This week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced competitive grants to encourage states to increase their college graduation rates, with a goal to add eight million college graduates by 2020.
Sure, there are plenty of legitimate policy-related reasons why we might want to increase the number of college graduates. After all, as Secretary Duncan put it, “We all know that the best jobs and fastest-growing firms will gravitate to countries, communities, and states with a highly qualified work force.”
But, for those who can’t imagine Obama doing anything without an ulterior motive, consider the graphs below that show that increasing the number of college graduates might also increase the number of Democratic voters and reduce the number of Republican voters.
The first graph shows the state-level relationship between the percentage of individuals identifying as Democrats (data from Gallup) and the percentage of individuals with bachelor’s degrees. There’s a clear, statistically significant relationship that explains 28 percent of the state-level variation in Democratic identification. For every one percentage point increase in college graduates in a state, the percentage of Democratic identifiers increases by 0.75 percent.
The second graph shows the state-level relationship of Republican identifiers and college graduates. As you’d expect, it’s pretty much the reverse. For every one percentage point increase in college graduates, the percentage of individuals identifying as Republicans decreases by 0.76 percentage points. This simple regression explains 30 percent of the variation.
Now let’s look at the relationship of state-level education to state-level liberals and conservatives. Here the relationship is even more significant:
For every one percentage point increase in state-level college graduates, the percentage of liberals also increases by 0.75 percentage points. Impressively, education level explains 66 percent of variation in state-level percentage of liberals.
By contrast, for every one percentage point in college graduates, there is a 0.88 percentage point decline in the share of conservatives, and this by itself explains 58 percent of the state-level variation in the number of conservatives.
Does this mean that there is a simple causal story that education makes people more liberal either because (in the conservative telling) it turns them into elitist snobs, or (in the liberal telling) it gives them enough knowledge to understand how the world works?
Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps liberal, Democratic states invest more in education, which is why those states have more college graduates. It’s also important to note that 1) these are state-level, not individual-level relationships, and 2) this is a static relationship, not a time series.
Nonetheless, the graphs are quite telling. The more college graduates, the more Democratic (and especially more liberal) the state. The fewer college graduates, the more Republican and (and especially more conservative) the state. There’s clearly something going on here, and I’m actually quite curious to hear how conservatives would respond.
Increasing the number of college graduates by eight million would bring the number of college graduates in the United States from approximately 83 million (27 percent) to 91 million (about 29 percent in 2020). That’s two percentage points, and if the relationship between state-level education and voting is indeed causal, it would mean a 1.5 percentage point increase in the share of Democratic identifiers and a similar decline among Republican identifiers. This could tip some states.
Well, now I’ve given conservatives an argument against increasing the number of college graduates.
Many parents can’t decide whether they love or hate the Tiger Mom. Either way, she has focused our collective attention on education in the United States. American students are falling behind students from other countries. In the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing of 15 year-old students from 65 countries, our children placed 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and a below-average 31st in math. The results from January’s National Assessment of Education Progress were equally dismal – only 21 percent of the nation’s 12th graders scored ‘proficient’ in science. In his State of the Union address, President Obama called this our “Sputnik moment,” a crisis moment in the history of our country that should shock us into action.
But is it possible to change our educational system in the US? Success in today’s world is based upon proficiency and innovation in science. Multiple factors contribute to our poor performance, but one glaring problem is the disregard of scientific facts by a large segment of our society. Science allows for a certain amount of dissent, but when ideological, political or religious beliefs automatically nullify reasonable scientific facts, there is potential danger.
Many American students are raised to disbelieve some of the bedrock principles of modern biological science, including evolution. A troubling report, published in Science (Jan 28), describes the concern that 13 percent of high school biology teachers actively teach creationism and an additional 60 percent avoid the controversy of evolution. That leaves less than one third of educators who teach the scientifically-accepted truth about evolutionary biology. To succeed in science, one needs to build knowledge from facts. If scientific facts such as evolution are taught to be false, what foundation then have we given our students? This is certainly not a solid one upon which to base innovation or the next great discovery.
Only 39 percent of Americans believe in evolution. Fifty-seven percent do not believe in global climate change. And only 38 percent believe there is no link between vaccines and autism. Solid bodies of literature separate fact from fiction on these topics, but the majority of Americans apparently disregards the truth. If this denial of scientific fact is then passed on to our children, the next generation of Americans will find difficulty not only with the PISA test, but also with the real world challenge of finding scientifically valid solutions to big problems like climate change and finding cures for disease. We need our children to be innovators, but America’s ideological constraints are holding them back.
Everyone has the right to their beliefs. The rub here is how to balance one’s religion, politics, or ideology with the validity of science. Is it not the responsibility of a religion or ideology to make its teaching compatible with scientific facts? Faith, as I understand it, should be enough to account for the unknowable or unexplainable. And it should be strong enough to accommodate scientific facts within its belief structure. This is not a new struggle, but the consequences are greater in today’s information age where the internet can spread data instantly. It took the Catholic Church almost 400 years to vindicate Galileo for his support of the heliocentric view of the universe, despite solid scientific evidence from Copernican times. Today, religions and ideologies not only harm their own credibility by not accepting evolution but potentially contribute to the flawed science education that seems so prevalent in the United States now. In Galileo’s time, some scholars tried to harmonize the new data with Scripture and Church teachings, but were not able to carry the day. Eventually, it became untenable to deny Galileo’s claims; now is that time for evolution and science in general. We cannot wait another 400 years or we will be overtaken by cultures that advocate real science.
Last December, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in December. Near the end of her comments, she called the K-12 education problem in our country a national security issue. “There are a lot of problems,” she said. “Proliferation, Afghanistan, the Middle East. But the US needs internal repair more than it needs anything else.” Now is the time to start that internal repair. We must teach true science to our children, before another country seizes our Sputnik moment.
High-performing charter schools need to grow faster to serve more students, but to do so, they will have to overcome not just organizational obstacles but also significant political ones. That was the takeaway from a panel discussion on charter schools the Progressive Policy Institute held at the National Press Club today to launch a new PPI report: “Going Exponential: Speeding the Growth of High-Quality Charter Schools,” by Emily Ayscue Hassel, Bryan C. Hassel and Joe Ableidinger.
Bryan Hassel led off the panel by discussing his report, which begins from the premise that high-performing charter schools need to grow faster in order to serve more low-income children. “They only serve a tiny fraction of the students, only ten percent,” he said. “And the average number of schools being added annually is 1.3 schools. Only five CMOs [Charter Management Organizations] are planning to have more than 30 schools in their network by 2025. I don’t see a lot of prospects for serving millions of kids who need these schools.”
Hassel’s report focuses on urging leading CMOs to think big, and he distills nine lessons from high-growth organizations in the private sector that could apply to charters. On the panel he focused on four: generating cash flow, tackling talent scarcity, reaching customers where they are, and finding top leaders committed to growth.
To improve cash flow, he proposed a pay-for-performance scheme: “What if the best charters were paid more?” Hassel asked. “What if the top 10 percent received 10 percent more? Then they could invest in growth. And then we’d pay worse charter schools less, which would hasten the closing of the worst charter schools.”
To improve reach, Hassel proposed micro-reach and micro-chartering strategies: “How do you do more without having to find a facility?” Hassel said. “One idea is that policymakers could issue charters not just to whole schools but to individual teachers who want to serve 20-40 kids.”
EvaMoskowitz, CEO of Success Charter Network (who was featured in the documentary “Waiting for Superman”), applauded the goal of rapid growth. Success Charter Network has doubled in size every for the last four years, and will open up two more in the next year. “And I don’t die of exhaustion,” said Moskowitz, “I could keep going.”
And when she says exhaustion, she means exhaustion from the politics. “In our world it’s really hand-to-hand combat,” she said. “It’s the teachers’ union blockading students and preventing them from entering the school. We’re talking about having to ask police to come to usher our kids, five year olds, into the building” These politics, she noted, put real obstacles on growth.
Andrew Rotherham, partner at Bellwether Education Partners and former PPI colleague, echoed Hassel’s call for scaling up. “This field does not understand scale,” he said. “The only thing we consistently know how to scale is problems, bad ideas, and perverse incentives.”
Like Moskowitz, he also put a focus on politics. “We’ve done a poor job of using regulation and incentives,” he said. “Really there’s only one state, Michigan, that in meaningful ways incentivizes a process where good charter schools can replicate effectively.”
Rotherham noted that in many ways, top charter schools have grown beyond expectations. Once upon a time people predicted KIPP would never expand beyond two dozen schools (it is now at 100) and TFA would never expand beyond 500 core members (it now has 20,000 alums). But he also posed a question for future growth: “Do we need more CMOs or bigger CMOs? We talk about more-more-more, but what should it look like.”
R. Brooks Garber, vice president of federal advocacy for National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, added a note of caution to the rapid growth strategy. Quality control is important, he said. “It takes only one failure, and one failure would be the end of the brand. We open schools one grade at a time.” But he agreed that charter schools could be more strategic.
Hassel responded by suggesting that even if rapid expansion resulted in slightly reduced performance for top charter schools, it would still probably be better than the alternative – the continuation of inferior public or other charter schools.
All and all, the discussion highlighted the tensions between the aspirations of rapid growth and the substantial on-the-ground obstacles, both political and organizational. Everyone wants high-performing charters to grow faster. But it ain’t easy.
Controversy rages over the overall contribution of charter schools to education reform. And while charter schools have produced mixed results, that is for a simple reason: not all charter schools are created equal.
Some charter schools do produce poor results. But other charter schools receive extraordinary results, turning around the lives of low-income children.
Rather than group all charter schools together and debate the wisdom of charter schools generally, here’s a better question to ask: How do we facilitate growth of the charter schools that work? How do we bring the effective teaching strategies from the most successful charter schools to more students?
That’s the question that Emily Ayscue Hassel, Bryan C. Hassel and Joe Ableidinger tackle in a new report for the Progressive Policy Institute, entitled “Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best.”
The report outlines nine lessons from fast-growing organizations that can be applied to charter schools. You can read it here.
But the big lesson is simple:
Charter leaders who want to pursue exponential growth and funders who want to support them must become much more familiar with the rapid-growth strategies used in other sectors and apply them to education. In addition, policymakers must prioritize removing any barriers to growth by the best – while also creating new incentives and avenues for excellent programs to reach more children.
Bryan Hassel will be on hand tomorrow (Feb. 17) at the National Press Club, to discuss the paper, along with R. Brooks Garber of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Eva Moskowitz of the Success Charter Network, and Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners. For more details, click here.
Going Exponential: Speeding the Growth of High-Quality
Charter Schools
Featured Speakers:
R. Brooks Garber, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Bryan Hassel,Public Impact
Eva Moskowitz,Success Charter Network Andrew Rotherham, Bellwether Education Partners
Moderator:
Will Marshall,President, Progressive Policy Institute
Date: Thursday, Feb. 17, 2011
10 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
Location: National Press Club
529 14th St. NW
Bloomberg Room
Washington, DC
The public charter school movement, hindered by major political and financial obstacles, has made slow and uneven progress over the last two decades. Its detractors charge that charters produce, on average, results no better than traditional public schools. Yet no one denies that there are many high-quality charters. As movingly described in documentaries such as Waiting for Superman, these schools are giving hope to poor families desperate for alternatives to the “drop-out factories” that plague many low-income communities.
Charter skeptics and enthusiasts, therefore, ought to be able to agree that it would be good for America’s neediest families have more high-performing charters schools. The question is how to spur such growth.
Please join us as PPI unveils a new study by Bryan Hassel, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Joe Ableidinger of Public Impact: Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best. The report draws lessons from high-growth organizations in other sectors for charter school operators and management organizations and offers charter operators practical advice for how to scale up.
PPI is also proud to present three distinguished commentators: Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Charter Network in New York, Andy Rotherham, co-founder at Bellwether Education Partners and Brooks Garbor Vice President for Federal Advocacy of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Just before the holidays, the National Center for Teacher Quality released a report evaluating 53 institutions* that train and educate students for the teaching profession in Illinois. Immediately and predictably, all hell broke loose. Schools responded that the report methods and data collection were skewed and lazy—the NCTQ responded back that its methods are well-founded and that great volumes of data were reviewed to inform their judgment.
The debate swirls on with US News and World Report’s recent announcement that it will be using NCTQ’s rating system to form its annual ranking of education prep programs. That’s okay. Debate is good, particularly around something like education, which is an undeniably big deal. But debate can also be obscuring.
At almost exactly the same time that NCTQ revealed its findings about Illinois’ teacher prep programs, another report was released, to relatively little fanfare, let alone debate. Prepared by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the 40-page document argues that the training of teachers needs to be “turned upside down”—more clinical experience, more rigor, more accountability, more careful placement for new teachers. In short, pre-ed should look a lot more like pre-med.
Citing both medicine and education as practice-based fields, the NCATE report argues that a doctor can’t practice from books alone. In fact, she can’t even begin to conceptualize practice without actual patients. Education works similarly.
This report is also hardly alone in the analogy—the National Research Council points out that this argument has been made in various forms since the ‘80s, and at least one Boston program has been placing “teacher residents” in city classrooms since 2003.
There are clear similarities between education and medicine: both draw from a rich body of knowledge, scientific inquiry, and multi-disciplinary information. Both seek to impact the body or mind to some degree, dealing both with internal structures and external stimuli. Both aim for betterment and regulation, though differently defined.
The biggest disconnect between the two might be the argument that education is not practiced to achieve a singular, universally agreed upon outcome—though I think any randomized sample of doctors would might have more to say (medicine to heal, to prevent, to improve, to harmonize, etc.). In both fields, technique is easy once you know the basics. And opinions on the purpose of your vocation will ultimately be self-generating. In education, it’s a common starting point that’s missing.
What would it look like if we were to train teachers they way we train doctors?
It would look interdisciplinary. It would look reflective. It would look more holistic than it does today—meaning, technique (how to get your 17-year-olds to pay attention to you for 42 minutes) and theory (17-year-olds are at a particular developmental phase, are suffering from over-taxed short-term memory, and are having difficulty building cognitive schemas that they need to organize and access information) would be linked, rather than siloed into separate classes or disciplines.
And it would look hard, I think. There’s a reason for the high attrition in freshman O-Chem courses. There’s no reason to assume that the demands of learning to teach should be any less. Being able to nurture an intellectual life is just as important as being able to save one on the operating table.
The old axiom “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” is standing in the way. But if we also value the statement that “Education is the silver bullet” (I’m quoting West Wing there, but the idea behind this statement saturates the panic about educational achievement we live with today) maybe it’s time to change axioms for good.
Making it happen, of course, is the sticky wicket. The NCATE report suggests that the solution might be in the change itself. It advocates involving clinical hosts (districts, schools, principals and individual teacher mentors) at the start of the training process.
This means not only co-designing goals and strategies for their achievement, not just providing placements, but also allowing for networks of critical reflection and feedback between the college classroom and K-12 learning site. Going beyond superficial partnership to create a deeply interconnected learning system does more than just give stakeholders a seat at the table—it changes the way they think about that table, and allows for a ripple effect of changing values.
Teach for America has long grounded its successes in the quick leap from its participants’ boot camp training to their presence in actual classrooms, and some charter schools or alternative certification programs have followed their lead to create their own quick-start or feet-wetting recruitment programs that often bypass traditional, certification-earning coursework for teachers—and often lead to high attrition and rapid teacher turnover.
Instead of squabbling over efficacy, traditional teaching colleges and university programs should learn from the best these programs have to offer (rapid introduction to clinical practice) and incorporate it into the just-as-necessary academic content they’re most equipped to provide: study in cognitive and learning sciences, developmental and psychological theories, and the most recent neurological findings that impact kids’ learning.
It’s not the NCATE report that’s ignited the firestorm of debate. But I would argue it should be. We’re used to a few key scapegoats for kids’ low achievement in schools (unions, assessment measures, etc.). But placing blame at that level disregards the source of the problem.
Re-tooling how teachers are educated seems to get us much closer to the root of the problem of our broken educational system. If nothing else, training teachers on a med-school model might provide some desperately lacking consistency in the field. The single-word summation of the NCTQ Illinois report was not, despite the responses it garnered, “evil” or “incompetent.” It was “inconsistent.” So maybe that’s the surest foothold to climb out of the teacher quality trap, stop placing blame, and start doing something.
*I would be remiss not to note, as a student and employee at DePaul University, one of the institutions in reviewed in the NCTQ Illinois report, that my views here are wholly my own and are not to be considered representative of the school.
Just before the holidays, the National Center for Teacher Quality released a report evaluating 53 institutions* that train and educate students for the teaching profession in Illinois. Immediately and predictably, all hell broke loose. Schools responded that the report methods and data collection were skewed and lazy—the NCTQ responded back that its methods are well-founded and that great volumes of data were reviewed to inform their judgment.
The debate swirls on with US News and World Report’s recent announcement that it will be using NCTQ’s rating system to form its annual ranking of education prep programs. That’s okay. Debate is good, particularly around something like education, which is an undeniably big deal. But debate can also be obscuring.
At almost exactly the same time that NCTQ revealed its findings about Illinois’ teacher prep programs, another report was released, to relatively little fanfare, let alone debate. Prepared by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the 40-page document argues that the training of teachers needs to be “turned upside down”—more clinical experience, more rigor, more accountability, more careful placement for new teachers. In short, pre-ed should look a lot more like pre-med.
Citing both medicine and education as practice-based fields, the NCATE report argues that a doctor can’t practice from books alone. In fact, she can’t even begin to conceptualize practice without actual patients. Education works similarly.
This report is also hardly alone in the analogy—the National Research Council points out that this argument has been made in various forms since the ‘80s, and at least one Boston program has been placing “teacher residents” in city classrooms since 2003.
There are clear similarities between education and medicine: both draw from a rich body of knowledge, scientific inquiry, and multi-disciplinary information. Both seek to impact the body or mind to some degree, dealing both with internal structures and external stimuli. Both aim for betterment and regulation, though differently defined.
The biggest disconnect between the two might be the argument that education is not practiced to achieve a singular, universally agreed upon outcome—though I think any randomized sample of doctors would might have more to say (medicine to heal, to prevent, to improve, to harmonize, etc.). In both fields, technique is easy once you know the basics. And opinions on the purpose of your vocation will ultimately be self-generating. In education, it’s a common starting point that’s missing.
What would it look like if we were to train teachers they way we train doctors?
It would look interdisciplinary. It would look reflective. It would look more holistic than it does today—meaning, technique (how to get your 17-year-olds to pay attention to you for 42 minutes) and theory (17-year-olds are at a particular developmental phase, are suffering from over-taxed short-term memory, and are having difficulty building cognitive schemas that they need to organize and access information) would be linked, rather than siloed into separate classes or disciplines.
And it would look hard, I think. There’s a reason for the high attrition in freshman O-Chem courses. There’s no reason to assume that the demands of learning to teach should be any less. Being able to nurture an intellectual life is just as important as being able to save one on the operating table.
The old axiom “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” is standing in the way. But if we also value the statement that “Education is the silver bullet” (I’m quoting West Wing there, but the idea behind this statement saturates the panic about educational achievement we live with today) maybe it’s time to change axioms for good.
Making it happen, of course, is the sticky wicket. The NCATE report suggests that the solution might be in the change itself. It advocates involving clinical hosts (districts, schools, principals and individual teacher mentors) at the start of the training process.
This means not only co-designing goals and strategies for their achievement, not just providing placements, but also allowing for networks of critical reflection and feedback between the college classroom and K-12 learning site. Going beyond superficial partnership to create a deeply interconnected learning system does more than just give stakeholders a seat at the table—it changes the way they think about that table, and allows for a ripple effect of changing values.
Teach for America has long grounded its successes in the quick leap from its participants’ boot camp training to their presence in actual classrooms, and some charter schools or alternative certification programs have followed their lead to create their own quick-start or feet-wetting recruitment programs that often bypass traditional, certification-earning coursework for teachers—and often lead to high attrition and rapid teacher turnover.
Instead of squabbling over efficacy, traditional teaching colleges and university programs should learn from the best these programs have to offer (rapid introduction to clinical practice) and incorporate it into the just-as-necessary academic content they’re most equipped to provide: study in cognitive and learning sciences, developmental and psychological theories, and the most recent neurological findings that impact kids’ learning.
It’s not the NCATE report that’s ignited the firestorm of debate. But I would argue it should be. We’re used to a few key scapegoats for kids’ low achievement in schools (unions, assessment measures, etc.). But placing blame at that level disregards the source of the problem.
Re-tooling how teachers are educated seems to get us much closer to the root of the problem of our broken educational system. If nothing else, training teachers on a med-school model might provide some desperately lacking consistency in the field. The single-word summation of the NCTQ Illinois report was not, despite the responses it garnered, “evil” or “incompetent.” It was “inconsistent.” So maybe that’s the surest foothold to climb out of the teacher quality trap, stop placing blame, and start doing something.
*I would be remiss not to note, as a student and employee at DePaul University, one of the institutions in reviewed in the NCTQ Illinois report, that my views here are wholly my own and are not to be considered representative of the school.
Last week, the Progressive Policy Institute released a Memo to President Obama, which contained 10 Big Ideas for Getting America Moving Again. How did the President’s speech match up to our recommendations?
Overall, he did quite well. Eight of our ten ideas were largely consonant with proposals included in the address, and the future-oriented rhetoric echoes the language in our memo. We also appreciate his willingness to look to both sides of the aisle to find solutions.
However, we were disappointed that he did not discuss the sluggish housing market, and that he did offer any ideas to address the roots of the partisan rancor in Washington.
Our overall grade: B+
Here’s a proposal-by-proposal scorecard:
1. Removing Obstacles to Growth: A Regulatory Improvement Commission
We proposed: A periodic review process conducted by a Regulatory Improvement Commission, modeled loosely on the BRAC Commissions for military base closures.
The President said: “To reduce barriers to growth and investment, I’ve ordered a review of government regulations.”
Analysis: The President clearly understands that we need to prune obsolete and ineffective regulations and stimulate economic innovation and entrepreneurship. But agency self-review is inadequate.
Grade: A-
2. Internal National Building: A National Infrastructure Bank
We proposed: Smart, innovative financing solutions that enable us to restore the backbone of our economy. A well-structured National Infrastructure Bank can play this role by leveraging public dollars with the participation of private-sector investors.
The President said: “The third step in winning the future is rebuilding America. To attract new businesses to our shores, we need the fastest, most reliable ways to move people, goods, and information — from high-speed rail to high-speed Internet.”
Analysis: Making infrastructure one of five sections of the speech gave it real prominence. But the President needs to do more than just propose “that we redouble those efforts.” He needs to lay out a mechanism to do that rationally, and to identify clear funding for it. A National Infrastucture Bank could accomplish that.
Grade: A-
3. A Way to Pay for High-Speed Rail
We proposed: Restructuring the Highway Trust Fund into a Surface Transportation Trust Fund that recaptures its original mission—to build and maintain an efficient national transportation network—and updates that mission to reflect 21st-century priorities, including upgrades to our passenger and freight rail systems.
The President said: “Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. “
Analysis: We applaud the President’s full-throated commitment to high-speed rail. However, he’s going to need to figure out a way to pay for it. We suggest he read Mark Reutter’s excellent memo on how to finance high-speed rail.
Grade: A-
4. Restoring Fiscal Discipline in Washington
We proposed: Restoringfiscal discipline in Washington by trimming the $1.1 trillion in outdated tax expenditures, capping domestic spending (including defense), eliminating supplemental defense budgets, and slowing mandatory expenditures by reducing benefits for affluent retirees.
The President said: “Starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years… we cut excessive spending wherever we find it –- in domestic spending, defense spending, health care spending, and spending through tax breaks and loopholes… we should also find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations…we simply can’t afford a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.”
Analysis: The President clearly gets the seriousness of the looming debt crisis, but understands the difference between smart cuts and needed investments. But he could have come out more strongly in favor the Fiscal Commission’s work, and he only paid lip service to entitlements.
Grade: B+
5. Setting National Targets: A Balanced Energy Portfolio
We proposed: A national Balanced Energy Portfolio with a target fuel mix allocated into thirds by 2040: one third of our electricity generated by renewable resources, one third by nuclear power, and one third from traditional fossil fuels.
The President said: “By 2035, 80 percent of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources. Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all — and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.”
Analysis: The President is thinking big, but also recognizing that nuclear and natural gas need to be part of any energy mix.
Grade: A
6. Greening the Pentagon: An Energy Security Innovation Fund
We proposed: An Energy Security Innovation Fund, housed in the Pentagon, to help companies bridge the gap. Such a fund would leverage public dollars with private money to support research and deployment of the most promising green products.
The President said: “We’re telling America’s scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo projects of our time.”
Analysis: The next clean energy breakthrough is going to require support from the government. But Obaa should look beyond the Department of Energy and recognize that the military can be a fertile source of innovation, too.
Grade: A-
7. Bringing Public Education into the 21st Century
We proposed: To radically transform public education by growing charter schools, ending teacher tenure as we know it, spurring a network of “Innovation Zones”, and creating a “Digital Teacher Corps”.
The President said: “Our schools share this responsibility. When a child walks into a classroom, it should be a place of high expectations and high performance. But too many schools don’t meet this test.”
Analysis: Education is clearly the key to our ability to “win the future,” and the President understands this. We support his Race to the Top program and the call for more bright young people to go into education. But we also hope he thinks more creatively about radical new ideas for 21st century education, embracing the possibilities of charter schools, digital education, and “innovation zones.”
Grade: A-
8. Lifting Housing Markets: One Million Homeowner Vouchers
We proposed: An innovative way to jump-start the housing market would be for the federal government to provide a million vouchers that allow low-income renters to become homeowners.
The President said: (Nothing)
Analysis: Surprisingly, the President failed to mention the sluggish housing market, which many economists believe is one of the leading factors holding back an economic recovery.
Grade: F
9. Align Innovation and Immigration
We proposed: Aligning innovation and immigration by providing a citizenship path for foreign students with advanced technical degrees and illegal immigrants’ children who are interested in national service.
The President said: “I strongly believe that we should take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration… I know that debate will be difficult. I know it will take time. But tonight, let’s agree to make that effort. And let’s stop expelling talented, responsible young people who could be staffing our research labs or starting a new business, who could be further enriching this nation. “
Analysis: The President deserves points for having the courage to bring up immigration reform. But he clearly gets it: our global competitiveness depends on continuing to be a magnet for the world’s best and brightest.
Grade: A
10. Taking Power from Special Interests: A Fair Way to Finance Elections
We proposed: A hybrid Fair Elections system introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to allow federal candidates to choose to run for office without relying on large contributions by using federal money to match small donations.
The President said: (Nothing)
Analysis: Campaign finance reform is not on the agenda, and the President does not seem particularly interested in putting it there. This is too bad. A great way to break the partisan rancor in Washington would be change the way politicians get elected to office. As long as congressional campaigns are privately funded, and as long as the big donations come primarily from ideologues and special interests, pragmatic candidates are going to have a tough time raising the resources they need to get started, and a difficult time winning in all-important low-turnout primaries.
Grade: F
Conclusion:
Overall, it was a great speech. It laid out the problems that we face as a nation, and provided a vision of an America that invests smartly in the future, building infrastructure, providing educational opportunities, and remaining a magnet for the best and brightest in the world, and all in a way that could move us past partisan divides.
One of Barack Obama’s finest moments as President came this past September, when he gave a speech to Congress urging passage of the health-care reform bill. In his closing remarks, he invoked the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, and what Kennedy had written him in his final days: “What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.” Those words resonated with Obama. “I’ve thought about that phrase quite a bit in recent days – the character of our country,” he told the country that night.
Those same words stung with relevance this weekend. Overshadowed by the landmark repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, a triumph of social justice, was a cruel development: the Senate’s failure to break the filibuster to pass the DREAM Act.
In more reasonable days, the DREAM Act would have been a no-brainer. The bill paves a path to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. by their parents. It would grant permanent residency status to immigrants who graduate from high school and complete two years of college or enter the military. In other words, young men and women who were brought to this country illegally by their parents and who want to become more integrated into our national life would finally have the means to do so.
A good idea, and a bipartisan one too – once upon a time. In a period when our nation is in need of as many achievers and public servants it can get its arms around, the DREAM Act would seem to be a common-sense solution (not to mention a deficit-reducing one, as the CBO found).
But those days are long gone, and when the vote to cut off debate came up, the bill fell five short of 60. Three Republicans – Richard Lugar, Robert Bennett, and Lisa Murkowski – voted in favor, while five Democrats voted against. All this despite the fact that, under the Obama administration, there have been a record number of deportations, part of Obama’s effort to convince the bill’s holdouts that it is serious on enforcement.
The pictures that accompanied the news stories of the bill’s failure tell the story. Here’s how the Timesdescribed the scene:
Young Hispanic men and women filled the spectator galleries of the Senate, many of them wearing graduation caps and tassels in a symbol of their support for the bill. They held hands in a prayerful gesture as the clerk called the roll and many looked stricken as its defeat was announced.
For those young men and women, the rebuff must have been unfathomable: Why would this country explicitly deny them the opportunity to be productive contributors to our national life?
That the DREAM Act has gone from a pragmatic, consensus policy to anathema to not just the right but even a handful of Democrats speaks to a worrisome shift in American attitudes. Demagoguery is rife; resentments are in full bloom. It makes one worry for the character of our country.
Most Americans appreciate the fact that the world is a very competitive place. Policy makers and parents have long known that our kids, from grade school through college, need to step up their skills and understanding of science, technology, engineering and math – know in education circles as STEM studies – if they are going to compete successfully with their counterparts in China, India, Korea, and many European countries. For this reason, for nearly 40 years there has been a lot of interest in improving STEM education. While it is laudable that we are focusing on STEM education, we are running the risk of tethering ourselves to assumptions that might be a little faulty and outdated. We can’t be truly innovative as a nation if we are not innovative in our thinking about STEM education.
The current assumption driving STEM education is that all students should get at least some STEM education at every step of their educational journey. Supply students with high standards, great teachers and get as many kids excited about STEM as possible. Call this the “some STEM for all” approach. It sounds appealing, right? Universal tech literacy for the 21st century.
Well, one problem with this is that most of us are not destined to be scientists and engineers – maybe five percent. Some of us simply don’t have the acumen and the economy only needs so many engineers and scientists and actuaries. So why should state and local governments, many of which are in deep financial peril, lavish resources on the “Some STEM for all” approach? The answer is that they shouldn’t.
Another problem with this approach is that it wants to push young people into studying what might not necessarily interest them and deny the real STEM stars the resources they need to excel. This is destined to fail. A successful education experience begins with motivated, excited students pursuing what truly interests them and going where their talents can shine. Forcing all students to take on AP physics or chemistry is going to have disappointing results during high school and beyond since these fields aren’t necessarily where the jobs are going to be. Ironically, over 80 percent of the STEM jobs are in engineering and information technology but there is a paucity of courses in these fields at the high school level. Therefore, the kids with the inclination are not getting access to what excites them – nor acquiring skills that employers actually need.
The time has come to try a more efficient and effective approach. Flip the paradigm around. Call it “All STEM for Some.” It is based on identifying the kids with the most promise and interest in STEM areas early on and giving them the challenging, exciting educational experience. This will allow them to move into advanced studies and then into the working world ready to contribute to a more dynamic U.S. economy. Not everyone is going to be Bill Gates. We don’t need everyone to be Bill Gates. But we have to make sure we have at least a few Bill Gateses in the years ahead.
Gates’s case actually provides a good example of the wisdom of this approach. As many of us have learned in the popular book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, Gates is a product of brains and hard work. But just as important, he had the luck to go to fine private high school where a parent with vision and resources provided a computer lab. This was a time when most universities had not computer lab. For a kid like Gates, it was heaven. He spent hours there. And the rest, as they say, is history.
ITIF fleshes out the idea of “All STEM for Some” and offers up ideas that should be embraced as part of a broader education reform effort in a new report Refueling the U.S. Innovation Economy: Fresh Approaches to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education. Among the ideas in the report is placing a greater emphasis on making sure students can demonstrate skills rather than merely memorize content. In addition, it would make sense to allow STEM-oriented students to spend more time in those courses and less time on other subjects. Also, we need to make sure the resources are there beginning freshmen year so we don’t lose the kids who were STEM-inclined but instead nurture them with greater opportunities right away.
In addition, the report urges policy makers to get serious about creating entirely new institutions – STEM specialty schools – and develop the infrastructure to identify and recruit the most promising students to pursue their passions in exceptional world-class educational environments.
We should also revise how we incentivize schools to make their STEM programs more effective. The report explains this could be done with a combination of federal grant money, as well as corporate or philanthropic efforts. Bolstering STEM education should be part of needed national strategy to make our national labs, universities and private employers act in a more coherent fashion when it comes to preparing students and workers in critical new fields.
We are not going to be able to develop the game-changing advances in biotechnology, robotics, energy and other fields unless we nurture the talent of our students effectively. Many of us will want to become artists, teach history, develop real estate, or run our own small business. That is fine. But we should get serious – immediately – about how we educate those students who show the keenest interest in the emerging growth fields of the future. Giving a smattering of science and math to them along with the aspiring novelists is not going to work. We only have about ten years to make changes in our STEM education so we will have the talent to create the STEM jobs so and therefore compete globally in the years ahead. The time to get started is now.
Until October, Texas owned the textbook debate. The Texas Board of Education, preparing last year for a book adoption, seemed determined to put a political spin into American history books Texas schoolchildren will be reading. That raised hackles and not just in Texas. A headline in England’s Guardian blared, “Texas school board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns.”
Time and cool heads prevailed and the new Texas standards, adopted in August, are not much different from those in other states. The textbook hoopla calmed down. And then, last month, a Williamsburg, Virginia mother (who happens to be a history professor) noticed that her son’s 4th grade schoolbook was—well, outrageous. It stated that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War, many led by Stonewall Jackson. This is not a view held by most historians.
The author of the book defended her work, claiming that she did her research on the Internet, where her source for information was the Sons of Confederate Veterans. This created a bit of brouhaha. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson of Princeton University commented, “These Confederate heritage groups have been making this claim for years as a way of purging their cause of its association with slavery.”
Virginia has what is supposed to be a rigorous adoption system, books with agendas aren’t supposed to get through the process. This book was called “accurate and unbiased” by a committee tasked to read it. Virginia school districts, having spent a lot of money on the book, are now pulling it from classrooms.
Textbook nightmares are nothing new in the school world, and they are not unique to Virginia and Texas. But purchasing policies there, and in 20 other “adoption” states, determine content in textbooks for schools throughout the nation. Those books, routinely dull, are often error-ridden and biased. Actually the adoption process began with bias as a goal. After the Civil War, southern leaders didn’t want their children reading a northern version of that conflict. They set up their own school standards and the publishing industry complied with different books for Southern and Northern markets.
Today, in school districts in all 50 states, adoptions are usually a winner-take-all affair that leads to giant sales and huge profits for a few publishers. Those publishers spend their efforts—not on creating good books—but on promotion, gifts, and fancy presentations. Think of the power of lobbyists; textbook salespeople perfect lobby-like outreach to teachers and administrators.
This is not a minor affair: books are the intellectual meat and potatoes we feed our children. Shabby textbooks make a difference. They don’t have to be. Here are some suggestions:
Have closed adoptions. No salespeople allowed. Let books and other teaching materials speak for themselves to teachers and committees. Don’t limit choices to books from textbook houses. Have librarians share their expertise. Let a subcommittee of children read the choices and submit their thoughts. If a book doesn’t work for its potential readers, it shouldn’t be adopted. And call in experts: historians to comment on social studies texts, scientists on science texts.
If possible, do away with whole city adoptions. The big bucks are just too tempting for those driven by bottom-line issues. Besides, given our diverse population, it doesn’t work for every fourth grade teacher in Los Angeles or Richmond to be forced to teach from the same history text. Have schools or even individual teachers pick books from a broad vetted list. Let some teachers, who can make a case for their decisions, pick volumes not on the list. Teaching U.S. history, or any subject, with good bookstore books, rather than texts, makes sense if a teacher wants to go that route. If we are to attract and hold sophisticated teachers we need to treat them as professionals rather than cogs in a bureaucratic wheel. Letting teachers choose their own books would not only support them and benefit kids, it might bring real competition to the schoolbook industry.
Some of our greatest thinkers have written books for children. Henry Steele Commager’s story of the Constitution is hard to top. Physicist Stephen Hawking is the author (along with his daughter Lucy) of a terrific physics adventure that is perfect for third graders. Why aren’t books like these read routinely in our schools?
Yes, the money-management folks will talk about the savings from mass purchases, an argument that doesn’t hold up. Most standard textbooks are outrageously overpriced. Today’s massive adoptions bring billions of dollars in annual income to a few big publishers whose goal, as with most businesses, is to make money. Educating children is a minor consideration. Trade (bookstore) books are generally inexpensive.
How about assessments? Can they deal with a variety of books rather than one text? No problem if we assess ideas and what is usually the small number of essential facts that support those ideas. Currently our tests are shallow, dull, limited, and limiting. Detach them from specific textbooks and canned lesson plans and they can begin to test critical thinking tied to broad knowledge.
Some current conventional wisdom says the textbook issue has been solved. Books are out; technology is in. But, so far, online texts are aimed at test preparation, not deep thinking. They promote skimming and browsing, not analytical reading. There’s a bigger issue here. We are giving up on whole book reading, which means losing our literary heritage as well as our national legacy. Right now, most schoolchildren have little access to what was once a shared body of heroes, villains, stories, and values.
As for our science scores, a recent study ranked us 48th internationally. “48th is not a good place,” said the New York Times. While hands on labs are exciting, without a story their concepts rarely stick. Only one state mandates science history. Ask your children: Who is Linus Pauling? How did we discover the atom? Chances are they won’t know.
Meanwhile, the current round of educational criticism is focusing on villainous unions and low performing teachers. Hardly anyone has looked in depth at factory-like education schools, administrator-heavy school systems, or the mental junk food we feed our children. All this is deeply discouraging to the good (and often great) teachers in our schools.
The so-called “gainful employment” rule currently being proposed by the Department of Education (DOE) has generated extensive controversy. The rule, designed to crack down on widespread recruiting frauds that can lead to huge student loan debts and ultimately put taxpayers on the hook, has drawn 90,000 comments.
DOE announced recently that it would implement the new regulations on July 1, 2011, as planned, though it may make a few changes in finalizing the rules.
Today, PPI is releasing a new memo by PPI senior fellow Michael Mandel on how to understand the new “gainful employment’ rule. You can read the full memo here.
But here’s the quick summary:
Mandel argues that in an uncertain economic environment like the one we are currently facing, it’s really hard to make specific rules about debt-to-income ratios or to predict in what sectors there is going to be demand for employment even a few years down the line. (Mandel shows how poorly the Bureau of Labor Statistics “hot job” list has predicted the future in recent years.)
Mandel also worries that too much focus on debt-to-income ratios is going to disproportionately hurt those students who most need education – poorer students from hard-hit states who don’t look like a great investment given the formulas drawn up by the DOE guidelines, but need the most help if they are going get the training they need to be part of any economic recovery.
The big point is that given the current economic uncertainty, you want institutions that are capable of reacting quickly to market demand for training and skills-acquisition. And while there are obviously needed reforms to prevent for-profit colleges from taking advantage of students and student loan programs, too many rules and regulations are going to make it difficult if not impossible for for-profit colleges to respond quickly to market needs for skills.
As Mandel writes: “When the economy starts growing again, we want our educational institutions to be able to react quickly, not drag behind. DOE’s proposed approval process is a disaster, hurting the parts of the educational system that are the most flexible.”
Recent belt-tightening (forced or otherwise) in education has resulted in major casualties to after-school programsaround the nation. As funding priorities shift to privilege teacher prep and accountability, after-school programs have been among the first to get the funding axe.
The 21st Century Community Learning Centers, a federal framework to support programs that target under-served or at-risk populations, provide academic support to struggling students and create opportunities for exploring arts, sports, and music. They are emblematic of after-school programs everywhere—in what they do, what they don’t do, and how we understand after-school time at large. So a proposed budget increase of almost $100 million to the 21st CCLCs should come as good news, right?
Not necessarily, according to some in the broader education community. The proposed appropriations bill bundles 21st CCLC support with money to “expand learning time” by extending the school day, or year. A recent Education Week article notes the ambivalence among after-school providers, citing “fears that opening the program to extended-learning-time initiatives could come at the expense of high-quality after-school efforts.” The Afterschool Alliance, a national advocate for after-school programs, has taken up a standing opposition to the bill.
So, what’s going on here under the surface conflict of too many line items and too few dollars? Why wouldn’t the nation’s biggest after-school supporter want a huge network of after-school programs to receive more funding?
Even more buried than the defensive concern about diverted support, there is also a surfeit of competing ideas about what education could or should be—and not enough space, consideration, or funding to follow each of those ideas to any sort of fruition.
Current funding strategies are furthermore pushing after-school and other interventions (extended-day included) to fit themselves into the ever-more restrictive reform rhetoric of increased academic achievement. If programs can’t be shown to improve kids’ test scores, they’re passed over, slashed from the budget, and relegated to the “tried and failed” pile.
The expectations placed upon after-school programs in recent years (increasingly, say, with the advent and legacy of No Child Left Behind) have reflected this slow constriction of values. After-school hours are expected to be as academically enriching as the classroom hours from which children are directly coming—if not moreso, as after-school has increasingly been incorporated into NCLB’s “supplemental services” for remediation.
Once valued primarily as a safe space in the hours between school and home for kids in at-risk areas or circumstances, or as an outlet for the abundant energy and creativity that accompanies and overwhelms adolescence, after-school time has steadily been re-appropriated as school-time in a slightly different setting.
Research, however, has shown that after-school programs are perhaps not as up to this new task as their proponents (and funders) would like to imagine. Even among the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, research has shown the programs have “few impacts” on participating students’ academic performance. Reports from 2004 to the present, available through the Department of Education’s website, show that fewer than half of participating students’ grades improve, and less than one-third of students’ state assessment scores improve after spending time in a 21st CCLC.
Presumably, someone, somewhere is gearing up to use this data to add fuel to the competitive fire of education reform—and that might be what the Afterschool Alliance really fears. If these programs don’t work, toss them out, forget about ‘em, and bring on the extended day (or value-added teacher assessment, or private tutoring services, or those helper-monkeys they’re using at the Commonwealth Games)! But before we throw the babies out with the after-school bathwater, let’s look a little deeper. There is, in fact, research on the obvious flipside of the issue: what are after-school programs good at doing?
Robert Halpern of the Erikson Institute has spent significant time wrestling with this very question, in part by asking: why aren’t after-school programs good at academic enhancement?
Citing the heterogeneity of after-school programs, the lack of a cohesive professional “field” for providers, the mixed backgrounds of staff, and unstable or unsustainable relationships with the resources upon which they so heavily depend, Halpern argues that after-school programs are poorly equipped to take on academic remediation. In Halpern’s view, after-school programs are not extensions of schools, and shouldn’t be viewed as such. They should provide what schools can’t, not simply make up the difference.
Re-assessing after-school programs along these lines, as first and foremost spaces for acceptance, socialization, and exploration – a new spectrum of possibilities for after-school hours begins to emerge.
The strengths of after-school programming, in Halpern’s estimation, suggest to me the same rubric of what’s being variously defined as “deeper” or “student-centered” learning, or as “21st century skills”: self-guided learning, collaboration, problem-solving, and communication. The basics beyond the academic basics, if you will.
Furthermore, the development of many of these skills or competencies is in conflict with many of the institutional particularities of the modern school system (as Richard Halverson and Allan Collins suggest in their work on technology’s place in learning and education).
The debate over 21st century skills assessment is almost as hot as the debate over what exactly to call this skill set. But advances are being made, and indicators outside of test scores have also been tracked in after-school programs for as long as such programs have been assessed. In 2004, 21st CCLC after-school programs were shown to have some positive effects on student-adult interaction, parental outcomes, and feelings of safety and security among participating children.
The most recent 21st CCLC report, from 2007, shows the target goal of three-quarters of participating students “demonstrating improved homework completion and class participation,” has nearly been met. Other unexplored after-school indicators could include: increases in school attendance, elective or extracurricular participation patterns, creative output, community involvement, and perhaps eventually job placements and earnings.
After-school programs may be as necessary an experiment in improving American education as anything else—including the extended day, and value-added assessments (probably not those security monkeys, but who’s to say?). And we should be looking for ways to both support and improve that experiment by enriching the after-school field, creating professional development opportunities for staff, creating standards to which providers can reasonably be held accountable for their successes as much as their failures. We shouldn’t be blocking after-school support because we’re not sure if another solution is as valid—saying no to something that works because we’re not as sure about something else that could also work.
If education reform is really more of a series of parallel structures rather than a single declarative (to draw from my 8th grade grammar lessons)—if we have to try this, and this, and this, and this, to try to arrive at some answers, then after-school programming, 21st century skill development, and an extended school day or year all deserve both attention and funding. Otherwise we lose $100 million for after-school programs and an untold amount of intangible support for experimentation and innovation within a reform that will only, ultimately, be more than the sum of its parts.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has a well-deserved reputation for not mincing words. She wasted no time last week in calling D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray’s primary victory over Mayor Adrian Fenty a “devastating” blow to children in Washington’s traditional public schools.
That pretty much scotched any talk of Rhee staying on as Chancellor under Gray. In truth, however, that was never in the cards because the Democratic primary race was in significant measure a referendum on Fenty’s signature initiative: his decision to take over the city’s troubled public schools and bring in the hard-charging Rhee to oversee their transformation.
Fenty’s defeat has delighted reform skeptics and the American Federation of Teachers, which pumped nearly $1 million into Gray’s campaign. The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt opined today that the outcome was more a repudiation of Fenty’s aloof style than school reform per se. But it’s hard for me to disagree with Natalie Hopkinson’s gleeful characterization of the vote as a “resounding rejection” of Fenty and Rhee’s struggles to dramatically improve D.C. public schools.
The Fenty-Rhee reforms proved deeply polarizing in Washington, with voters splitting along racial lines. According to a pre-election poll by the Post, 68 percent of white voters said Rhee was a reason to support Fenty, while 54 of black Democrats cited her as a reason to oppose the Mayor. What in one community looked like a bold attempt to shake up a deeply dysfunctional education bureaucracy in another looked like a callous effort to foreclose opportunities for middle class employment.
Gray played shrewdly to public discontent over Rhee’s firings of hundreds of teachers and many principals for poor performance. And it wasn’t just schools: Critics also slammed Fenty for not awarding enough high city posts to blacks, and for building bike paths and dog parks prized by affluent D.C. residents while neglecting poor neighborhoods. In last Tuesday’s primary, Gray won more than 80 percent of the vote in predominately black wards 7 and 8, while Fenty did nearly as well in mainly white Ward 3.
But what of Rhee’s charge? Will Fenty’s loss condemn tens of thousands of D.C. children to substandard public schools?
There’s no doubt that Rhee’s departure will slow the momentum of school reform in Washington. With unswerving backing from Fenty, the blunt and often impolitic Rhee imposed real accountability on the school system for the first time. She won national acclaim for making student testing more rigorous, closing failing schools, attracting outside talent (like private foundations and the Teach for America volunteers Hopkinson dismisses as “cultural tourists”), and firing incompetent administrators and teachers.
Under Fenty and Rhee, D.C. public schools moved from the cellar of urban education into the vanguard of reform. The schools opened on time, with books and accurate counts of students. And test scores rose: Over the past three years, Washington was the only big city to show double-digit increases in state reading and math scores for the 7th, 8th and 10th grades.
Rhee also negotiated among the most innovative teacher’s contracts in the country, which offers teachers the chance to earn extra pay in exchange for loosening tenure rules. There’s worry in reform circles that her departure could induce foundations to withdraw $65 million in pledges to fund $25,000 performance bonuses for teachers under the next contract. And since Rhee was a virtual poster child for the kind of education reforms the Obama administration is pushing, there’s also speculation that D.C. would lose a $75 million “Race to the Top” grant from the Department of Education if Rhee leaves.
So now the spotlight turns to Gray, whose victory in November is a given in overwhelmingly Democratic Washington. If Fenty and Rhee failed to win support from black voters for their reforms, what will Gray do differently?
It should be noted that he is not uniformly hostile to school reform. As Council Chairman, he has been a strong supporter of D.C.’s robust public charter school sector, which now enrolls about 38 percent of the city’s students. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of the board that oversees D.C. charters).
Still, Gray faces a dilemma: continue reform and disappoint key allies, especially the teachers’ union, or slow things down and risk abandoning Washington’s hard-won progress toward raising school standards. And it’s not just Gray’s challenge. In fact, this is a moment of truth for the city’s black establishment.
Can the city’s new leaders really find a kinder, gentler way to fix D.C.’s chronically underperforming schools? Or will they revert to the traditional practice of regarding education as a kind of patronage or public jobs program for adults?
The city’s economic vitality, not to mention hopes for raising living standards in its poorest communities, hinge on the answer.
Long one of urban America’s ugly ducklings, Washington D.C. is beginning to shine as a national showcase for school reform.
Two developments this week burnished the capital city’s growing reputation as a laboratory for tough-minded reforms in the areas of school choice and teacher accountability. Education Secretary Arne Duncan named Washington along with nine states as winners in Round 2 of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grants. And a new Fordham Foundation survey, America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reformranked D.C. second among the 26 cities most receptive to change.
The $4.3 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) program is arguably one of President Obama’s most successful and cost-effective initiatives. To qualify for the competitive grants, states have been obliged to change their laws to make them more reform-friendly. For example, many states have lifted legislative caps on charter schools, adopted common performance standards, and, perhaps most controversially, agreed to use student test scores in evaluations of individual teacher performance.
Reformers and skeptics alike nonetheless slammed this week’s awards as arbitrary and political (some pointed out, for example, that a lot of the winning states happen to have Democratic governors.) Reformers fretted that RTTT’s vague selection criteria rewards states for winning teachers’ union acquiescence in modest reforms, while overlooking states like Colorado that have pursued bolder experiments. In any case, Washington will receive $75 million to be shared by the traditional school system headed by Chancellor Michele Rhee and the city’s robust charter school sector.
So what makes Washington, D.C. so special?
The Fordham study gave the District high marks for attracting talented educational entrepreneurs and organizations, like Teach for America and the New Teacher Project, that recruit and train highly qualified teachers. It praises D.C.’s new contract with the Washington Teachers’ Union, which permits teachers to be paid according to performance, and merit-based layoffs.
The study notes that, with the help of private philanthropy, the District invests generously in school improvement and innovation. The city’s “thriving charter sector” also comes in for praise (full disclosure: I’m a member of the Public Charter School Board here), though the chronic shortage of suitable and affordable facilities for charters is also acknowledged. D.C. also gets high marks for quality control in both the traditional and charter sectors.
Rising test scores in the District attest to Rhee’s single-minded devotion to closing achievement gaps, as well as the charter board’s increasingly tough stance toward persistently low-performing schools in its portfolio. Last spring, 40 D.C. elementary schools achieved double-digit gains in pass rates on the citywide math exams, while 19 had double-digit losses. In reading, 26 elementary schools gained at least 10 points in pass rates on standardized tests, while 19 lost ground. Scores also rose at public charter schools, which enroll fully 38 percent of D.C.’s students. While far from perfect, these numbers represent dramatic progress for a school system that has habitually dwelt in the cellar in comparisons with other urban systems. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081402168_pf.html)
Rhee also has done battle with the school system’s notoriously inefficient central bureaucracy. Now the schools open on time with a full complement of textbooks. Now we know how many people the system employs. And then there are the all-important intangibles: A new cultural of accountability is being systematically instilled in the system as bad schools are closed or merged with better ones, new principals are brought in and teachers are evaluated and paid based on classroom performance.
On a less positive note, the survey highlighted a polarized D.C. municipal environment. No doubt there’s been a backlash against Rhee’s disruptive reforms and hard-charging style. Lots of comfortable employment arrangements have been upended. Here’s the Fordham Foundation survey: “respondents report that Mayor Adrian Fenty is the only municipal leader willing to expend extensive political capital to advance education reform.” Fenty is locked in a tough reelection battle against D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray. If he loses, it’s widely assumed that Rhee will have lost her lone protector and will be forced to step down as Chancellor. (She may be gone soon anyway; next month she’s getting married to Sacremental Mayor and former NBA standout Kevin Johnson.)
Whatever happens, Washington’s business, political and civic leaders need to find a way to unite behind a firm commitment to finishing the job Fenty and Rhee have begun, as well as strengthening the innovative charter sector. It’s the only way to give D.C. students a decent shot at a quality education, to close achievement gaps between black and Latino kids and others, and to staunch the steady flow of middle class families with kids from the city to the suburbs.
Last week, Michelle Rhee, chancellor of D.C. public schools, made national news by firing 241 — six percent — of the District’s teachers deemed underperformers. Rhee’s move came after negotiations in June with the Washington Teachers’ Union that created a merit-based bonus system that permits well-performing teachers to earn up to a 21 percent pay increase. The agreement also allows the District to fire those who did not meet minimum benchmarks. Teacher assessment scores will be based half on student improvement and half on in-class teacher evaluations.
While performance-related pay has been around since the 1700s and affects the pay scale of over 85 percent of private sector employees, the debate over merit pay for teachers is still highly contentious. On one hand, proponents argue merit pay will help cash-strapped schools retain good teachers and shed bad ones. They also argue that this will create a salary scale that is fairer than the system of seniority pay that currently exists in most school systems. On the other hand, opponents contend that merit pay may work for seamstresses, but teaching is too complicated to base quality on student performance on a standardized test.
The argument goes, evaluating teachers based solely on a set of student-achievement benchmarks will incentivize teachers to neglect the essential but non-tested responsibilities of educators. As George Parker, current president of the Washington Teachers’ Union put it, “It [merit pay] takes the art of teaching and turns it into bean counting.” Yet numerous other professions that require complex skills and responsibilities have adopted merit pay with positive results. For example, the department of Homeland Security has recently implemented performance-related pay for security analysts, and few would equate scrutinizing terrorist threats with “bean counting”.
The real question for education policy makers is to what degree can metrics assess the added value of different teachers? Part of the answer to this question relates to the availability of good data. Teacher performance may vary significantly depending on a number of variables such as student household income or the percentage of students with English as a second language. Without significant aggregate databases recognizing and accounting for such variables when developing performance pay systems may be difficult or even impossible. Yet technological advancements in the longitudinal data systems being put in place in states and districts are increasingly allowing for a more granular understanding of where educators do and do not add value to the learning process. Although it’s probably true that the current level of data may not be enough to predict exactly what makes a good teacher, what’s important is to use the data, along with the ways of assessing teacher performance, we have to make a better incentive system for the nation’s educators.
Yet that hasn’t been the case. In 1950, for example, 97 percent of public school teachers were paid based on seniority and education attainment (because data did not exist to fairly reward teachers based on any other benchmarks). But by 2007, 96 percent were still being paid based on these payment schedules; regardless of the numerousstudies that have actually found experience (after the first two years) and teaching certifications are two of the worst indicators of teacher performance.
The blatant disregard of the evidence is not accidental. Several players in education policy—particularly teachers’ unions—have described evidence-based pay as some sort of pedagogical chimera, sucking the lifeblood out of what it takes to be a good teacher. For example, Doug McAvory, general secretary to the National Association of Head Teachers, a teachers’ union in the UK, argues, “The extension of performance-related pay based on pupil progress will further demoralize and demotivate teachers.” Yet given that educators readily embrace handing out grades to seven year olds, the argument that performance metrics might “demoralize” underperforming adult professionals seems unpersuasive. Such arguments do little more than distract educators from the importance of using technology and advanced metrics to create better schools.
ITIF and others have emphasized the importance of an educated workforce to improving the innovative and global competitiveness of the United States, but U.S. students are falling behind when measured against their counterparts in other countries. For example, in 2007, only ten percent of U.S. fourth-graders and six percent of eighth-graders scored at or above the international benchmarks in mathematics. Yet as other nations, such as Finland, South Korea and Sweden, have embraced data-based pay in public schools, United States has resisted.
Educators and policy makers should keep in mind the simple syllogism that there is nothing better than a good teacher and nothing worse than a bad one. As a society, we should do what is necessary to get more of the former and fewer of the latter, whether that requires more money, monitoring or better metrics.
Democrats like to think of themselves as champions of economic fairness for working families. But for decades now, working class voters – especially white ones – haven’t been feeling the love. Even as their economic condition has deteriorated, they persist in voting against their “class interest” by voting Republican.
Few U.S. political leaders have studied this phenomenon more intently than Virginia Senator James Webb. In a thought-provoking Wall Street Journal article last week, Webb took aim at government policies intended to promote “diversity,” which he says have marginalized many white workers.
Webb acknowledged Washington’s responsibility to redress the wrongs endured by black Americans. But he maintained that affirmative action policies have been expanded to include many people, including recent immigrants, who cannot by any stretch of the imagination claim to be victims of discrimination. Such policies give a leg up to minorities in competition for government jobs and contracts, broadcast licenses, college admissions and even private sector hiring.
“Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years,” Webb wrote.
Excepting programs intended to benefit black Americans, “government-directed diversity programs should end,” he added.
Webb’s criticism of group preferences is reminiscent of President Bill Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” approach to reforming affirmative action. Perhaps because of their own humble origins, both men feel viscerally that policies that treat all whites as privileged, regardless of wide variations in their socio-economic background and circumstances, make a mockery of the liberal ideal of equal justice.
That glaring contradiction at the heart of contemporary liberalism offers a more-than-plausible explanation for why non-college white voters spurn Democrats. Liberals generally have preferred other explanations: endemic racism, or the supposed power of cultural issues to trump economic ones. Webb is challenging Democrats to come to grips with the obvious: white working class voters have good reasons for believing the party doesn’t stand for economic fairness for them.
All this is highly relevant to Democrats’ electoral prospects, in the midterm election and beyond. In last year’s big elections in New York, Virginia and even solidly Democratic Massachusetts, only a third of working class whites picked the Democratic candidate. According to a recent Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll, a mere 34 percent of non-college white men and 37 percent of non-college women approve of the job President Obama is doing.
Even among college white men, Obama’s approval stands at 42 percent, and 50 percent for women. In fact, the sharp drop in Obama’s public esteem Gallup seems to be largely due to the defection of white voters, and women in particular, since nearly two-thirds of minority voters approve of his performance.
Obama and the Democrats don’t need to win a majority of white voters, but they can’t afford to lose them by enormous margins, either. To close the gap, progressives must do a better job of addressing the real economic interests of white working class, which after all are not much different than those of working class blacks, Latinos or Asians.
What’s needed is a new agenda for modernizing public infrastructure, expanding access to education and retooling the American economy to win in global competition. The details of that agenda are a subject for another day. But Sen. Webb is right: Progressives should start by tailoring affirmative action policies narrowly to those they were originally intended to help, and let everyone else compete for economic opportunities without government’s thumb on the scales.
Many parents can’t decide whether they love or hate the Tiger Mom. Either way, she has focused our collective attention on education in the United States. American students are falling behind students from other countries. In the 
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One of Barack Obama’s finest moments as President came this past September, when he gave a speech to Congress urging passage of the health-care reform bill. In his closing remarks, he invoked the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, and what Kennedy had written him in his final days: “What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.” Those words resonated with Obama. “I’ve thought about that phrase quite a bit in recent days – the character of our country,” he told the country that night.
Most Americans appreciate the fact that the world is a very competitive place. Policy makers and parents have long known that our kids, from grade school through college, need to step up their skills and understanding of science, technology, engineering and math – know in education circles as STEM studies – if they are going to compete successfully with their counterparts in China, India, Korea, and many European countries. For this reason, for nearly 40 years there has been a lot of interest in improving STEM education. While it is laudable that we are focusing on STEM education, we are running the risk of tethering ourselves to assumptions that might be a little faulty and outdated. We can’t be truly innovative as a nation if we are not innovative in our thinking about STEM education.
