Education Week will be hosting a live webcast of a debate between education advisers to the two presidential campaigns, Jon Schnur (the Obama campaign) and Phil Handy (the Romney campaign) tonight (Monday, October 15th) at 7 p.m. EST. The webcast is free, but requires that you register here.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Today is a day for John Silber’s detractors to put their pens down. John Silber is dead, and he was a great man in the sense of how human beings long were measured—by their accomplishments.

In many ways he was the exact opposite of the famously self-referential Milan Kundera, whose own thinking was summed up nicely in his novel Immortality:

A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn't matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don't understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of the eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved?

While hypnotic, that obsession with self-reference is a recipe for hyper-sensitivity, resentments, and all-too-much navel-gazing, the kind that we require of our students all too often as they learn to write. We have them write about their feelings, their observations, their observations about their feelings, and maybe even their observations about others’ observations about their feelings.

For John Silber that was a disaster—in some ways the disaster of American education.

Some may think that Silber’s brusqueness was all about shunning people’s feelings. Back in 2008, when the Massachusetts Board of Education spent successive meetings seeking nicer ways to speak about school failure, hoping to soften even the already fluffy “underperforming” by calling them a “Commonwealth priority,” Silber thundered:

This is all word games… Changing the name doesn't change the reality. I think Shakespeare had a good line: 'A rose by another name would smell as sweet.' A skunk by any other name would stink.

The newspapers delighted in such quotes. But the fact is that Silber was interested in attaching the right word to the right object or the right idea. He is called the “architect of the MCAS” in today’s Globe, but the fact is that he thought that any useful test was good – even the Stanford 9. (He was wrong on that, BTW.) What he really is the architect of is the broader set of education reforms that set this state on a path focused on academics rather than simple skills or self-esteem. He believed in knowledge acquisition and thereafter the formulation of an individual’s judgment.

Tests were a vehicle to inject this into a system that was failing spectacularly. Like so many in the state, when Silber started as Chairman of the Board of Education in Massachusetts, he was not a fan of charter schools. He thought he would by dint of personality and force of will turn around the state's entire network of district schools. And he aimed to do it by focusing on academics, higher-quality teaching (ensured through subject/content–based tests rather than the usual PRAXIS tests employed in other states) and an accountability/audit office for the public schools that was to mirror the British system.

Those were difficult times for such an argument. After all, the Board of Education was, prior to his arrival, a place where debates about whether to include Ebonics in the state’s content standards took considerable air time. He was appointed in 1996 by his former rival for Governor, William Weld, to chair the state’s Board of Education. That appointment had the support of both the Senate President and the Speaker of the House, because they were disappointed with the pace of reform after the Commonwealth’s 1993 landmark Education Reform law.

All three of these elected leaders got what they were looking for: An energetic, focused educational leader who was willing to do what it took to shake up the education establishment and bureaucracy.

In this work, he followed the same principles and mission he used at Boston University, in taking it from a commuter school to a uniquely branded university with some of the most qualified faculty in the country. Coming from Texas, he brought scholars like William Arrowsmith, classicists like D.S. Carne-Ross and others. He recruited big names like Derek Walcott, Saul Bellow, and Elie Wiesel in the arts and humanities as well as high-profile scientists, critics like Christopher Ricks, and more. But he spent time personally and drove his staff to scour the academic credentials and weigh the quality of the academic publications of each tenure decision and even some non-tenure hires.

Some decisions may have rankled feathers, but the fact that a university president took that kind of care and spent the time acting as an academic leader is almost unheard of in modern day higher ed. Far too many have become an awkward blend of messenger-, ambassador- and fundraiser-in-chief. Silber did all that too, leading to a dramatic increase in the university’s endowment.

But Silber cared most about academic work and preserving the university from political correctness. Like Charles W. Elliot of Harvard at the end of the 19th century and Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago in the mid-20th century, Silber took the role of public intellectual seriously and leading voice in higher education seriously. Ask yourself this: When was the last time you heard a college president engage the public on an important topic or make a public speech of any note? Yeah, and this is Boston.

That unwavering focus on academic quality and high standards transformed Boston University from a large but unspectacular university to one of the leading institutions of higher ed in the nation. It was a university that probably would have recoiled from the current facile marketing campaigns attached to it (start with the “Be You” t-shirts). Instead it was a university that sought to re-create the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought on the Charles River, calling it the University Professors Program. It was a university that created Trustee Scholarships that were meant to be the university’s

most prestigious merit-based award [which] recognizes students who show outstanding academic and leadership abilities. Students from the United States and around the world are nominated by secondary school principals and headmasters.

It was a university that dared to partner with the Boston City Hospital and create the new Medical Center, building research and faculty facilities to rival those of the best universities in the country.

It was a university that dared public involvement in the community, providing opportunities to many of the City’s inner city students but on a grander scale spent two decades and millions of dollars running the Chelsea Public Schools.

I am not saying Dr. Silber got everything right. Yes, yes, his detractors will read this and say that I am focusing on nothing but the good. On this day, clam up. Massachusetts students are the best-performing state and internationally competitive. No other state in the nation can make that claim. Boston University continues to be a strong university, though in a more humble way; today, it does not dare, as Silber explicitly did to the chagrin of many of the city's elites, to try and rival Harvard).

Contrary to his tough-guy image, he was an incredibly generous man who almost always kept his good deeds quiet and out of the public eye. You see, he didn’t care much for what people thought about him. He was aiming for what he believed was right.

That may not appeal to people today who “celebrate overcoming adversity,” when in Silber’s world that simply meant working hard and being an intellectually and morally serious person.

To many of us personally he has meant a lot. But for all of us he has improved our lot. Godspeed, John.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Twain famously noted that

the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug.

Getting words right is arguably the key task in educating an individual, for precise use of language is critical to developing the ability to observe and to think.

Then there is the sinister twisting of language for reasons of power (most often political power). This was a topic of intense focus by George Orwell, who in his staple of 9th grade reading courses, Animal Farm, described how the vision of Old Major was transformed to the darker purpose of other animals after his death. In the novella, the animals rebel against the drunken farmer Mr. Jones for mistreatment, with Old Major noting that “all animals are equal.” By the end, Napoleon has moved aside other competitors for power and trampled on Old Major’s original ideals. He has set himself up (and apart) in comfort with the final formulation of his new ideal: “some animals are more equal than others.”

Orwell developed an interest in and ability to perceive political uses and abuses of language through a life “suffering” from wanderlust, traveling and living in Burma, Paris and London, chronicling working class life throughout England (most famously in The Road to Wigan Pier), and staying in Spain during its civil war.

Teacher contract negotiations are not a civil war, nor should they work from allegories on the history of socialism. They do seem like either or both at times, as we have watched the Chicago teachers strike with wildly stated facts on both sides of the argument and, closer to home, the Boston Teachers Union’s two-year dance with the Boston Public Schools Administration, which concluded in a settlement last week.

In a real (though legalistic) way, the teachers union in Boston and the City were hard at work for 800 or so days, trying to find the right words to express what they wanted to achieve together. A teacher contract is not all about where the district and the teachers want to take the system. But at its most basic level, it tries to answer this question: What is the best way for adults to work together to improve student performance the fastest?

Or even better, this question: How can the teachers and the city’s school management system work most effectively together to provide an excellent education? We sometimes forget that that is the outcome we want—and we feel like we are asking for the impossible because we are so far from it in reality. But it is the right question, using the right words.

But whatever path you take to improve schools, the recently settled contract negotiations in Boston and the continuing strike in Chicago have millions of Americans reading lots and lots of words about the teachers unions, urban schools, and the need for radical improvement.

In both circumstances, we should be struck by how 95 percent of education policy discussions are actually totally devoid of any mention of the academic substance that is the real, central work of schooling.

There, I’ve said it.

With the mediocre performance of American schoolchildren overall and the shockingly low performance of schoolchildren living in U.S. cities, as compared to our international competitors, this kind of ongoing political theatre (mostly among public officials who often fund each others’ campaigns and each others’ initiatives) and the ensuing horse trading found in contract negations, says everything about what ails public education in our nation.

That is, when the adults carry on like children the general public and students alike witness it and hear the empty language these supposed “educational leaders” use.
Consequently, everyone gets the correct impression that academic content doesn’t matter much in K-12 education, while people also realize that the adults who run our edu-systems are far more concerned about the adults’ interests, edu-processes, and dead education language (not ancient Greek or Latin) than about actual academic content, ideas, and the life of the mind among their students.

So that we can start hearing more words around K-12 schooling that are “lighting” and not merely “lighting-bugs,” Pioneer has a great event featuring real scholars in academic content areas.

In this case, the event is on Mark Twain. Twain was a wanderer, like Orwell, and developed a keen ear for how people spoke—and what would be the right word. His ability to shape our way of reading, writing and speaking in a distinctly American voice was the product of innate talent, but also of his continuous chronicling of his times and his almost Zelig-like knack for finding himself in exactly the right place at the right time in history.

His masterwork Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and classic literature more generally are vitally important in K-12 English standards. This is a particularly important discussion now that 46 states have adopted weaker quality national standards that emphasize so-called “informational texts” and cut classic literature in formerly high standards states like Massachusetts, California, and Indiana by more than 50 percent.

Here are the all-star speakers—Jocelyn Chadwick and Ron Powers:

Jocelyn Chadwick has more than 30 years of experience as a teacher, scholar, and author … is a nationally recognized Mark Twain scholar…she is the author of The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn, and is currently writing another book on Twain.

Ron Powers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning and Emmy Award-winning writer and critic, has studied and written about Mark Twain for many years. He is the author of 12 books, including Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain and Mark Twain: A Life.

Here’s an outstanding essay that Chadwick wrote on Huck Finn and race and Ron Powers on CSPAN.

This is the kind of scholarship and expertise, academic content, and substantive world of ideas that our teachers and schoolchildren need to be exposed to and engaged with. It is only through great books and ideas that our schools will truly be the transmitters of academic rigor that is worthy of our teachers’ and kids’ precious time.

Mark Twain’s greatest achievement was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. According to PBS, Huck Finn, along with Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, ranks among the greatest American novels.

Sadly, the new national K-12 education standards that have been adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia don’t even mention either Huck Finn or Moby-Dick. And what we know from standards and curriculum is that what’s not cited in standards doesn’t get included in the tests and if it’s not tested – it doesn’t get taught.

Mark Twain wrote the way everyday Americans spoke. His Huck Finn is a tale about a half educated, backwoods kid and Jim, black slave fleeing captivity and their journey together down the Mississippi. Twain used common words to highlight Jim’s humanity and heroism to help Huck unlearn his own racism, but to illustrate the moral and societal failure of slavery and racial discrimination.

Maybe if Twain could use common language and plain words to help move Huck and Americans closer towards enlightenment on race issues, then maybe, just maybe, classic literature can help America’s educationists find enlightenment and stop putting edu-process before academic content and interests of our schoolchildren.

Just once, wouldn’t it be fun to force union and district officials to sit down at the table, to set aside contract negotiations, the Step tables, and the talking points, and to discuss in earnest Huck Finn? I’m not fool enough to think it would lead to dramatic change; but I sure would enjoy seeing people who are arguably interested in education talk about the purpose of education.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Those Chicago teachers are really being intransigent. They need to learn how to compromise, settle and drink deep from the well of education reform—just like the Boston teachers union, which finalized a contract with the city’s school department on Wednesday.

That’s the view from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. But is it true? False? Well, it certainly seems like the rest of Chicago isn’t buying it. The fact is, neither should we. The debate on the Chicago school contract and its now four-day-old strike is enlightening if we look at what the Chicago Teachers Union wants and what the BTU got.

Consider what the Boston Teachers Union says about the comparative terms sought (CTU) and agreed to (BTU) in their full-page ad in today’s Chicago Sun-Times.

On teacher quality, there are two issues that are perennial points of contention. Can a principal choose who s/he wants in the classroom based on performance or will it be based upon other factors such as the number of years a teacher has in the profession? At its core, it's a question of who gets to control hiring and firing of teachers.

As CBS Chicago notes, the BTU ad argues that

teachers in Boston whose schools have closed have a seniority-based right to obtain positions in other schools. The deal is the same when there are layoffs, the ad says.

“We support the right of Chicago Teachers to obtain similar protections. To deny hard-working professionals this right is to deny that experience and training matter in educating our youngsters,” the ad says.

The Chicago Sun-Times has an editorial today on Mayor Emanuel’s misrepresentation of the BTU contract settlement, where it notes:

The Chicago Teachers Union wants teachers displaced from closed schools to get first crack at job openings, something Chicago has never had.

Boston has always had recall, always and forever guaranteeing laid-off teachers a job. Seniority trumps all else. That remains in the new contract for teachers displaced from closed schools.

A second critical issue for districts seeking to improve the quality of teaching is often said to be having a standard evaluation process. (I have written extensively about how overstated the impact of such evaluations will be in the hands of school officials who will employ them bureaucratically — but that’s another discussion.) On evaluations, the BTU settlement and what’s at stake for the CTU are miles apart. CBS notes:

the ad says, “At some point, student test score data will be used as one of multiple measures to determine part of the teacher’s ratings.” It says there is no set percentage, and the issue was not part of the settlement.

The Sun-Times’ editorial underscores the fact that Emanuel is seeking to attach 40 percent of teachers’ evaluations on student performance. In contrast

Boston teachers agreed to evaluations based in part on student performance. Boston doesn’t have a set percentage like Chicago… and their union president tells us it will never get that high in Boston. [my italics]

Finally, there is more money. Emanuel repeated that while the CTU is striking to gain a 16 percent raise over a four-year contract, Boston teachers settled for a nominal 12 percent raise—and that was for a six-year contract. And that raise included cost-of-living increases. Wow, right? Not so fast, says the Sun-Times editorial:

Chicago’s 16 percent includes a cost-of-living pay raise plus annual increases for each extra year of service and more education. The COLA raise is only half of the 16 percent.

Shockingly, Boston’s announced raise only includes the COLA. But the district, like nearly every one in the country, also offers raises for experience and education. This omission makes comparison impossible and unfair — but so hard to resist!

Those extra raises in Boston amount to an additional 2 to 3 percent a year, the school system tells us.

Boston teachers, it follows, will get raises that range from roughly 24 to 30 percent on average over six years.

Not 12 percent.

This stuff is complex. It’s complex because we, the adults, have made it overly complex to muddy the waters and the ability to have a debate that is non-political. Here are some basic facts for us in Boston:

1. Seniority continues its reign in Boston.
2. The teacher evaluation will not include the kind of focus on student performance that will have an impact, and it will likely be just more paper that covers all kinds of soft measures that will lead to sparingly few changes. This is another way of restating (1).
3. The topline 12 percent raise is the product of legal parsing and theory. In reality, we will see 4-plus percent increases annually.

I get why Rahm is using Boston as his example. Our politics these days is not a place of vision, and that’s why the rhetoric has little to recommend it in terms of hard truths. That’s in part why people have turned off from following what should be important debates, like the teacher contract. We all knew how it would turn out. Admit it.

Our political and community leaders keep tacking toward the siren’s song of in-district reform for no other reason than their own ambitions. Literary history teaches us that only two boats ever escaped the siren’s song. That’s a lot of kids washed up on shore.

The Boston Teachers Union did not settle. They won.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Here is the Democratic National Platform on K-12 education, taken from the national Democrats.org site:

An Economy that Out-Educates the World and Offers Greater Access to Higher Education and Technical Training. Democrats believe that getting an education is the surest path to the middle class, giving all students the opportunity to fulfill their dreams and contribute to our economy and democracy. Public education is one of our critical democratic institutions. We are committed to ensuring that every child in America has access to a world-class public education so we can out-educate the world and make sure America has the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. This requires excellence at every level of our education system, from early learning through post-secondary education. It means we must close the achievement gap in America's schools and ensure that in every neighborhood in the country, children can benefit from high-quality educational opportunities.

This is why we have helped states and territories develop comprehensive plans to raise standards and improve instruction in their early learning programs and invested in expanding and reforming Head Start.

President Obama and the Democrats are committed to working with states and communities so they have the flexibility and resources they need to improve elementary and secondary education in a way that works best for students. To that end, the President challenged and encouraged states to raise their standards so students graduate ready for college or career and can succeed in a dynamic global economy. Forty-six states responded, leading groundbreaking reforms that will deliver better education to millions of American students. Too many students, particularly students of color and disadvantaged students, drop out of our schools, and Democrats know we must address the dropout crisis with the urgency it deserves. The Democratic Party understands the importance of turning around struggling public schools. We will continue to strengthen all our schools and work to expand public school options for low-income youth, including magnet schools, charter schools, teacher-led schools, and career academies.

Because there is no substitute for a great teacher at the head of a classroom, the President helped school districts save more than 400,000 educator jobs.

We Democrats honor our nation's teachers, who do a heroic job for their students every day. If we want high-quality education for all our kids, we must listen to the people who are on the front lines. The President has laid out a plan to prevent more teacher layoffs while attracting and rewarding great teachers. This includes raising standards for the programs that prepare our teachers, recognizing and rewarding good teaching, and retaining good teachers. We also believe in carefully crafted evaluation systems that give struggling teachers a chance to succeed and protect due process if another teacher has to be put in the classroom. We also recognize there is no substitute for a parent's involvement in their child's education.

To help keep college within reach for every student, Democrats took on banks to reform our student loan program, saving more than $60 billion by removing the banks acting as middlemen so we can better and more directly invest in students. To make college affordable for students of all backgrounds and confront the loan burden our students shoulder, we doubled our investment in Pell Grant scholarships and created the American Opportunity Tax Credit worth up to $10,000 over four years of college, and we're creating avenues for students to manage their federal student loans so that their payments can be only 10 percent of what they make each month. President Obama has pledged to encourage colleges to keep their costs down by reducing federal aid for those that do not, investing in colleges that keep tuition affordable and provide good value, doubling the number of work-study jobs available to students, and continuing to ensure that students have access to federal loans with reasonable interest rates. We invested more than $2.5 billion in savings from reforming our student loan system to strengthen our nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges and Universities, Alaska, Hawaiian Native Institutions, Asian American and Pacific Islander Institutions, and other Minority Serving Institutions. These schools play an important role in creating a diverse workforce, educating new teachers, and producing the next generation of STEM workers.

We Democrats also recognize the economic opportunities created by our nation's community colleges. That is why the President has invested in community colleges and called for additional partnerships between businesses and community colleges to train two million workers with the skills they need for good jobs waiting to be filled, and to support business-labor apprenticeship programs that provide skills and opportunity to thousands of Americans. The President also proposed to double key investments in science to educate the next generation of scientists and engineers, encourage private sector innovation, and prepare at least 100,000 math and science teachers over the next decade. And to make this country a destination for global talent and ingenuity, we won't deport deserving young people who are Americans in every way but on paper, and we will work to make it possible for foreign students earning advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to stay and help create jobs here at home.

Mitt Romney has a radically different vision. He says we need fewer teachers, cops, and firefighters—good middle class jobs—even after losing hundreds of thousands of such jobs during the recession and at a time when state, local, and territorial governments are still shedding these jobs. He supports dramatic cuts to Head Start and the Pell Grant program. Tuition at public colleges has soared over the last decade and students are graduating with more and more debt; but Mitt Romney thinks students should "shop around" for the "best education they can afford." And he supports the radical House Republican budget that would cut financial aid for more than one million students while giving tax cuts to the rich. We Democrats have focused on making sure that taxpayer dollars support high-quality education programs, but Mitt Romney is a staunch supporter of expensive, for-profit schools—schools that often leave students buried in debt and without the skills for quality jobs and that prey on our servicemembers and veterans.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Here is the Republican platform on K-12 education, taken from the National GOP web portal:

Education: A Chance for Every Child Parents are responsible for the education of their children. We do not believe in a one size fits all approach to education and support providing broad education choices to parents and children at the State and local level. Maintaining American preeminence requires a world-class system of education, with high standards, in which all students can reach their potential. Today’s education reform movement calls for accountability at every stage of schooling. It affirms higher expectations for all students and rejects the crippling bigotry of low expectations. It recognizes the wisdom of State and local control of our schools, and it wisely sees consumer rights in education – choice – as the most important driving force for renewing our schools.

Education is much more than schooling. It is the whole range of activities by which families and communities transmit to a younger generation, not just knowledge and skills, but ethical and behavioral norms and traditions. It is the handing over of a personal and cultural identity. That is why education choice has expanded so vigorously. It is also why American education has, for the last several decades, been the focus of constant controversy, as centralizing forces outside the family and community have sought to remake education in order to remake America. They have not succeeded, but they have done immense damage.

Attaining Academic Excellence for All
Since 1965 the federal government has spent $2 trillion on elementary and secondary education with no substantial improvement in academic achievement or high school graduation rates (which currently are 59 percent for African-American students and 63 percent for Hispanics). The U.S. spends an average of more than $10,000 per pupil per year in public schools, for a total of more than $550 billion. That represents more than 4 percent of GDP devoted to K-12 education in 2010. Of that amount, federal spending was more than $47 billion. Clearly, if money were the solution, our schools would be problem-free.

More money alone does not necessarily equal better performance. After years of trial and error, we know what does work, what has actually made a difference in student advancement, and what is powering education reform at the local level all across America: accountability on the part of administrators, parents and teachers; higher academic standards; programs that support the development of character and financial literacy; periodic rigorous assessments on the fundamentals, especially math, science, reading, history, and geography; renewed focus on the Constitution and the writings of the Founding Fathers, and an accurate account of American history that celebrates the birth of this great nation; transparency, so parents and the public can discover which schools best serve their pupils; flexibility and freedom to innovate, so schools can adapt to the special needs of their students and hold teachers and administrators responsible for student performance. We support the innovations in education reform occurring at the State level based upon proven results. Republican Governors have led in the effort to reform our country’s underperforming education system, and we applaud these advancements. We advocate the policies and methods that have proven effective: building on the basics, especially STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) and phonics; ending social promotions; merit pay for good teachers; classroom discipline; parental involvement; and strong leadership by principals, superintendents, and locally elected school boards. Because technology has become an essential tool of learning, proper implementation of technology is a key factor in providing every child equal access and opportunity.

Consumer Choice in Education
The Republican Party is the party of fresh and innovative ideas in education. We support options for learning, including home schooling and local innovations like single-sex classes, full-day school hours, and year-round schools. School choice – whether through charter schools, open enrollment requests, college lab schools, virtual schools, career and technical education programs, vouchers, or tax credits – is important for all children, especially for families with children trapped in failing schools. Getting those youngsters into decent learning environments and helping them to realize their full potential is the greatest civil rights challenge of our time. We support the promotion of local career and technical educational programs and entrepreneurial programs that have been supported by leaders in industry and will retrain and retool the American workforce, which is the best in the world. A young person’s ability to achieve in school must be based on his or her God-given talent and motivation, not an address, zip code, or economic status.

In sum, on the one hand enormous amounts of money are being spent for K-12 public education with overall results that do not justify that spending. On the other hand, the common experience of families, teachers, and administrators forms the basis of what does work in education. We believe the gap between those two realities can be successfully bridged, and Congressional Republicans are pointing a new way forward with major reform legislation. We support its concept of block grants and the repeal of numerous federal regulations which interfere with State and local control of public schools.

The bulk of the federal money through Title I for low-income children and through IDEA for disabled youngsters should follow the students to whatever school they choose so that eligible pupils, through open enrollment, can bring their share of the funding with them. The Republican-founded D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program should be expanded as a model for the rest of the country. We deplore the efforts by Congressional Democrats and the current President to kill this successful program for disadvantaged students in order to placate the leaders of the teachers’ unions. We support putting the needs of students before the special interests of unions when approaching elementary and secondary education reform.

Because parents are a child’s first teachers, we support family literacy programs, which improve the reading, language, and life skills of both parents and children from low-income families. To ensure that all students have access to the mainstream of American life, we support the English First approach and oppose divisive programs that limit students’ ability to advance in American society. We renew our call for replacing “family planning” programs for teens with abstinence education which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and respected standard of behavior. Abstinence from sexual activity is the only protection that is 100 percent effective against out-of-wedlock pregnancies and sexually-transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS when transmitted sexually. It is effective, science-based, and empowers teens to achieve optimal health outcomes and avoid risks of sexual activity. We oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for abortion and contraception. We support keeping federal funds from being used in mandatory or universal mental health, psychiatric, or socio- emotional screening programs.

We applaud America’s great teachers, who should be protected against frivolous litigation and should be able to take reasonable actions to maintain discipline and order in the classroom. We support legislation that will correct the current law provision which defines a “Highly Qualified Teacher” merely by his or her credentials, not results in the classroom. We urge school districts to make use of teaching talent in business, STEM fields, and in the military, especially among our returning veterans. Rigid tenure systems based on the “last in, first out” policy should be replaced with a merit-based approach that can attract fresh talent and dedication to the classroom. All personnel who interact with school children should pass background checks and be held to the highest standards of personal conduct.

Improving Our Nation’s Classrooms
Higher education faces its own challenges, many of which stem from the poor preparation of students before they reach college. One consequence has been the multiplying number of remedial courses for freshmen. Even so, our universities, large and small, public or private, form the world’s greatest assemblage of learning. They drive much of the research that keeps America competitive and, by admitting large numbers of foreign students, convey our values and culture to the world.

Ideological bias is deeply entrenched within the current university system. Whatever the solution in private institutions may be, in State institutions the trustees have a responsibility to the public to ensure that their enormous investment is not abused for political indoctrination. We call on State officials to ensure that our public colleges and universities be places of learning and the exchange of ideas, not zones of intellectual intolerance favoring the Left.

The Democratic Party platform on K-12 education is coming tomorrow.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

There are many lessons to learn from this year’s two major party conventions, many of which extend beyond education—the focus of this blog. The “scriptedness” of the events was only outshone by the color coordination of the sets and clothing. Viewers and attendees came away feeling like the proverbial man behind the curtain (as in the Wizard of Oz) had projected words onto the teleprompters and that those stepping to the mikes were little more than political actors. The exceptions—Clint Eastwood’s chair routine and Mayor Villaraigosa’s handling of the vote to re-insert “God and Jerusalem” into the Democratic Party platform—were cringe-inducing as much for the substance as for the contrast from the rest of the convention schedule.

The second takeaway for me was that both parties have lost any sense of the civic attachments that once characterized and distinguished this country. In the second book of Democracy in America, Tocqueville recognized our lively political associations but he famously heralded “those associations that are formed in civil life without reference to political objects":

The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies , in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

The Republicans made a nod to these non-governmental associations, but almost exclusively in terms of family, church, and the kids’ sports teams. While important to many of us, the repetition of these three forms of associations gave the sense that these are the start and end of the American associationism, which is what the original Bill of Rights aimed to protect. The Republicans did not recognize the earthquake in associationism caused by social media (admittedly many of which are vapid or “futile”, but many of which aren’t); worse, they omitted any thought of the “cause-focused” associations that are to this day so important. Think people fundraising to help a neighbor in need, to build a YMCA or fight cancer through the PanMass Challenge; the numerous support networks for immigrants; volunteers in non-profits; those for and against Abolition, Prohibition (+ and -), women’s right to vote, expanding the teaching of US History in our schools, same-sex marriage, and more.

The Democrats made a nod to many of the causes—at least the ones dear to progressives—but when they spoke of what binds us together, they spoke almost primarily of government. Through government, their issues would be addressed and associations nurtured, even financially supported. If Republicans communicated a fairly pedestrian and highly suburban view of associations, Democrats communicated that such associations are no longer non-governmental.

This impoverishment on both sides has affected how the major parties discuss education.
A number of speakers including US Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Bill Clinton, and the president all made arguments that their efforts have elevated standards around the country—something that states and local were incapable of doing. Readers of this blog know (1, 2, 3 and many others) that my view is that this is a top-down imposition where states and localities are fully capable of having these discussions in the open and that they are issues that parents must associate about and discuss. The same is true of all the rhetoric on teacher evaluations, testing and all the rest.

Democrats actively involved in the national party often now come with a view that the party is to create a “more perfect union” that is vertically integrated and that integrates non-governmental associations. The brouhaha over the screening of “Won’t Back Down” is just another sign that the party is having an internal debate on the extent to which parents can have a say in the education of their children.

The most controversial thing to happen at the Democratic National Convention this week may end up being a movie screening.

On Monday afternoon, a Hollywood film called "Won't Back Down" -- which opens in theaters nationwide on Sept. 28 -- will be shown to a select crowd of convention-goers in Charlotte, N.C., just as it was one week prior at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.

But unlike Tampa, where the promoters had little concern about making waves with the party establishment and had no trouble when they ran the idea past the Republican National Committee, the request for a Charlotte screening went to the highest levels of the Obama administration…

In Tampa, the movie received an overwhelmingly positive response. During one pivotal scene involving Viola Davis' character and her son, people could be heard crying throughout the theater.

In Charlotte, the film's promoters are expecting protests outside the theater, and possibly some inside as well.

Why all the fuss?

"Won't Back Down" stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a single mother determined to get her daughter out of their failing public elementary school and Davis as a teacher at the school who joins with her to gather parent and teacher signatures behind a proposal to take over the school.

It's a movie about the push for school choice, a movement that has been gaining momentum around the country for the past several years. It is also a film about teachers' unions, who are one of the Democratic Party's biggest and most loyal sources of political contributions.

If Democrats are having an internal battle over choice, Republicans are having an internal debate over elements that go to a broader education agenda beyond choice. Given a desire to move away from most things stemming from the Bush administration, there should be no surprise that it is hard to find a Republican who today supports NCLB and its mixed record: Conservatives and middle-of-the-road Republicans both feel the need to move on. But they are a little lost at sea on education. There is no clear agenda beyond choice. While all Republicans support parental choice, the main agenda outside of that belongs to establishment Republicans, like Jeb Bush, who embrace US Ed Secretary Duncan’s centralization of standards, tests, curricular materials and instructional practices in Washington. (A recent RTS post discussed the weakness of the Bush establishment view.)

My wishes for the two parties? They’re simple:

• That the Democrats stop substituting government for associations, and not insist that the government is the glue that holds us together. Our rich store of associations means that what holds us together is a lot deeper and nimble than anything government bureaucracy. We just need to find how to leverage these American qualities—especially when the alternative is to undertake policies that break three federal laws.


• That the Republicans provide a real alternative to the Democrats’ vision of a centralized Ministry of Education, but not simply based on a vision of individual choice—however important that is. While “Won’t Back Down” is inspirational, and its clear emphasis on parental association and bootstrapping may prove a big addition to urban school reform, a major party needs more than that. They need a vision.

A real debate on education would be so good for the country. But until Republicans settle on a course, there is no way for them to champion education as a major cause. The risk to their party is not small: They are handing an issue (that they championed at the state level for over a decade) back to the Democrats.

Republicans can’t blame the unions if they themselves can’t settle on a coherent set of ideas.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Facts are, as John Adams famously noted, “stubborn things.” But facts are also what makes politicians of good will less stubborn; that is, it is empirical evidence that allows both major parties to to coalesce around reforms that will work. Compromise for compromise’s sake, or hewing to conventional wisdom, is most often pandering with an eye toward one’s own ambitions. But, armed with facts, people of even the most strongly held principles can come to very surprising positions.

We’ve been hearing a lot about how education may be the area for compromise between the two major parties. What's driving this coalescence? Hard choices by the Obama administration? Empirical evidence? Or it is conventional wisdom?

With Labor Day now behind us and the Democratic National Convention beginning, we are in for two months of debate on issues that will necessarily go well beyond the “fairness” narrative of the left and the “job creator” narrative of the right. It’s a useful moment to take stock of how the past four years have changed education reform debates.

On the substance, Rock the Schoolhouse readers will know that I give the legacy of President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan a mixed review, with early positives and later negatives. The shortest hand way to put is this: The first year used the bully pulpit well to expand charter schools and, importantly, in a way that upheld appropriate state legislative prerogatives (in all but four states, such expansions went through state legislative processes). The debate over charters is forever changed, though one hopes that states will not just expand charters but learn some lessons from Massachusetts, which has made no bones in closing underperforming charter schools.

The last three years have, unfortunately, been less successful, turning into an increasingly disappointing exercise in hubris, with numerous federal and state administrative moves that centralize in Washington DC decision-making on academic standards and tests, teacher evaluations, student data (a story to be told), curricular content and instructional practice. The fight against expanding school choice options right in the president's backyard is wrong-headed. And the continued emphasis on using stimulus money to boost teacher employment levels is not nearly as important as getting great teachers into the classroom.

We’ll see how the Democrats talk about education at their convention, which reportedly will be more lightly attended by union officials than in the past, but without a doubt they will spend more time discussing education than the Republic conventioneers did.

If the Republican convention showed us anything about Republicans' views about education, it demonstrated just how successful the Obama administration has been in politically scrambling the decks. No longer is it clear which party is for standards, testing and charter schools (used to be Republicans), and which is for centralized policymaking in DC (used to be Democrats).

Republicans have always had within their midst a cadre of policymakers who believed that they could counter union power from the center—from DC—with prescriptive standards and testing as their core tools. The Fordham Institute and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander fall within that camp, comfortable with a level of control in DC that even the architect of the Great Society programs, President Lyndon B. Johnson, did not countenance. The justification for this convergence is “international competitiveness,” the driving force for DC-based policymakers since A Nation at Risk, if not 50 years before.

At the Republican national convention, Jeb Bush and Condoleezza Rice made focused on this line of argument, with Bush noting:

Of 34 advanced nations in the world, American students ranked 17th in science, 25th in math. Only one-quarter of high-school graduates are ready for their next steps.

Since the time when he was governor of Florida, Bush has been a passionate advocate of a nearly comprehensive set of education reforms. He and Rice showed passion in their descriptions of how high a priority education reform should be in a possible Republican or Democratic administration:

Bush: “The first step is a simple one. We must stop prejudging children based on their race, ethnicity, or household income.”

Rice: “We have been successful because Americans have known that one's status of birth is not a permanent condition. Americans have believed that you might not be able to control your circumstances but you can control your response to your circumstances.”

Bush went on to tout his reforms in Florida, such as school accountability via an A to F grading system, the establishment of tough 3rd grade reading accountability, a top-notch virtual school program, expansion of parental choice, and charter schools. These reforms were important and have had sizable effects on the state’s performance relative to other states on national assessments.

Here in Florida, in 1999, we were at the bottom of the nation in education. For the last decade, this state has been on a path of reform… Today, more students are reading on grade level, passing rigorous college prep courses, and graduating from high school, and perhaps most exciting, those traditionally left behind are showing the greatest gains.

Among African-American students, Florida is ranked fourth in the nation are academic improvement. Among low- income students, we are ranked third for gains. Among students with disabilities, we are ranked first. Among Latino students, the gains were so big, they require a new metric. Right now, Florida's fourth grade Hispanic students read as well or better than the average of all students in 21 states and the District of Columbia.

His is a strong record on many fronts, but also one with chinks in the armor, and overstatements of accomplishment. This summer, the Florida school grading system has run into a buzz saw this year, with sometimes wildly changing school grades and a loss of confidence in the accountability system’s objectivity and reliability.

The progress of Florida’s Hispanic students on the NAEP is impressive but in reality only slightly better than in Massachusetts (which would not think of heralding itself a miracle state as regards Hispanic achievement and, whose Hispanic students, like those in other states, scored below Florida’s when NAEP began providing more consistent student performance data in 1993).

Most importantly, there are distinct limitations to Florida’s reforms. The Sunshine State as a whole rose to join the top 10 states on the national assessments and then more recently fell out of the top 10, suggesting that the changes sufficed to rise in the rankings, but not to sustained performance at the top level. As they say, the higher the altitude, the tougher the climb.

What has always been missing from Florida’s reform efforts is a strong focus on academic standards. That same lack of focus on academic content can be seen in the work of other education reformers, such as former NYC School Superintendent Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who made frequent changes in direction on standards without a coherent liberal arts vision for their schools.

That’s why when Governor Bush began speaking of academic standards at the convention, one is not sure what he is suggesting. He recognized that a number of states have made real progress in improving the quality of public education:

We must have high academic standards that are benchmarked to the best in the world. You see, all kids can learn. Governor Romney believes it, and the data proves it. While he was governor, Massachusetts raised standards, and today their students lead the nation in academic performance.

Even during Governor Bush’s two terms, Florida did not show particular passion for academic standards; and recently his energetic boosterism for a key initiative of the Obama administration—to create nationalized standards and tests—seems out of place when he speaks of “high academic standards that are benchmarked to the best in the world.”

Why? As Sandra Stotsky, a national expert on academic standards who has worked with states across the country and is the individual most responsible for Massachusetts’ now-defunct state standards which were internationally benchmarked, noted in testimony to the Utah Education Interim Committee in August:

Common Core’s standards for English language arts are neither research-based nor internationally benchmarked… To judge from my own research on the language and literature requirements for a high school diploma…, Common Core’s ELA standards fall far below what other English-speaking nations or regions require of college-intending high school graduates.” In fact, that is the main reason that [Stotsky] and four other members of the [Common Core] Validation Committee declined to sign off on Common Core’s standards.

Governor Bush’s embrace of national standards and tests has cost him support from key education policymakers in the Republican Party. One noted to me by phone while she was at the convention that “Jeb’s advocacy for Race to the Top smacks of too much comfort with big government bureaucracy and the usual ‘Let’s make the states comply with federal dictates.’” Those are tough words—and in some sense merited if you are a Republican surprised by Bush’s embrace of having the federal government fund and in part direct the development of national standards, tests and curricula. After all, even LBJ’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act expressly prohibited such a thing.

I know, like, and respect, and have publicly debated Governor Bush on this point. He is serious about K-12 education—but he has too great a faith in big centralized solutions (a cynic might say that’s a long-standing trait of the Bush family’s governing philosophy).
The Common Core he is supporting around the country has never been tested and there is no evidence to suggest it will accomplish anything. That’s a remarkable background for a policy pushed onto 50 million schoolkids. Even more remarkable is that it breaks the very provisions of the education law LBJ signed to put limits on the expansion of the size and scope of the federal role in education.

A focus on the law and empiricism would follow Bush’s admonition that “We must stop excusing failure in our schools.” That is true of not putting up with failure in specific school systems—and especially urban school districts. But it equally applies to the failure of the federal government during the 33 years of the USDOE’s existence to improve the quality of education in the country. Failure to move the needle is not the only vestige of federal education policy, but so is the lack of continuity and settlement in policy (the latest example of which is the whiplash-inducing support for and then retreat from the DC Scholarship program within the one jurisdiction the constitutionally delegated to the feds.).

If Governor Romney stakes out a clear position on academic standards during the final 60-plus days of the campaign, he should follow the Massachusetts example, not the, let’s admit it for what it is, a somewhat politically self-serving celebration of Florida’s progress—and an inaccurate representation of Florida’s good reforms at that.

After all, Florida made faster progress on the NAEP before it got itself bogged down in its current embrace of federally imposed and highly bureaucratic teacher evaluation processes, curricular standards, curricular materials and instructional practices.
Instead, Governor Romney would do well to embrace Bush’s admonition to “start rewarding improvement and success.”

Rather than impose all kinds of new explicit or de facto federal mandates, a Republican administration would do well to create a real Race to the Top, which simply rewards states for results—not compliance with federal rules. If we are so taken with the narrative of falling behind other countries and losing our competitive edge as a result, a trope that is present since the 1983 A Nation at Risk report and continued in both Governor Bush and Secretary Rice’s remarks at the RNC, then a focus on results rather than what bureaucrats in DC think will work is the way to go.

My own view is that in domestic matters the feds are not good at all the details needed to be effective in delivering public services of most any kind. That’s especially so with education (and I would argue health care), where big bureaucratic structures are anathema to the kind of creativity and relationships that make for good teaching and great learning. The feds are, however, good at spending.

So why not have the federal government provide base funding for those states that want to measure themselves on multiple assessments (SAT, ACT, the international Trends in Math and Science Study and PISA tests). And the feds could provide a financial reward to those states that improve the most on these tests outside the government’s control.
That would encourage governors, state legislators, and state education officials to experiment and innovate. It would allow us to reward only that stuff that works—not the stuff we’ve been hoping might work for 35 years. And it would allow states real flexibility as to whether they want to be part of the effort.

Pay for results, not compliance with the federal government’s growing pile of rules and regs. What an idea.

It sure beats the conventional wisdom in both parties right now.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

(Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times)

The Common Core national standards are increasingly controversial, with Utah, Indiana and a number of states that had adopted them now reconsidering. A recent New York Times education blog notes the following:

Forty-four states and United States territories have adopted the Common Core Standards and, according to this recent Times article, one major change teachers can expect to see is more emphasis on reading “informational,” or nonfiction, texts across subject areas:

While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the fourth grade, students should be reading about the same amount from “literary” and “informational” texts, according to the standards; in the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational, and by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70.

And seeing itself as a potential vendor, the Times chirps cheerfully:

Well, The New York Times and The Learning Network are here to help.

There’s been a lot written on the loss of literature in curricula around the country. And there is good reason for that. As I noted in testimony to the Utah Education Interim Committee:

Massachusetts’ remarkable rise on national assessments is not because we aligned our reading standards to the NAEP. Rather, it is because, unlike Common Core, our reading standards emphasized high-quality literature. Reading literature requires the acquisition in a compressed timeframe of a richer and broader vocabulary than non-fiction texts. Vocabulary acquisition is all-important in the timely development of higher-level reading skills.

But even if you agree with the idea of refocusing our classrooms on nonfiction texts, what is the quality of the offerings suggested by Common Core, a set of standards copyrighted by two Washington-based entities (the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association)?

I can think of no one whose opinion might be better informed on the topic than Massachusetts’ own Will Fitzhugh, who founded The Concord Review in 1987 and has received numerous prizes and appointments as a result of his work there. For those who aren’t familiar with The Concord Review, it is a quarterly journal that

has now published 1,033 exemplary history research papers (average 6,000 words), on a huge variety of topics, by high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries. The journal accepts about 6% of the papers submitted.

In a January 2011 piece highlighting his work, then-education reporter Sam Dillon of The New York Times noted that Fitzhugh

showcases high school research papers, sits at his computer in a cluttered office above a secondhand shop here, deploring the nation’s declining academic standards…

…His mood brightens, however, when talk turns to the occasionally brilliant work of the students whose heavily footnoted history papers appear in his quarterly, The Concord Review. Over 23 years, the review has printed 924 essays by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations…

Fitzhugh is deeply concerned by the fact that the majority of students pack up their duffelbags and computers, and head off to college without ever having completed a genuine research paper on history. The Concord Review has been a labor of love that seeks to change that sad state of affairs. In a piece entitled “Skip the Knowledge!” published in EducationViews.org at the start of August 2012, Fitzhugh articulated his view on the value of Common Core in getting students to be truly college-ready in reading and writing non-fiction texts:

It is not clear whether the knowledge-free curricula of the graduate schools of education, or the Core experiences at Harvard College, in any way guided the authors of our new Common Core in their achievement of the understanding that it is not knowledge of anything that our students require, but Thinking Skills. They took advantage of the perspective and arguments of a famous cognitive psychologist at Stanford in designing the history portion of the Core. Just think how much time they saved by not involving one of those actual historians, who might have bogged down the whole enterprise in claiming that students should have some knowledge of history itself, and that such knowledge might actually be required before any useful Thinking Skills could be either acquired or employed. If we had followed that path, we might actually be asking high school students to read real history books—shades of the James Madison era!!

and

Keep Poor James Madison, back in the day, spending endless hours reading scores upon scores of books on the history of governments, as he prepared to become the resident historian and intellectual “father” of the United States Constitution in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia! If he had only known what we know now thanks to the new Common Core, he could have saved the great bulk of that time and effort if he had only acquired some Thinking Skills instead!

In a piece entitled “Turnabout,” which came out Tuesday, Fitzhugh goes further.

The New Common Core Standards call for a 50% reduction in “literary” [aka fictional non-informational texts] readings for students, and an increase in nonfiction informational texts, so that students may be better prepared for the nonfiction they will encounter in college and at work.

In addition to memos, technical manuals, and menus (and bus schedules?), the nonfiction informational texts suggested include The Gettysburg Address, Letter from Birmingham Jail, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and perhaps one of the Federalist Papers.

History books, such as those by David Hackett Fischer, James McPherson, David McCullough, Ron Chernow, Paul Johnson, Martin Gilbert, etc. are not among the nonfiction informational texts recommended, perhaps to keep students from having to read any complete books while they are still in high school.

In the spirit of Turnabout, let us consider saving students more time from their fictional non-informational text readings (previously known as literature) by cutting back on the complete novels, plays and poems formerly offered in our high schools. For instance, instead of Pride and Prejudice (the whole novel), students could be asked to read Chapter Three. Instead of the complete Romeo and Juliet, they could read Act Two, Scene Two, and in poetry, instead of a whole sonnet, perhaps just alternate stanzas could be assigned. In this way, they could get the “gist” of great works of literature, enough to be, as it were, “grist” for their deeper analytic cognitive thinking skill mills.

As the goal is to develop deeply critical analytic cognitive thinking skills, surely there is no need to read a whole book either in English or in History classes. This will not be a loss in Social Studies classes, since they don’t assign complete books anyway, but it may be a wrench for English teachers who probably still think that there is some value in reading a whole novel, or a whole play, or even a complete poem.

But change is change is change, as Gertrude Stein might have written, and if our teachers are to develop themselves professionally to offer the new deeper cognitive analytic thinking skills required by the Common Core Standards, they will just have to learn to wean themselves from the old notions of knowledge and understanding they have tried to develop from readings for students in the past.

As Caleb Nelson wrote in 1990 in The Atlantic Monthly, speaking about an older Common Core at Harvard College:

The philosophy behind the [Harvard College] Core is that educated people are not those who have read many books and have learned many facts but rather those who could analyze facts if they should ever happen to encounter any, and who could ‘approach’ books if it were ever necessary to do so….

The New Common Core Standards are meant to prepare our students to think deeply on subjects they know practically nothing about, because instead of reading a lot about anything, they will have been exercising their critical cognitive analytical faculties on little excerpts amputated from their context. So they can think “deeply,” for example, about Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, while knowing nothing about the nation’s Founding, or Slavery, or the new Republican Party, or, of course, the American Civil War.

Students’ new Common academic work with texts about which they will be asked to Think & Learn Deeply, may encourage them to believe that ignorance is no barrier to useful thinking, in the same way that those who have written the Common Core Standards believe that they can think deeply about and make policy for our many state education systems, without having spent much, if any time, as teachers themselves, or even in meeting with teachers who have the experience they lack.

It may very well turn out that ignorance and incompetence transfer from one domain to another much better than deeper thinking skills do, and that the current mad flight from knowledge and understanding, while clearly very well funded, has lead to Standards which will mean that our high school students [those that do not drop out] will need even more massive amounts of remediation when they go on to college and the workplace than are presently on offer.

"Turnabout" may mean many things, including fair play, a reversal of direction or even what we might call a turncoat. (My own favorite reference is to Hal Roach’s screwball, gender-bender comedy of the 1940s.) But the more serious people look at it, the more Common Core is looking like an attempt to revive that merry-go-round of ed fads that have never worked in American education--and are best abandoned.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

One of two kids in the Lawrence Public School system do not cross the 12th grade finish line. Even that is beyond what the "soft bigotry of low expectations" crowd can explain away on the basis of factors like poverty and family situation. Sadly, that dropout reality holds true in a couple of other urban districts around the state. But no other district is in school receivership... in a city that is in state fiscal receivership. And no other district can boast of the on-the-record, court-documented corruption within the school district office that we've seen in Lawrence.

As noted in several previous blogs (such as this one), in Lawrence, just over 1,000 students of the 13,000 in the district will be affected by the new school receiver's plan to introduce charter operators to help out and even run district schools. So, the question becomes, if charters are working well in Lawrence, why are we keeping the charter caps in place in in a city where the state effectively picks up 100% of the cost of the public schools?

Well, just how well are the charter public schools doing compared to their district peers?

Click here for MassReportCards.com comparison of performance for the charter schools currently in existence, Lawrence Community Day Charter Public School (LCDCPS) Upper and Lower School and Lawrence Family Development Charter School, and the city's district middle school counterparts. In 2009, LCDCPS had the top rated 8th grade class in the state, notwithstanding poverty and all the other usual factors.

So, then, why such a limited charter effort? Is it due to lack of interest on the part of parents?

Not at all. There is clear evidence of great parental demand for charter school options in Lawrence at the charter public schools currently in existence. And thanks to the 2010 law that partially lifted the cap on charter schools in districts with failing schools, the LCDCPS school network is opening two new charters this September: the Gateway and Webster schools (the latter named after the education philanthropist Kingman Webster, who has long been committed to improving the Lawrence schools). The Lawrence charter school waiting list is by some reckonings in the thousands, perhaps encompassing as much as 30% of the overall district's student population.

Another indication of demand comes with a June MassINC Polling Group survey of 400-plus adults in households with Lawrence public students, whether they were in charter public or district public schools. Notwithstanding the fact that the group surveyed was only 48% familiar with charter schools (26% and 25% of respondents were either not too or not at all familiar with charter schools) and only a majority aware (51%) of the state’s strict limits on charter schools, a majority of respondents wanted to see the caps removed. Once the respondents were informed of the length of the waiting list, the percentage of respondents opining that the caps should be removed leapt to 71%.

The language in the survey informing respondents about the waiting list was hardly leading: “Currently, there are about 4,100 students on the waiting list to get into the charter schools in Lawrence, who are unable to attend the city’s charter schools because of the limit on the number of students who are allowed to attend.”

So why are we limiting charter public school options, when charters are working so well in Lawrence and the rest of the state? Why can charter public schools provide options to no more than 18% of the district population, even in a case where the need is so obviously extreme? And why are we keeping the caps on charter schools in Lawrence when any number of charter operators that I have spoken to, charters with excellent records in Massachusetts, who meet the state's new bar of being so-called “proven providers,” would step up and expand in Lawrence in a heartbeat?

Chalk the lack of legislative leadership on this issue up to the adult protection racket that controls Beacon Hill. It's time for special legislation expanding charters in Lawrence. Anything less than that is simply kicking the can down the road. And when each high school dropout ends up costing fellow citizens hundreds of thousands of dollars in entitlement support, public services and more, that's a mighty expensive can to kick.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

There are two issues that matter in K-12 education – what you might call the twin achievement gaps, those between the inner city poor (often including English language learners) and the rest of the state, and the international achievement gap whereby the percentage of students who are advanced in core subjects in the top-performing countries far outstrips the percentage among Massachusetts students.

The second achievement gap is urgent; the first is an emergency and has to be treated as such. Ground zero for the emergency achievement gap is the city of Lawrence, where the public schools have been in free fall, where the previous superintendent has been convicted, where dropout rates are approaching 50 percent (not a typo), and where the state’s department of education has stepped in by putting the city’s schools into receivership.

I’ve blogged multiple times on the challenges before Lawrence and the power of New Orleans' school reform model (1, 2, 3). But last week was an opportunity to have a public conversation about the Lawrence schools. The acting superintendent, Jeff Riley, addressed a forum on the school receivership effort, relaying a message that was focused on his personal commitment to righting the public schools, calling it, as Mark Vogler noted in the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune:

"unacceptable" that half of the students who attend Lawrence High School "actually wind up walking across the stage" to receive their diplomas.

Most interestingly, Riley underscored that his approach to district reform will provide a framework for school reform but to give school principals and teachers plenty of flexibility to reach the district goals. Promoting school-level flexibility and, conversely, limiting the district office to more of a goal-setting and accountability function were key elements of the 1993 Education Reform Act (and sadly elements that have not been implemented in school districts outside of Barnstable). Riley’s drive for greater flexibility for schools led him to seek out new partnerships including inviting the operators of successful charter school models to come in and run district schools. Riley’s plan would differ

from more traditional methods that had been proposed, like reorganizations with a "top-down strategy." "We're making the unit of change the individual schools where teachers and the principal, the majority of whom spend next year planning to change what the school day looks like, what the school year looks like, what the school looks like," Riley said.

"We're looking to build a system which is decentralized" where the central office that previously ran the school system "is changed to a more nimble structure that only goal is to support the schools, principals and the teachers," he said.

One of Riley’s slides provided a sense of the comprehensive approach he is taking, covering dropouts and at-risk students, teacher quality, parental involvement, good governance and physical plant.

• Summer school: 90+ students will be eligible to graduate after summer school; 10 formerly dropped out of the LPS system
• Re-engagement: Recruiting in order to re-enroll 230+ students who dropped out during the 2011-12 school year
• Recruiting: Extensive recruitment efforts underway, including a job fair, over 225 interviews for teachers and administrators, Globe ads, other listings
• Training: Planning PD that will focus on implementation of the new educator evaluation regulations and quality instruction
• Outreach: Developing a parent outreach plan, particularly for Level 4 schools; looking for location for Family Welcome Center
• School Committee: PD has begun in collaboration with MASC; will continue in September
• School supports: Developing Office of School Improvement, including autonomy and accountability system
• Resources: Awarded four new (and one renewal) School Redesign Grants
• Facilities: Continuing repairs to prepare for beginning of school year

A panel followed consisting of education scholar Charlie Glenn, Tom Gosnell (head of the American Federation of Teachers’ Massachusetts chapter, which is the local teachers union in Lawrence), Beth Anderson (head of the Phoenix Charter Academy, which is reconstituting and running a district school under the auspices of the Lawrence school receivership), and Jose Afonso of SABIS Education Systems (which runs two highly successful schools in Springfield and Holyoke and will soon open a third in Lowell in September 2013). And the panel talked extensively about the evidence that school-based, rather than district office-centered, approaches are the most effective way to achieve success in urban districts.

As the Eagle-Tribune’s Vogler also noted, the forum highlighted very aggressive strategies to fix the schools in New Orleans

in the years since Hurricane Katrina ravaged that Louisiana city in August 2005. In the rebuilding of New Orleans, the increase in charter schools has been credited with improving an educational system once considered among the nation's worst.

"Lawrence is our Katrina moment," Stergios said, referring to the potential opportunities that can be achieved by using charter schools to help turn around the school system.

It’s no hyperbole to say that Lawrence is our Katrina moment. Students in Lawrence at the start of 2012 had every issue besetting the City of New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina, the point at which, suddenly, the country woke up and recognized the city’s structural poverty and failing schools.

We can pretend no such ignorance about Lawrence. The state Board of Education intervened even as far back as the late 1990s. And the greater emphasis on data collection has made the picture in Lawrence very clear indeed for quite some time.

With nearly 100% and over 40% of their schools now charters, New Orleans and Washington D.C., respectively, have chosen robust school choice through charter schools as the way forward. (In Lawrence, the percentage is over 10%.) There are many merits to the New Orleans and D.C. approach:

• Charters are the most decentralized, school-based approach within the public school framework.
• Expanding charter schools has the merit of avoiding failures seen in other districts when a “Superman” is brought in to fix the schools. Riley acknowledged that stating that he knows of no situation where a superintendent has turned around a district.
• It has the strong backing of parents (see this poll and this one, too, which is focused on the views of parents in Lawrence).
• More importantly, charters have worked very well in Massachusetts because of the extraordinary talent in the Bay State, an authorization process that has long focused on objective evaluations and business planning, and no fear in closing down (or putting on probation) those charters that do not live up to their promises. Imagine if the state lined up schools like MATCH, Roxbury Prep, Boston Prep, Lawrence Community Day, KIPP, SABIS and others with strong records of success in Massachusetts, inviting them to submit charter applications for the city of Lawrence. There is no doubt that the needle would move significantly and that students would have far better outcomes within five years.

Unfortunately, that is not the path the state has chosen. I am all for Jeff Riley providing flexibility within district schools. And I hope 100% for his success—and the success of all those now committed to making the education of Lawrence’s young a radically better experience.

I hope it not simply for the kids and families in Lawrence—though that has to be the number one goal. But also because this “Katrina moment” is an opportunity to inspire other cities to change.

After all, anyone familiar with education debates in the late 80s will recognize that the landmark 1993 education reform was in important ways inspired by another attempt at radical transformation of a district, wherein Boston University took over the Chelsea Public Schools with the support of key legislators. Such crises are moments when we test our mettle and we inspire a new generation of reforms and reformers.

History in Chelsea also teaches us that there are limits to full district reform. There have been real successes, but it is still a long way from where we need it to be.

One recommendation to help us all in this process is for the state to disseminate an annual report on the Lawrence effort. This is something that is required of charter schools. Charters have to submit annual reports based on goals they set. Charters often include in their reports evaluations of their fidelity to the charter (mission and operating plan), academic program success, organizational viability and financial oversight. Such reports set out clear accountability plans and missions, performance metrics in English, math, writing, science, college preparation, SAT scores, and college success. They include metrics on instruction and methods for program evaluation, goals for school culture, metrics on attrition, the school environment, and more.

So far the receivership has set goals compared to other older industrialized cities and some additional measures. But let’s state clearly what we are after. The receiver has started down this path. But here are some perhaps more general goals any well-intentioned person would agree with, followed by basic ways to measure change:

Are the children in the city of Lawrence far better served (not just a little better served)?

• What percentage of the students (and in what grades) will be advanced, proficient, needing improvement or failing on the MCAS?


• What improvement in attendance will we see?


• What percentage increase in the number of graduating seniors admitted to 2- and 4-year colleges?


• How much will the dropout rate go down? (I have a strong feeling this will be improved given that Phoenix Charter Academy is helping on this issue.)

How supportive will the school environment be to great teachers and newer teachers?

• What percentage of the teachers will be using curricula aligned with the state’s frameworks?


• How many teacher observations will principals make?

How will the school environment and school culture improve? (On this issue, the LPS could learn a lot from its new partner, the MATCH Schools, which focus strongly on positive behavior.)

• Why not track behavior metrics such as the number of fights per year?


• How many weapons or drugs violations will there be after three years?


• Will there be annual reductions in incidents of vandalism?


• How about reaching for lower daily absenteeism – something well below the Boston Public Schools double-digit rate?

Lawrence is a reform effort to be watched. Let’s do the kids justice and give them and their families clear goals. The fact is that already within three years we will be able to see trend lines – and numbers will allow us to adjust the plan if it is not achieving the kind of success we all want.

We chose not to take the path New Orleans did after Katrina. They have a record – and we will too. Would we have been better off recruiting our best charter operators for this challenge? Would student outcomes have differed significantly?

Time will tell. I simply hope we have the courage to look at the data squarely and make good judgements. Families and kids in Lawrence are investing a lot in this effort: 3 years is a quarter of a kid’s public school life.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Happy Birthday to Milton Friedman, who would have been 100 today. A great way to understand Friedman's contribution to the field of education can be summed up in the following series of videos associated with his renowned Free to Choose series on PBS. This series of six YouTube segments covers (in the first three) the actual documentary/commentary of the Free to Choose on the idea of scholarship vouchers for students to attend K-12 schools, as well as a fantastic roundtable debate on the then controversial idea.

The FTC special on education opens up with a look at a Hyde Park school that was in the 1980s already plagued by the need for uniformed police, metal detectors, and other safety features.

The series on education then moves to a focus on Harlem Prep -- a school that initially embodied many of the virtues Friedman had hoped to see in urban school choice.

In the final part of the documentary, Friedman makes a full-throated case for school choice:

Parts 4-6 are an informative debate including legendary leaders of the American federation of Teachers Al Shanker, former Massachusetts Commissioner of Education Gregory Anrig, and an official from the National School Boards Association, as well as Milton Friedman debating school choice. What's most interesting is how few of the arguments have changed since the filming of the Free to Choose program and the subsequent debate.

That's a great line-up of participants in the debate. Happy viewing.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Neil Swidey had a wonderful article (N.Y. vs. Boston: The endgame) in the Boston Globe Magazine on the fabled Boston-NY (or is that NY-Boston) rivalry delving into the ever-timely question: “Where did all this nonsense begin?”

What most intrigued me was his reference to New York’s plan to take “Roosevelt Island and a decrepit hospital that offers priceless views of the United Nations and the Chrysler Building” and turn it into “a new tech-focused graduate school that, in many ways, will be built in the image of MIT.”

Swidey’s set-up is pitch-perfect in noting the pride Greater Boston takes “in our identity as College Town, USA, the egghead capital of the nation, anchored by Harvard and MIT and fortified with a host of other competitive universities that would dominate their regions if they were located anywhere but here.” And the mayoral aide that tells Swidey that “New York has more college students than Boston has people” is sure to drive local university professors and development directors to take up Red Sox banners, even in this disastrous year.

Already a study is suggesting that New York has seen good growth in venture capital deals supporting new tech startups (see New Tech City) whereas other parts of the country, including New England have seen declines in recent years.

Enter New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan, as cited by Swidey, to create New York's version of MIT. Just what is New York planning and can they get it done?

The goal is clear: David Skorton, the president of Cornell, one of the partners to win the city’s competition for proposals noted that “New York City is positioned to become the new technology capital of the world.”

As the Times’ Richard Perez-Pena noted:

That has long been a goal for Mr. Bloomberg, who noted that the city had only recently surpassed much-smaller Boston in attracting venture capital for high-tech start-ups, and that such businesses here face a chronic shortage of engineers.

With their $2 billion project, which covers 10 acres of Roosevelt Island, Cornell and its partner, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel,

promise to start offering classes next September in temporary space, and to complete 300,000 square feet of space on Roosevelt Island by 2017 and more than 2 million square feet by 2037. Plans call for about 280 faculty members and 2,500 students in master’s and doctoral programs, a larger contingent than the universities had proposed a few months ago.

The schools have also committed to training at least 200 teachers each year in science education.

The universities plan to organize the campus around three overlapping, shifting “hubs”: technologies for “connective media,” applicable to everything from finance to social media; health care industries; and sustainable development, chosen in part to mesh with the city’s existing strengths.

The Cornell-Technion plan seeks to create a “linkage” between business start-ups and a “major applied-sciences institution” in New York, similar to what we’ve seen sprout up around Cambridge.

That plan includes

a $150 million venture capital fund for start-up companies that agree to remain in New York for three years, as well as math and science education support for 10,000 city children.

With deep pockets and already a lead gift of $350 million from a Cornell-associated philanthropist, New York's project of creating a new institute of technology is going to move fast. One more challenge for the Greater Boston area.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

The recent deal brokered by Stand for Children with the Massachusetts Teachers Association (and at the end supported by the AFL-CIO and the Massachusetts chapter of the American Federation for Teachers) made some progress in making student performance a larger consideration in evaluating teachers and lessened the role of seniority.

The Globe editorial board put it this way:

Stand for Children was plowing ahead with a tough ballot initiative that would have eliminated nearly all aspects of teacher seniority in the state’s public school systems. It went so far as to put non-tenured teachers with three years or less experience — so-called provisionals — on par with the most senior teachers during layoffs.

With the 107,000-member Massachusetts Teachers Association gearing up for a fight—and also thinking that it wanted to avoid a protracted battle and a diversion of funds away from political causes in an important Senatorial election year, the unions sought compromise. Back to the Globe:

The union gave up less. Under the compromise legislation, for example, provisional teachers — no matter how promising — will continue to be laid off before senior teachers. The union also eludes the ballot question’s requirement that every school district adopt a model teacher-evaluation method or state-approved alternative. Under the compromise legislation, school districts retain more leeway, and the emphasis shifts to more comprehensive reporting of teacher-evaluation data.

But there is real reform in the compromise bill. Unlike now, teacher performance — and not seniority — becomes the new touchstone for reassignments, transfers, and other staffing decisions.

I am not sure I’d go as far as that, but the Globe is absolutely right that

The compromise bill makes a huge course correction by giving principals significantly more power to build their faculties through the teacher-evaluation process. A cynic might also note that the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s president Paul Toner did also negotiate a delay in the implementation of the legislation to 2016, meaning that the MTA and its allies will still have two legislative cycles to undo what was done.

All that said, Toner’s piece in the summer MTA newsletter gives good reason to think there is a shift underway in his membership. He starts by underscoring his total opposition to the Stand referendum:

We met with Stand’s leaders repeatedly and urged them not to proceed. We also asked major education and parent groups and leading policymakers to press them to stop. Dozens of them did, including Governor Deval Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray, House Speaker Robert DeLeo, Secretary of Education Paul Reville, the Massachusetts PTA and John Walsh, the head of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. Undeterred, Stand easily collected the first round of signatures needed to qualify the question for the ballot.

We challenged the attorney general’s decision to certify the initiative. When we didn’t prevail in that effort, we filed a complaint with the Supreme Judicial Court on behalf of seven plaintiffs contending that the question was not appropriate for the ballot. Many labor and education groups filed briefs supporting our complaint.

More important than Toner’s views and views, though, are what he learned by listening to his members.

We assessed our odds of prevailing on the ballot and determined that it would be an enormous challenge. The initiative was very complicated, but easily reduced to an oversimplified sound bite: Every child deserves a great teacher; therefore, performance should be more important than seniority in personnel decisions. Our polling found that a vast majority of Massachusetts voters agreed with this proposition. Significantly, so did a majority of our members, who were polled on the issue in three separate random sample surveys. (my italics)

Put that data point together with this survey just released by Education Sector, and a picture begins to emerge where teachers are beginning to embrace some reforms focused on the profession such as "evaluation, pay, and tenure, and the role of unions in pushing for or against these reforms." From the press release of the sample of 1,100 K-12 public school teachers included in Trending Toward Reform: Teachers Speak on Unions and the Future of the Profession:

The 2011 survey repeats questions from Education Sector’s 2007 survey Waiting to Be Won Over and a 2003 Public Agenda survey on these same issues. So Trending Toward Reform shows how teachers’ thinking has evolved on some reform issues. The findings show continued strong support for teachers unions. Compared with earlier years, teachers say their union plays an important role in protecting jobs and addressing working conditions. But teachers want more from their unions. In 2007, 52 percent of teachers said their union should “stick to bread and butter issues” rather than focusing on reform; today, just 42 percent of teachers feel that way. At the same time, the number of teachers who want their union to put more focus on reform has risen from 32 percent to 43 percent. As one example, 75 percent of teachers surveyed said that unions should play a role in simplifying the process to remove ineffective teachers—up from 63 percent in 2007.

The Ed Sector survey also finds that teachers “support differentiated pay for teachers who work in tough neighborhoods with low-performing schools” and “those who teach hard-to-fill subjects.”

The survey shows that teachers, however, still oppose the use of student test scores to reward performance. No questions on broader reforms (charters, standards and curricula, etc.) were included in the Ed Sector survey.

Is this change? For now, it's small change. Let's hope the teachers themselves begin yearning for more.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Two-and-a-half years have passed since the passage of the reform law ("An Act Relative to the Achievement Gap") that will, over time, double the number of charter school students and established a new category of in-district reform called innovation schools.

(The law also made virtual schools possible, but the state’s department of education decided two years ago to tie a few regulatory double-knots on that type of reform, as I’ve blogged here and here.)

In districts where MCAS scores lagged in the bottom 10 percent statewide, the cap on the number of number of students who could attend charter schools was doubled from 9 percent to 18 percent. We saw an increase of 16 charter schools in year one and 3 charters in year two.

What about “innovation schools”? That is the reform that most interests the state ed department. Anecdotally, a number of localities have shared that the state’s ed department has reached out to them talking about how they could either see a charter established outside the district’s control or, if they wanted to avoid that eventuality, well, they could start an innovation school.

Given that districts are almost maniacally concerned about keeping education funds under the control of the district (rather than focusing on what will give kids the best outcomes), the calculus for them is pretty clear.

But will innovation schools work? And, more importantly, what happens if they don’t?

That’s not a negative spin on the innovation schools, but rather the right question to ask. After all, innovation school plans, like charter plans, like any effort started with the best of will to change a school, are not guaranteed success. But in the case of charter schools, there is a clear path to shutting the ones down that are not working. Even somewhat early in its five-year charter, a poorly performing charter school can be put on probation. If the charter proves unworthy of renewal by the end of its five-year term, the charter will be shut down.

It’s an especially good question to ask because there are empirical and common sense reasons to wonder about the efficacy of in-district reform models.

Empirically, we’ve seen a number of charter-lite “new school” reforms, from pilot schools to Commonwealth pilot schools to the unionized Horace Mann charter schools, all of which are in-district reform efforts. They have not even come close to the performance of Commonwealth charter schools in Massachusetts.

Then there’s common sense. The Achievement Gap statute spends an inordinate number of words and provisions (in Section 92 of the law, subsections (a) through (m) all define the various processes that innovation schools have to go through in order to constitute a school. Even proposals that truly are innovative will have lost any tinge of “cutting-edge” intent by the time they make their way through the gauntlet of community, special interest, constituent, and status quo-lover groups that have to give an innovation school its blessing. Common sense also suggests very strongly that when a statute spends page after page describing just what “innovation” is, it’s not innovation.

Then there is Section 92 (n), which provides the only real input on assessing and holding accountable these new “innovation” schools. And what kind of accountability system does it call for? Basically, there is a requirement that the superintendent must perform an annual evaluation and follow-up with the school committee to share the results of the evaluation. If the school committee then finds that 1 or more goals have not been met, they proceed with an amendment process to “reasonably modify” the original innovation plan (the original proposal with statement of purpose, discussion of budget/admin/curriculum, etc.).

So what happens if, still, student outcomes have not improved substantially? If the superintendent and school committee conclude that there are multiple failures to deliver on the innovation plan, there are three degrees of action.

(i) limit 1 or more components of the innovation plan;
(ii) suspend 1 or more components of the innovation plan; or
(iii) terminate the authorization of the school; provided, however, that the limitation or suspension shall not take place before the completion of the second full year of the operation of the school and the termination shall not take place before the completion of the third full year of the operation of the school.

OK, so the school is "terminated." But what does that mean in practice? Does the principal or do the teachers put their jobs at risk? Does the school get put out as a charter school?

Not at all. What will happen is that the school loses its status as an “innovation school” and reverts to being a district school. That’s not what happens to charters and it’s not enough to create a sense of urgency.

Section 92 starts out with much promise noting that “An Innovation School shall be a public school, operating within a public school district,that is established for the purpose of improving school performance and student achievement through increased autonomy and flexibility.”

While it is leading to a number of experiments, I fear that without an explicit hard-nosed accountability component to the law, there is little reason to believe that the level of urgency to deliver reform will not come to fruition. The state legislature should put in place the same accountability measures for innovation schools as exist for charter schools – essentially, if the schools don’t work, shut them down.

Twenty years ago, when the Education Reform Act was passed, one of the basic ideas was that district schools would draw lessons from charter schools and incorporate them into their own reforms. Why is it that no one ever talks about having district schools emulate the accountability piece of charters’ success?

I know. It was a rhetorical question.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Internet traffic has been especially heavy for the past 32 hours as people across the US are trying to understand just what the decision yesterday by SCOTUS means. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is an extremely complex piece of legislation famously weighing in at well over 2,000 pages and already a couple of years into implementation leading to thousands more pages of regulations and guidance to fill in the gaps left to the U.S. Health Secretary Sebellius.

As people learned the news yesterday, of course, some had extra pep in their step; others required pepto-bismol.

Such high-profile ruling with broad implications for federal-state relations is bound to touch on education policy -- and it does. The discussion of the Commerce Clause and whether the individual mandate overstepped the Court's understanding of the CC's power does not impact ed policy but the 7-2 decision on the ACA's Medicaid expansion does.

A little background. When it was established in 1965, Medicaid was limited to “furnish[ing] rehabilitation and other services to help families and individuals attain or retain capability for independence or self care,” and it cost a few billion dollars.

In 1985, the federal government began expanding Medicaid to serve non-welfare recipients. States had authority over administrative functions such as setting asset tests and cost-sharing levels, and could choose whether to cover “optional” groups.

Today Medicaid serves 65 million Americans at a cost of nearly $400 billion. The ACA expands Medicare to cover an additional 17 million Americans at a 10-year cost of $1 trillion and it prohibits changes in benefit levels. The critical aspect of the ACA that came under consideration in the Court was that the law stated that states must enact the Medicaid expansion or risk losing not only new federal funding but all existing (base) federal funding for current Medicaid services.

Back during March's oral arguments on the ACA, the question of whether the law's Medicaid expansion constituted federal coercion came to the fore.

Justice Samuel Alito used a hypothetical about education to ask if the the Medicaid expansion would amount to federal coercion. Assume, Alito suggested, Congress recognizes that education “expenditures are a huge financial burden” on states and announces that “we are going to take that… off your shoulders” through a federal tax that will “raise exactly the same amount of money as… the states now spend on education.”

To get the money, states would simply need to surrender control over teacher tenure, collective bargaining, textbooks, class size, the school calendar and more to the feds. States could theoretically say no, but their citizens would still pay the federal education tax and existing state taxes to fund public education.

“Would that,” Alito asked, “reach the point where financial inducement turns into coercion?” Solicitor General Verilli argued that it wouldn’t; to which Alito curtly responded “[I]f that is the case, then there is nothing left of federalism.”

Alito’s focus on education is instructive. For there is concern among some that the federal role in education has expanded markedly over the years -- and especially so during the Obama administration, which has demonstrated the same federalizing impulse in education as it has in health care.

The same year Medicaid was established, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) broadened federal power over education. In 1979, President Carter answered the prayers of DC-based education special interests by establishing the US Department of Education. The pattern of expanding USDOE’s reach continued through the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) championed by President George W. Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy.

None of these federal efforts raised student achievement, but they sure boosted the US Department of Education’s budget, which has risen from $14 billion in 1979 to $70 billion last year.

Certainly, those concerns about coercion are in part related to the federal department of education's development of national standards and tests, as well as the use of grant money to coax states into action. That practice was not impacted by Thursday
s historic ruling.

But the much-discussed possibility of having the federal department pull Title I funding from states should they not enact policies of the feds' liking is likely dead at this point.

As Lindsey Burke noted in the Daily Caller:

Concern grew when President Obama indicated that access to federal Title I dollars for low-income schools would be contingent upon adoption of national standards — a policy that, unlike Race to the Top, would make the standards anything but voluntary. In remarks to the National Governors Association in February 2010, Obama noted that “as a condition of receiving access to Title I funds, we will ask all states to put in place a plan to adopt and certify standards that are college and career-ready in reading and math.”

As Mark Walsh of EdWeek noted:

On the Medicaid issue, the court effectively ruled 7-2 that the Medicaid expansion violates the U.S. Constitution by threatening the states with the loss of their existing Medicaid funding if they decline to comply with the expansion.

Congress put "a gun to the head" of the states to force them to to add a much larger pool of the poor to the Medicaid rolls, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in his main opinion inNational Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (Case No. 11-393). Medicaid funding accounts for over 20 percent of the average state's total budget, with federal funds covering anywhere from 50 to 83 percent of those costs, he noted.
"Congress may use its spending power to create incentives for states to act in accordance with federal policies," the chief justice said. "But when pressure turns into compulsion, the legislation runs contrary to our system of federalism."

Roberts said, though, that the Medicaid expansion could be saved by allowing funds to be withheld only for violations stemming from the expansion itself, not from existing funding.

So, without Congressional authority that redefines the purpose of Title I funds, such an action would be impossible.

Pay no mind, though. Today, five more states received waivers from the No Child Left Behind law from the US Education Department. This highly coercive practice, where the USED grants waivers from NCLB's accountability provisions, is based on conditions (adoption of curricular materials, instructional practice guides and national tests) that are contrary to federal law is not impacted by the decision.

That's not unconstitutional. It's just illegal...

The talk of how the SCOTUS decision confirms important principles limiting the federal government to enumerated powers is overblown.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Today’s lead story in the Globe relates the three years of “reform” by Sito Narcisse at English High:

An extraordinary three-quarters of English High’s teachers and administrators have quit or been let go during the past three years, school records show, as headmaster Sito Narcisse pushed through one controversial initiative after another — from school uniforms to single-sex classrooms to eliminating the grade “D,” forcing students to earn a “C” or fail. Teachers who did not go along with Narcisse’s approach were “not the right fit,” in his words, and he sent 38 of them packing, while dozens of others retired or resigned.

Given the continued drift in the school’s MCAS scores and observations of kids napping in class and worse, the Globe’s Andrea Estes and Jamie Vaznis seem on target in suggesting that all the energy and change the past three years to turnaround the school by English High’s Narcisse was for naught.

A cursory reading of the article suggests an additional takeaway. In their frustration with their inability to move the needle in urban district schools, many administrators, here and around the country, are operating under the justification: We had to do something.

And that’s almost always the first whiff of bad policy in the making.

For it often means “management had to do something” rather than schools have to do something. Given that schools = students + teachers + management + mission (and everything that flows from the mission), you can see the problem. Too often, the new policies lack coherence (connection to mission), an overarching connection to the teachers and the students, and a base in research. It’s not that Narcisse’s push to mandate uniforms was a bad idea, but was it connected to the mission, and if so why did he and the teachers not devise a way to gain traction on the policy and, if need be, enforce it? Same thing with male and female classes. If it was tied to the mission, it would have been implemented with training for teachers, outreach to parents, and follow-up to ensure it was working.

Without connection to a school ethos and mission, such changes not only run into opposition but they are little more than symbols for management. And the symbolic value, I can assure you, does not translate directly for the teachers and students.

Symbolic actions by management are hardly limited to Boston schools. Consider the recent expression of frustration by Rahm Emanuel and the superintendent (with the words: “We had to do something”!) as they called for “longer school days as key to achievement” in the Chicago district schools. Notwithstanding the confident proclamations of former Chicago superintendent and current US Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the progress in Chicago has been extremely slow and such frustration is warranted.

But does Chicago have a problem because it only requires 5 and 3/4 hours of school a day? Is the problem, as the spokeperson for the Chicago Public Schools explained, that “[a]mong 10 of the largest cities in the U.S., our students have 22 percent less instructional time than their peers”?

Perhaps. Or is it much more than a question of instructional time in a day? Harsh?

As Mayor Emanuel begins his fight with the Chicago teachers union over lengthening the school day, he certainly appreciates reporters who pitch the battle in the following terms, as did the Reuters/MSNBC writer:

Many children in Chicago Public Schools will go from having the shortest school days in the nation to some of the longest this fall, a move that some experts say is needed to help push the struggling system ahead in student achievement.

The reporter continues:

… in Chicago, public school students have the shortest school day — 5 hours and 45 minutes — among the nation's 50 largest districts, according the National Council on Teacher Quality. The national average is 6.7 hours in school. Under Chicago Mayor Rahm Emnauel's plan, elementary schools will move to seven hours and most city high schools will extend their day to 7˝ hours, although one day during the week would be shorter by 75 minutes.

But I am not convinced the facts are on the side of lengthening the school day if the rest of the school activities, governance, expectations/accountability, and mission are left as is. The problems with urban district schools go way beyond, and in fact, trump extended learning time (ELT). As such, ELT is a punt every bit as symbolic and disconnected from coherent reform as the well-intentioned changes advanced by Mr. Narcisse.

I say this not to diminish the importance of time on task. The first opinion piece I ever wrote for a newspaper, way back in 1989, was on the need to extend the school year in the United States. After working as a consultant on how to harmonize high school graduation and college entrance requirements across European countries, I wrote what many feel intuitively: How can we raise our students' achievement levels if they are going to public school 180 days a year (maximum), when some are going to school 213 (Germany) or even 243 days (Japan) a year.

I still think extending the year for schools that are not making the grade can be important due to the research-verified loss of concept knowledge that occurs over the summer vacation, especially in urban districts.

But even with that in mind, it is important not to overstate the time-difference between the US and other countries as a core reason for our falling behind on international assessments.

Consider Aaron Benavot’s 2005 UNESCO report, “A global study of intended instructional time and official school curricula, 1980-2000”, which has a number of interesting takeaways, the most relevant one being that the US is pretty much in line with the rest of the world in terms of annual hours of required instruction.

The Reuters article on Rahm Emanuel's standoff with the Chicago teachers union points to data assembled by the The Center for Public Education, an initiative of the National School Boards Association (NSBA), with primary backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, ARAMARK Education, Apple, Inc., Pearson Education, Sodexo School Services, The Coca-Cola Foundation, ACT, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., The College Board, Microsoft Corporation, and Scholastic, Inc., State Farm Insurance (a big national standards backer) and a long list of state school board associations (Texas’ in a leadership position) for laying out in summary form the facts on instructional time in the US:

According to the OECD, the hours of compulsory instruction per year in these countries range from 608 hours in Finland (a top performer) to 926 hours in France (average) at the elementary level, compared to the over 900 hours required in California, New York, Texas, and Massachusetts. Of particular note, no state requires as few hours as Finland, even though Finland scores near the top of nearly every international assessment. As a matter of fact, Vermont – a high-performing state7 -- requires the fewest number of hours (700 hours) for its elementary students (grades 1-2) than any other state, and it still requires more than Finland. Vermont’s requirement is also more than the 612 hours high-achieving Korea requires of its early elementary students. Moreover, all but 5 states require more hours of instruction at the early elementary school level than the OECD countries average of 759 hours.

At the middle school level, total hours of instruction range from 777 hours in Finland (a top performer) to 1001 in Italy (an average performer). Three of our 5 large states, New York (990 hours), Texas (1,260 hours), and Massachusetts (990 hours) would rank near the top of all industrialized nations in number of hours required. California and Florida would rank near the middle at 900 hours but still above the OECD average of 886 hours. It should be noted that even at the middle school level, countries like Japan and Korea require fewer hours (868 and 867 respectively) than most U.S. states. So by the 8th grade, students in most U.S. states have been required to receive more hours of instruction than students in most industrialized countries, including high-performing Finland, Japan, and Korea.

In most countries, there is a significant increase in the time students are required to be in school at the high school level. In the U.S., most states require the same number of hours in high school as in middle school. Just as they did at middle school level, Finland (856 hours) and Italy (1,089 hours) required the fewest and most hours of instruction respectively. Italy’s 1,089 hours surpasses all but 2 out of our 5 selected states. Texas requires 1,260 hours of instruction at the high school level, while California requires 1,080 hours. Korea requires 1,020 hours of instruction at the high school level. Nearly half (22) the states require more instructional hours than Korea. Moreover, the vast majority of states (42) require more hours of instruction than the OECD average of 902 hours. Again, there’s no evidence that students in other countries are required to receive more instruction than students in the United States.

Assuming 180 days of school at 5.75 hours a day, the average Chicago student is receiving 1,035 hours of instruction in a year. Is it enough given the student needs in Chicago?

It may not be. But I am not at all convinced that adding an hour a day to the current system of district schools is a solution. Why? First, the above CPE international data show very clearly that there is no correlation between student performance and time in school. Second, the real question is what you do with the time, the school culture and the expectation set for students so that they are focused during their time on task. Which is why I chafe at this statement from Jennifer Davis, president of the National Center on Time and Learning (located here in Boston and the principal advocate for extended learning time).

“More districts are now looking to break free of the standard school schedule because there are too many students who are not reaching higher academic standards...”

The fact is that in Massachusetts, where the $13-14 million we are spending annually to support extended learning time in a couple of dozen schools has had little effect, as repeated reports from Abt Associates have demonstrated.

The idea of “breaking free of the standard school schedule” is of course a good one, especially as we see expansion of online resources and the success of charter public schools, which have greater autonomy in terms of teacher recruitment, ethos, and management but with a higher level of accountability.

But while they are both public schools, charters differ greatly from districts schools. Charter public schools have greater flexibility, a greater mission focus (that is, a focus on academic performance and the specific school ethos) and a higher level of accountability. So an added hour in a charter is different from an hour in a district school—especially one that has not been reconstituted from the ground up.

That’s why when NCTL head Davis suggests that the Louisiana Recovery District is a good example of how extended learning time can be effective, she is off the mark. It’s not a broad-based strategy that will work. Where it can be helpful is in places like Lawrence, where the receiver is looking to reconstitute specific schools, giving them broad autonomy and in fact installing charter entrepreneurs to run the schools.

ELT supporters should not beef up their case by association with schools that are markedly different from the district schools they believe they can impact by adding hours of instructional time.

Improving schools is a lot harder than simply expanding time. The way forward on ELT is to:

1. recognize the limits of ELT as a broad-based policy and restrict expansions of the school day to schools undergoing full reconstitution;
2. study why ELT worked in a handful of schools and why it failed to raise student achievement in the majority of schools in Massachusetts where it was tried; and
3. give greater consideration to lengthening the school year in target schools, where the research clearly tells us that the loss of concept knowledge over the summer vacation can be impacted by an extended school year.

The history of district-driven reforms is littered with symbolic actions, as we have seen at English High. Few of these reforms have actually worked. Time is too important to waste -- and we should stop treating it, too, like a symbol.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

In recent weeks, there was sad news in the literary world: science-fiction writer and author of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury died, at age 91.

People often inaccurately thought his masterwork, Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which paper supposedly burns), a novel about futuristic firemen being enlisted to burn books, was about government censorship. In point of fact, Ray Bradbury was trying to caution us about something else far more relevant to American readers.

Exasperated by the constant misinterpretation of his book, Bradbury used a 2007 L.A. Times interview to clear up his book’s true meaning, which is this dystopian future: TV would kill peoples’ interest in books, and, in particular -- literature.

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens, and Tolstoy…

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship…

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.

“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship…

In the 1950s, when Bradbury wrote the novel there was a legitimate concern, as there is today, that people's attention spans would be stunted by TV and that consequently people (and young people in particular) might not develop the intellectual stamina, or discipline, to devote hours to reading difficult books.

But these days, TV has some allies in its war against peoples’ attention and affection for classic literature. As noted previously, Bill Gates has frequently expressed misgivings about the centrality of the liberal arts in the American education system. He has principally made public comments about higher education, but with the Gates Foundation's support for the new national K-12 education standards, he has brought his focus on workforce development to our public schools.

It's sad to see Bradbury's passing at the same time that role of literature and the time and resources committed to literature are being diminished in our K-12 schools.

A recent opinion piece by Jamie Gass notes:

Architects of the landmark [Massachusetts] 1993 education reform law understood and appreciated our literary heritage; that's why Massachusetts public school students were reading much of the work produced by these and other ancient and modern poets.

The results of our students' grounding in poetry, literature and higher-level vocabulary have been outstanding. In 2005, the commonwealth's fourth- and eighth-graders came out tops in the reading component of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation's report card. In 2007, 2009 and 2011, each time the test was administered, they repeated that feat.

But recently, our students started learning 60 percent less about the many great Massachusetts poets and literary figures. That's because the commonwealth ditched its nation-leading English standards for inferior national standards that will have students reading far less poetry, fiction, and drama, particularly in high school…

Is the Fahrenheit 451 - national standards analogy a bit overwrought? Consider the following comments from the architect of the national standards/Common Core (and now the head of the College Board, which develops and administers the SAT and AP tests) David Coleman. In delivering the core pedagogy of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) to educators gathered at the New York State Department of Education in April 2011, Coleman made clear that he believes emphasizing so-called “informational texts” (whatever that means in the hands of ed school types, DC trade groups, and educrats) is the way to go:

Number one, it begins in the earliest grades. We in America in K-5 assessment and curriculum focus 80% of our time on stories, on literature. That is the dominant work that is done in the elementary school and that’s what’s tested on exams and that’s what’s in our textbooks…

So the core standards for the first time demand that 50% of the text students encounter in kindergarten through 5th grade is informational text…That is a major shift and if you think about what’s happening in this country unintentionally literature and stories dominated the elementary curriculum…

Then, he goes on to say:

“[A]s you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a s%$* about what you feel or what you think.” [Please note: I have replaced Coleman's wording with a "symbol swear" to conform with community standards at Boston.com]

A wise person once said: “There are people who burn books and then there are people who sit down and carefully revise away the reading lists to exclude what they don’t like, don’t think is useful, or don’t find fashionable anymore.”

The educationally reductive proponents of national standards (the Gates Foundation, Achieve, Inc., the Council of Chief State Schools Officers, and the National Governors Association) with their orientation towards K-12 schooling as mere workforce development training, while advancing empty so-called 21st century skills, are among this latter group.

What Ray Bradbury might say is that TV’s dumbed-down culture helped pave the way for limited attention spans and respect for imaginative texts, which make possible national K-12 education standards committed to vague, ill-defined “informational texts” and softy “21st century skills” related to the more mundane and demotic aspects of daily life. Oh yeah, the kids will really find that intellectually engaging.

RIP the farsighted Ray Bradbury.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Over the past decade, while there has been incremental success in most suburban schools, and limited incremental success raising achievement in a few urban school districts, the big stories in raising student achievement have come in the state’s 70 or so Commonwealth charter schools and its 27 regional career-vocational technical schools.

Currently, there are 63 CVT schools in the Commonwealth with about half serving regional populations while the other half is under the direct jurisdiction of larger districts. The regional voc-techs have many similarities with charters: They operate outside the direct control of a single district superintendent, and in fact have their own dedicated leadership (superintendents and elected school committees); they are schools of choice; they are highly focused on their missions; they have embraced the state’s academic standards; and they have sought to raise student achievement with vigor.

But there many of the similarities end. Regional career-vocational technical schools are home to a very large cohort of special needs students and English language learners.

While Commonwealth charters often bring a “no excuses” focus on academic attainments (and for good reason, given the correlation of academic attainment and later college and career success), vocational schools are by nature different. The mission of CVT schools is hands-on, project-based learning. And for the schools and their students it is working.

So, the big question for cities like Boston, which has an in-district career-vocational technical school, is “Why aren’t we seeing anything close to that level of improvement at Madison Park High School?

The answers, as noted above, are easy to state but hard to change.

How do we get the superintendent to give up her direct line authority? That’s a question that has vexed charters from day one. Ironically, it is the one of the questions the Boston Public Schools are asking themselves about why Madison Park has shown none of the improvement in student achievement seen in the state’s 27 regional career-vocational technical schools.

That was clear in a press release the BPS put out in May. The PR featured a January 2012 review of Madison Park High School compiled by a group of nationally-recognized education experts, including strong representation from the career-vocational technical world.

Research from Pioneer Institute has demonstrated that the Massachusetts regional career-vocational technical model has been extraordinarily successful. Certainly, it has been effective in raising student achievement; for example, see page 5 of the report.

And it has been equally up to the task in reducing dropout rates to unheard of lows. The last look at dropout rates in VTE schools is on the order of 1.5 percent a year (or a four-year/high school dropout rate of 6 percent), versus 3.8 percent for the state as a whole (four-year/HS rate of 15.2 percent).

This is a report, though, that’s been issued with the names of many institutional players. And as is the case with institutional reports, there's a certain art to writing these reports – in a way that saves face for all involved while still trying to deliver a tough message. That's precisely what you’ll find in the Madison Park Technical Vocational High School Review if you read between the lines.

The big takeaways are that

• Boston is paying full freight for a CVTE education for many students who really don't want it.
• There are many students who want a CVTE education in the city, who are not getting it.
• Madison Park has received significant investment and receives higher per student funding from the BPS than most other schools, based on its vocational mission.
• But the school is not delivering actual vocational training, its student achievement levels are unacceptable, and the school is beset by a culture of low expectations.

A few examples of how the school is not delivering actual vocational training:

• The school's insistence on daily academics, as opposed to the typical voc-tech schedule of alternating weeks of vocational and academic instruction, prevents the implementation of most vocational training, including key items such as an on-site food service operation.


• Only 11 students were involved in cooperative education in SY10-11.


• Minimal achievement of training/apprenticeship credentials

A few examples of how Madison Park’s low achievement levels

• In SY10-11, only 60 seats were occupied in AP classes (with a school enrollment of around 1300) and only 1 student scored high enough to qualify for AP credit.


• Most students have GPA’s no higher than 2.0.


• Significant anecdotal evidence that many students enroll who are not interested in vocational training or don't understand the intent of a CVT school.

And a few examples of its low expectations

• The average student is absent for a month per year.


• Many students arrive late for school, arrive late for individual classes, and many classes fail to start on time.

Finally, the big takeaway and the only thing, in my mind, that will change the poor vocational training and academic learning at Madison Park comes on page 25 of the document: Move Madison Park to an operational structure outside of district control, just as is the case in the state’s successful regional career-vocational technical schools.

In order to take full advantage of this assistance, the Review Team also believes that Madison Park needs more flexibility. This core principal has already been recognized around the Commonwealth, since most of the regional vocational technical high schools function independently of the districts they serve. They have the freedom to set policies and procedures appropriate for a vocational technical high school, and to establish conditions that recognize the unique responsibilities and needs of their students, their teachers and their programs. In contrast, Madison Park currently operates as other comprehensive Boston high schools. Even at Worcester Technical High School, an in-district urban vocational school, teachers have successfully altered schedules, practices, and policies to accommodate and implement the vocational and academic standards required to create a strong vocational program.

Rather than recommend a specific form of governance, we suggest that the City and BPS consider this a very high priority. Creating a more vocational/technical tailored model for governance would establish the foundation and create the environment for the school that we are convinced Madison Park can become. The need for a successful Madison Park is enormous, and the opportunity to make progress has never been better.

So, where will this effort go? It’s hard to say. Madison Park staff voted to turn itself into an “innovation school,” a new category of charter-lite options created by the 2010 achievement gap legislation that also doubled the number of charter schools. Innovation schools follow a litany of previous charter-lite options created by legislators: “pilot” schools are union-led flexible schools; “Commonwealth pilot” schools are state-sanctioned “pilot” schools; and “Horace Mann” charter schools are unionized charter schools. None of these in-district efforts has proven effective in closing achievement gaps.

In fact, it is arguable that the 2010 legislation provides even less flexibility than the enabling Horace Mann charter statute (1997). The 2010 law takes dozens of pages to describe the meaning flexibility available to (and the laundry list of processes and signoffs needed to move ahead with) an innovation school.

While I am always an optimist, I have always feared that innovation schools would simply deviate efforts from proven models. There is nothing wrong with principals, teachers, parents and district-level folks to come together and try and innovate. In fact, that’s what they should be doing. To the extent that innovation schools promote that, it’s a wonderful opportunity for great conversations. But the problem with in-district reform is not the people involved – all of whom are of good will. It is that empirically there is no evidence that the “system” that envelopes them allows them to be innovate in a way that is accountable for results.

So, here’s the deal. Let’s watch for two or three years and see if Madison Park is performing at the level of the regional CVTs. If not, we will know that the innovation route was a detour from real reform, and that innovation status was simply the fig leaf to cover the emperor that had no clothes.

While the kids wait for the adults to try and figure things out, let me ask a simple question: Wouldn’t it have been easier to go with a proven model—that is, to free Madison Park from the district and allow it to have the flexibility and school-level control available to the 27 autonomous regional CVT schools?

But of course that would have upset the adults, who want to control the money.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

In November 2011, the Board of Education decided to put the city of Lawrence's public schools into receivership. With that announcement the power to install a receiver for the district was given to the state's education commissioner. The January appointment of Jeffrey Riley as receiver by the Education Commissioner was well received. Riley has experience as a Teacher for America and also as a principal of a challenging school. His work as the Chief Innovation Officer in Boston's schools was marked by a steady but persistent push for change.

So, yesterday the receiver and the commissioner made public the state's turnaround plan for the Lawrence Public Schools today with fanfare and much talk about urgency. The Lawrence Eagle Tribune lists key highlights of the state's turnaround plan for the city's public schools as:

• A requirement that starting in the 2103-2014 school year, all Lawrence public schools will be required to have a minimum of 1,330 school hours, adding 160 hours to the school year.
...
• Many of the changes will require a renegotiation of contracts for teachers in the district to accommodate for longer hours and duties.
• Funding for all the new initiatives will come from the school department budget.
• [...] Six principals have already been informed they won't be returning in the fall, a number of teachers will not be invited back.

Then there is the biggest change of all included in today's announcement:

Private education firms with proven track records of running successful charter schools in Boston, Chelsea and Lawrence will be brought in to take over management of Lawrence's worst schools, provide tutoring in two of the city's high schools and run a new alternative high school targeting dropouts.

Let's unpack exactly what this is and isn't. First, the private education firms we are talking about are charter schools and school operators--Unlocking Potential (UP), which has taken over what was the Gavin School (a district school) in Boston and changed its operation from inside the district; Lawrence Community Day Charter School (LCDCS), which is a longtime charter school operator in Lawrence; MATCH Charter Schools, an operator of three schools in Boston; and Phoenix Charter Academy, which operates a Chelsea-based school that focuses on putting at-risk students and dropouts on a college track.

• As is the case with the Gavin, UP will re-engineer the management and operations of a middle school;
• LCDCS will begin managing an elementary school;
• MATCH will provide tutors to two high schools; and
• Phoenix "will start a new alternative high school targeting dropouts."

All of this work will be done "within the system," that is, within the district and with unionized teachers but with carve-out agreements that will give the charter operators the flexibility to change the district schools for a period of years.

This is all good stuff to do, and the charter operators brought in are precisely the caliber of people with the level of commitment to get the job done... in the limited scope they've been given. But why is it that with such a dire reality in the LPS our education leaders still could not muster the courage to expand on the one proven mechanism for bridging achievement gaps--charter schools? Why couldn't the receiver and ed commissioner lead an effort to allow a special expansion of charter schools in Lawrence? Instead, this turnaround plan strikes me as a good initial step but a step in the continued dance of the adults who protect their turf and jobs and money.

If not, why insist that these charter operators tether themselves to the district schools and to the unions?

And isn't it odd that we are settling on a solution where at most these charter operators operating district schools will touch the lives of only 1,500 of the 13,000 students in the district? Put that up against the challenge recognized by the Massachusetts ed department and board when they declared Lawrence would be put into receivership:

Three-fourths of the schools in Lawrence experienced declines in student achievement from 2010-2011, and five of the 28 Lawrence schools are now in Level 4. District-wide performance in ELA and math is among the bottom one percent of all the state's school districts; Lawrence has the third lowest math Composite Performance Index (CPI) and fourth lowest ELA CPI in the Commonwealth. Less than one-half of Lawrence's students graduate from high school within 4 years, which is the lowest graduation rate of any (non-charter) district in the state.

The turnaround plan's second major element is an addition of 160 hours to the school year (that's around 4 weeks) -- and that could help. But the fact is that extended learning time efforts, as I have pointed out recently and admittedly to my own surprise, have not borne fruit five years into the experiment. So there is no empirical reason to be optimistic that in the Lawrence Public School setting additional time will translate into big gains.

And, after all, that's what this turnaround operation has to be about. It can't aim for modest improvement. The baseline is so low that any turnaround plan worth its salt has to aim for huge change.

I know the ed commissioner declared that he is "jazzed up about this" new plan. Perhaps he was referring to these two blogs (1 and 2) I did on how Lawrence should adopt the New Orleans model for a district turnaround.

Remember: Almost all of the money going into the Lawrence Public Schools come from the state. The money for the additional extended learning time proposed in the turnaround plan will be paid for by the state.

So let me summarize: The situation is dire, with a "four-year gradutation rat eof 52 percent in the 2010-11 school year, 31 points below the state average, and nearly a quarter of high school freshmen fail[ing] to be promoted to the 10th grade." The state pays for the schools and is going to pay more for extended learning time. Extended learning time has a poor track record in improving students' academic achievement in district schools. We have refused to expand charter schools, which are the only proven mechanism for bridging achievement gaps.

I wish the charter operators the very best and know they will work incredibly hard and make their important efforts successes. I wish the teachers in LPS the best of luck in making extended learning a success. I wish Jeff Riley the best of success in making progress on this plan, however limited it is.

But why is it, if the situation is as dire as the data suggest and as the parents themselves tell us, that the adults in the system always win out? Why not a deeper, district-wide transformation based on proven models?

This plan falls far short of the target, no matter how often our top officials crow about how they are bringing Lawrence schoolkids "the world-class education they deserve."

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

A round-up of various perspectives on Governor Romney's education policy announcement yesterday. I'll post later on today to help you navigate through the noise, but it is always good to have a broad set of perspectives when big announcements are made.

Here is the full education "white paper" entitled A Chance for Every Child and a list of the Romney education team.

Here is a transcript of Governor Romney's speech before the Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit in Washington, D.C.

From today's Boston Globe, here is Matt Viser's article.

The Wall Street Journal's video take below:

Trip Gabriel's take in the New York Times.

And Paul West of the LA Times.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

Dear David,

Congratulations on becoming the new head of the College Board. I know, as a Founding Father of the national standards effort, you may have read certain things I have written that you do not agree with. While I haven’t met you personally yet, I look forward to it. I have heard universally that you are a smart guy and reputed by all to be a nice person.

I hope you and the Coleman family are well, and I am writing to say I’m sorry.

In addition to writing about school innovations, charter schools, vocational technical schools, school choice, accountability to results, and teacher quality issues, I’ve written with some frequency about academic standards and curricula—and especially recently about the effort to advance national (Common Core) standards.

I’m sorry because I think I may have gotten some of the intentions of Common Core's supporters wrong. Considering the heavy hand of the Gates Foundation and DC-based trade groups and their support of an effort that violates three federal laws; the imposition of $16 billion in new unfunded mandates on states and localities; and the feds’ shoehorning of states into adopting mediocre/community college readiness academic standards; I thought there may have been a well-thought-through plan at work. I thought the fact that many of the same players were involved in the 1990s in similar efforts meant that they had learned from past mistakes and decided to bypass congressional scrutiny and state legislative processes.

I thought they (and by association perhaps you) were consciously flouting the rule of law, the Constitutional Framers, and 220-plus years of American constitutional history. After all, supporters of national standards know their history and what is legal and illegal, and why all this was a bad idea.

Well, I just watched this national standards promo video by a couple of Gates Foundation clients—the Council of Chief States School Officers (CCSSO) and the Jim Hunt Institute, what I have affectionately in the past termed the EduBlob (perhaps too often uploaded with cheesy 60s’ movie posters). The video features you and it illustrates to me how I was wrong on the question of intention.

The video (see especially 2:07 to 2:49) does not dissuade me from my view that the national standards are a mediocre race to the middle, or that they are illegal, or needless centralizing and expensive.

In it, you articulate how you would use Madison’s Federalist #51 to teach students and teachers about carefully reading primary sources like Madison’s work and how to understand concepts like “faction” as the authors themselves understood these terms. The video comes with a nice-looking pictorial text of Federalist #51 on the screen. Listening for a few minutes, I thought it sounded good, especially where you note:

I want to say a little more about what we mean by building knowledge through reading and writing. It doesn’t mean simply that students can refer to a text they’ve read in history and social studies and mention that in Federalist Paper 51 someone named Madison had some ideas about faction. To be able to read and gain knowledge to analyze that document would be as the [national] standards require to examine precisely what Madison said or didn’t say about faction and from reading that document carefully having a rich and deep understanding about precisely what Madison thought about faction. It’s about the close study of primary documents to understand from whence they come and what they might mean and not mean.

David, I think at this point it would be helpful to introduce you to James Madison. Another Founding Father—but he was a key drafter of the United States Constitution. He drafted the 10 initial constitutional amendments, which we call the Bill of Rights.

He was the co-founder of a major political party. Author of the Virginia Resolution. Secretary of State (1801-1809). Fourth President of the United States of America (1809-1817). Unlike a president before him (John Adams) and many after, even in times of existential crisis for the nation (the War of 1812, when Washington, D.C. was being burned by the British), Madison didn’t abuse executive power to abridge the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights. He knew better than most the power of the Constitution and was its faithful implementer.

Despite almost incomparable Founding accomplishments, Madison is best known for essays he, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, wrote called the Federalist Papers, the most enduring articulation of American constitutional principles ever committed to paper. It’s the kind of stuff our kids (and we) need to know.

I’m not sure if Yale and Oxford, while you were there as a Rhodes scholar, forgot to tell you this, but Madison’s Federalist #51 isn’t about “faction.” I know you repeat this point over and over in the video tutorial. But, as any well-educated 10th-grader knows (at least in Massachusetts before we switched to the national standards), Federalist #51 is actually about checks and balances. Here’s the title and most famous lines from Federalist #51:

The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments

In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others...

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition...

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

In fact, David, I hope you and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Hunt Institute, and the whole swarm of national standards proponents will take the time to read Federalist #10, which, incidentally is the most famous of all of Madison’s works. The term “faction” is mentioned 18 times (including the title) and is the major topic of Federalist #10. Madison’s views on “faction” are thoughtful and far-sighted. Let me share a section with you:

The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection (continued)

AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it...

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community...

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time...

David, I truly hope you and other supporters of the Common Core will come to read the Federalist Papers and demonstrate the skills to understand James Madison’s original intent. I further hope you will gain the ability to reflect on the premises of the American constitutional republic. Perhaps close attention to the section of Federalist #10 regarding not serving as judge in your own case would help you and the Gates Foundation understand that advancing a policy with hundreds of millions of dollars and then paying others to support that view is a no-no. I am convinced that, with this reading and study complete, you will understand why national education standards are anti-constitutional, illegal, and violate the public trust.

In truth, when crafting the Constitution and the Federalist Papers Madison and the Framers very much had in mind the reckless ambitions of the recklessly ambitious. The drive to advance the Common Core outside the boundaries of the Constitution and legal restrictions is just what Madison had in mind. And the EduBlob represents exactly the types of dangerous “factions” whose “common impulse of passion, or of interest” were contrary to the public good and the “aggregate interests of the community.”

The next time you would like to opine about why you and others should set national standards, curricula, and testing for America’s 50 million schoolchildren, I would ask you to reflect on your and your peers' lack of even the most basic understanding of our Founding principles.

Respectfully,

Jim

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

The Education Reform Act of 1993 was a complex piece of legislation but its principal components are four:

• High academic standards for K-12 schools;
• Accountability through the MCAS test and a state office that performs audits on schools and districts;
• Improved teacher quality through rigorous testing of teacher’s mastery of the content in the state’s academic standards; and
• Expanded public school choices for parents through charter schools.

The subsequent history of education reform in Massachusetts has been an ebb and flow of implementation of these elements. It took until 1996 for the state to truly embark on any of the first three reforms listed above (and it took a long time and lots of public debate to move them ahead--one example). After 2001 charter expansions slowed to a trickle until the 2010 education law doubled the number of charters. After 2007, our academic standards were first injected with greater emphasis on “soft skills” rather than academic content and then switched for lower quality national standards; and the state’s school auditing office has been all but shuttered.

Two things are a constant throughout the history of two-decades-old reform effort. First, charter schools have proven over and over again in Massachusetts a high level of consistent performance and markedly higher performance than their district peers. Nothing has changed since a 2006 Massachusetts Department of Education report concluded that

In both English Language Arts and Mathematics, at least 30 percent of the charter schools performed statistically significantly higher than their CSD [ed. note: charter sending districts--i.e., district systems sending kids to charters] in each year with the exception of 2001.

That report goes on to observe that another 60 percent of charters were either as good or better than their district peers. As I’ve noted elsewhere:

A January 2009 Boston Foundation report shows Boston charters blowing the doors off of Boston district schools. To show you just how good their performance is, you might think about the impact of charters over middle school years as akin to bridging the gap between Boston public school performance and Brookline public school performance.

Not a bad outcome for people who cannot afford, or don't want, to move to Brookline.

That’s important as we see the effects of the 2010 education law doubling the number of charters. Boston will benefit greatly with up to 18 percent of its students in charter schools by 2016. We have thus far seen far less expansion outside of Boston, notwithstanding the fact that the 2010 law also increases the potential for charter growth to 18 percent in most major Massachusetts cities. (More on that another day.)

There is an additional constant in the state's history of education reforms, and that is choice options have been expanded beyond Commonwealth charter schools (CCS), which are highly flexible schools that operate without the requirement of teachers unions and oversight of local school committees. In additional to the CCS, we have seen a series of in-district efforts to gain the benefits of charters without sacrificing the interests of the adults in the system. Were it so simple…

We have seen pilot schools championed by teachers unions, Horace Mann (unionized, in-district) charter schools, Commonwealth pilot schools, and more recently innovation schools and extended learning time (ELT). The first three charter-lite options have not borne significant fruit. We are at the experimental stage with innovation schools and will know more within a year or two.

ELT is right about at the stage of development where we have to look ourselves in the face and make some hard choices. I understand the adults’ push for the charter-lite solutions. It keeps all the usual political alliances and interests intact; no difficult political decisions are necessary; and we can continue going to the same cocktail parties and cookouts. That’s important with the weather getting nicer just about this time.

As I wrote in a 2010 post,

I understand the political impulse to push ELT -- just more money and more time will solve the problem. Nothing against more time. If kids in Japan go to school more like 240 days a year, and we go 180, sure, there is no way we can keep up.

Intuitively, it makes sense, right? Reporters and radio journalists like Anthony Brooks of RadioBoston suggest that, in fact, charter schools have longer days, so longer days must be what makes them work.

But, before we jump to conclusions, let's ask the question: Do Massachusetts' ELT work? And are the results we are getting from these programs worth the $14 million a year we are currently spending on it. Roll the data. In 2010 the data, the data on ELT provided in Abt Associates' "Year 3" report suggested that

• ELT had a significant, positive effect on 5th grade science MCAS scores in year two, but no statistically significant effects on other MCAS outcomes in year one or two.
• ELT had a statistically significant, negative effect on school attendance in both year one and two.
• While very few students received suspensions or were truant, ELT schools had slightly higher rates of out-of-school suspensions in both years.
• 8th-grade students in ELT schools were more likely to use a school computer for school work at least once a month in year one, but not year two. ELT students were no more likely to spend > 3 hours a week on homework in year one, and less likely in year two. 8th grade students in ELT were no more likely to use a home computer for school work at least once a month, or two or more hours per week.
• 5th grade ELT students were less likely to participate in non-academic clubs at school (no other significant effects).
• ELT had no effect on 5th grade students’ perceptions about their relationships with teachers. ELT had no effect on 5th grades students’ perceptions of the learning environment offered at their school or level of school engagement.

That was an interim assessment admittedly covering only the first three years of implementation of ELT programs. Has anything changed in the two years since? Happily, Abt Associates has continued to update its reports. Unhappily, many of the key findings remain negligible. Consider, for example, page XVII of the "Year 5" assessment from Abt:

On average, there were no statistically significant effects of ELT after one, two, three, or four years of implementation on MCAS student achievement test outcomes for 3rd, 4th, or 7th grade ELA, 4th, 6th, or 8th grade math, or 8th grade science.

and

There was a statistically significant positive effect of ELT after four years of implementation on the MCAS 5th grade science test.

Those are quotes, folks. For all the activity and all the spending, there are few positive effects, save for the 5th grade science test. And, ahem, the positive effects on the 5th grade science test seem to disappear by the 8th grade.

Then there are negative effects. Both staff and students report higher levels of fatigue; students were less enthusiastic about school.

The Abt study design in the "Year 5" assessment is impacted by the involvement of both Mass 20/20 and Focus on Results, two organizations that are the state's biggest advocates of ELT. Some of the impact is helpful. The qualitative survey work with teachers notes high teacher satisfaction with ELT because it "allows them to accomplish their teaching goals and cover the amount of instructional material their students need to learn than would be expected in the absence of ELT." While that is almost tautological, it is also a fact that allowing the time to go more in-depth or cover more material, as determined by the teacher, is a good thing.

The influence of these advocates, however, may have led to some self-interested conflation between ELT as implemented by the state and other programs that are categorized as 'extended.' For example, the study often folds charter schools into the discussion as examples of places that have longer days on average. But the fact is that charters (especially Commonwealth charters) are so much more than that: they have a different approach to achieving teacher quality, different approaches to culture-setting and expectations, a more entrepreneurial bent, and a level of urgency that is unique given the "high-stakes" accountability they have for results. If they don't work, they get shut down.

ELT has some encouraging results in a few schools, but on an overall basis the results are not terribly encouraging. Are the results described above worth $14 million? Should we continue to fund it? Those are tough questions, I know. Let me pose the question in an even harder way: Given the success of charter schools and the less-than-inspiring results of ELT, would it be better to spend the $14 million funding 800-1,000 additional charter school students rather than spend the money on ELT? (Note: charter school students are funded at about $10,000 per student, with another slug of money going to pay districts for the loss of students.)

In the public sphere, choices to do one thing are often decisions not to do something else. It's decision time on ELT.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

In a previous job, I spent a lot of time in major Massachusetts cities outside of Boston. Cities like New Bedford and Fall River, with their stunning coastal views, and cities at the edge of Boston with so much potential like Lynn and Brockton, always intrigued me. But I have to admit to two favorites--Springfield and Lawrence. They are indeed among the most troubled, but they are both architecturally unique, with strong neighborhoods and muscular industrial histories.

Whenever in Lawrence, I would try to make it to Saint Anthony's Maronite Church or eat at Cafe Azteca. The smells in each place are enough to keep you going for days. A sensation similar to the "beignet haze" you get walking within 50 feet of New Orleans' Cafe Du Monde.

With the Lawrence Public Schools now in state receivership, a few recent posts have focused on what could and should be done there. I am decidedly against the idea of waiting for Superman and seeking a centralized solution from the new school receiver Jeff Riley, no matter how many good things I hear about him. We've seen that movie before with Michelle Rhee and other heroic reformers. They quickly get ahead of the local population and the embedded interests, and politically their attempts are pretty certain to meet resistance and failure. I've written extensively about the need to move away from that model of the heroic reformer who fixes all of the schools from the central office.

So, what to do?
#1. Recognize the problem
I have made it a point in recent posts to draw a direct parallel to Katrina, calling the Lawrence school receivership Massachusetts' "Katrina moment."

A few folks challenged that parallel, with, for example, Kevin Franck, communications director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, tweeting this:

KevinFranck May 08, 2:13pm via TweetDeck

1,800+ people killed? RT @JimStergios: Lawrence district schools = Massachusetts’ Katrina #mapoli #edchat

So, Kev, let's run the numbers.

The unemployment rate in Lawrence is a whopping 15.8 percent. The unemployed/Underemployment percentage is almost certain to be 1 of 5 people, and the number of those who have dropped out of the workforce completely only makes the number more alarming.

The unemployment problem in Lawrence precedes the recession and is structural. In 2005 the unemployment rate stood at 9.8 percent. (See page 11 of this report.)

Median household income in Lawrence stands at less than half the average in Massachusetts (in 2009, $31,000 vs. $64,000), and household income for Hispanics in Lawrence, by far the largest ethnic group in the city, has been flat since 2000.

Poverty is deep and broad in Lawrence. Fully 37 percent of households in Lawrence earn less than $20,000 a year (vs. 16 percent for Massachusetts). That embedded poverty, just like the embedded unemployment, feels a lot like the structural poverty "discovered" in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina.

In fact, New Orleans' unemployment rate prior to Katrina was only 5.6 percent. Median household income in New Orleans prior to Katrina was $31,369; the percentage of individuals earning less than $20,000 was far lower than in Lawrence.

As is well known, the poor student achievement data and outrageous dropout data lead to poverty, embedded poverty, poor health outcomes and high crime levels, which can lead to death, physical and mental impairment, and the demise of a once-great city.

The toll in terms of crime has been enormous since 2000. There have been over 50 murders, 228 rapes (which are routinely underreported), 1,642 robberies, 4,080 assaults, 5,885 burglaries, and almost 10,000 thefts (not including the largest category of thefts, car thefts).

Take all of these factors and then remember that our Lawrence is a small, small city covering only 7 square miles and with only 76,000. New Orleans (the city and the parish) extends a massive 350 square miles; and boasted 450,000 residents just prior to the hurricane. Truth be told, Katrina affected the entire metro region (1.4 million residents prior to the hurricane) and well beyond.

The comparison stands. Perhaps people like Kevin would like to compare the state of Lawrence schools with those in New Orleans? Happy to have that conversation.

In Lawrence we have had dropout rates north of 30 percent for some time now.

And a lot of the above statistics are related to the fact that over 40 percent of Lawrence's population has less than a high school diploma. Another 30 percent have only a high school diploma, which, if it is from the Lawrence Public School system, is not likely to have provided strong grounding for later learning. So you have nearly 80 percent of the population of Lawrence with either no high school diploma or no more than a high school diploma.

Education is the driver for unemployment, crime and the inability of the city to attract or grow businesses or jobs. Lawrence's schools are as bad as anything in NOLA before the deluge.

#2. Think big but not centralizing

The solutions are there if we simply have the courage to avail ourselves of them. In places where the state chips in well below 50 percent of the local school budget, I can understand the pushback from local mayors, who complain about dollars lost to their big central school bureaucracies. I don't agree with it for a minute, but I understand the (backwards) logic that the dollars belong to the adults in the system rather than to the students and parents.

But in Lawrence, the state is paying for almost the entire $135 million (soon to be $150 million) school budget. Moving to the New Orleans solution (with nearly all of its schools now public charter schools) has raised student scores and improved a number of key academic and school-based metrics. Doing the same in Lawrence is a no-brainer. There is little, if any, local money being put into the Lawrence schools and therefore no reason for the state to hold back on charterizing the entire district.

The blueprint is here -- and the results for Lawrence's kids would, over time, change not only their lives, but the trajectory of a once-great city.

It's all possible, but our political and education leaders need to have the brass to choose that course.

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.

The 2010 Achievement Gap bill that was passed by both the House and the Senate and signed into law by Governor Patrick lifted the limits on charter schools and the number of students in them in districts that were failing to see improvements in student achievement. Rather than limiting the number of students to 9% in these largely urban districts, the law allowed up to 18% of students to attend charter schools.

The six-year period for the expansion up to 18 percent of students was not coincidental. It aligns with the six-year reimbursement schedule for districts, by which districts:

• receive 100% of the per-pupil funding for in the first year after a student leaves for a public charter;


• continues to be reimbursed for the “phantom” student in years 2 through 6 at 25% of the student’s per-pupil funding.

That’s a lot of extra state funding, which is in part why many parents and district educators in Lowell feared negative impacts from the closure of a charter school in the city a couple of years back.

So, what to make of today’s front page Globe story ballyhooing the state's decision to release 1,000 charter seats in Boston and 360 in Lawrence as a "charter school cap lift?

Is that good news and something to be pleased about? Yes, on the practical impact, but not so much on the politics and policy of the decision.

On the practical impact, there is plenty of evidence of the strength of Massachusetts’ public charter schools, and even greater evidence of the strength of public charters in Boston. Massachusetts' and Boston’s charters are in fact pretty unique in the level of consistency they have, which is testimony to the good vetting process in place for many years (something that needs closer scrutiny given reason to believe that political considerations have played a fairly significant role in charter approvals and rejections in Gloucester and Brockton).

So applaud the practical impact, with proven schools likely to expand in Boston and also in Lawrence.

On the politics, I can’t say that the release of the seats was a story for any reason except that the Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester complied with the 2010 law. I am not grateful for that. He is expected to do that – it’s called the public trust.

The fact that he held up seats in the initial expansion was altogether understandable – but when the Department would make those seats available should never have been in question. It’s the law, and the fact is that the commissioner should have given a time certain for the release of the additional seats from the beginning.

Policy-wise, there is not much here. Lawrence has some of the worst-performing schools in the state—low student achievement in math, English, and science; scores that are not moving to anywhere close to acceptable levels; it has 30+% dropout rates. We know that’s not sustainable – and those facts affect most people and make them want to take real action, not just temporize and avoid responsibility.
But even from a purely financial perspective, the right policy is to take actions that have been proven successful. As Mark Vogler of the Lawrence Eagle Tribune recently reported:

Lawrence Public Schools' annual payroll will go over $100 million for the first time in the city's history in fiscal 2013.

A $4.8 million hike in overall salaries for the city's 2,000 School Department employees — due to step increases negotiated before the state placed the district in receivership — accounts for more than half of the $8.3 million increase in the proposed education budget for the 2013 fiscal year that begins July 1.

Nearly that entire eye-popping amount is paid for by the state. In addition, the state Board of Education stripped the local school committee of most of its powers and put the district in receivership, naming former Boston Public Schools official Jeffrey C. Riley Superintendent/Receiver. We own the problems of the Lawrence public school district.

Lawrence has some great charter schools, including the Lawrence Family Development Charter School and the Lawrence Community Day School. Given that, why are we just expanding 360 seats when there are 13,000 kids in the district?

Lawrence is Massachusetts' "Katrina moment." Let me put it another way to Massachusetts’ education officials: How would you respond to this crisis if your kids were in the Lawrence district schools?

They would respond just as the country did after Katrina, insisting on a new path for New Orleans schools – and one that has served the kids well, giving parents real choices and expanding charters to encompass nearly all the schools in the city. So here's the question I asked a couple of weeks ago – and it's a good one:

Lawrence has very good charter schools and could line up more charter operators very quickly. It also has the advantage of an existing network of high-quality parochial schools that could play a key role in changing the prospects of kids -- not after the successful execution of a five- or ten-year improvement plan but immediately.

Do we really have to wait for an act of god before we act?

Crossposted at Pioneer's blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer's website.