A Good Thing About What Works

I'm not the biggest fan of the What Works Clearinghouse (as you might note from my earlier rant on "What Works" best for ELL tots: lions or aardvarks). So it gives me pleasure to share, as reported in a recent EdWeek article, that IES has formally acknowledged that WWC might need some tweaking to actually become relevant to educators.

You might have expected big things in the first 4 years of the WWC. I mean, when the American Institutes for Research, which must be the biggest ed research firm by now having eaten up most of its smaller competitors in the past five years, teams up with big-time subcontractors like Lockheed Martin and the University of Pennsylvania, you'd think something pretty big would come out of it. But you'd be wrong.

Yes, there's been a lot of time and effort (oh, and a little money too) invested in creating an initial infrastructure and then protocols for review, advisory groups and other "products, activities and services". But still there are only 7 topics covered and a paltry number of studies that may or may not work but at least made it through the crazy filter set up to distinguish good research from bad.

Really, though, I'm glad that they've seen the light and are looking for ways to include real programs and practices that schools and communities are using. It should push AIR or any other potentially winning bidders to change the approach, which is a good thing.

Julie Amero and Technical Literacy

Technology and science bloggers and writers have been buzzing recently about the case of Julie Amero, a substitute teacher from Connecticut facing up to 40 years in prison because of an incident in which some students saw pornographic photos on a classroom computer. Amero's defense argues that the pictures the students saw were unwanted pop-ups, the result of a spyware infecting the computer. Her story sounds quite plausible and people who know more than I do about both technology and the specific facts of the case seem to believe she's an innocent victim here, not a criminal.

Somewhat surprisingly, education blogs have been pretty quiet about the case.

Reading accounts of the case, I couldn't help but be struck by the level of technological incompetence and neglect they suggested. The classroom computer involved was seriously outdated--WaPo reports it was running Windows 98. What's more, the school's technology infrastructure appears to have been very poorly maintained: Both the school's firewall subscription and the machine's anti-virus software were expired, which seems pretty inexcusable and possibly a violation of federal law. And I would be shocked if Norwich--which has more-disadvantaged kids than the average Connecticut school, but is hardly high-poverty and spends about the statewide average--is the only school district where this is the case. There's a lot of talk in education circles about the need to get kids proficient in using modern information technology, of which I'm sort of skeptical, but it's hard to see much chance of that happening if the adults in charge can't even take care of basic maintenance of their technology equipment. Moreover, and I know this is a cliche, but what other professionals would put up with working with the kind of out-dated, ill-maintained technology so many teachers are expected to use?

Better Than Anything in the SOTU

So, I think Assorted Stuff's suggestion for open source textbooks is a pretty good idea.

And, all due respect to The Essential Blog's objections, this sounds pretty sweet, too, certainly no worse than the umpteen other game shows out there built around the same "superficial nature of displaying knowledge" that Essential Blog finds so offensive. And way cooler than Deal or No Deal, which seemingly requires no knowledge at all.

Will the real Margaret Spellings please stand up?

Note to NBC: This woman is NOT Margaret Spellings.


This is Margaret Spellings. Yes, the pink suits can be confusing.

Bush Hearts Baby Einstein

Am I the only person who found it odd and somewhat unseemly that the President of the United States used a portion of his State of the Union Address to essentially advertise a line of baby toys? Does this mean they qualify as being based in scientifically-based research? (Cuz I'm skeptical: more TK)

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The Most Education-y Oscars Ever?

Let other folks be all about the SOTU; I want to talk about the educational implications of today's Academy Award nominations. In what may well be an historical first, three out of the 20 acting nominees are nominated for their performances as teachers: Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson and Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal. I haven't seen Half Nelson--though I want to--but Notes on a Scandal was very good and impressively acted. It's worth noting that none of these actors are playing the sort of teacher/hero/martyr character NYT contributor Tom Moore was all worked up about earlier this week; in fact, none of the characters are admirable, and some might even find them, especially Dench's Barbara Covett, despicable. I'm not sure if this says anything about public perception of teachers today (I kind of doubt it) or simply reflects that fact that deeply flawed characters tend to give actors more opportunities to show off their chops than saintly ones do. While you'd think martyr teacher roles would be Oscar bait, given the Academy's affection for "socially-conscious" movies (cough!-Blood Diamond-cough!), that doesn't seem to be the case. I can't find a recent example of someone being nominated for such a role, and I believe the last person to win an Academy Award for playing a teacher was Maggie Smith in the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie--a complicated character who inspired her students, but with some tragic effects. (I may be missing someone here, though: If I am, please shoot me a note and I'll correct.)

The educational relevance of this year's Oscar noms doesn't end there, however: Will Smith got a nomination for his performance in The Pursuit of Happyness, from which Richard Colvin drew some very interesting observations related to education.

And, lest we forget it's really all about the kids, there's awesomely adorable Abigail Breslin with a supporting actress nomination for Little Miss Sunshine. Indeed, the entire best supporting actress category is pretty kid-centric this year, including Breslin, Blanchett, Adriana Barraza as a nanny/housekeeper in Babel (her storyline includes some moments of not-high-quality childcare), and Rinko Kikuchi, also in Babel, playing a deaf mute teenager (even though Kikuchi herself is 25). The only one I can't make fit into that scheme is Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, which I guess is sort of appropriate seeing as how her character also winds up getting cut out of the group in the movie.

UPDATE: So it's not really Academy Awards or education related, but I'm pleased to read this story (via Joanne Jacobs) about young girls admiring recent Golden Globe winner (for Ugly Betty) America Ferrera. Ever since I saw Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (ok, make fun of me, yeah), I've believed that, if we lived in a good, righteous, just and proper world, America Ferrera would be oodles, oodles more famous, highly-compensated and adored than, say, Lindsay Lohan or the zillions of other stick-skinny, dippy starlets I keep seeing on the magazine covers in the supermarket chekout line. I was annoyed to learn she was being cast an an "ugly" character in Betty, but the show is proving itself worthy and Ms. Ferrera's getting mad kudos, so maybe the world is good after all.

UPDATE II: Speaking of things that prove the world is good and just (and now totally unrelated to education), yay for Mark Wahlberg getting nominated for his hysterically profane performance in The Departed.

More School Time

There are a lot of people celebrating the merits of Time right now. Policy proposals to add time to the school day or school year are popping up in states, districts and even on the national front. More school time is seen as the best way to help schools and students meet higher academic standards and keep the U.S. globally competitive. More time, it is said, will lead to more of everything: more core academics, more enrichment, more teacher planning and professional development.

There is no question that schools are struggling to fit it all in. But is adding time the answer?

Education Sector just released a new report on time. In it, I turn to research on time and learning to try to explain that while time certainly matters, it may not be the linchpin of school improvement. Of course it's a valuable resource for schools and yes, in good schools with quality teachers and strong curriculum, having more of it will lead to more good learning. But in schools with fewer experienced teachers, high turnover rates in staff and leadership, and a record of poor performance, it just doesn't sit right to keep kids in these schools longer. The kids in these schools-- generally the poorer kids who don't have their parents waiting at home to read to them or take them to private music lessons or language programs--do need more quality learning time to keep up with their peers and to get the education they deserve. But we must be careful not to assume that quantity matters as much as quality. It simply doesn't.

Read Jay Mathews take on it here, and read the full Education Sector report here.

Join us on February 7th to hear more perspectives on extending time in school.

The 99th Percentile of Intellectual Dishonesty

Charles Murray, in the first($) of a three-part(!) series on the relationship between IQ and education in the WSJ opinion page, says:

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question.

He then goes on to say:

That total lack of knowledge will not, however, prevent me from making a series of wholly unsubstantiated assertions about the educational limits of persons possessing various levels of intelligence. Such as saying of a student in the 49th IQ percentile, "It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity." Or that a student at the 20th percentile "will be able to comprehend only simple written material." Or that "To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you." Or that "it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education." These statistics and facts are, mind you, complete fabrications. But that's okay! As a reader of the Wall Street Journal Opinion page, you undoubtedly have a high enough IQ to discern the larger truth.

I may have made some of that up (not the quotes). But you see my point.

Note also the class condescension here:

The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason -- the list goes on and on -- is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?

Apparently, we should all appreciate the sacrifices made by Charles Murray and his ilk in the white-collar world, who have selflessly foregone the arcadian satisfactions of a blue-collar livelihood in order to enlighten us with their wisdom. And what do they get in return? An education system so hell-bent on giving everyone a chance to learn that you can't get any good help around the house. Why are those people wasting time in college when they could be downstairs fixing my sink?!

Bennet's (Revised) Rescue Plan

This week's New Yorker magazine features a story about Denver superintendent Michael Bennet's efforts to reform one of Denver's worst public schools. You may have seen some pieces of the ongoing saga about Manual High School, which by all accounts was a tough place to succeed as a reformer or as a student. Boo's account captures the story of this school and its students as a defining part of Bennet's tenure as superintendent, which began in the summer of 2005.

Bennet previously served as the chief of staff for Denver's mayor Hickenlooper and as a managing director for an investment company. An "educational outsider", Bennet looked to some basic principles of management and problem-solving, and immediately announced bold plans to improve and reform Denver's lowest performing schools. He developed three "steps to success", which he laid out in a July 2005 op-ed:
1. Create a safe and orderly environment in every school and every classroom;
2. Develop a highly skilled faculty in every school with access to robust professional development and real-time diagnostic data to evaluate student progress;
3. Support and equip principals to be instructional leaders for the faculty in their school.

All good ideas. But not enough. At least not for Manual High School. With good reason, Bennet set his sights on Manual from the start. Reforms at Manual had failed. Achievement was among the lowest in a low-performing district. In 2005, the 35 percent of Denver public school 9th graders scored proficient in reading, 24 percent in writing, and 12 percent in math. At Manual, 9th grade proficiency levels were just 12 percent for reading, 4 percent for writing, and a miserable 2 percent for math.

Bennet decided to close Manual, abruptly and without community buy-in or involvement. Bennet called it a "rescue mission" but the community was outraged and called the closure an "attack" on the low-income minority neighborhood and student body (Manual's student body is 90 percent Latino and 10 percent Black, 70 percent receiving free and reduced lunch, and nearly half designated English language learners).

As Boo describes, the plan was to redistribute Manual students among four higher-performing schools but, despite campus tours, new bus routes, and additional counseling, the kids scattered to schools throughout the city, including other low-performing public schools as well as online and night programs. Many registered but never showed up at their new schools.

Bennet still has high hopes for Manual, which is scheduled to be re-opened next year with a ninth grade (subsequent grades to be added each year), and stands behind his goals for all schools to be rigorous, high-performing and headed by strong leaders.

But Bennet has changed his tune and now acknowledges publicly that the culture of school and community has proven to be a stronger force than he expected, or bargained for. So he's now calling for more direct community involvement, even leadership, in redesigning Manual and other schools.

Boo's article reminds us of the obvious– school reform isn't easy. It also reminds us that separating school change from community change is not the best way out. Saving Manual will take innovation and smart ideas but, as Bennet has seen, it also will require collaboration and community support. There's a Manual Renewal Project, complete with community council, now in place. Whether this will work to save or re-invigorate this or any other failing school depends largely on how and if the community is really engaged and sustained in the effort to improve the school. After years of community-school reform efforts at one high school, I've learned that parent and student involvement in meetings and committees will not do the trick. Manual will need not only strong leadership (the job of Manual High School principal is open), high quality teachers and a new paint job, but also some systemic and ongoing partnerships with CBOS, local businesses and colleges to ensure that these kids get all of the resources and opportunities they need to succeed.

Down the Financial-Aid Hole

Two articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education today illustrate the complicated, head-spinning world of financial aid.

First, the White House issued a response yesterday to the Democrat’s proposed bill to cut interest rates on student loans. The response states:

Reducing student loan interest rates would direct subsidies to college graduates, not to students and their families who are struggling to meet current and future educational expenses. College graduates have higher lifetime earnings, and can already take advantage of flexible repayment options available under current law and reduce the effective interest rate they pay through the existing tax deduction for student loan interest.

While I agree with the White House’s argument that the Democrats’ bill neglects needed increases in grant aid, I disagree with the implication that all college graduates are equally able to repay student loans, or that current policies sufficiently help students with low post-graduation earnings. Few students take advantage of alternative repayment options--only 11%, according to an NCES report--and yet those with high debt or low incomes are at much higher risk of default. This is likely because 1) students don’t understand their options and 2) these programs don’t provide a real benefit to students, they only increase the repayment term and total cost of loans. Also, while current interest rate tax deductions provide some relief, it is minimal compared with the Democrats’ proposal. According to a GAO report, the average annual deduction is $134, which, over a 10-year loan amounts to much less than the $4,000 benefit under the Democrats’ plan.

Add to this mix story #2 from the Chronicle about a recent report from Eduventures on the rise in institutional aid among colleges and universities. While not entirely new information (see here and here), the report adds fuel to criticisms of colleges’ use of institutional aid. The report states that "need-based awards may be used, in part, as a recruiting mechanism to attract students of relatively higher academic profiles." This also means that less of this money is going to low-income students.

All this to say that financial aid in this country has become too complicated, too much of a black box, for most students and families to understand, much less optimize. The complicated and changing array of federal programs, not to mention state and institutional aid programs, makes a comprehensive financial aid reform bill both formidable, and absolutely necessary.

Mysteries, Puzzles, and Think Tanks

Malcom Gladwell published an article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago about the difference between a puzzle and mystery. While his focus was mainly on Enron, Watergate, and the changing nature of foreign intelligence, it strikes me that the distinction has a lot of relevance to some of the ongoing tensions between the research and think tank spheres. Gladwell says:

The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a puzzle. We can't find him because we don't have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn't a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much."

The foreign intelligence community has been struggling, according to Treverton, because the nature of its job is changing. During the Cold War, it spent a lot of time solving puzzles. In this day and age, it is increasingly charged with solving mysteries, which requires a different set of skills and attitudes.

On some level, the same kind of thing is happening in public policy. There's a lot we don't know about education. But we certainly know much more know than we ever knew before. Formulating good policy, therefore, is increasingly becoming a function of making sense of the information we have, not finding new information to consider. In other words, solving mysteries instead of puzzles.

The research and think tank spheres engage in both of these activities. But their underlying value systems are different. The most important thing you can do in the research sphere is create new knowledge, add to the collective sum of human understanding. The think tank sphere does some of this, but for reasons of design and purpose it tends to put more emphasis on interpreting information and translating it into specific policies. The end product of research lends itself to puzzle-solving, while think tanks tend to focus on mysteries.

You can see how these value systems clash by observing the way people criticize think tank reports. For example, a few weeks ago, Education Sector released a new report called "Frozen Assets," which used data and findings originally published by many other researchers to do two things: (1) Identify a group of common teacher contract provisions that, according to research, have a weak or inconsistent relationship with student learning, and (2) Estimate how much those provisions costs -- $77 billion nationwide.

Teachers union critics of the report immediately said, "There is no new or original research here." Implicit in this criticism is the idea that new and original research is inherently more valuable and worthy of discussion, and that by lacking those elements the paper is unworthy of serious consideration by definition. This is clearly an argument that resonates, otherwise critics wouldn't use it. "Move along," they're saying. "Nothing new to see here."

This misses the point entirely. "Frozen Assets," like a lot of think tank work, is not about solving puzzles by finding new information. It's about finding new meaning in the information we already have. In this case, that consists of connecting research about how various school factors and policies do--or do not--improve student learning with research and analysis about how much related contract provisions cost, in a way that makes sense to policymakers and the general public. This kind of mystery-solving isn't inherently more or less valuable than puzzle-solving. It's just different, and deserves to criticized on its own terms.

The larger issue lies with the fact that as the amount of freely-available information grows ever larger and the world becomes more complex, education policy will become more like foreign intelligence. The key issues will tend to be mysteries, not puzzles, and influence will accrue to the mystery-solvers.

Many people in the research and academic communities find this troubling, for some completely valid reasons. The media, public, and policymakers don't always have the time or expertise needed to figure out which reports and information sources are truly credible. The academic community addresses this problem with strong internal controls based on credentialling and peer review. But as we learned during the recent Abramoff scandals, anyone can hang out a shingle and call themselves a think tank, all you need is a Web site and an important-sounding name. Remember the "American International Center," the "premiere international think tank" run by a lifeguard in Rehoboth Beach?

That said, there are also many really good think tanks and NGOs. They're meeting the growing demand for mystery-solving, in a way that's purposefully designed to change policy. That doesn't excuse them from any and all scrutiny of the quality or integrity of their work. But that scrutiny is more meaningful when it focuses on what their work actually is.

Update 1: Alexander Russo weighs in here.

The Other 25% of D.C. Students: Fenty's Plans for the District's Charters

D.C. edu-watchers have been abuzz lately--with good reason--over Mayor Adrian Fenty's plans to take over operation of the city's public school system. Less attention has been devoted to Fenty's plans for charters, which serve 25% of D.C.'s public school students. But Theola Labbé takes up the issue in today's Post.

There are three key elements of Fenty's plans related to charters. First, the plan would strip the existing Board of Education of its chartering authority and transfer oversight responsibility for schools chartered by the BoE to the city's other chartering authority, the Public Charter School Board (PCSB). In addition, Fenty would require PCSB to review school charters every three years, instead of the current five-year reviews, and would give the State Education Office greater oversight authority over PCSB, including allowing schools to appeal charter denials or revocations to SEO and allowing SEO to revoke charters itself.

Labbé's piece focuses primarily on the concerns some BoE-chartered school leaders have about shifting to the PCSB, which some view as less publicly-responsive, since it's appointed by the Mayor rather than elected. It made sense for some school leaders to prefer the Board of Education earlier in the history of D.C.'s charter movement, because there was a perception that charters had been Congressionally-imposed on the District and some charter leaders felt affiliating with the semi-elected Board of Education gave them greater public legitimacy. But when you consider that the elected Board of Ed. itself wants to get out of the chartering business, that half the Board of Ed's members are already mayoral appointees, and that Fenty's plan would make virtually all the key decisionmakers for public education in D.C. mayoral appointees, the concern seems less compelling. More significantly, the definition of publicness in charter school oversight should not be whether an authorizer is composed of elected or appointed officials, but how well it serves the public good. And the scandals of the past year have made clear that the Board of Education has done a much poorer job executing its public trust as a charter authorizer than has the Public Charter School Board. That's why I think putting all the existing charters under PCSB oversight is a good part of Fenty's plan.

I'm more concerned about some of the provisions regarding SEO oversight of the PCSB. I have studied charter schooling in other states where it was clear that there was a need for greater state-level oversight of charter school authorizers, but the PCSB's record and reputation do not suggest a major need for greater oversight of authorizers in D.C. Three-year rather than five-year reviews for all schools would dramatically increase PCSB's workload, as well as the burden on charter schools. I understand the call for more frequent reviews, but at the very least the new legislation should allow five-year reviews for established charters with a strong record of compliance and performance. This is just being smart about where to devote oversight resources. The charter school community is also understandably concerned about provisions giving the State Education Office the right to revoke charters.

But my biggest disappointment with Fenty's plans as they concern charter schools is what I don't see. First, I'd like more clarity about how the new Facilities Construction and Maintenance Authority will ensure that children attending charter schools benefit from new investments in D.C. school buildings just as much as their non-charter peers do. Second, I wish Fenty had considered taking on some charter authorizing responsibilities himself. The Public Charter School Board is a good authorizer, but it's in the best interests of D.C.'s charter sector--and indeed the overall educational ecology here--to have multiple high-quality authorizers operating in the District. Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson is doing a great job of chartering schools there. Fenty should consider following Peterson's lead and establishing a new charter authorizing office under the Deputy Mayor for Education. This would create another high-quality charter school authorizer in D.C. and send a signal that Fenty cares about and has a stake the city's charter school sector as well as DCPS.

An Appletree Grows on Capitol Hill?

I forgot to mention last week that D.C.'s Appletree Early Learning Public Charter School, (disclosure alert!) on whose board I serve, got some good news from the D.C. Board of Zoning Adjustment (BZA). Last year the Zoning Administrator denied Appletree a permit to build a school on a lot it owns near Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill. As Joe Williams has noted, gaming zoning rules has become a popular tool in the "ground war" against charter school growth. Last week the BZA granted Appletree's appeal of that denial. Appletree's still not in the clear--as yesterday's Examiner noted, neighborhood residents who oppose the school plan to continue fighting it--but this is good news for the school and for families struggling with the shortage of high-quality preschool and childcare options on the Hill. The Examiner also subtly notes the real source of neighborhood opposition to the plan: white, affluent Lincoln Park residents don't want the school bringing disadvantaged and minority students into their neighborhood.

btw: It's recently come to my attention that the Examiner runs a surprising number of articles focusing at a fairly granular level on various goings-on in public education in the District. The Examiner and the Post also tend to cover different stories in education, with the Examiner sometimes bringing more of a muckraking angle to education coverage in DC.

Stands Scotland where it Did?

WaPo gives more background to the racial tensions that have surfaced at Montgomery County’s Winston Churchill High School following a string of recent fights and letter sent home by the school’s principal describing them as “Black-on-Black violence.” Residents of Scotland, an historically African-American community in the school’s attendance area viewed the comment as a specific attack on them. In the more recent article, the principal says she made the comment to defend the school’s black students, who have recently raised their test scores.

But the school's African-American students are still not doing very well on state achievement tests. In the most recent assessment, in 2006, only 51% of the school’s black students (who make up 6% of its enrollment) tested proficient in reading—worse than the average for black students in Montgomery County or the state of Maryland as a whole, and a sharp contrast with the 95% of the school’s white students—well above state and county averages—who were proficient in reading. Gaps between Winston Churchill’s white and black students were similarly large in math, although the school’s black students performed marginally better than the state average in math. The racial tensions at Churchill accompany large achievement gaps.

These gaps exist in what is generally regarded as a high-performing, elite suburban school—according to Jay Mathews, one of America’s 100 best—underscoring why disaggregated accountability reporting, a la NCLB, is so important to advancing educational equity for poor and minority kids. Some of Winston Churchill’s students are learning much less than others, but you’ve gotta look past the averages to see what’s going on. Further, Winston Churchill's African-American and low-income students are barely matching or doing worse than their peers statewide even though they attend a racially- and economically-integrated (at least at the schoolwide level), high-resource, generally high-performing school. That’s not an indictment of efforts to advance racial and socio-economic integration, but it is a caution against expecting either to be a silver bullet for improving the achievement of disadvantaged and minority students.

Frosty the Anti-Snow Man

Frosty Hardison, a concerned parent of seven, wants Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" banned from school. In an interesting twist, he objects not because he doesn't believe in global warming, but because the movie doesn't present an alternative explanation for global warming: instead of rising carbon emissions, it's a sign that the biblically ordained end times are upon us. Which seems pretty ridiculous, but then again I did just read that shockingly reasonable Bracey report....

For Lenders, the Trouble Begins

Next week, the house will consider a bill to cut interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans in half--to 3.4%--over five years. The cost of these cuts will come close to $6 billion and, under the new ‘PAYGO’ rules, the Democrats are paying for it with cuts in lender subsidies. While some students will benefit from the lower interest rates, this bill is more about freeing-up money from the heavily-subsidized lending industry than it is about making college more affordable.

Making college more affordable will require broader changes in the lending ‘system’ (although our confusing and complicated financial aid system is hardly a system at all), including targeting aid to students who need it most and providing help to students who are struggling to repay their debt. While interest rate subsidies will alleviate debt payments for some, they are poorly targeted, do not encourage colleges to lower costs, and do not take into account students’ post-graduation income levels and ability to repay debt.

This bill does make some important steps forward, however, in how money is allocated in our lending system. Currently, a lot of money is tied up in lender subsidies and payments. This bill starts to chip away at those subsidies and reallocate the money to students. Hopefully, once it's apparent that lenders can survive reduced government subsidies, it will make room for more lender subsidy cuts and more reallocations to financial aid.

A Sign of the Coming Apocalypse

Jerry Bracey has released his annual "Rotten Apples" awards. Roughly speaking, I agree without about half of the awards. I find this to be an inordinately high and deeply disturbing number. It's some kind of leading indicator of deterioration in the education policy sphere--the more often Bracey is right, the worse things have become.

Down to Brass Tacks on Teacher Pay

Leo Casey has weighed in on "Frozen Assets," Education Sector's recent report on the fiscal consequences of teacher contracts. Or as he puts it, "yet another" Education Sector report. Sorry, Leo--plenty more where that came from! No rest for the wicked!

It seems like just a couple of days ago--oh wait, it was just a couple of days ago--that Leo laid out some sensible ground rules for substantive, informed blogging on education policy, such as the fact that union critics are not wrong by definition. So it's a little disappointing to see him dismiss the research cited in the report as "old thin gruel by the anti-union, anti-public education short order cooks." There have been cease-fires in the Middle East that lasted longer than that....

But Leo's post is nonetheless useful, because he quickly gets down to the heart of the matter: merit pay. "Frozen Assets" isn't a merit pay manifesto by any means, but it does put the idea squarely on the table, and it does criticize the seniority-based single salary schedules used by the vast majority of school districts. Even though research clearly shows that teacher effectiveness tends to stop increasing after about five years in the classroom, salary schedules keep bumping up pay for years or even decades beyond that.

To his credit, Leo concedes this point. But he defends perpetual seniority-based raises on the grounds that they're needed to retain teachers, particularly after all that goes into getting them past the five-year threshold. And to do that, we have to "take into account the mid-life financial pressures faced by teachers, as they pay home mortages and send their own children to college."

In this one sentence, once can learn a great deal about why issues of teacher pay are so contentious and hard to resolve.

I suspect that teachers unions often wonder why people keep obsessing over merit pay, particularly when they concede, as Leo does, that it would be okay to have differential pay for other things, like working in hard-to-staff schools or getting National Board certification.

The answer, I think, is that getting paid based on how well you do your job is so ubiquitous and inherently sensible that to deny it on principle is to fundamentally dissociate onself from both logic and the common experience of workers and professionals in this day and age. In that sense, merit pay is about more than the issue at hand. It's a litmus test for reasonableness, an indicator of whether you're serious about schools and educators being driven by performance, about whether you believe that teachers should or should not be compensated in basically the same way as everyone else who has a job requiring similarly high levels of education, professionalism, and dedication.

Leo can object to merit pay "schemes which seek to replace the entire structure of teacher salary schedules with pay differentials decided by subjective supervisory judgments and by poorly crafted standardized tests." But I think we all know that it goes deeper than that, that even if the schemes became plans and the supervisory judgments became objective and the tests became well-crafted, the basic issue would remain.

The vast majority of people who work, particularly in professional jobs, are paid what their labor is worth in the open job market, no more, no less. That amount can often seem arbitrary or divisive or insufficient or unfair. And all those things are frequently true. But in the end, they don't get paid more than their colleagues who do work of the same value, or more, just because they happen to be of a certain age or have kids in college and a mortgage to pay. That's the world we live in.

Perhaps Leo think that's the problem in a nutshell, that teachers unions have achieved a more enlightened way of doing business, one that keep workers together instead of pushing them apart, one that is more stable, fair, and humane. Which makes merit pay a litmus test of a different kind, an indicator of whether people want to preserve the past victories of labor and build on them, or attack those victories and tear them down.

I believe in unions. As I've said before, I think the final reckoning of the last 100 years will show that unions are disproportionately responsible for much of what's decent and honorable in the working lives of Americans. But on this issue, I think teachers unions are trying to do too much, at too great a cost. The best way to help teachers with kids in college isn't to pay them extra, it's to fully fund Pell grants and keep tuition low. Unions can, and should, push for increasing the overall amount of money teachers are paid, which I think is too low. But the dynamics there are not the same as, for example, increasing the minimum wage. And banding together to collectively fight for higher wages doesn't preclude teachers from making distinctions about those wages based on something as elementary as performance. Unity and uniformity are not the same thing.

In the long run, performance has to matter in education. If you tell a group of people that their status and salary will be determined in a manner that is indifferent to how hard they work or what they ultimately accomplish, they will, collectively, accomplish less. In the long run, teachers unions are going to have to concede this principle. That doesn't mean that there are no difficulties in transforming the principle into practice, or that teachers shouldn't play a major role in making those decisions. They absolutely should. But as long as unions stay on the wrong side of this line in the sand, they're going to be fighting a losing and increasingly lonely battle.

Update: Sherman Dorn comments here. Briefly: Sherman gives Leo (or me, not quite sure which) too little credit here--I actually think Leo does a good job of engaging seriously on the ideas, which distinguishes him from some of his colleagues. I just think his ideas are problematic. I'm not sure what "significant logical flaws" Sherman is talking about--does he mean Leo's comments about the NYC class size limitations? Of course eliminating a class size reduction or limitation policy would increase class sizes. That goes without saying, doesn't it? What else could it mean? What the paper says is that there's little in the way of research to suggest that marginal class size reductions, along the lines the 1.5 or 2 per class that Leo describes, have significant benefits. Big reductions below a certain threshold, yes. Small reductions that don't reach that threshold, no. Therefore, that money could potentially be spent for other, more productive purposes--like increased teacher salaries.

When Mom and Dad Don't Show Up

Sophia Pappas has a really terrific post up about parent engagement and teacher responsibilities. After trying--and failing--to engage the mother of one of her lowest-performing students, Pappas writes:

I grow frustrated and decide instead to focus solely on Tyrique and our work inside the classroom. With our efforts to target his needs in one-on-one, small group, and whole group interactions, Tyrique has now started to identify beginning sounds and some letters in words on his own. He can also write his name and read the names of his friends.

Is family support important? Of course. But what happens when difficulties with parental investment arise, even as early as pre-k? Does the child become a lost cause? Of course not. Should teachers relinquish their own responsibility? Just the opposite.

This strikes me as just about right. Communicating with parents and trying to engage them in their children's learning when appropriate is part of teachers' jobs. But teachers have relatively little leverage to change parent behavior, so focusing on what teachers can do to address children's needs directly often has better returns to effort than trying to engage unresponsive parents.

In an ideal world, we'd want all kids to have engaged, supportive parents who were eager to get information from teachers about how to support their children's learning and to put that information in practice. In reality, that's not always the case, even when parents love their children very much, for a host of reasons. And the kids who are getting the least support at home are also those who can least afford to have their teachers give up on them as a result of their parents' shortcomings.

Anyway, I've really been enjoying Ms. Pappas' blog since it launched in early December, so if you haven't checked it out yet, you should.