Go Schools.Com/Courage

This is year 2 of the Public Education Network's national campaign for good public schools. Its aim is to get people talking about public schools, caring about public schools, etc. I don't know how PEN is evaluating its success, or if it can, but its efforts are a drop in a pretty dry bucket. In an effort to improve public schools, we're all pretty focused on what's not working. If you were to read a random selection of policy papers on education right now, you'd hear different voices of the same chorus: our school teachers are weak and maldistributed, school leaders are even weaker, our students are overtested or poorly tested or both, and we need more and better choices if we want our kids to be able to compete in a global economy. Much of this is true, and the fundamental inequity that some policies are trying to address is absolutely a worthwhile civil rights fight. But lest we succumb to the baby/bathwater problem, we should be reminded that public education is still one of, if not the best social service system we have. And it is without a doubt our nation's most important democratizing institution. So how useful is PEN's campaign? Not as useful as it would be if we had a real marketing strategy for our nation's public schools-old and new models alike- the way we do for other publicly-funded endeavors.

p.s. Video-gaming war wouldn't be my pick for schools. But then neither would Kanye West in all his educational glory.

Death at an Early Age

I was in San Francisco the weekend before last, not at the big ETS teacher quality shindig with everyone else, but across town at an event sponsored by CFED (formerly, in a Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-to-KFC kind of way, the Corporation for Enterprise Development) focused on building assets for low-income families. The topic was school funding fairness, and the audience was mostly child advocates who tend to be removed from many education debates. It was a good reminder that that the conceptual and organizational divide between the education and human services spheres is significant and problematic. They often don't know or understand what we're doing, and vice versa.

So, in a small attempt to bridge the gap, let me just note that President Bush's veto of the State Children's Health Insurance Program expansion is surely the worst education news of the day. Children--students--die every day in this country for lack of health insurance, a moral stain that has set for much too long.

The New York Times reports that "The White House has rejected as “preposterous” any suggestion that Mr. Bush does not care about the welfare of poor children." I'm sure that's true, since you'd have to be a sociopath to feel otherwise. The President just doesn't care about poor children as much as he cares about financing massive tax breaks for the wealthy, disastrous foreign wars, cowtowing to big business interests, and staying in the good graces of the militant anti-governement types who comprise what's left of his small and shrinking base of support.

Two Down, Five to Go

I wasn't going to read Bob Herbert's education column today, because Bob Herbert is boring, but then I thought of T.A. Frank's excellent article on the Herbert boringness phenomenon, and decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did! Instead of the standard establishment fare I was expecting, Herbert comes strong from the edu-reform CW perspective, saying we need more charter schools like KIPP and endorsing the Kane / Staiger / Gordon teacher-effectiveness-based, fie-upon-certification induction model.

With Nicholas Kristoff's column from earlier this year, which made the same exact point, that makes two New York Times columnists to jump on the Kane bandwagon. How many more can he bring on board? David Brooks seems like the obvious next choice, this is right up his alley, and he can probably get Friedman to bite if he uses the word "Bangalore" a lot. It'll be tougher sledding from there, though -- if Kane can get Maureen Dowd to write 700 words on teacher quality, I'll be impressed.

Philly Phun

While Eduwonk was busy making sure the whole edu-world knows about the Missouri Department of Education's shameful anti-NCLB conspiracy, I spent the weekend in Philadelphia visiting friends, eating a lot of good food, and generally soaking up the kind of festive atmosphere that can only come from the knowledge that you, as a city, are collectively sticking it to millions of baseball fans in the greater New York metropolitan area.

On Saturday my lovely wife and I spent some time on Philadelphia's famed museum-lined Benjamin Franklin parkway, which is the big wide street Rocky sprinted down before climbing the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, turning to face the city, and doing that arms-above-the-head, jumping-up-and-down, end-of-"Gonna Fly Now"-montage thing. Thirty-some years after the movie was released, tourists repeat this manuever approximately once every 30 seconds, all day long.

Anyway, they were having some kind of big street-festival type thing, which featured a bad rock band at the end and a motorcycle stunt team in the middle, sponsored by Red Bull. Interesting fact: watching someone jump off a ramp on a motorcycle and then do handstands on top of the motorcycle or better yet backflips with the motorcycle before landing on another ramp is exponentially more exciting in person than on TV. This is a consequence of the CGIfication of entertainment, I think--what with the computer special effects these days, nothing on a screen is truly thrilling, even if you objectively know it's real. Seriously, I now have a much greater appreciation for why people pay $40 to see this stuff at various regional civic centers nationwide.

The event was also rife with for-profit student lenders (Philly has a zillion colleges) who offered a simple, enticing deal: in exchange for your name and email address, we'll give you a frisbee, a beer bottle opener key chain, and barrage you with offers to lend you vast amounts of money at non-subsidized and possibly usurious interest rates, starting tomorrow and ending (possibly) when you die. Who could resist? I know I didn't.

I also saw a guy with a T-shirt that said the following:

Knowledge is Power.
Power Corrupts.
Study Hard.
Be Evil.

Finally, at long last, our blog has a slogan.

NCLB Lawbreakers

Via Eduwonk, a story of what appears to be a widespread conspiracy within the Missouri Department of Education to systematically violate the No Child Left Behind law. According to a U.S. Department of Educaiton investigation, the state illegally failed to identify many low-performing schools and districts as not making "adequate yearly progress" under the law. It also failed to identify schools as "in need of improvement," because that status is assigned to schools that missed AYP two years in a row, and the state never compared the current year's AYP list to the previous year's AYP list.

Why did Missouri do this? Because they don't like NCLB:

In an interview with Thompson Publications, a state official acknowledged that Missouri circumvented the law at least partially due to philosophical objections to aspects of NCLB. Misunderstandings betwen [the U.S. Department of Education] and the state also played a role, said Becky Kemna, Missouri's new director of federal programs.

Another issue is that Dee Beck, Kemna's predecessor and an outspoken critic of many aspects of the law, retired just before [U.S. Department of Education] monitors visited--a fact Kemna tried to address diplomatically.

"I'm in kind of a difficult spot," she said. "I just took this job. I don't want to be seen as being critical of the past director."

Nontheless, she said, the problems outlined in the report were the result of "a combination of not agreeing with aspects of the law and not being clear about what was expected of us in some cases."

Kemna laters complains that Missouri should have been cited for merely"a faulty calculation" on district AYP. Next time I cheat on my taxes, I'm going to run that one by the IRS.

A couple of observations:

One, it's amazing to see the difference between the way NCLB is talked about and the way it's playing out on the ground. Even as we witness the sorry spectacle of the California Teacher's Association denouncing George Miller and Nancy Pelosi for not watering down the law enough (memo to liberal interest groups: if you find yourself denouncing Nancy Pelosi as a tool of the conservative establishment, its time to seriously consider switching medications), there are whole states where the law has already been rendered effectively meaningless.

Second, this kind of behavior is beyond the pale. It's one thing for a state to monkey around with confidence intervals and N-sizes and various other dubious mechanisms for relieving pressure on schools to improve. I've criticized those measures in the past and will again. But they've all been approved by the U.S. Department of Education. Nobody's breaking any laws.

This, on the other hand, is illegal pure and simple. Congress will reauthorize NCLB some day, and when it does various chief state school officers and state officials will wring their hands and complain about burdensome federal intrustion, violations of state's rights, etc. etc. When they do, I hope someone reminds them how Missouri definitively proved that when it comes to education, some states simply can't be trusted to the right--or legal--thing.