issue: Education

Turnaround Schools: Rising to the Challenge

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Wednesday, May 26,  11:30 a.m. — 1:30 p.m.

Click here to RSVP for this event.

The United States has fallen behind as the world leader in educating students preparing for college or the workforce. The Obama administration, with the leadership of Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has made a commitment to improve America’s schools and provide every child with a world-class education. In the recently released education reform “blueprint,” President Obama noted that turning around low-performing schools is essential in providing America’s children with the education they deserve.

Please join PPI for a forum with education leaders and policy experts that will examine the challenges facing administrators, students and teachers in bringing about lasting change to low-performing schools.

Featured panelists:

Michelle Rhee
Chancellor, District of Columbia Public Schools
The Honorable Jared Polis (D)
U.S. Representative, Colorado
David Cicarella
President, New Haven Federation of Teachers
Justin Cohen
President, The School Turnaround Group, Mass Insight Education
Jordan Meranus
Partner, NewSchools Venture Fund

Location:

Mandarin Oriental Hotel
1330 Maryland Avenue SW
Grand Ballroom
Washington, DC 20024

Space is limited. RSVP required. Lunch will be provided.

For more information, please contact 202-525-3926.

Click here to RSVP for this event.

Texas Revisionism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When we last checked in on the Texas textbook wars, the craziest advocate on the state School Board for rewriting American history was a dentist named Don McLeroy, who had become so embarrassing that he faced a Republican primary challenge from a more conventional conservative. The good news is that McLeroy lost, albeit very narrowly. The bad news is that he remains on the Board for ten more months, and as James McKinley explains in the New York Times today, McLemore and the conservative bloc he leads on the Board is going for the gold in imposing its revisionist views on the school children of the Lone Star State (and many other states, given Texas’ outsized clout in the textbook market).

Check this out:

Dr. McLeroy still has 10 months to serve and he, along with rest of the religious conservatives on the board, have vowed to put their mark on the guidelines for social studies texts.

For instance, one guideline requires publishers to include a section on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

There have also been efforts among conservatives on the board to tweak the history of the civil rights movement. One amendment states that the movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities. Another proposed change removes any reference to race, sex or religion in talking about how different groups have contributed to the national identity.

Don’t know if the instruction on the important role of the NRA will include in-class Eddie Eagle appearances, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The revisionism does not, of course, only pertain to relatively current events:

References to Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are proposed to be removed, while Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, is to be listed as a role model for effective leadership, and the ideas in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address are to be laid side by side with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.Early in the hearing on Wednesday, Mr. McLeroy and other conservatives on the board made it clear they would offer still more planks to highlight what they see as the Christian roots of the Constitution and other founding documents.

“To deny the Judeo-Christian values of our founding fathers is just a lie to our kids,” said Ken Mercer, a San Antonio Republican.

The new guidelines, when finally approved, will influence textbooks for elementary, middle school and high school. They will be written next year and will be in effect for 10 years.

It’s long been a common ploy for Christian Right advocates to insist on the “Christian roots of the Constitution” as a way to marginalize the church-state-separatist legacy of Jefferson and Madison, and limit the protection of religious liberty to Christians (and we are talking about people with a rather rigid view of what constitutes a “Christian,” with the President of the United States or pro-choice Catholics often not qualifying). The elevation of Confederate leaders into a position of moral equivalency with Lincoln also has an old and unsavory history, as anyone who grew up in the Jim Crow South (as I did) can tell you. But it’s arguably not surprising to see such travesties gain ground in a state whose current governor has been known to flirt with antebellum theories of nullification and absolute state sovereignty.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Does KIPP Get Results?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In education circles, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the nation’s largest charter management organization, is considered one of the great success stories in the charter school movement. But as Quick and the Ed’s Chad Aldeman points out, even though an observer of a KIPP classroom can immediately tell the difference, quantitative analyses of KIPP’s real-world effects have been sparse and low-level — which is why the National Bureau of Economic Research’s new study (PDF) of a KIPP charter school in Lynn, Massachusetts, the sole KIPP school in New England, is noteworthy.

As with other KIPP schools across the country, the Lynn school has a long school year that starts in August and includes some Saturdays, and a long school day running from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm. The school has a code of behavior that calls for orderly movement between classes and students to speak only when called upon. The curriculum puts a strong emphasis on basic reading and math skills.

The study was a quasi-experimental evaluation that compared students who attended KIPP with those who wanted to attend but couldn’t get in because of space restrictions. In Massachusetts, charter schools are required to hold a lottery for admission if a school is oversubscribed. Because KIPP Lynn’s enrollees are determined by a randomized lottery, the study was able estimate the causal effect of the program on achievement without the problem of selection bias — the idea that a charter school gets results by “skimming from the top” of a given demographic — tainting the results.

What did the researchers find? KIPP Lynn attendees registered Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) gains of about .12 standard deviations for each year that a student stayed in KIPP. For math, the gains were even larger at .35 standard deviations for each year. The results for limited English proficiency (KIPP Lynn has a high proportion of Hispanic students) and special education students were even more positive.

While it’s just one study for one school, the NBER analysis is a well-designed quasi-experiment that offers robust quantitative evidence for KIPP’s effectiveness. (Aldeman calls it “by far the most rigorous of all the evaluations thus far that specifically focus on KIPP.”) As the researchers point out, KIPP has a replicable model and runs similar schools across the country, and it’s not hard to imagine that KIPP has had similar effects at other sites. Of course, more studies like this are needed to measure KIPP’s results. But in the meantime, the NBER study should embolden charter proponents, who seek to bring demonstrably successful models to areas badly in need of alternatives for students willin and eager to learn.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mlleleela/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

“Race to the Top” for Child Nutrition

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the least heralded but potentially consequential initiatives by the Obama administration has been its steady campaign against child hunger and obesity. The administration has set an ambitious goal of eliminating child hunger by 2015. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama has spearheaded the Let’s Move! program, aimed at combating childhood obesity.

At an event at the National Press Club today, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke in greater detail about the administration’s priorities as the Child Nutrition Act comes up for reauthorization. The centerpiece of the administration’s child nutrition push is an additional $10 billion over 10 years to improve school breakfast and lunch programs, increase child participation, and equip schools with the resources they need for student health.

One aspect of Vilsack’s presentation seemed familiar:

We cannot rest while so many of our children struggle with access to food, but the federal government will never solve this challenge alone. In the last year, educators have seen the difference that a national “race to the top” in education has made. I am pleased to announce my support for a new competition to eliminate hunger by 2015. We’ll provide competitive grants to Governors, working with stakeholders statewide, so that states can act as laboratories for successful strategies. We’ll let them be creative in experimenting with models that match program delivery with evaluation, so that we can learn what works and what doesn’t. Possible steps will include policy modifications to existing nutrition programs, enhanced outreach efforts, improved coordination between nutrition assistance programs and family supportive services, and work with community and non-profit organizations. Grants would be provided to States with prior accomplishments and commitments to reducing hunger, applications that target communities with higher prevalence of child hunger, and projects that reflect collaboration with a wide range of partners. It is only with these sorts of coordinated efforts that we will achieve our ambitious and important goals.

“Race to the Top” is, of course, the hugely successful program that the Obama administration has used to incentivize education reform across the country. By dangling the promise of federal funds, the White House has been able to push reforms in states and districts that for years had resisted change.

Vilsack’s proposal is especially familiar to us here at PPI. Our own Joel Berg and Tom Freedman, in a “Memo to the New President” last year, called for something like it:

State governments are often the testing ground for the nation’s most important policy experiments. Your administration could reward states for successful innovations in feeding the hungry and improving nutrition. For example, every three years, the USDA could finance bonuses to the five states that show the greatest reduction in the agency’s measures of food insecurity and hunger. These states could then use their winnings to expand and improve their anti-hunger programs. This would act as an incentive for other states to create truly effective hunger policies.

Vilsack’s proposal is another demonstration of the creativity with which the administration is tackling some of our pressing domestic problems. Initiatives like the one Vilsack announced today or Race to the Top may not get as much publicity on a day-to-day basis, but they may yet end up the most enduring of this administration’s accomplishments.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chidorian/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Culture Wars Live On In Texas

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The CW these days is that with Americans having real (i.e., economic) problems to worry about, they’re no longer inclined to engage in “culture wars” over abortion, church-state separation, GLBT issues, etc. Aside from the rather insulting premise that struggles over personal freedom, equality, and for some combatants, the structure of the universe and the definition and meaning of human life are less important to people than real growth percentages, it’s not actually true. Cultural issues are less visible in Washington for the simple reason that Democrats control the congressional agenda (if not always the results), and are generally either uniniterested in or divided over cultural issues. (This doesn’t, of course, keep conservatives from claiming that health care reform legislation is actually designed to promote both abortion and euthanasia).

Outside Washington, however, the culture wars often rage on. For a good example, check out a long, fascinating piece by Russell Shorto that appeared in the the latest New York Times Magazine, on the Texas State School Board’s ongoing struggles over public school curriculum and textbook content.

As you may know, Christian Right leaders in the late 1980s, frustrated by the limited ROI from their involvement in national politics, encouraged their followers to run for local office, particularly school boards, in an effort to promote theocratic thinking from the ground up and from early childhood on. The bitter fruit of this strategy is most on display in Texas, where self-consciously Christian conservatives running as Republicans captured the State Board of Education in the late 1990s.

Shorto explains in detail how the Board’s Christian Right bloc pores over textbook content in periodic reviews, usually offering hundreds of amendments to recommendations made by expert panels (which are themselves being skewed towards theocratic views). He also notes that these activities have an impact far beyond Texas, since the state’s gigantic market heavily influences how textbook companies operate nationally. That the Christian Right bloc is interested in religio-political rather than educational goals is best exemplified by the presence on the Board of Cynthia Dunbar, who commutes once a week from Texas to Lynchburg, Virginia, to teach at the late Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University School of Law. Among other things, Dunbar has publicly denounced the very existence of public schools, and said sending one’s children to them (she didn’t, of course) is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” Just the kind of person you want supervising an entire state’s public schools.

Most interestingly, Shorto demonstrates that the ultimate goal of the Christian Right bloc on the Board goes well beyond such headline issues as the teaching of “scientific creationism” or church-state separation hot buttons. They are mainly, as Dunbar puts it, focused on embuing students’ understanding of American history and law with a “biblical worldview.” That means, in practice, emphatically teaching such distinctly non-biblical principles as “American exceptionalism” (which for these folks means America’s divine mission to Christianize the world, by military means if necessary), limited government, and absolute property rights. It’s a very political–one might even say secular–agenda that happens to coincide nicely with the long-range agenda of the secular as well as the religious Right. And it’s an excellent example of how in Conservativeland cultural and economic issues cannot be neatly separated. If God’s a hard money man, an anti-tax activist, and a neocon, then the whole idea of a “Christian Nation” has implications significantly broader than municipal Christmas creches, or even abortion and LGBT equality.

Shorto suggests that the extremism of the Texas State School Board has been controversial even among conservative Republicans, and points to a Republican primary challenge to Board member Don McLeroy (a dentist whose especially heavy hand with science textbooks led to his removal as Board chairman by the state senate) on March 3 as a bellwether:

If Don McLeroy loses, it could signal that the Christian right’s recent power surge has begun to wane. But it probably won’t affect the next generation of schoolbooks. The current board remains in place until next January. By then, decisions on what goes in the Texas curriculum guidelines will be history.

I’d say McLeroy’s defeat, if it happens, is more likely to produce a shift in Christian Right tactics than any real loss of power. But I’ll probably be watching his numbers on March 3 as avidly as I watch the gubernatorial primary battle between Tea Party favorite Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchiston. In good times and bad, the culture wars abide.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Charters and Civil Rights

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Gary Orfield, a UCLA education professor, has long been the nation’s foremost chronicler of racial segregation in schools. According to today’s Washington Post, a new study by Orfield’s Civil Rights Project shows that public charter schools are less racially diverse than traditional schools.

“As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools,” the report concludes.

This assertion seems suspect on several grounds, and it illustrates the pitfalls of viewing the public charter school movement through the frame of the nation’s great school integration battles of the 1960s and 1970s.

For one thing, minority families are freely choosing charter schools. In the bad old days of Jim Crow, they were forced to attend segregated schools. Later, as many whites fled the cities to avoid sending their children to integrated schools, black families were left behind and had no choice but to attend their local district school. As Orfield and others have documented, this “re-segregation” in impoverished urban neighborhoods was a disaster for big city school systems.

Public school choice arose in Minnesota in the late 1980s to give parents the option to send their children to schools outside their local districts. The charter school idea was conceived in part as a way to bring innovative public schools to the students, rather than forcing them to travel to other districts to find them.

The Charter Record in D.C.

 

As it happens, Washington is in the vanguard of the public charter movement (full disclosure: I’m a member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board). About 84 percent of charter school students here are black, compared with 78 percent in traditional public schools. Why have so many charters located in poor and working-class minority neighborhoods? Because it is precisely the kids in those communities who urgently need better education options. The city’s regular public schools have historically ranked near the bottom in comparisons of major urban education systems, although Mayor Adrian Fenty and Chancellor Michele Rhee have launched a determined effort to lift their performance.

The city’s 58 charter schools have given low-income black and Latino children something they never had before: a choice of where to attend school, as well as an array of innovative learning programs tailored to diverse interests and learning styles. That 28,000, or 38 percent, of D.C.’s students have exercised that choice — in effect voting with their feet — attests to the need for new options. And the shrinking of the traditional school sector’s “market share” was no doubt a big factor behind Fenty’s decision to take it over.

The important question, as Charter School Board Vice Chairman Brian Jones observed to the Post, is not the racial composition of charters, it’s whether they are providing a better education than traditional schools.

The answer is fiercely contested in the research community. Here the evidence is mixed: Many of the District’s best schools are charters, but not all charters are performing well. That’s why our Board has shut down four schools and accepted the voluntary surrender of charters from seven more since 2003.

Why Segregation Is Not the Issue

 

There’s considerable irony here. When I was advocating for charter schools back in the early 1990s, many Democrats in my native Virginia and other southern states were suspicious. Given the region’s bad racial history, they feared that charters would become a new, publicly funded version of the old “segregation academies” – private schools to which white families turned to avoid sending their children to school with blacks. That’s one reason Virginia has lagged in charter school innovation.

In this respect, the Orfield report indirectly raises a very interesting question: Why aren’t there more charter schools in white neighborhoods in Washington and other major cities? Given that the dismal reputation of urban education is a chief catalyst for suburban flight, more charters might be a good way to keep more middle-class families (white and black) in the urban core.

If charters are less racially diverse than other public schools, it’s largely because they are cropping up in the urban communities that desperately need school innovation and choice. Since many charters aim at closing the educational achievement gap between white and minority students, it seems perverse to cast them as agents of school segregation.

There is a civil rights issue here, but with all respect to Gary Orfield, it’s not segregation. It’s that too many low-income black, Latino, and immigrant students are trapped in dysfunctional urban school systems.

In Massachusetts, Race to the Top Spurs Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Massachusetts state House and Senate yesterday passed a major education overhaul bill, considered to be the most sweeping school legislation in the state in more than 15 years.

The bill calls for doubling the number of charter schools in districts that are in the lowest 10 percent of state assessment scores and grants new powers to superintendents, making it easier for them to dismiss teachers and lengthen school days (a policy that PPI supports).

The story might seem like a state matter, but it actually has broader relevance. Here’s the telling passage from the Boston Globe:

The bill represents a cornerstone of Patrick’s education agenda, which slightly more than a year ago appeared to be all but on hold as the state confronted ever-worsening budget woes.

But the effort was reignited last year at the prospect of receiving $250 million from President Obama’s Race to the Top competition, reserved for states aggressively pursuing overhauls of failing schools and expansions of charter schools.

Now state education officials are racing to meet a Tuesday deadline to submit their funding proposal, including a copy of the approved bill. They will send the hundreds of pages by express carrier, while a state official who will be in Washington Tuesday has agreed to drop off a backup copy.

Massachusetts students are typically among the top-performing students in the country. But when broken down along socio-economic lines, the results actually vary greatly, with black, Latino, and low-income students all lagging behind. By lifting the cap on charter schools, the bill allows charter schools with proven track records to replicate their methods and try to revitalize long moribund school districts.

With Race to the Top, the Obama administration made a bet that dangling financial incentives for states would prompt them to enact reforms that for years have been stuck in sclerotic legislatures. By combining money with reformist guidelines — for instance, Race to the Top’s insistence on a favorable policy toward charters — the administration is getting states and districts to consider and pass bold education policies without imposing onerous top-down orders. The Massachusetts education bill is a victory for the reform in the state, but it also augurs well for the national education reform landscape.

To Fix Our Country, We Need to Fix Our Politics First

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s the start of a brand new decade, but declinism hangs heavy in the air. And that, says writer Jim Fallows, is a good thing.

Having returned from three years in China, Fallows finds America in a funk. Bled by war and terrorism, beset by a lingering financial crisis and stubbornly high unemployment, facing stagnant wages and growing inequality, saddled with obsolete infrastructure and massive public debt, the United States today seems far removed from the confident “hyperpower” of a decade ago. Among the global commentariat, the “post-American world” is the cliché du jour.

But Fallows comes to challenge, not embrace, this glum narrative. In a lengthy Atlantic essay, he notes that premonitions of American decline have recurred frequently in U.S. history – and have just as often been proved wrong. He admits to having contributed himself to the “Rising Sun” hype in the 1980s, when many observers worried that Japan would soon overtake the U.S. thanks to its superior production techniques and state-guided economic strategies.

Instead, Japan sank into a long period of stagnation. But if the “jeremiad tradition” is a poor predictor of the future, says Fallows, it has the salutary effect of spurring Americans to rise to new challenges and prove the doomsayers wrong.

He attributes American resilience and adaptiveness to our inventive, entrepreneurial culture, a welcoming immigration policy and first-rate system of higher education. What’s holding us back, however, is a hopelessly dysfunctional political system that has lost the capacity to deal effectively with big national problems.

“This is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke,” he says. So far, so persuasive. But Fallows’ congenital optimism seems to fail him when the discussion turns to solutions. He’s no doubt realistic in dismissing great structural transformations, like a Constitutional convention to reorder our governing system, a parliamentary system or new rules that favor third parties. But concluding that “our only sane choice is to muddle through” under present arrangements ignores political reforms that are both powerful and attainable.

We could, for example, launch a frontal attack on Washington’s transactional culture and diminish the power of special interests by changing the way we finance Congressional elections. And rather than accept the inevitability of “rotten boroughs,” we could counter the worst abuses of gerrymandering by insisting that political districts be drawn by nonpartisan commissions charged with increasing rather than decreasing the number of competitive seats. We could also think seriously about addressing the abuse of the filibuster in the Senate, something that has sparked a great deal of commentary from progressives of late.

Such reforms would make it easier to overcome obstacles to the substantive changes that progressives favor, from affordable health coverage for all, to big investments in modern infrastructure and a new, low-carbon energy system. And where policy changes often expose philosophical cleavages and well as clashing interests within the Democratic coalition, fixing our broken political system is a cause that has the potential to unite all progressives.

Fallows has highlighted the right problem. But progressives should give high priority to fixing our broken politics as the prerequisite for renewing America.

Charter Schools 2.0

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is a guest column by Rep. Jared Polis (D), who represents Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District and is a member of the House Education and Labor Committee.

Classroom desks

For education reformers who care about extending opportunity to every American family, these are exciting times. Congress has approved unprecedented funding to support our public schools, while at the same time driving much-needed and long-overdue reforms in states and districts across the nation through competitive grant programs like Race to the Top. Change is in the air and the upcoming reauthorization of Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) offers a historic opportunity to do the right thing for all of our children, regardless of background.

As a founder and former superintendent of charter schools serving at-risk students, I am heartened by the strong, fresh leadership of this administration and Congress in support of charter schools and innovation in public education. Both President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have repeatedly called for federal investment in innovative programs with a proven track record of helping schools meet high standards.

The $4 billion Race to the Top program incentivizes states to embrace charter schools; the $3.5 billion Title I School Improvement Grants feature charter schools as a key strategy in turning around poor schools; and the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund invites entrepreneurial charters to partner with districts to improve student outcomes. The House Committee on Education and Labor, on which I serve, held a very informative hearing in June highlighting the amazing results attained in top-performing innovative charter schools around the country.

For those of us who have been advocating the critical role that high-quality charter schools can play in helping to close the achievement gap – and kudos to the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) for being a pioneer in touting the potential of charter schools since the mid-1990s, well before they became widely recognized – the current push for reform is gratifying. But it also requires us to think about what’s next for the charter movement in the federal framework. Seventeen years after the first charter school opened in Minnesota, what have we learned and how should ESEA reflect those lessons?

The Next Step: Scaling Up Successful Innovation

I believe we need to develop the 2.0 version of federal investment in charter schools. While we should continue supporting the Charter School Program, which helps start-ups, we must now focus on scaling up successful innovation – the proven models that we know get the job done in schools across the country. That is why I have introduced H.R. 4330, the All Students Achieving through Reform or All-STAR Act, which will enable and encourage top-performing public charter school models to expand and replicate, and also strengthen public charter school accountability and transparency. The All-STAR Act:

  • Establishes a new competitive grant program for the expansion and replication of top-performing public charter schools to serve at-risk students who are currently in underperforming schools.
  • Encourages new rigorous levels of reporting, oversight, and accountability for charter school authorizers, including intervention in or closure of low-quality charter schools.
  • Focuses resources on areas that are most in need by giving priority to eligible entities that serve a large share of low-income students who are enrolled in underperforming schools.
  • Gives priority to states that do not have caps restricting the growth of public charter schools and have policies in place that support academically successful charter schools, provide autonomy to schools, promote strong authorizing policies, and ensure quality control through performance-based accountability.

The bipartisan ALL-STAR Act is supported by several major education and civil rights organizations, including the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, Education Equality Project, United Negro College Fund, National Council of La Raza, Thomas Fordham Foundation, Democrats for Education Reform, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Center for American Progress Action Fund, and of course, PPI. It is also backed by major charter management organizations like KIPP, Aspire, Achievement First, and others.

All-STAR reflects the need for us to build on what we already know works. As America keeps losing ground in the global competition for human capital development, we have no time to waste. While systemic reform is desperately needed, we must act now with the tools we have at our disposal. Let’s reward educational entrepreneurship, duplicate and expand success, and help close the achievement gap. America’s students deserve nothing less.

Taking Measure of D.C.’s IMPACT Program

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As states craft their Race to the Top applications, they will likely focus on how to improve teacher and principal quality, as 28 percent of the points that they can earn fall under the “Great Teachers and Leaders” category. The criterion covers, among other things, the development of evaluation systems for teachers and principals, and the use of those evaluations to inform key decisions.

The press release announcing Race to the Top stressed a key point about the teacher-evaluation component:

…states should use multiple measures to evaluate teachers and principals, including a strong emphasis on the growth in achievement of their students. But it also reinforces that successful applicants will need to have rigorous teacher and principal evaluation programs and use the results of teacher evaluations to inform what happens in the schools.

That emphasis on “multiple measures” informs D.C. Public Schools’ new teacher evaluation system: IMPACT. The evaluation program offers a combination of approaches. Teachers of grades 4-8 mathematics and reading, for whom value-added data can be collected, will have 50 percent of their evaluation based on DC-CAS student achievement data. But another 40 percent will come from something called the Teaching and Learning Framework. For teachers in non-tested grades and subjects, the Teaching and Learning Framework comprises an even greater proportion – 80 percent – of their evaluation.

The Teaching and Learning Framework calls for five observations of teachers by administrators and master teachers in a given school year. Evaluation is broken down into three major categories: planning, teaching, and increasing effectiveness. Planning has to do with preparation of the content as well as the creation of a safe and productive learning environment; teaching gets into engagement, instructional techniques, and interaction with the students (among other factors); and increasing effectiveness deals with student assessment and the use of data to inform decision-making.

The use of more frequent observation of teachers and a clear rubric fills an important gap in teacher accountability. Since value-added student achievement data is currently available for only a small cohort of the teaching force, reliable tools for evaluating the rest of the teachers are crucial. We need rigorous ways to identify great and struggling teachers, but also to help the ones in the middle range improve. It’s easy to identify poor teachers; the tougher part is knowing how to help them improve or when to cut the cord. The Teaching and Learning Framework helps to define and show teachers paths to improvement through post-observation conferences.

George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, has been critical of IMPACT, saying, “It’s very punitive. It takes the art of teaching and turns it into bean counting.” A union-administered focus group and survey found that the primary concerns revolve around inadequate training under the system prior to implementation and fears of its use for punitive measures rather than as a tool for improving teacher quality. Early reports on completed observations indicate some bumps in execution. Whether feeling satisfied, overrated, or underrated, teachers have expressed disappointment in the quality of suggestions offered by administrators and master teachers during post-observation conferences. Given the culture of mistrust and fear that permeates many schools, teachers are understandably skeptical and justified in noting that they cannot possibly hit all points of the rubric during a 30-minute observation. However, teachers must also recognize that their openness to the evaluation process is integral to its success and to building a better culture in schools.

The IMPACT program sets a process for clear expectations, clear feedback, and clear growth plans. While value-added testing is a useful measure for student achievement, IMPACT is a worthwhile experiment in pursuing a more expansive evaluation of teacher quality. Offering not just a goal but a pathway for improvement, it’s an innovation worth keeping an eye on.

An Innovative Way to Improve Teacher Quality

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

How does a school or school district consistently attract, develop, and retain effective teachers? If you can answer this, you’ll not only boost your chances of receiving some Race to the Top funds — you’ll also put to rest one of the hotly debated topics in education today.

A recent report from Education Sector, titled Teachers At Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design, examines a less widely discussed approach to improving teacher quality: school design. The report argues that in order for reform initiatives to be sustainable, we need to “fundamentally overhaul the way the work of teachers is organized within schools.”

The report focuses on the Generation Schools model, developed by Furman Brown and Jonathan Spear, which restructures the traditional school day and school year. The average Generation Schools day for students consists of two 85-minute foundation courses in the morning during which students focus on core academic learning (English, math, science, and social studies) and three 60-minute studios in the afternoon, during which students take additional required courses, electives, or mandated services such as art, foreign language, and fitness. Students also participate in two month-long career and college planning units at staggered times during the course of the year, and the overall school year is 200 days, about 20 days longer than the typical school year.

In addition to rethinking the way time is used, the model reconsiders the way teachers interact with one another. Among other things, teachers are organized into grade- and subject-based teams and are allotted two hours per day for planning and preparation. These changes are intended to “blend different types of expertise and levels of experience” and allow time for teachers to reflect on their work and learn from one another. It’s not only whom you hire to teach and how you evaluate and reward them – it’s also about the structures in place to support and develop teachers. And all of this is achieved without increasing the time required from teachers – and, by extension, the costs to a school.

The student performance results at the Generation Schools pilot school, Brooklyn Generation School, a public high school in New York, have been positive so far. Teacher satisfaction also seems high, with only one teacher electing to leave after the first year, although all had the option to return to their previous schools. The United Federation of Teachers has also supported the initiative. In order to implement their unique organizational structure, the school entered into a side-letter agreement to the teachers’ contract, initially for one year in 2007, then an additional three-year period.

The Generation Schools model is not alone in thinking creatively about the use of people and time. Education Resource Strategies, an organization focused on the strategic use of resources, has done an in-depth study of nine high-performing high schools across the country that have also rethought the traditional school model with positive results. Many charter schools are also experimenting with innovative ways to use resources. While no one model is right for all schools, the basic idea is key: examine your resources and think creatively about using them efficiently and effectively to maximize teacher effectiveness.

To be sure, there are impediments to this kind of creative thinking, ranging from laws restricting the length of the school year to rigid line-item budgeting requirements for school funding. Models like Generation Schools will have trouble being scaled up unless policy makers act to remove such obstacles. State and federal governments should continue to find ways to encourage experimentation on a local level — even as they continue to hold schools accountable for the results.

Candor We Can Believe In

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Let us now praise undiplomatic women.

Two cases in point: Michele Rhee, Washington, D.C.’s blunt public schools Chancellor and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Yesterday, Rhee told a gathering of CEOs that the District suffers from a “complete and utter lack of accountability in this system.” That’s likely to intensify the flak she’s already taking from the teachers’ union, which is apoplectic about her decision to lay off 250 subpar teachers, and from the City Council, which sees her as insufficiently deferential on matters of school reform.

But Rhee was unapologetic. “Collaboration and consensus-building are quite frankly overrated in my mind,” she told the executives. “None of you CEOs run your companies by committee, so why should we run a school district by committee?”

It’s a good question, though such characteristic bluntness probably won’t lengthen her tenure as chancellor. Rhee is adamant about putting the needs of Washington’s public school children, who are overwhelmingly poor and minority, above the interests of adults in the District’s political-educational complex who resist fundamental changes in a system that’s manifestly failing.

On measures of student performance, the District ranks 51st among the states and near the bottom of nation’s biggest metropolitan regions. In weeding out teachers on the basis of job performance rather than seniority, Rhee has hit a very sensitive nerve. She’s saying, in effect, that public education in the District isn’t a jobs program for city residents. Let’s hope she goes on making waves.

Here’s Rhee at yesterday’s event:

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton created a flap in Pakistan recently when she had the temerity to note that Osama bin Laden and his top al Qaeda henchmen have been living in that country since 2002.

The Pakistani press, ever alert for signs of U.S. encroachment on that nation’s sovereignty, went ballistic. Foreign policy mandarins sagely opined that the U.S. secretary of state had committed a clear breach of diplomatic protocol by embarrassing her hosts.

Well, they should be embarrassed. The presence of America’s terrorist enemies in Pakistan should be a besetting sore point in U.S.-Pakistani relations. It signifies either governmental incompetence or, worse, collusion. And with the Pakistani Army now clearing Taliban havens in South Waziristan, which it formerly regarded as no-go territory, the question of why the nation’s intelligence and security forces can’t locate our enemies only grows more insistent.

Pakistani officials reportedly are pushing back hard on U.S. suggestions that they go into North Waziristan next. It’s the home base for the notoriously thuggish Haqqani network, which is responsible for a wave of kidnapping and terrorist attacks in neighboring Afghanistan.

All this suggests that Pakistan, set to receive about $7 billion in U.S. aid, remains a strangely reluctant partner in the struggle against extremists who threaten Pakistan, Afghanistan and the U.S.

The White House reportedly is upset with Clinton for her occasional outbursts of candor. Let’s hope they don’t fit the muzzle too tightly.

Growing Pains: Scaling Up the Nation’s Best Charter Schools

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The last decade has seen a tremendous boom in charter schools. Charter management organizations (CMOs) have played an increasingly important role in state and national efforts to bring reform to the toughest educational environments. But as a new report from Education Sector points out, CMOs have expanded more slowly and required more resources than supporters had hoped. Ed Sector proposes a series of recommendations to policy makers for CMOs to realize their full potential, including: lifting artificial caps on the number of charter schools that can operate; prioritizing funding for states with level fiscal playing fields for charter schools; standardizing data collection requirements across charter schools; and requiring states to have accountability systems for charter school authorizers.

Race to the Top Begins

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Department of Education today released the final application for its Race to the Top Fund after a period of public comment and revisions. With the release, the department officially parts the curtain on an ambitious education initiative, one that may well prove to be the closest the Obama reform agenda comes to an unqualified success.

The seriousness with which the administration takes education policy can be seen in gestures substantive – Race to the Top – and symbolic, such as the decision to mark the anniversary of President Obama’s election with an education event in Wisconsin.

The department’s rules for Race to the Top offer states a guideline on how best to steer their education policy. At stake: a $4.35 billion pool of funds that the department will award to states based on their performance in more than 30 criteria. Of that $350 million goes to states to create common-standard assessments. The remaining $4 billion will be up for grabs.

The program’s assessment process involves scoring states in a detailed system that goes up to 500 points. The department’s thinking on reform can be gleaned from the breakdown of scores. Under the rubric of “Great Teachers and Leaders,” the department plans on awarding up to 138 points, 28% of the total, more than any category. That category breaks down into subcategories, with points awarded for measuring student growth, developing evaluation systems, and using evaluations to inform key decisions, among other measures. The message is clear: student improvement and teacher excellence are at the heart of reform.

The other category that receives a large share of the points — 25% — is dubbed “State Success Factors,” which enumerates the ways in which states can present to the department their comprehensive vision for reform. The section asks states to articulate its plans for reform, prove its capacity to carry it out, and enlist the support of school districts. Joanne Weiss, the director of the Race to the Top program, explained in an interview with Education Week that the category aimed to encourage states to really think through their reform strategy. “It became clear that a lot of states were treating [the criteria] as a checklist. There was no big picture,” Weiss said. “Now this is where they build their case.”

The key now is the judging process. The department will select 125 judges from 1,400 applicants to go through and grade the state applications. As the Eduwonk blog points out, “If they’re not strong and keenly attuned to change and reform then this initiative won’t succeed.” Here’s hoping that the department applies the same rigor to that process as it wants the states to apply to theirs.

Education Reform Under the Radar

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In today’s New York Times, David Brooks writes about one of the Obama administration’s quiet successes:

Over the past few days I’ve spoken to people ranging from Bill Gates to Jeb Bush and various education reformers. They are all impressed by how gritty and effective the Obama administration has been in holding the line and inciting real education reform.

The engine for reform has been the administration’s Race to the Top initiative, a $4.3 billion fund that the federal government has used to reward states that have pursued reform most aggressively. With Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at the helm, Race to the Top has proven to be a rigorously applied program that’s meeting its objectives — as good in practice as it is on paper.

The initiative reflects this administration’s predilection for using incentives to nudge behavior, rather than issuing top-down policies to effect change. As Brooks points out, the approach has yielded stellar results: states raising their caps on charter schools, a stronger emphasis on student performance, greater union openness to pay reform.

In recent weeks, the administration has come under fire for its seemingly thin list of accomplishments to date. The jury is still out on hot-button topics like health care and Afghanistan, but on education, the administration has been as bold and effective as reformers had hoped.