Full-Service Schools

I had the good fortune to moderate a symposium on education policy in Denver last week hosted by Mayor John Hickenlooper. It was one of ten non-partisan events the host city organized in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention on wonky topics ranging from global warming to transportation infrastructure.

There were several highlights to the conversation among the ten panelists at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, including a declaration by John Wilson, the executive director of the National Education Association, that his union is open to changes to the traditional single salary schedule for teachers. A couple of weeks earlier, the NEA's Denver affliate had theatened to go on strike during the convention over Denver's closely watched alternative to the single salary schedule, called ProComp.

The Denver Classroom Teachers Association had originally signed onto the four-year-old experiment, which combined incentives pay for working in tough-to-staff schools with performance pay tied to strong evaluations, student achievement, and professional development work. The local started making feints towards the picket line in part because superintendent Michael Bennet wanted to give less experienced teachers larger raises than veterans to lower attrition among the city's newer teachers.

Bennet got most of what he wanted in a deal signed during the convention. Word has it that the Obama campaign suggested to the NEA that it probably wouldn't be in the interest of the Democratic party and the several hundred NEA members serving as Democratic delegates to have images of striking teachers playing on a continuous CNN loop in the middle of the convention.

On another topic, Paula Prahl, a vice-president at Best Buy, a symposium sponsor, offered up one of the pithier formulations on public school finance that I've heard: Our dependence on the property tax system to fund public education has turned public schooling into a property right. So if you don't have property [ie, if you don't live in a school system with decent property values], you don't have the right to a good education.

But for my money, KIPP founder Mike Feinberg made one of the most important contributions to the roundtable discussion, which in addition to Wilson and Prahl included Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute, former Colorado Governor and LA school superintendent Roy Romer, Obama advisor Jon Schnur, billionaire school refomer and philantropist Eli Broad, former Cleveland superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett, and a number of others in the school reform and corporate worlds.

In response to a question from one of the 350 or so people in the audience about whether schools should be expected to overcome the many disadvantages that students from poor families bring to the classroom, Feinberg pointed out the KIPP is build on the premise that there should be high expectations for all kids--and that schools serving kids from impoverished backgrounds need to surround them with support. KIPP provides a longer school day and school year, tutors, parent education programs, and host of community partnerships that supply vision screening, health care, counseling and other services.

KIPP, it struck me as Feinberg was speaking, suggests the futility of the now-several-months-long debate between two rival camps of mostly Democratic school reformers. The first, the Education Equlity Project, a coalition of reformers, urban political leaders, and civil rights advocates organized by New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, is advocating a regulatory reform agenda: rigorous standards, school accountability and, above all, changes in the way teachers are hired, fired and compensated. The project is the brainchild of Klein's deputy, Chris Cerf, who has sought to build a coalition of African American political leaders to counter the influence of teachers' union in urban education. Cerf believes that it's going to take minority communities and their elected representatives standing up to the unions to win the new teacher compensation systems and other changes that he, Klein and others are pushing to attract and keep talent in urban schools.

The EEC was out in force in Denver, co-sponsoring a press conference and panel discussions featuring rising African American political stars like Corey Booker of Newark and Adrian Fenty of Washington.

The other group, formed by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, argues in a manifesto called the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education that it's not reasonable to assign to schools alone the challenge of, or the responsibility for, educating disadvantaged students. It's unfair to expect schools to bear that burden without the help of better health care and housing and improvements in other aspects of the lives of the disadvantaged.

The two factions have polarized the school reform debate dramatically in recent months. Needlessly, the KIPP model suggests. Many KIPP schools have produced impressive results by combining the core elements of both camps. They have reconfigured the school day and the school year. They have rethought teacher recruitment, roles, and compensation. And they have demanded accountability from every adult in their buildings. At the same time, many of the 66 KIPP schools around the country have sought to address head-on the dearth of social capital among many of their students and have extended their relationship to their students far beyond the classroom to help improve their students' readiness to learn.

At their best, they represent a new breed of innovative youth service and education centers. It's a model for the rest of public education, though one that raises a lot of issues for public educators and school reformers alike, as I'll discuss in a forthcoming Education Sector report.

"would not benefit..."

A little after noon today, the Washington Teachers Union (WTU), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, sent an email to its members that begins as follows:

Dear [member],

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has proposed regulations that would require a DC Public School (DCPS) teacher to demonstrate effectiveness as a condition for teacher licensure renewal. This proposed regulation would not benefit DCPS teachers, as a teacher's true effectiveness should not be linked to a teacher's right to renew his or her license.

The email goes on to label as "dangerous and discriminatory" a proposal that would create "a new Advanced Teaching Credential that would require a candidate to demonstrate effectiveness to continue teaching in a District of Columbia Public School." It then offers a sample letter for members to write to DC elected officials, including the following:

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has proposed a new Advanced Teaching Credential that would require new and current teachers to demonstrate effectiveness in order to obtain licensure renewal. Clearly these proposed regulations would not benefit DCPS and have no relationship to student achievement.

I understand that the WTU has an obligation to look after the interests of its members. That's what it's there for, and there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, I think a well-functioning school system requires teachers who are well-represented and have their voices heard. And while it's easy to be self-righteous and say "we need to worry about what's good for the children in our schools, not the adults," that's an extreme and ultimately self-defeating formulation. The adults in the schools will determine whether the children are well educated. Both interests must be served. When those interests collide, as they sometimes do, they should be balanced. It's fair to say that adult interests have had too much sway in many cases, but we can't pretend they don't exist. I suppose it'd be in the best interests of students for adults to work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for $10,000 a year, but I don't think anyone could reasonably suggest that teachers be forced to do so.

The letter also makes the fair point that it could be confusing and problematic to have the OSSE engage in a teacher evaluation process that's separate from or overlapping with processes conducted by the district itself. The WTU calls for a comprehensive and ongoing process" of teacher evaluation that "uses clearly-defined standards." I agree.

But--it's hard for me to attribute reasonableness and good faith to the WTU in all of this when they say that "a teacher's true effectiveness should not be linked to a teacher's right to renew his or her license." That's a clear line, and they're on the wrong side of it. Nobody deserves the right to a job irrespective of their ability to do it well, particularly not people who teach schoolchildren.
It's also hard to credit the idea that the proposed regulations "clearly" have "no relationship to student achievement" when, as the letter notes, the final regulations defining the Advanced Teaching Credential haven't even been issued yet.

The bottom line is that the teaching profession needs to become more attuned to and aligned with the reality of teacher effectiveness, defined as success in helping students learn. There are all kinds of difficult issues to contend with in getting there. But the kind of principled rejection of that idea embodied in this letter will marginalize teachers unions in a way that serves no one well in the end.

Update: Interesting comments thread on this here.

Backward, Forward, Upside-Down

Last week, Post business columnist Steven Pearstein praised the Fenty/Rhee proposal to pay teachers much more money in exchange for more accountability and less tenure. In doing so, he also acknowledged the tradeoffs and potential complications:

Sure, there will be times when teachers will be treated in an arbitrary and capricious way if they give up their tenure rights. Guess what: It happens all the time in the private sector, where hiring, promotion and pay decisions are sometimes made with incomplete information, favoritism, or undue emphasis on one factor or another. But despite this imperfection, despite the numerous instances of unfairness and poor judgment, somehow the vast majority of Americans manage to find a job, move up the ladder and enjoy their work, and companies manage to operate successfully and turn a profit.

Leo Casey of the United Federation of Teachers in New York responded to the above by saying, "In short, non-union employees are regularly screwed, so why should unionized teachers expect a fair shake? Can anyone say “race to the bottom?”

I think Leo is getting the directionality wrong. To be sure, there are millions of workers in jobs that combine low wages, few benefits, and a high degree of vulnerability to the caprice and ill intentions of management. Unions have historically played a tremendously valuable role in lifting such workers up, giving them the compensation, stability and dignity they deserve.

That said, there are also steps on the career and professional ladder above and beyond solid, reasonably paid union and civil service-type jobs: management and the highly-paid professions. Once people move into this realm, they start to relinquish the very same workforce protections and guarantees that they gained when they moved from poorly-paid, unstable positions into the the solid middle. But they do so from a very different position, one that affords them far more power to negotiate in the labor market and more flexibility to make choices about where to work.

The Fenty/Rhee proposal is really about moving teachers up into that third category. It's a race to the top, not the bottom. That comes with serious implications for the nature of teacher collective bargaining, which is why the DC contract negotiations have taken on larger national significance. But it's a conversation that has to happen if schools are going to get the kind of talented, highly-paid teachers they need. (Read more on this from Paul Tough at his new temporary Slate education blog here.)

Boast Away

Like all good Ohio State University alumni (M.P.A. ‘95), I’ve been preparing to obsessively follow the highly-ranked Buckeyes football team from the pre-season all the way to the traditional blowout loss in the National Championship game on January 8th. But this year my loyalties are divided. I have a new favorite team: the aptly-named Mavericks of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, which recently had the temerity to issue a press release announcing that it may be doing a particularly good job of helping its students learn.

Oh, the controversy! By citing its unusually high scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, UNO was either giving in to satanic temptation or paving the way for totalitarian dictatorship, depending on who you asked. “Shame,” said one anonymous commenter at Inside Higher Ed. “Lies,” said another. “Gamesmanship,” said an official at the State University of New York at Binghamton, lamenting that his faculty’s hard work in developing local assessments would be undone.

Well, that’s easy for him to say. Binghamton is the flagship university in the SUNY system. It can pick and choose from among the best students across New York State and nationwide, most of whom come from relatively well-off backgrounds and enroll full time, living on-campus or nearby. Binghamton’s median SAT scores are high, funding levels generous, and scholarly reputation strong, leading U.S. News & World Report to rank it as the 37th best public university in America — sorry, 34th best, up three from last year, which Binghamton proudly announced on August 22nd. In a press release.

Apparently, it’s perfectly OK to boast about your performance on a measure that’s highly correlated with, and partially based on, how well your students did on a standardized test they took when they were juniors in high school. But a test of how much they learned after enrolling? Gamesmanship!

Read the rest of this column here at Inside Higher Ed.

The Loving Hardass

I'll second Kevin's link to Sherman Dorn. Sherman's post does a nice job splitting the difference between the Education Equality Project and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Read it all, but note especially his title, "The Loving Hardass." I think that's about right where we should be in accountability for schools: we should not forget that we're working with children from diverse backgrounds, nor that we have a responsibility as adults to do our jobs as best we can with what we have.

That said, Sherman's even-handed approach lacks the insistence necessary for change. We need our education leaders to say, with more frequency and greater urgency, things like, "We can prove it doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is or what your home life is -- every single child can achieve." We need more speeches that include unequivocal lines like this one:

For the children who are denied the education they need to fulfill their God-given potential, it is a personal tragedy, and an inexcusable injustice. It is also an affront to American values, and a threat to America’s role as an incubator of innovation.

This must change.

Contrast the above quotes with this, the third graf of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education:

Evidence demonstrates, however, that achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status are present before children even begin formal schooling. Despite the impressive academic gains registered by some schools serving disadvantaged students, there is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can close these gaps in a substantial, consistent, and sustainable manner.

Ignoring for a moment what type of message this sends, consider that the word "education" appears in the Broader, Bolder title. It isn't a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Social Policy" or a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Children's Policy." The authors specifically chose to include the word "education" in the title, but spend the brunt of the statement asking for an expansion into early childhood education and health services and for education policymakers to pay more attention to student experiences outside of school. Again, those are worthy goals, but they ignore what schools can do. Writing in Democratic Education, in 1987, Amy Gutmann had a strong rebuttal to this point that still applies today:

Among the many myths about American education in recent years has been the view that schooling does not matter very much--except perhaps for the pleasure it gives children while they experience it--because it makes little or no difference to how income, work, or even intelligence gets distributed in our society. Like most myths, this one has no apparent author but a lot of social influence. Unlike some myths, the myth of the moral insignificance of of schooling distorts rather than illuminates our social condition. Its prophecy--of inevitable disillusionment with even our best efforts to educate citizens through schooling--is self-fulfilling because it pays exclusive attention to the question of whether schools equalize and neglects the question of whether they improve the political and personal lives of citizens.

Sweet

Reading the somewhat positive reviews of Matthew Sweet's new album generated a fit of early-90s nostalgia over the weekend, so I threw the trio of albums he recorded with Robert Prine, Richard Lloyd et al into the car and gave them a re-listen while driving around town doing errands and such. Conclusion: still really good! But while Altered Beast and 100% Fun are certainly minor classics, 1991's Girlfriend remains a certified desert island-quality pop-rock masterpiece. On one level it's just another piece of evidence supporting the first principle of musical greatness, namely that while talent, hard work, and inspiration can take you far, the path to true immortality necessarily involves falling deeply in love only to have your heart ripped from your chest, thrown to the ground, and stomped so badly that you have no choice but to write songs about it because nothing else can ease the pain. Yet Girlfriend is also noteworthy for being a particularly comprehensive example of the genre, narratively speaking. Blood on the Tracks is mostly aftermath, a pure howl of rage. Rumours demonstrated the commercial potential of keeping the band together after everyone cheated on and betrayed everyone else--no easy trick. (Sleater-Kinney managed this for one song but I suspect the wounds in that case didn't go so deep.) In Girlfriend, Sweet takes nearly half the album explaining the precursors of his failed marriage, laying out with brutal honesty how his own obsessive neediness and impossible expectations sowed the seeds of the inevitable breakup. Then, the gut-punched anger of "Thought I Knew You" on track 8 is followed by sadness ("You Don't Love Me"), defiance ("I Wanted to Tell  You"), and so and so forth all the way to the philosophic resignation of "Nothing Lasts," the original title of the album. Of course, the perspectives of heartache have their limitations--some things last. Girlfriend, for one. 

Dorn Speaks

I've sort of resisted buying into the "dueling manifestos" charaterization of this and that, since the makers of the respective documents insist that wasn't their intent and I'm inclined to believe them. Nor are they really written in a way that allows for clear comparisons. But in the end it's fair to say that they represent two competing perspectives on education reform and the dueling meme seems inescapable, so with that in mind let me say that I find very little to disagree with in Sherman Dorn's lengthy take on the subject and I recommend it for those who really like diving into these weeds.

A Great School Depression?

Not to be insensitive (okay, maybe a little), but color me skeptical of Sam Dillon's new piece in the New York Times, "Hard Times Hitting Students and Schools," which stitches together a variety of anecdotes and data points related to mortgage foreclosures, rising food and fuel prices and state budget shortfalls into a picture of school fiscal distress that's almost surely overblown. And in some cases, misses the point entirely:

Responding to a cut of $43 million by the state in education spending and to higher energy and other costs, school officials in Jefferson County [Kentucky] have raised lunch prices, eliminated 17 buses by reorganizing routes, ordered drivers to turn off vehicles rather than letting them idle and increased property taxes.

and:

West Virginia officials issued a memorandum recently to local districts titled “Tips to Deal With the Skyrocketing Cost of Fuel.” Last week, David Pauley, the transportation supervisor for the Kanawha County school system, based in Charleston, met with drivers of the district’s 196 buses to outline those policies. Mr. Pauley told them to stay 5 miles per hour below the limit, to check the tire pressure every day and to avoid jackrabbit starts.

As others have noted, school transportation is notoriously inefficient, wasteful and polluting. Rather than characterizing the above as evidence of a terrible financial crisis, it would make a lot more sense to call it what it is: a case of rising fuel prices causing schools to implement common-sense fuel efficiency measures that should have been in place a long time ago, and we're all better off as a result. 

Also:

In interviews, educators in many states said they were seeing more needy families than at any time in memory.

The national poverty rate didn't change in 2007 and while the economy seems to have deteriorated since then, I doubt poverty has suddenly yanked back up to where it was in the early 1990s. The article also cites an increase in the number of students applying for free- and reduced-price lunch. It's worth noting that those numbers held steady and in some cases rose all the way through the late 1990s, even as poverty fell to historic lows in 2000, so that measure doesn't have a great track record in terms of sensitivity to changing poverty conditions. 

The point being, we (a) live in a big, diverse country, and (b) have not vanquished the business cycle, so there will inevitably be places and times when the fiscal fortunes of schools and students take a turn for the worse. But if you simply pick and choose the most alarming numbers and quotes, you're almost surely going to portray things as worse in the aggregate than they really are. 

Words from Vowell

Sarah Vowell offers a paeon to Pell Grants:

I paid my way through Montana State University with student loans, a minimum-wage job making sandwiches at a joint called the Pickle Barrel, and — here come the waterworks — Pell Grants. Thanks to Pell Grants, I had to work only 30 hours a week up to my elbows in ham instead of 40.

Ten extra hours a week might sound negligible, but do you know what a determined, junior-Hillary type of hick with a full course load and onion-scented hands can do with the gift of 10 whole hours per week? Not flunk geology, that’s what. Take German every day at 8 a.m. — for fun! Wander into the office of the school paper on a whim and find a calling. I’m convinced that those 10 extra hours a week are the reason I graduated magna cum laude, which I think is Latin for “worst girlfriend in town.”

People tend to talk and think about student financial aid and college access in pretty straightforward terms: College is the kingdom of opportunity, but they charge at the gate to get in. Give students financial aid and they'll go to college; don't give them aid and they won't.

But while economics tells us that there must be students whose go / no-go college attendance decisions are affected by marginal differences in price, in the grand scheme of things it's pretty clear that most students are going to college whether or not Pell Grants and other aid programs are well-funded. College has doubled in price in real dollars over the last two decades, aid programs haven't kept up, yet the percentage of high school graduates going on to higher education hovers at an all-time high. 

Most students, in other words, are entering the kingdom, one way or another. The real difference financial aid makes is in what happens when they get there. Spiraling tuition is forcing more low-income students out of the four-year sector into community colleges, and while you can get a great education in the two-year sector, your odds of ultimately earning a bachelor's degree are much lower. Without sufficient financial aid, a lot of students are forced to work near full-time, and while Sarah Vowell went on to the pages of the New York Times, studies show that working 30+ hours a week is a significant risk factor for dropping out before earning a degree. Or students grind through, but miss the experiences that make college so worthwhile. Or they finish, but buckle under the burden of debt (un-dischargeable in bankruptcy, thank you Sallie Mae) five or ten  years down the road. 

In other words, Pell Grants don't always make the difference between nothing and something when it comes to a college education. But they do make the difference between something and something worth having.