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Texas Revisionism

Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

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

Check this out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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Does KIPP Get Results?

Friday, February 26th, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Culture Wars Live On In Texas

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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Charters and Civil Rights

Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

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

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

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

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

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

The Charter Record in D.C.

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

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

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

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

Why Segregation Is Not the Issue

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

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

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

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

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State of the Union: A Litany of Solid, Progressive Proposals

Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Mike Derham


Mike Derham is chair of PPI's Innovative Economy Project.

by Mike Derham

Facing almost as much uncertainty about the economy one year into his mandate as he did at the outset, President Obama gave his State of the Union address the way we’ve come to expect him to – sticking to his guns with cool determination while acknowledging that not everyone agrees with him. His speech highlighted what he has accomplished and promised to the American people, but didn’t propose any sweeping new changes.

With unemployment at 10 percent and Wall Street banks handing out record bonuses (Goldman Sachs’ bonuses are reported to match 2007’s record levels), and pundits reading doom for the administration in the tea leaves of the Massachusetts election, the political temptation to go populist would be strong. But Obama decided instead to reassert his progressive program for addressing the economy. Obama highlighted not grand industrial policy, but accomplishments that have helped the American people face a truly global recession. The stimulus bill helped us avoid falling off the economic precipice, and unemployment protection and COBRA extensions make a meaningful difference to people looking for work in a changing economy.

Obama’s call to Democrats to not “run for the hills” on issues such as health care suggests that the talk of that reform’s demise was premature. The embrace of centrist – and even Republican – proposals on energy, including nuclear power and offshore drilling, might offer some hope on a climate change bill making it’s way through the Senate. But until politicians spell out what sacrifices will come with addressing climate change, it may be a campaign promise that remains unfulfilled.

Disappointingly, the president soft-pedalled trade and immigration priorities. While they were mentioned, it’s notable that the president didn’t call on Congress to pass free trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. And the reference to the Doha global trade round and immigration reform were pro forma at best, not promising any results.

Obama was laying the foundation for significant payoff from his education initiatives, however. Student loan subsidies to banks are an easily overlooked handout to Wall Street that the president was smart to put an end to. The investment in K-12 education reform, community colleges, and Pell grants will help prepare the next generation of Americans for the 21st-century economy. Incentives for debt forgiveness for public sector workers will mean that our best and brightest — who go to very expensive colleges and graduate schools — can now afford to look at public service, and can be used to limit some of the demand for a revolving door between the public and private sectors.

The president didn’t break new ground, or lay out a visionary mandate for change. But he reassured us that he was going to govern as he was elected, looking for progressive solutions to the challenges the country faces.

One last point — at last week’s “banking limits” announcement, beltway Kremlinologists were reading volumes into the fact that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was off to one side, while presidential economic adviser Paul Volcker was front and center. (Simon Johnson said: “Where you stand at major White House announcements is never an accident.”) Last night was Geithner’s chance to stand front-and-center — shoulder to shoulder with Bob Gates. With Larry Summers way off to the right — and I didn’t see Volcker in the audience — the handshake the president gave Geithner on his way in would seem to be sending the message that the secretary continues to be the president’s man.

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix, New Schools for the 21st Century | 1 Comment »

In Massachusetts, Race to the Top Spurs Reform

Friday, January 15th, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ross Douthat’s Agenda

Monday, January 4th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

I don’t know exactly what it is about being a “conservative columnist” at The New York Times, but now the young-un on that beat, Ross Douthat, is exhibiting the same habits as his older colleague, David Brooks. Brooks, of course, has mastered the art of looking down at the squabbling major parties from a great height, condemning them both, and somehow always coming down in the conclusion with recommendations that coincide with the short-term positioning of the Republican Party.

In his first column of the new year yesterday, Douthat performs a similar pirouette, with some interesting twists. His own skywalk begins with an Olympian view of America’s position in the world after the aughts–we’re now just a superpower, not a “hyperpower”–then predictably cites political polarization as one of the threats to our competitive position.

Warming to his task, Ross criticizes conservatives of the Bush era for a failed experiment in reduplicating Reaganomics, but then equals the score by accusing “Obama Democrats” of “returning to their party’s long-running pursuit of European-style social democracy — by micromanaging industry, pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs, and binding the economy in a web of new taxes and regulations.”

Aside from that very questionable characterization of the Democratic agenda, you will note that Douthat does not observe any causal relationship between one party’s “sins” and the other’s. Any “micromanaging industry” that’s going on presently is, rather obviously, the result of an economic calamity introduced under the previous national management. I don’t know if by “pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs” Douthat is referring to stimulus legislation used to counteract the disastrous effects of the economic calamity, or to the resolutely centrist health care reform proposal that is struggling through Congress after being signficantly compromised along the way. Any “new taxes” in prospect are part of said centrist plan, or part of the broader Democratic objective, announced not this year but as early as 2002, of reconfiguring the tax system to resemble what it looked like before the failed Republican exercise in Reaganomics that Douthat denounced earlier in his column.

All this is rather ho-hum High Broderism, but then Douthat gets more interesting when he proposes his own “center-right agenda” to replace the horrific move to the left essayed by Democrats. He begins with a tout court endorsement of the agenda recently laid out by Manhattan Institute wonk Jim Manzi, which is all the rage right now in what’s left of the non-Tea Party conservative commentariat:

Manzi’s National Affairs essay, a tour d’horizon of our socioeconomic situation, provides a solid place to start. He proposes a fourfold agenda: Unwind the partnerships forged between Big Business and Big Government in the wake of the 2008 crash; seek financial regulations that “contain busts,” by segregating high-risk transactions from lower-risk enterprises; deregulate the public school system, to let a thousand charter schools and start-ups bloom; and shift our immigration policy away from low-skilled immigration, and toward the recruitment of high-skilled émigrés from around the globe.

To this list, I would add tax reform and entitlement reform. The former should broaden the tax base while cutting taxes on work, childrearing and investment. The latter should means-test both Social Security and Medicare, reducing both programs’ spending on well-off retirees rather than questing fruitlessly for their privatization.

Now Manzi’s agenda has some virtues, but not so much as a Republican agenda. The Obama administration hopes to “unwind the partnerships” between government and business as fast as it can, and it, too, seeks to re-regulate the financial system in order to “segregate” high-risk transactions. For all the perennial conservative caterwauling about teachers’ unions holding a veto over good education policy, Obama, too, is a big fan of charter schools. This only looks like a “center-right agenda” if you buy the earlier Douthat premise that Obama is hell-bent on Swedenizing America.

Shifting the immigration system to favor higher skills (a very old “idea” also embraced today by Michael Barone) is not, as Douthat seems to think, a way to buy off conservative hatred of high levels of immigration; it may make the corporate community happy, but won’t do a thing for rank-and-file conservatives who dislike any wage competition from immigrants, and who want not a calibration of policies but wholesale expulsion of immigrants already in the country.

As for Douthat’s own supplementary ideas for a “center-right agenda,” he offers “tax reform” and means-testing Medicare and Social Security. Now “tax reform” as he is apparently discussing it is either one of two things: a continuation of the Bush-era failed experiment in Reaganomics involving deficit-financed tax cuts, however well-targeted they happen to be to workers and families, or a redesign of the system involving tax increases on some to pay for tax cuts for others. As Douthat knows, the constituency within the Republican Party for any tax increases on anybody could be comfortably accomodated in his own office.

Moroever, at a time when Republicans are shrieking about mean old Obama’s euthanasia-inspired efforts to cut Medicare benefits, Douthat is proposing the one “entitlement reform” — means-testing — that’s even less popular than privatization. It ain’t happening, and thus, like most of the rest of Ross’s “center-right agenda,” it’s not a serious contribution to the actual debate.

Now you could give Ross Douthat credit for thinking outside the box and proposing things that his own party would never embrace, which is tempting since he is a decent, thoughtful man. Or you could conclude, as many of us have simiilarly concluded about David Brooks’ MO, that by condemning Democratic policies without offering anything realistic to replace them, he’s simply ratifying the “Party of No” agenda of killing Obama’s policy intiatives and then figuring out later what to do once Republicans are back in the saddle again. It all adds up to an endorsement of Republican victory in 2010 and 2012, even if that would predictably return the country to the conservative policies that so distressed Ross Douthat, in retrospect of course, over the last ten years.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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Charter Schools 2.0

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
Jared Polis


Rep. Jared Polis represents Colorado’s Second Congressional District and is a member of the House Education and Labor Committee. He is a former chairman of the Colorado State Board of Education who founded and served as the superintendent of charter schools serving at-risk student populations.

by Jared Polis

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

Classroom desks

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

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

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

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

The Next Step: Scaling Up Successful Innovation

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

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

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

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

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Taking Measure of D.C.’s IMPACT Program

Thursday, December 10th, 2009
Laura Sonn


Laura Sonn taught sixth-grade math at MS 821 in Brooklyn, N.Y. through the Teach for America program. She earned an M.S. in Teaching from Pace University and a B.A. in Economics and Theology from the University of Notre Dame.

by Laura Sonn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s About Time: 180 Six-Hour Days No Longer Meet the Needs of Students

Monday, December 7th, 2009
Jennifer Davis


Jennifer Davis is the president and CEO of the National Center on Time & Learning.

Chris Gabrieli


Chris Gabrieli is chairman of the National Center on Time & Learning.

by Jennifer Davis and Chris Gabrieli

The problems that beset America’s schools are myriad: a seemingly unbridgeable achievement gap; deteriorating international competitive position in educational attainment; data showing that schools are narrowing their curricula at a time when a broader course of study is necessary for success. But these challenges have also forced the country’s education leaders to think creatively about reforming the nation’s schools.

One idea that has begun to catch on is the need to change one of the most intractable features of our country’s education system: a 19th-century school calendar of 180 six-hour school days. Increasingly, schools across the country are switching to an expanded time frame to enhance teaching and learning.

Our organization, the National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), has sought to focus the education policy agenda on converting standard district public schools across America to expanded learning time (ELT) schools. After successfully promoting the idea of shifting schools to ELT in Massachusetts — the first such state policy in the nation — NCTL has spent the last two years building federal interest in the concept, as well as early-adopter interest in several other states and districts.

Education leaders have recognized the need for more days in our school calendar for some time now, but until recently there has been little movement on the issue. While many charter schools have been quick to innovate, using their autonomy to give students the additional time they need to excel academically, traditional district schools have not followed suit. Costs and deeply entrenched cultural routines and expectations have been key obstacles to change. More important, education leaders and policy makers have lacked the “proof points,” policy levers, and models for the successful expansion of learning time within standard schools.

Steps in the Right Direction

But all of this is changing. Today, we are proud to release a new report that finds that a growing number of U.S. schools have already broken from the traditional school calendar and shifted to expanded learning time to improve educational outcomes. The report draws from our new national database and is the first effort to catalog schools operating with days substantially longer than the six-hour norm and, in many cases, a calendar that exceeds the standard 180-day school year.

The report comes at a time of great momentum for the issue nationally. In March, President Obama called for expanded learning time as part of his education agenda, stating, “We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day.” In his Senate confirmation hearing, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “I think our school day is too short, our week is too short, our year is too short.” And the guidelines for the highly competitive Race to the Top grant channel unprecedented federal funds to education, including incentivizing adoption of a longer school day and year as part of a strategy for improving schools.

Supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the report and accompanying database comes over 25 years after A Nation at Risk called for a longer school day and year. The report, Tracking an Emerging Movement: A Report on Expanded-Time Schools in America, identifies 655 schools in 36 states serving more than 300,000 students that met the following definition: “An expanded-time school is any public school that has deliberately added more time to the school day and/or days to the school year for all enrolled students (or has been founded with a deliberately longer day and/or year than surrounding public schools) for the express purpose of improving student outcomes.” The study also includes key characteristics and survey data on 245 schools on how the added time is utilized and funded.

Key Findings and Future Research

Significant findings from the analysis of the profiled schools include:

  • On average these schools offer about 25 percent more time than the national norm, which would translate over the course of a school career to over three additional years in school for participating students;
  • While many of the schools included are public charter schools, more than one-quarter of the schools identified are standard district public schools;
  • Compared with national averages, schools with expanded time serve a more heavily minority and poorer student population;
  • 75 percent of schools that convert from a traditional school schedule to an expanded school day pay their teachers more for the additional time worked, an average increase of over 13 percent, while only 44 percent of new schools that start up offer increased compensation; and
  • Data suggest that more time may boost academic achievement, with students in schools with a significantly expanded school day outperforming their district peers.

While the limited data show a positive relationship between student performance and daily time, more study is needed to know what impact these schools will have on closing achievement gaps and providing a more well-rounded education. Even at this stage, however, we can surmise that the act of giving students and teachers more time together has the potential to unlock greater student achievement and engagement, as past research has been fairly clear in establishing a link between time spent learning and student retention and mastery.

As leaders in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country seek to spur the kinds of educational innovation that will bring us closer to our ambitious goal of universal student proficiency, it is clear that expanded time will be a part of the solution. Our challenge will be to learn from the highest performers and ensure that best practices are implemented as this movement expands.

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Posted in Daily Fix, New Schools for the 21st Century, Policy Memo | 2 Comments »

An Innovative Way to Improve Teacher Quality

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Kirsten Taylor


After practicing law in New York City for five years, Kirsten J. Taylor recently returned to the field of education. She has previously worked for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources and for the Boston Plan for Excellence.

by Kirsten Taylor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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P-Fix Highlights: Growth, Equity, & Fiscal Responsibility

Friday, November 20th, 2009
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

In case you missed it, here are Progressive Fix’s highlights from the past week on economic and social policy:

  • PPI Policy Memo, “The Morning After Health Care Reform: A Progressive Fiscal Wake-Up Call,” Scott Winship

If health care reform is enacted in the coming months, progressives will need to focus sincerely on a problem to which they have paid only lip service over the last few months, one that reform is sure to exacerbate: the perilous fiscal health of the federal government. Read more…

  • “Facing the Hunger Problem,” Joel Berg

Yesterday’s release of the USDA’s report on hunger in America was the latest dismal dispatch from the recession’s frontlines. Read more…

  • “Candor We Can Believe In,” Will Marshall

Rhee is adamant about putting the needs of Washington’s public school children, who are overwhelmingly poor and minority, above the interests of adults in the District’s political-educational complex who resist fundamental changes in a system that’s manifestly failing. Read more…

  • “A Chart That Should Keep Progressives Up at Night,” Scott Winship

Progressives, in short, are going to be caught between a rock and a hard place: we will either have to find a way to convince the electorate to go along with massive tax hikes, with all of the electoral risk that entails, or we will have to come up with a plan to make equally massive cuts to entitlements that are likely to also be unpopular and that may do significant harm if not thought through carefully. Read more…

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