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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who famously (and bizarrely) promised Congress a billion-dollar edu-bonus if it reauthorized No Child Left Behind (NCLB) by the administration’s deadline and to the president’s satisfaction, was back at it on Friday. Exhibiting the administration’s patented disinterest in the niceties of the Constitution, he announced that he’s getting ready to waive NCLB requirements for states if they agree, as the New York Times put it, “to embrace President Obama’s education priorities, a formula the administration used last year in its signature education initiative, the Race to the Top grant competition.”

Being a “reformer” means not having to sweat little things like statutory authority or Article I of the Constitution. Can’t you just see Duncan telling his team: “Badges? Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

Education Week reported, “Any new flexibility would come with strings attached, as states would be asked ‘for courage and for reform.’” Duncan highlighted labor-management collaboration, laws that establish new teaching standards, and “the next generation of assessments” as the kinds of things he’d insist upon.

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Last fall, Vincent Gray upset incumbent D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty in a momentous election. The outcome was denounced by champions of tough-minded reform as a crushing setback—especially after the resignation of Chancellor Michelle Rhee. However, when Gray promised to stay the course on D.C.’s promising reform efforts and welcomed Fenty’s decision to name Rhee’s deputy Kaya Henderson as interim chancellor, reformers crossed their fingers and hoped (especially since Gray knows that any serious retreat from the D.C. reform agenda risks tens of millions in philanthropic support, and an equal amount in federal Race to the Top funds).

Well, Gray’s handpicked education transition team yesterday made it clear that reformers can pretty much pack it in. Gray’s transition team, headed by Michael Lomax of the United Negro College Fund and Katherine Bradley of CityBridge, unfurled the threadbare tapestry of “can’t-we-all-just-get-along?” reform. They called for remaking D.C.’s nationally regarded evaluation instrument into one more professional development tool. Lomax and Bradley deemed it problematic that D.C.’s pioneering IMPACT system for teacher evaluation “is seen by many teachers as a sorting and terminating tool.” (That suggests D.C. teachers are perceptive, because all serious evaluation systems are conceived in part as tools for sorting and terminating personnel. It’s kind of management 1A and all.)

This whole sorting and terminating notion quite bothered Lomax, Bradley, and their 30-member (!!) team of educators, parents, students, and activists. So they recommended bringing in outside experts to declaw IMPACT and turn the system—crafted under Henderson’s supervision—into one more tool for professional development. Apparently very concerned with ensuring that the Washington Teachers Union’s preferences are fully aired, Lomax and Bradley will be including the union’s own report in their final draft.

Meanwhile, just to pile on, Gray went out of his way to inform the press that Henderson has been lusting after the chief’s job. (I’m skeptical, to say the least, given that she had mixed feelings about taking the interim job in the first place. And given that she’s said nothing publicly on the question so far, it’s a hell of a thing for Gray to give the impression that he’s dangling the job in front of her.) Oh, and Gray took pains to say he’s working closely with anti-IMPACT Washington Teachers Union chief Nathan Saunders to name the 16-person panel that will select the new chief. The panel will be co-chaired, conveniently enough, by… Lomax and Bradley.

I’ll say this for Gray: when he throws someone under the bus, he does it with vigor.

Image by Dbking.

Michelle Rhee announced today that she will be stepping down as chancellor of DC Public Schools (DCPS) at the end of this month. The announcement brings to an end her remarkable, tumultuous three-year tenure. In that time she drove more substantial and potentially lasting change than most superintendents do in a ten-year term, and she also endured predictable blowback for her bold and uncompromising efforts.

Three big thoughts today as I survey Rhee’s legacy.

First, unlike most superintendents who fritter away their honeymoon period chasing an ephemeral “consensus” and tinkering with curriculum and instruction, Rhee tackled the hardest and most entrenched problems first. Just a couple months into the job, she and DC Mayor Adrian Fenty went to the DC textbook storage warehouse to highlight the millions of dollars wasted and materials left unavailable by dysfunctional operations. That venture set the tone. Without getting much acclaim for it, Rhee has done much of the hard work of cleaning up a system that was profoundly broken when she took over. Besides the groundbreaking contract negotiated with the Washington Teachers Union earlier this year, DCPS has pioneered the cutting-edge IMPACT teacher evaluation system, fixed a once broken personnel system, overhauled textbook requisition and distribution, shuttered a raft of dilapidated and half-empty schools, addressed a massive backlog in its special needs caseload, slimmed a bloated central administration, and built a respected data and research operation.

Second, when it comes to all of this, she has received less credit than she deserves—largely because of the relentless focus to boost test scores and teacher quality. The problem is when the public is lead to imagine that school districts are just black boxes, and that all of these other critical efforts are nonexistent or negligible. In truth, like any large organization, school districts have layers of function or dysfunction—and Rhee’s efforts to address those were crucial stepping stones in transforming DCPS. Unfortunately, her team and her allies (and the media) often skipped past all this. This gave her less credit than she was due, shaped the impression she was spending all her time picking fights, and created the false impression that this workhorse leader was more of a glamor-seeking show pony.

Third, we’ve frequently heard that Rhee needed to be “nicer” or more inclusive. Well, the contract negotiations with the Washington Teachers Union stretched on three years and she did scores of community meetings around her school closings. I don’t recall that either process did much to allay her critics. The real lesson here is that transforming dysfunctional systems inevitably entails fierce pushback in the schools and communities—especially in the African-American community. In places like DC, even black parents who welcome many of the school improvements are concerned about the influx of “outsiders” or question whether reform needs to be so tumultuous. For would-be reformers to succeed in the long run, they can’t rely merely on test scores and graduation rates to win the debate—they need to address such concerns and explain why their harsh medicine is necessary. They need political cover and aggressive efforts to make their case to parents and voters. Even Rhee, with the enthusiastic backing of a strong mayor, couldn’t do all this on her own.

Happily, Rhee leaves DCPS in the mega-capable hands of her longtime number two Kaya Henderson. Henderson was with Rhee when she built the New Teacher Project from a concept into the nation’s best teacher recruitment operation and a leading voice on teacher quality, has been with her every step of the way in DC, and is going to dazzle with her smarts and straight talk as observers get to know her. If Mayor-in-waiting Vincent Gray quickly signals an intention to scrub the term “interim” and names Henderson as Rhee’s successor, the children of DCPS will be in good hands indeed. And, given that Rhee is now free to take her formidable skills to a new role with a broader national impact, this turn of events could yet turn out to be a happy one.

On Monday, President Obama laudably spoke the plain truth. When asked if he thought his daughters could receive as good an education at a D.C. public school as they are receiving at private Sidwell Friends School, he said, “the answer is no, right now. The D.C. public school systems are struggling.” Exactly right. Good for him for speaking up. Now, it would be nice if he’d more vocally speak up on the behalf of D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s transformative agenda. In the meantime, President Obama should push to renew the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Fund so that all of D.C.’s families can act in accord with his judgment.

In Tuesday’s biggest surprise, tea party candidate Christine O’Donnell shocked heavy favorite Representative Mike Castle in the GOP primary, beating the nine-term representative, former governor, and former lieutenant governor by about six points. The result put an exclamation mark on a series of tea party primary wins in Nevada, Kentucky, Alaska, Utah, and Colorado.

When it comes to schooling, the impact of this primary season is not yet well understood. Some, like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, seem inclined to presume that K-12 bipartisanship will breezily return after November’s election. Indeed, Duncan is in good company, as seasoned Washington hands trust that any tea partiers who survive November will learn the ropes soon enough. Former Senate Republican leader Trent Lott observed in July, “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”

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Image by the Obama-Biden Transition Project.

The “buy-in” tar pit is located adjacent to other similar geographical oddities, like the “consensus-seeking” sinkhole and the “capacity-building” briar patch. These are all easy ways to blame process rather than substance when the complaint is really about substance. So efforts to close lousy schools, trim benefits, or toughen up evaluation are inevitably attacked for a lack of buy-in or stakeholder support, no matter how much time was spent on just those things. (Meanwhile, you hardly ever hear any complaints that across-the-board pay raises were decided with insufficient input.)

Right now, the Washington Teachers Union (the American Federation of Teacher’s D.C. local) is throwing everything it has behind D.C. City Council Chairman Vincent Gray in a push to unseat Mayor Adrian Fenty. The media have reported mass mailings, nightly phone banks, and big bucks, in addition to the hard-to-miss radio ads. This all follows, by just a few months, the groundbreaking collective bargaining deal between the WTU and Fenty’s schools chief Michelle Rhee, which included generous across-the-board raises along with a new evaluation and performance pay system.

No one should be surprised that the WTU is charging Fenty and Rhee with inadequate efforts to build trust, forge consensus, or win buy-in. The surprising thing, for me, is that perfectly sensible observers so frequently seem to take these complaints at face value.

I’ll be blunt. Given Fenty and Rhee’s determination to move forcefully to improve a district with no functioning personnel system, abysmal levels of achievement, schools in need of closure, a lethargic central administration, too many overmatched principals, and too many teachers who weren’t up to snuff, there was no way they could make real progress without angering powerful constituencies and hurting a lot of feelings.

Jerry Weast, superintendent of Montgomery County (a D.C. neighbor), just announced his impending retirement. As fond as I am of Jerry and as much as I respect his 12-year track record, the recent spate of comparisons between him and Rhee typically ignore the fact that Jerry was hired to tone up an admired district and Michelle to clean up a disaster zone. You can do the first with a fair bit of buy-in, since most everyone will come out okay. You can’t do the second without making a lot of enemies—in communities who are seeing schools closed, among fired principals and central office staff, and… in the teachers union.

The problem is we’ve a sector full of educational experts who claim to love kids, are sure that everyone wants to do the right thing, and can’t imagine that buy-in and consensus won’t yield solutions. Unfortunately, the kumbaya approach only works in schools or systems that are already doing fairly well—and where, therefore, change won’t involve too much disruption or produce too many losers. When it comes to troubled systems, even a thousand meetings, get-to-know-me sessions, and stakeholder buy-in roundtables won’t suffice. Rhee can testify to this, because she held scores of community conversations in 2007 and 2008 as she planned a series of desperately needed school closings—and then was slammed for inadequate efforts to secure buy-in.

If the WTU wants to attack Fenty because they don’t like what he did, that’s their business (though it shows the problems that result when public employee unions play an outsized role in selecting their boss). But no one should imagine that a kinder, gentler Fenty-Rhee effort would have assuaged the WTU—not unless “kinder and gentler” is code for business as usual.

Image by flickr user dbking.

Last Tuesday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced round-two winners in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) program. By Tuesday night, there was outrage that admired reform states such as Colorado and Louisiana had lost while head-scratchers such as Hawaii, Maryland, and Ohio won. By Thursday, there was grumbling that some judges had savaged Colorado for failing to attach a copy of Senate Bill 10-191, and that presentation skills had helped determine the results. By Friday, the big story was not the contest but New Jersey Governor Christie’s decision to fire his commissioner of education for misrepresenting what efforts had been made to inform the RTT reviewers about a paperwork error in the application. It all brings to mind something I noted last winter: that RTT was a good idea that could all-too-easily go south.

All of this has pushed even Andy Rotherham, my good friend and an influential Democratic education policy operative, to concede substantial problems with the once-heralded RTT program. Andy writes:

A general consensus has emerged that again there were problems with the scoring. Not the sensational political tampering claims that some people are trying to allege, there is no evidence of that, but rather problems with the process. Those problems are at once more mundane and a lot more far-reaching.

Andy, who is credited with authoring a Brookings white paper that helped inspire RTT, points out that “In the case of Race to the Top, while it wasn’t a disaster, there were enough problems that some people favorably inclined … are now asking if the federal government, with all the political and substantive constraints upon it, can really run a reliable high-stakes competition.” He notes that numerous conflicts of interest made necessary a “sub-optimal” pool of reviewers. He observes that panels which helped states prep for the contest frequently appeared more knowledgeable and incisive than the actual RTT reviewers and that they paid more attention to “the guts of the applications and the connective tissue that really makes plans like this rise or fall.” He continues, “Likewise, the actual reviewer comments and scoring variances … don’t always inspire confidence, to put it gently.”

He concludes that RTT was “constrained by a flawed process” and urges Duncan to convene some kind of commission to dig into the problems and challenges, including, “What are best practices for ensuring reliability among and between reviewers? … Is more training needed, and if so what kind? What else has to change if substantial amounts of federal aid are to be allocated this way?”

All of this is terrific and I’d regard it as gratifying if Andy and other Democratic reformers hadn’t pooh-poohed these same questions as a paranoid attack when I raised them last winter. At the time, I wrote:

RTT lacks even modest safeguards because the administration has moved forward with a lack of attention to several crucial elements. The degree to which political appointees were involved in hand-picking reviewers is not clear. Reviewers selected by Education Department officials have been ceaselessly bombarded through the media with clear signals as to which states those same officials think should win. And despite the fact that they are working with novel criteria that include many obvious tensions, it’s not clear how reviewers are supposed to translate thousands of pages of narrative and vague promises into the intricate point system Education Department established.

Back then, I offered a list of questions for Secretary Duncan to answer in order “to alleviate these concerns.” Those questions were roundly dismissed as irrelevant or persnickety by administration supporters. Some of those questions included:

•    What criteria were used to select reviewers?
•    What constituted a conflict of interest in selecting reviewers?
•    What kinds of instructions were given to reviewers?
•    How much weight are the reviewers supposed to accord to the boldness of promises the states make versus the credibility of those promises?
•    What will constitute states failing to deliver what they promised? What are the consequences?
•    What are the “finalists” expected to say during their dog-and-pony show visit that they haven’t already said in the tens of thousands of words in their applications?

Might’ve been nice if would-be reformers had sorted through these questions before we gave away $4 billion, rather than after.

Image by Keith Williamson.

Nope, I’m not talking about grading the Race to the Top (RTT) winners. Frankly, I don’t have much confidence in the elaborate scoring system that the Department of Education jury-rigged—especially not after Ohio, Hawaii, and New York finished in the money while Louisiana and Colorado were ludicrously left out in the cold. As if my skeptical nature needed more cause for worry after the post hoc “norming” of i3 grades and the concerns raised regarding judge selection and training, blatant disregard for application guidelines, and emphasis on airy promises rather than concrete actions already taken. And, given the number of new governors, legislators, and state chiefs who will be taking office by early 2011, I’m not sure how much credence to put in the promises states have made. That said, I do want to offer a special congratulations to my hard-charging friends in Rhode Island, D.C., Florida, and Massachusetts, and was glad to see their efforts recognized (full disclosure: for what it’s worth, I served as an advisor on the Massachusetts RTT application).

Rather than play the “who got a rose” game, though, I just want to make two typically dyspeptic points amid this season of RTT mirth.

First, for all the cheers being lapped up by our earnest Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, it’s important to grade the administration’s efforts on an appropriate curve. After all, the Department of Education’s unprecedented impact is only being made possible by an extraordinary bout of federal edu-spending—and the unprecedented borrowing that made it possible. While observers frequently note the big bang that Duncan has gotten from “just” $4.35 billion for RTT, it’s worth recalling that it cost more than $120 billion in federal edu-stimulus and the Edujobs bill to buy that handful of reform dollars. And, while limited relative to the enormous status quo spending that Duncan has cheered, that $4.35 billion still dwarfs the “reform” dollars available to all previous secretaries of Education—combined.

So, even for those who ardently support Duncan’s efforts, it’s worth keeping in mind how aggressively we’re raiding our kids’ college funds in order to sponsor his agenda. After all, any superintendent can have an outsized impact if he spends wheelbarrows of borrowed cash that his successors will have to repay. An honest reckoning mandates taking such behavior into account.

Second, there’s a crucial opportunity cost to RTT that’s gone largely unnoted. In the midst of a fiscal crunch which calls for smart budget-cutting and careful rethinking, RTT has encouraged state leaders and reformers to focus on dreaming up new ways to spend. Chasing new dollars has allowed state chiefs and legislatures to ignore less pleasant questions and to plug in hoped-for federal funds when baking the state schools budget. This has all served to sap time and attention from efforts to identify efficiencies, tackle problems with pensions and benefits, or help districts identify cost-savings and then muster the will to pursue them.

State chiefs don’t have all that much talent in their offices, and their best people—and their consultants of choice—have been more intent on dreaming up RTT-compliant proposals than on figuring out how and where to cut smart. Is it any surprise that budget-cutting, pushed off to the last minute and approached with little sustained thought, has typically been reflexive and desperate?

Image by christopher.

In a Daily Censored blog post titled “Public Education Under Attack by Bay Area Media,” educator and scholar Adam Bessie made clear just how devoid of thought are claims that schools should be protected from responsible belt-tightening. The same day that congressional Democrats are moving to borrow another $10 billion to protect teacher jobs and put off tough choices, Bessie attacked the Oakland Tribune for a story reporting on inefficiencies in California school staffing. Bessie didn’t claim that the numbers were wrong or challenge the analysis. Rather, his hysterics were due to the story quoting me too heavily—and the fact that I hang my hat at AEI.

This is worth checking out, simply to see how vapid the champions of the status quo really are. Bessie wrote:

Today, The Oakland Tribune lead with a cover story Eating away at education: Math doesn’t add up when teacher salaries and budget cuts collide (reprinted by San Jose Mercury News), in which the reporter parrots the neo-conservative think tank The American Enterprise Institute’s party line, that schools are being run inefficiently, and teachers paid too much. The reporter used AEI as the primary source for this major story in a large urban market, but framed it as a nonpartisan source.

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Image by Lel4nd

Every time our earnest Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speaks of late, he seems to unearth new things that Washington can and should do to schools. Earlier this month, he promised the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that the administration would see that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization required turnaround schools to obtain parent and community input as well as lead an “honest, open discussion.” Of course, Duncan is ardently pushing “state-led” national standards and watching his Department of Education flag 19 (!) states as impressive enough to merit being Race to the Top finalists. Earlier in the year he promised Congress a billion-dollar bonus if they reauthorized NCLB this year (though this one kind of ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution).

Yesterday, Duncan told the National Urban League, “We will ensure that all schools—public, private, and charter—serve the kids most in need.” He went on, saying, “That is also something you told us was important. We heard you loud and clear, we are responding and these schools will be held accountable.”

Mike Petrilli, over at Flypaper, had the most appropriate response—which boiled down to, “What the hell?” Or, as Mike put it:

Set aside the Secretary’s assumption that charter schools aren’t serving “the kids most in need.” What on earth is he planning to do to “ensure” that private schools serve needy kids? How is he going to hold them “accountable”? Accountable to whom? Most don’t get public funds. Many are more diverse than traditional public schools. What the heck is he talking about?

Today, the president, after allowing his affinity for crowd-pleasing jobs packages and his hot-and-cold attention to out-of-control federal spending to force him into a showdown with House Democrats over Representative David Obey’s jobs bill, spoke to the Urban League about the importance of teacher quality and the need to remove ineffective teachers. He spoke some important and difficult truths, saying:

Surely we can agree that even as we applaud teachers for their hard work, we need to make sure they’re delivering results in the classroom. If they’re not, let’s work with them to help them be more effective. And if that fails, let’s find the right teacher for that classroom.

Good for Obama. These are hard things to say, especially for a Democratic president facing a challenging fall, and he deserves much credit for hanging tough. But the problem is that I now get nervous when I hear the president say even good and important things. The reason is simple: the secretary of Education’s seemingly limitless sense of his role has me leery that every promising idea the president voices is going to become yet another opportunity for ill-considered overreach.

Image by Obama-Biden Transition Project

Last week, I was grumbling about the potentially unhealthy influence of edu-agitprop and the inclination of many would-be reformers to approach education reform as a simple, and simple-minded, moral crusade. I’ll start the new week on a happier note, as a trio of straight-shooting reformers—all of them comfortable with messy truths—have penned an unvarnished, eye-opening account of what it means to struggle to transform K-12 schooling.

In Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Frontlines, Fordham Institute chief Checker Finn, Fordham Vice President for Ohio Terry Ryan, and veteran scribe Mike Lafferty recount the Fordham Institute’s efforts to, in their words, “help launch new schools; to fix broken older schools; to assist needy families to make their way into better education options—and to duke it out with powerful institutional resistances, reform-averse politicians, and adult interests bent on maintaining the status quo.” (Full disclosure: the book was published, with my enthusiastic recommendation, as part of the “Education Policy” series I co-edit for Palgrave Macmillan).

Continue reading here.

Image by Rob Shenk

The Republic of Georgia’s attempt to embrace expansive school choice has encountered some substantial roadblocks, all of which are more than a little familiar and may provide some useful guidance and cautions for those promoting choice-based reform in the United States and elsewhere.

Georgia offers a terrific illustration of the difference between choice in theory and in practice. The theory of choice requires that schools compete for students, with rewards flowing to schools that attract students (and therefore revenues) and adverse consequences to those that do not. However, in Georgia, there is no shame in being director (e.g. principal) of a school whose revenues do not cover its outlays. Indeed, half or more of the nation’s 2,300 schools are now “deficit” schools. The rationales and excuses are many. “High mountain” schools cannot attract new students (though, of course, they also don’t lose students, and they receive a voucher weighted at 1.7 times the basic voucher), utility bills are unexpectedly high, especially in areas affected by the 2008 Russian invasion, and so on.

As the reform-friendly Transparency International Georgia concluded in a 2010 analysis, the reforms have “not been as successful in achieving many of [their] objectives as had been hoped. A lack of funding for the voucher system has meant that schools have not been able to assert their financial autonomy. School boards of trustees have been undermined by a range of factors, including the lack of clear rules from the center. Indeed, the government appears to be undecided on whether it really wants decentralization at all. Amendments to the Law on General Education passed in 2009 significantly weakened school principals vis‐à‐vis the Ministry of Education and Science.” In short, a seemingly elegant market design has been undermined by the familiar shibboleths of problematic funding formulas, incoherent governance, ambiguity about the practical extent of school autonomy, and the reluctance of state officials to keep their hands off the schools.

If enough students don’t attend, principals just ask for more money each month. Meanwhile, school directors are theoretically empowered to dismiss or reward staff (at least according to ministry officials), but directors themselves either don’t believe they really have that power or are loath to use it. Why? They don’t want to upset communities, older teachers are dependent on their salaries because pensions are tiny, it’s just not the way things are done, and so on. Pretty standard (I made some not dissimilar points regarding Milwaukee vouchers in my 2002 book Revolution at the Margins), but still a reminder of how choice theorists have shown a curious reluctance to consider the real-world challenges of market-driven school reform.

Now stop me when this sounds familiar. School directors in this market-driven system supposedly have the legal authority to dismiss teachers but explain that they cannot do so in practice because of court rulings and local resistance. The lack of a quality assessment instrument means that directors may lack legal grounds for terminating agreements. The result? A 2009 “Need Assessment for Principals” study authored by two Georgian researchers reported that approximately 90 percent of dismissed teachers win court disputes after a termination—forcing directors to take them back “even in cases of gross violation of school ethics.” Also, directors technically have the authority to assign teachers instructional hours, but they routinely turn that decision over to teacher committees.

Once again, we can see all the ways in which school choice is not a self-executing strategy or a panacea. It is one useful tool in smart efforts to rethink schooling, but it has to be approached accordingly. Georgia is a fascinating place and well worth checking out, especially for ed reformers curious to see how a choice regime adopted enthusiastically by a libertarian government just five years ago has played out in practice.

Image by Robert S. Donovan.

I’ve just spent the better part of three weeks lending a hand to school reform efforts in the Republic of Georgia. For those who don’t follow developments in the Caucasus countries, Georgia is an intriguing place. Formerly part of the Soviet Union (and the birthplace of Joseph Stalin), Georgia declared its independence from the Soviets in 1991. After a decade of out-of-control crime and corruption, the government was turned out in 2003 when protesters stormed the parliament in response to a suspect election. In early 2004, this Rose Revolution (for the flowers the protesters carried) ushered a 30-something, U.S.-educated lawyer named Mikheil Saakashvili into the presidency. A libertarian and unabashed reformer, Saakashvili has tried to transform this nation of nearly 5 million people. And he’s having more than a little success.

Regarding a nation that, less than a decade ago, was thought to be on the brink of economic collapse, the World Bank now speaks of a “Georgian phenomenon.” Saakashvili likes to compare Georgia to Singapore and Hong Kong. The capital, Tbilisi, offers much of the same charm as a Prague or Budapest, straddling a collection of impressive old churches, cobblestone neighborhoods, and notable swaths of urbanity (all interspersed with stolid Soviet-era buildings). On the World Bank’s annual Doing Business rankings, Georgia has climbed from 112th in 2006 to 11th in 2010. It shot from 18th to second in registering property, and vaulted into the top ten when it comes to starting a business and employing workers. (As an aside, it’s a shame that these kinds of metrics, which help guide efforts to liberalize developing economies, are pretty much absent in American K-12 schooling. But keep an eye out. I’m hopeful we’ll see something that ranks America’s cities for their friendliness to school reform in this fashion later this summer.)

Meanwhile, Saakashvili and his libertarian-leaning allies took school choice seriously when they waded into education policy. They weren’t kidding around, drafting a law guaranteed to bring smiles to my friends at the Cato Institute. The 2005 law on general education, as enacted by parliament, declared, “The state shall protect freedom of educational choice of a pupil and a parent…The state shall finance education of a pupil from the central budget by a voucher [and] every parent has a right to get a voucher for financing the education of a child who reaches school age.” And, just for good measure, showing the libertarian bent bred by close to a century of Soviet subjugation, the law also states that, “Violation of editorial independence of school editions and censure of books within the school library shall not be allowed” and that “a school has no right to lead or control the process of meeting of pupils, parents, or teachers against their will.”

On Wednesday and Thursday, I’ll offer a few thoughts regarding the shape of Georgian school reform, which holds more than a few instructive lessons for those in the United States and elsewhere.

Image by M.J. Milloy.

The Washington Post’s education columnist Valerie Strauss took issue recently with Arizona Superintendent Tom Horne for promoting legislation (focused primarily on ethnic studies classes) that “pretends to be about education but is all about politics.” Strauss wrote, “If you think Arizona state government officials would have something better to do than go after an ethnic studies program they don’t like, you’d be wrong.”

Strauss reports that Horne is so over the top that he thought it inappropriate for a Hispanic activist to tell Tucson high school students that “Republicans hate Latinos.” Maybe it’s because I’m some kind of bitter partisan, but I totally understand why Horne might find that troubling.

So, what was Horne’s big offense that set Strauss off? What pernicious agenda did he foist on Arizona’s schools? Horne championed the recently enacted House Bill 2281, which states that “a school district or charter school … shall not include in its program of instruction any courses or classes that include any of the following:

•    Promote the overthrow of the United States government.
•    Promote resentment towards a race or class of people.
•    Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
•    Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of students as individuals.”

The bill stipulates that the State Board of Education can withhold a portion of state aid that would otherwise be due to offending district or charter schools until the school is back in compliance. Radical stuff, huh?

Time was—oh, like last Tuesday—when charter critics were expressing concerns that charter schooling could lead to the balkanization of America and voiced fears that charters might promote racism or bias. In fact, charter proponents have been attacked as closeted racists because the absence of such prohibitions as above meant that conservative whites were free to use choice as an opportunity to flee to their own enclaves, where they would indoctrinate students with racist sentiments. Talk about a no-win situation… Heck, even Strauss had previously written, “Few people would support a class that promotes resentment of a race [or] class of people, or the overthrow of our government.”

So, now I’m just confused. I’m pretty sure Strauss doesn’t think it’s okay for schools to urge kids to overthrow the government or for them to fan ethnic or racial passions, so what’s the beef?

Whatever Strauss thinks of Horne, whether she likes his politics or not, the four prohibitions seem to make pretty good sense—whether applied to district schools or charter schools. They give shape to the widely shared belief that public schools of any stripe ought to serve the public weal, promote mutual respect, and honor that which unifies us as Americans. Unlike Strauss, I don’t see anything in there that would stop teachers from exploring “the role of Hispanics in the Vietnam War” or “emphasiz[ing] Latino authors.” Indeed, I’m not sure I see anything that stops Latino activists from teaching Latino children that Republicans are the enemy. I merely see some reasonable boundaries to help ensure that schools and instructors don’t go too far in pursuing their particular “pluribus” at the expense of our “unum.”

Image by kevindooley.

On Friday, I penned a modest op-ed for the New York Daily News , arguing that, in light of New York City’s budget crunch, it was reasonable to lay off up to 6,400 teachers (potentially 8 percent of the teacher workforce). I wrote, “Not only would the layoffs of thousands of teachers not mean the sky is falling … thinning the teacher ranks, done right, could be a very good thing.”

I further asserted, “Smaller classes would be good if a school district could hire all the great teachers it wants and if funding were unlimited. In the real world, neither of those is true. In practice, smaller classes make it harder for districts to recruit enough talented teachers while soaking up dollars that could otherwise reward good teachers or fund crucial services.” I went on to note that if NYC teachers want to protect jobs, “They have an easy solution. They did well through the economic boom of the 2000s, with average teacher salary rising by 35 percent from 2001 to 2009. Meantime, the city’s teacher ranks grew by more than 12,000. If the UFT wants to protect all those new jobs, a simple way to forestall layoffs is to simply give back a modest portion of those hefty raises.”

The reception from NYC teachers was not enthusiastic. But what caught my attention was the degree to which their tone brought to mind Greek protesters rioting against the notion that a nearly bankrupt government had to trim jobs, generous salaries, and unaffordable benefits. You’d have thought that NYC didn’t have a teacher for every 12.5 students or that only agenda-driven crazies would seek to trim jobs and/or salaries in a grim fiscal environment.

One Daily News commenter opined, “This clown has obviously never stepped into a NYC Public School. Classrooms are already overcrowded, and this guy wants to put more students into those rooms? … Teachers deserved every penny of those raises that were given between 2000-2009.” Another quipped, “This author is promoting a lie. I must ask has this person ever taught a class? Of course not, or he would have included his credentials. Any idiot, except apparently Mr. Hess, would understand that class size matters a great deal.” A third offered, “Here we go with another powerful idiot and deciever [sic] who has never set foot in a modern day classroom weighing in on educational matters. This is the type of sick hypocrite who for some reason wants to influence the public’s opinion by telling public school parents what is acceptable.”

The problem is that states and districts overextended themselves in recent decades, spending the windfall generated by soaring property taxes through the 2000s without ever contemplating the possibility that the good times might end. Today’s teachers and public servants may feel entitled to the salaries, benefits, pensions, and perks they’re currently receiving, but a glance at the looming federal deficits, unfunded healthcare and pensions, and grim state and local projections indicates that, even with higher taxes, cuts are going to have to be made.

The really unlovely part is when a sense of entitlement gets wrapped in the cloak of self-righteousness and moral umbrage. As one anonymous woman rioting in Greece explained, “The measures aren’t fair for workers, because they didn’t cause the crisis, and they want money from the loan to pay the banks.” Another Greek rioter told the press, “We must protest and continue the struggle until we take back what they are trying to take away from us.” When those paid from public coffers cease to feel any obligation to recognize that public resources are limited, or that others, suffering through the same turbulent times (and those that won’t draw their first paycheck for a while yet), must foot the bill, it raises questions about whether public servants have morphed into public claimants. Something seems fundamentally off when irresponsible spending is justified as a matter of “fairness.”

NYC’s teachers may not believe it, but they have been the beneficiaries of unaffordable and unsustainable generosity. Average teacher pay in NYC jumped more than 35 percent between 2001 and 2009 (a period bookended by two devastating recessions), increasing from $51,000 to $70,000 per annum. At the same time, the city’s teaching ranks grew by 12,000, reaching 80,000 teachers for NYC’s 1 million kids (a student-teacher ratio of about 12.5 to 1, for those keeping score).

If “it’s for the kids” (gag!) and if we think (as the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers repeatedly explain) that educational success is largely a factor of home and community environs, then I’d think the teacher associations would be eager to trim raises and forgo extravagant benefits in order to cushion the severe cuts being visited upon libraries, parks and recreation, departments of youth services, police, and so on. As another Daily News commenter noted, school performance is impacted by “homes, neighborhoods, lack of role models, peers, socio-economic levels, and self-inflicted deviant behaviors.”

While policy makers may wish to cater to the mob by ladling out fresh goodies, as Greek politicos did for so long, the piper eventually comes calling. As that day draws closer, will educators step up to the plate and concede the need for cuts in staffing, salary, and benefits, like their neighbors at so many public and private organizations (including Education Week), or will they caterwaul like the Greek rioters? The early returns aren’t promising.

I was challenged last week on an intriguing question: Why did I react so differently to the underwhelming findings on the performance of Milwaukee voucher students and to the Ravenswood City school board’s effort to shutter the Stanford Graduate School of Education’s charter school for mediocre performance? In one blog post, I casually brushed off the Milwaukee voucher results as telling us nothing important, but in another I suggested that the performance of Stanford New School raises real questions about the “expertise” of Stanford’s big-name pedagogues.

A few eagle-eyed commenters asked if this isn’t a case of double standards or even blatant hypocrisy (see, for instance, comments by plthomas and Kronosaurus). As plthomas argued, “I think the double-standard you apply, as noted in one of the comments above, is a clear indication that you have an agenda clouding your commentary  . . . Forgive choice no matter what the evidence shows  . . . the standard is moving always because it is an ideology, not a conclusion drawn from evidence.”

First, let’s be clear: of course my commentary is always and absolutely motivated (or “clouded”) by my view of the world (which can be deemed an “agenda”).

But second, this is a terrifically instructive point, and I’m glad it has come up. Short answer: Nope, I don’t think my stance is inconsistent or the least bit hypocritical. I think the notion that I was playing it loose and fast is due to a broader tendency of both advocates and critics of structural reforms like choice and accountability to try to prove that they “work” (or don’t work) in ways that are politically useful but are also ill-advised and ultimately unproductive.

Longer answer: Understood rightly, structural changes, like the Milwaukee voucher program, are about creating opportunities for students to be better served. They are not prescriptions for improving teachers or learning. Choice-based reform, properly understood, proceeds from the assumption that it’s one way to help align incentives and opportunities so that quality schooling and learning will become more likely. It’s not prescriptive about what those schools or that learning should look like (e.g., it doesn’t say exactly what is to be done with autonomy and opportunity) and it is tolerant of any number of instructional models and pedagogical approaches. When increased autonomy and opportunities are used well, it doesn’t prove that school choice “works”—it just shows that it’s possible to organize systems to encourage excellence.

And when autonomy and opportunity are used poorly, or when choice is designed in a fashion that doesn’t foster quality, it doesn’t mean that choice-based reform “doesn’t work.” Rather, it suggests to me that it may well have been poorly configured, ill-designed, ineptly supported, accompanied by unfortunate inattention to the larger ecosystem, or launched in an environment devoid of effective entrepreneurs. And, it’s entirely fair, if the results of structural reforms consistently disappoint across a variety of contexts and designs, to conclude that those measures aren’t worth pursuing. Of course, I’d argue that the takeaway is actually the opposite—that we’ve seen in places like New York City, Houston, and New Orleans that sensibly cultivated choice ecosystems hold great promise.

On the other hand, the case of Stanford New School involves practitioners who believe they have devised pedagogies, instructional approaches, and classroom management techniques that “work.” When given the chance to run a school and employ their favored approaches, it’s fair to ask whether—at least in those controlled circumstances—their methods work as advertised. If they do, it doesn’t mean they’ll work at scale, but at least it’s something. If, however, when given a laboratory setting where they have enormous expertise at their disposal, get to select their teachers and instructional materials, and determine instructional priorities and classroom management strategies—and the results dramatically disappoint, it raises legitimate questions about whether the strategies are all they’re cracked up to be. This isn’t a question of “going to scale.” It’s not about whether or not it’s reasonable to expect that Stanford’s prescriptions governing instruction, curriculum, teacher training, and the rest can actually work as intended in tens of thousands of schools or thousands of districts across the land. Rather, this is a case where the experts’ preferred practices didn’t even work as intended under carefully controlled circumstances.

When it comes to choice-based reform, I’m simply arguing that opening the system to new kinds of problem-solvers, creating more autonomy and flexibility, and doing so in a quality-conscious manner is likely to facilitate improvement. I’m not promising it will do so and I’m not claiming that evidence proves it will; I’m just arguing this is the way that sensible parents, voters, and policy makers should bet. And, if those broad structural adjustments aren’t delivering, I’m inclined to suspect it’s because we haven’t gotten them right rather than because somehow K-12 schooling alone among human endeavors is the one place where allowing industrial-era bureaucracy to stifle human ingenuity, talent, and creativity yields optimal outcomes.

The difference in the Stanford case is that many of the Stanford faculty involved in Stanford New School do in fact argue they know the “right” way to manage classrooms or organize instruction. If they claim to know what works, and travel the nation prescribing particular practices and models to states, districts, and schools while pocketing hefty fees for their expertise, then their ability to produce impressive outcomes at their proving ground matters a good deal. (And, to be fair to choice skeptics, it’s absolutely true that many choice enthusiasts have tried to claim that this or that study “proved” the efficacy of choice-based reform when it suited them. So, I totally get the temptation to insist on treating choice as one more intervention—I just think it’s a mistake to do so.)

Anyway, that’s how I see it. I’d welcome thoughts and comments, as this is a tricky area and one where I have long thought the lines have been fouled by an inability or unwillingness of advocates and critics alike to make their peace with the innate ambiguity of structural reforms. I am explicitly suggesting that the standards of evidence for structural alterations are necessarily vague and murky, and that research on these is useful mostly for its ability to improve program design and shape public debate rather than for its ability to prove what “works” or what doesn’t. (For more on this, see this 2008 Education Week commentary that I penned with Jeff Henig).

I’m well aware that my stance can be enormously frustrating to folks on both sides—to structural reformers who believe I’m short-changing empirical evidence on merit pay or school choice and to critics who think I’m apologizing for lackluster results. So, I’m happy to stick with this topic, address feedback, and talk it through more fully, if readers desire.

The University of Arkansas School of Education, home to my good friends Patrick Wolf and Jay Greene, yesterday released new research showing that students in Milwaukee’s two-decade-old voucher program (the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, MPCP) “scored at similar levels as their peers not participating in the school choice program.”

Wolf, who has led this effort as well as the federally endorsed evaluation of the D.C. voucher program, summarized, “Voucher students are showing average rates of achievement gain similar to their public school peers.” Translation: when it comes to test scores, students with vouchers are performing no differently than other kids. (It is worth noting that MPCP students are being educated more cheaply than district school students.)

What to make of the results? First off, 20 years in, it’s hard to argue that the nation’s biggest and most established voucher experiment has “worked” if the measure is whether vouchers lead to higher reading and math scores. Happily, that’s never been my preferred metric for structural reforms—both because I think it’s the wrong way to study them (see “Science and Nonscience“) but, more importantly, because choice-based reform shouldn’t be understood as that kind of intervention. Rather, choice-based reform should be embraced as an opportunity for educators to create more focused and effective schools and for reformers to solve problems in smarter ways. Whether any of that pays off is much more a question of quality control, support, talent, investment, infrastructure, and the rest than it is of whether or not a choice program is in place.

Second, congrats to Wolf and his team for reporting this straight and for not trying to spin the results. There’s way too little of that for my taste. And I was happy to see Wolf, who generally favors school vouchers (as do I), not engaging in tortured efforts to make the data tell a happy tale. Advocating for vouchers (or charters or merit pay) by struggling to extract some favorable coefficients from math and reading scores has always been a problematic way to argue the need to fundamentally rethink the design of schooling.

Third, the wrong response to the findings is to conclude that “school choice doesn’t work.” As I’ve noted, overhyping by choice enthusiasts has invited just such disenchantment by encouraging a simple faith that choice would be self-executing. The Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern, who a couple years ago more or less renounced his once-avid support for school choice, drolly opined, “So after 20 years of the most comprehensive voucher program in the country, the voucher students ‘are achieving on the same level’ as their peers in the Milwaukee public schools. Left unsaid is that Milwaukee black students in the public schools have the lowest reading scores of any cohort of black students in the country.”

Finally, I think the right reaction is to recognize that choice enthusiasts have been overselling the miracle, restorative powers of choice for years. Choice can make it easier for quality schools to emerge, for schools to forge coherent and disciplined cultures, and for reformers to break out of the contractual and cultural handcuffs implicit in so many districts. For too long, reformers underinvested in recruiting high-quality operators, providing support to tackle legal and facilities issues, broadening the pool of talented educators and leaders, incubating promising ventures, encouraging successful private schools to expand, or generally building an ecosystem that would fuel excellence in the new sector. One only need look to New Schools for New Orleans or Indianapolis’s The Mind Trust to see other ways to approach this challenge. Anyway, this is all stuff I address at much greater length in Education Unbound, but it’s especially relevant when making sense of Milwaukee’s bleaker-than-promised results.

Yesterday, D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) and the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) announced that they had agreed upon a new contract for teachers in Washington, D.C. After two years of stop-and-go negotiations, punctuated by occasional rifts between outsized personalities D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, they settled upon a five-year agreement (with a couple of the years retroactive). Bill Turque has reported the salient details and the Washington Post editorial page has offered an enthusiastic endorsement.

A couple of thoughts on all this. First, the salaries we’re talking about are really eye-popping. Starting teachers will potentially be able to earn more than $72,000, as compared to the current $45,000. Teachers will be able to earn as much as $146,000, up from the current max of $87,000.

Second, the famed “red-green” proposal is gone. This proposed to allow current teachers to choose whether to remain in the traditional step-and-lane pay scale and the security it afforded or to opt for a new, lucrative, performance-oriented “green” scale without the job security. All new teachers would have been hired into the “green” scale. That framework is not in the agreement.

Third, Rhee has won for DCPS the long-sought “mutual consent” provision. This means that schools can no longer be forced to take on faculty that they don’t want. Under the new contract, teachers who lose their positions will not be guaranteed new slots. Rather, they will only be assured the opportunity to interview for available positions. If teachers cannot find a school that wants to hire them, they’ll be let go (teachers who meet “performance expectations” will receive one year of leeway).

Fourth, the contract takes a clever, less confrontational tack on tenure and seniority. Unlike under the old “red-green” proposal, teachers aren’t asked to give up tenure to get the big dollars. Instead, tenure is “redefined.” DCPS documents explain, “This contract clarifies tenure to ensure due-process rights for teachers without guaranteeing them a job for life” and that the “system must have ‘just cause’ before it can dismiss a tenured employee.” Dismissed employees will still be able to fight terminations if they believe DCPS “did not follow the evaluation process.” DCPS officials tell me the result is school leaders have dramatically more freedom; but only time will tell whether this language amounts to a velvet revolution, or something less substantial.

Fifth, on seniority, the win is clearer than on tenure. When employees are to be cut, seniority will not be determinative. Rather, DCPS will employ a performance-based rubric, with seniority making up 10 percent of that rubric. Instead of fruitlessly striving to “abolish” seniority, Rhee has taken the more nuanced tack of diluting seniority into irrelevance. If it works as intended, it’ll offer a powerful path for contract reform.

Finally, the $64.5 million question: The contract was funded with the support of $64.5 million in funds provided by four major foundations (Arnold, Walton, Broad, and Robertson). The question has arisen as to what this might portend for the sustainability of the agreement. It’s a fair question. Indeed, in 2009, when the contract was going to be backed by $200–$300 million in foundation support, I voiced such concerns. With this new agreement, I’m much more inclined to give DCPS the benefit of the doubt for three reasons. First, the total wound up being just $65 million—down three-quarters from the figure that had been previously floated. Second, given that I’m guesstimating that we’re only talking about $20–$25 million a year, at most, I’ve full confidence that savvy leadership can find those dollars within DCPS’s current outlays and projected revenues (after all, D.C. spent about $1.3 billion in 2008–2009, all in). Third, so long as Weingarten is on board, D.C.’s contract can now be sold as a national model for district-union partnerships (who’d a thunk it?!), which has the potential to shake loose additional funds.

What now? Well, the agreement has gone to D.C.’s chief financial officer, Natwar Gandhi, for fiscal certification. If it passes muster, it will then go out to WTU members, who will have two weeks to vote on ratification. If they ratify the contract, it’ll then go to the D.C. Council for final approval.