, and it feels rude when someone tells you otherwise. But that's where the real potential for change lies--not just telling people what to think but how to think, not just giving them new information but new ways to interprate all kinds of information. Doing so makes people unfcomfortable, and is bound to produce an intemperate blog post or two. But in the long run, it's the policy work most worth doing.

Update: AFTie Michele notes that I've spelled her name wrong throughout the post above. My bad! Clearly, I need to be reading Eduwonk more closely. It's One-L, not two.....