Less Deliberation; More Leadership

Looking for signs of leadership in the newly formed Senate HELP Committee, I watched the entire education hearing held last Tuesday. The deliberative chamber is certainly taking it’s time considering reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—the sweeping education omnibus that in its last iteration became the driving force in American education. Taking an extra year could actually be a good thing if a coherent bill was in formation, but it’s difficult to detect where bipartisan leadership will emerge on this committee to complement Miller’s leading man role in the House.

Joel Klein, NYC Chancellor, and Marco Petruzzi, Green Dot CEO, headlined the panel. The Committee was at least deferential to the successful close/replace strategy that the two have executed on opposite coasts. Klein, having replaced 90 failing schools with 400 new schools, argued that districts should use outside partners given their ability to attract talent and deliver coherent solutions.

Sen. Harkin noted that the entire panel supported schools of a manageable size but desperately wanted the answer to be class size. The panel unanimously suggested teacher quality was a much more important variable. Harkin suggested that there should be a child psychologist to every classroom—this could be a long deliberation.

Senators Enzi, Murray, and Franken all suggested the Departments four turnaround strategies didn’t fit rural challenges. A South Dakota superintendent said they had experimented with online learning but were back to DIY solutions. This discussion was a big strike out; the committee needs to hear from skilled and scaled operators like Connections Academy, K12, and KCDL. There is simply no way to offer high quality, high level college prep STEM nationally without incorporating online learning.

Lamar Alexander, who served as Education Secretary in the early 90s, suggested (a little disingenuously) that the feds should just override all local contracts and policies and empower governors. I’d love to see draft language on that proposal. Governors are empowered to lead, but many punt—like Charlie Crist did in Florida last week—when given an opportunity.

Michael Bennet, the senate’s edu-star, seemed distracted and may not even be around for reauthorization given his primary polls.

In short, the Dems are sweating context variables and uncomfortable pressing for improvement (and losing campaign contributions). The ‘just say no’ crowd on the other side of the isle appears unwilling to engage in real problem solving. And the chairman is waving reports from 1991.

We haven’t hit bottom, but other countries are making real progress while we tread water. Greenspan may have missed the crash but he was right that in the long run it’s all about education. It is time to lead.
Who will take the mantle of bipartisan education leadership that Ted Kennedy carried in 2001? Breaking with caucus leaders to do the right thing will be uncomfortable for senators but everything is at stake. And who will cross the aisle and help Miller write a great House bill?

With another round of Race to the Top applications due, which governors will step up? With a great state superintendent, Bobby Jindal has the opportunity to put Louisiana in the poll position and become the leading education governor. Who else will take a stand to convert promises into policies?

There is an opportunity to lead at every level—neighborhood, school, district, and state. It’s time for folks with a backbone to say we want a great teacher in every classroom and we want a good school in every neighborhood. Once you get started, tell your senator it is time to lead.

RttT Phase 2 Slog

I had hoped that after the Department held a high bar for phase 1 Race to the Top awards, that we’d see a rush of bold improvements to state plans.  It doesn’t appear to be working out that way.

A number of governors and chiefs appear disheartened or bitter; some are considering not reapplying.  And the ‘just say no’ crowd is newly emboldened.

The high bar set by phase 1 awards suggests that most states need to convert some/all promises into policies before making phase 2 application.  Florida Governor Crist’s veto of SB6 after a massive ‘no’ campaign suggests that this conversion process won’t be easy when it comes to lifting charter caps or improving teacher evaluations.

Where is the next Jeb Bush? Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has the chance to be the leading voice among Republican governors (in fact, all governors) simply by supporting his chief, Paul Pastorek.  The poll position is open.

After giving the nod to an inclusive process, Duncan will need to take sides and come out strong if he wants to see real follow through.

NEA Hits the Brakes on Obama’s Plans

The NEA just flipped President Obama the bird and used Charlie Crist’s finger to do it.  The FEA apparently gave Crist, who is trailing in the Republican primary, a deal too good to pass up.  He followed their lead and vetoed SB6, the bill that would have killed tenure and implemented value-added evaluations.  Read more from the Miami paper.

The veto of SB6 also signals Crist’s willingness to give up Florida’s poll position for phase 2 Race to the Top, setting up a possible Hail Mary run for governor as an independent.

More importantly, this a sign of NEA using a state affiliate to hit the brakes on the Obama/Duncan teacher effectiveness agenda. The NEA supported the budget backfilling portion of ARRA but is obviously willing and able to torpedo the reform agenda baked into the last 5% of the stimulus bill including RttT, School Improvement Grants, and teacher effectiveness grants.  We’re seeing more evidence of this inColorado and Louisiana this week.

I was meeting with Florida charter leaders in Tallahassee when the Governor vetoed SB6.  They suspect things will get really interesting in Florida–and nationally–in the next few months.

Flipping Florida; The New Employment Bargain

The only thing at stake is the future of America.  Two big dramas involving teachers and testing are at play in education.  My last post discussed the $350m federal grant program that is likely to lock in another decade of bubble sheet tests rather than a forward leaning framework open to the flood of keystroke data telling us more than we ever knew about achievement, motivation, and learning modality.

The other drama is playing out in Florida. The Palm Beach Post outlines the new teacher employment framework sitting on Gov Crist’s deck:

Collective bargaining could be used to establish salaries and raises, but the process would have to set a pay raise schedule based on two-part evaluations:

• Half on factors such as classroom management, advanced degree, knowledge of subject.
• Half on student ‘learning gains’ as measured through end-of-course exams.
• No credit for raises could be based on years of teaching.

‘Learning gains’ and how to measure them would be defined by the Florida Department of Education after the law is passed:

• The department is working closely with researchers at Vanderbilt University.
• Lawmakers say ‘learning gain,’ not score on exam, needs to be measured .
• Teachers want language exempting them from issues beyond their control, such as attendance or socioeconomic status.

End-of-course exams to measure learning gain must be developed by each district for all classes by 2013-2014:

• Officials are struggling with the concept when it comes to the arts.
• Department of Education won’t have to approve every exam in every district, but will do random sampling yearly.

Tenure would end for teachers new to the system:

• First-year teachers would be on a one-year probationary contract and could be dismissed at any time without cause.
• After that, a teacher would be put on an annual contract. To receive a new contract each year, a teacher would have to be ranked as ‘effective’ or ‘highly effective’ over two of the three preceding years.

What the law would do:

• Partially base teacher and administrator pay raises on students’ end-of-course exams as of July 1, 2014.
• Require each district to develop end-of-course exams for all subjects in all grades by 2013-2014.
• Eliminate tenure for teachers hired after the law takes effect, but keep it for current teachers.
• Offer extra pay for teachers who take on extra duties or teach in high-priority locations or subject areas.
• Require districts to use at least 5 percent of funding to implement end-of-course exams and merit raises.

President Obama and Race to the Top made this possible; the landscape is irreversibly different this year with a clear focus on the importance of teacher effectiveness.  When Crist signs this bill, it sets a new benchmark for phase 2 RttT applications in the most heavily weighted section.  Like welfare in Wisconsin, state examples of new policy frames are useful models and can lead to rapid and widespread adoption.

Next up: ending tenure for schools–a state moving to performance contracts (i.e., charters) for all schools as the basis for accountability.  Who will lead the way?

More Widgets, Less #2 Pencils

With last week’s launch of the $350m federal grant program last week, National Journal is hosting a conversation about student assessment.  Here’s my contribution.

Students should be assessed all day every day but not the way we do it today.  We currently attempt to use 1950 tests for instructional improvement, student progress, school accountability and increasingly for teacher evaluation—all over weighted toward reliability (i.e., cheap) rather than validity.  Assessment should be largely invisible and incorporated into learning experiences and performance demonstrations.

The exciting opportunity right in front of us is the potential for assessment frameworks flexible enough to incorporate the flood of keystroke data to come from learning games, simulations, virtual environments, adaptive assessments and online end of unit quizzes. This world of instant feedback will be especially useful for students and teachers—if we don’t get in the way.  Here’s a couple postcards from 2015 if you want examples.

A comprehensive online assessment system, possibly including merit badges, would also take the pressure off end of year exams.  Key will be using these grants to build something more like a widget platform with a lot less #2 pencils and bubble sheets

Catherine Gewertz, EdWeek, wrote a good summary of the federal grant program that has forced states into the 1) lock in gains with cheap/uniform tests group, or 2) there must be a better way to incorporate student work group.   The problem with the grant program are the intended recipients—states are broke, under pressure to adopt new standards, and don’t have the capacity to innovate.  Let’s hope there are a few interesting assessment consortia in the i3 applications.

Why Great Teachers Matter to Low Income Students

Here’s a great op-ed in WaPo by Joel I. Klein, Michael Lomax and Janet Murguía:

In the debate over how to fix American public education, many believe that schools alone cannot overcome the impact economic disadvantage has on a child, that life outcomes are fixed by poverty and family circumstances, and that education doesn’t work until other problems are solved.

This theory is, in some ways, comforting for educators. After all, if schools make only a marginal difference, we can stop faulting ourselves for failing to make them work well for millions of children. It follows that we can stop working to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (currently known as No Child Left Behind) and stop competing in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, which promises controversial changes.

Problem is, the theory is wrong. It’s hard to know how wrong — because we haven’t yet tried to make the changes that would tell us — but plenty of evidence demonstrates that schools can make an enormous difference despite the challenges presented by poverty and family background.

Consider the recent national math scores of fourth- and eighth-graders, which show startling differences among results for low-income African American students in different cities. In Boston, Charlotte, New York and Houston, these fourth-graders scored 20 to 30 points higher than students in the same socioeconomic group in Detroit, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and the District of Columbia. Boston fourth-graders outscored those in Detroit by 33 points. Ten points approximates one year’s worth of learning on these national tests, which means that by fourth grade, poor African American children in Detroit are already three grades behind their peers in Boston.

Not surprisingly, these differences persist (or grow) by the eighth grade, at which point low-income African American students in Detroit are scoring 36 points behind their peers in Austin.

The scores tell a similarly painful story for low-income Hispanic students in different cities. In fourth grade, there is a 29-point difference between test scores in Miami-Dade and Detroit. By eighth grade, the gap has closed slightly, with low-income Hispanic students in Houston outscoring their peers in Cleveland and Fresno, Calif., by 23 points.
These numbers represent vast differences in millions of lives. Low-income African American and Hispanic students in different cities are sufficiently similar in terms of their academic needs, but their outcomes are so dramatically different.
The main difference between these children is that they are enrolled in different school districts. And research indicates that if the data were broken out for the same students in different schools the differences would be more dramatic; and more dramatic still if broken out for the same children in different classes.

What explains these differences? Schools and teachers. “Teacher quality is the single most important school factor in student success,” the Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind recently noted. Given how much research supports this view, it is especially troubling, the commission found, that “teacher quality is unevenly distributed in schools, and the students with the greatest needs tend to have access to the least qualified and least effective teachers.”
Different teachers get very different results with similar students. So as reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is considered, we should look closely at those whom we attract and retain to teach, with regard to their quality and to ensuring they are distributed equally across our school districts. If we can do those things, we could at least make Detroit students perform like those in Boston, and make Boston students do a lot better.

A few things need to happen:
First, we must attract teachers who performed well in college. Countries that do best on international tests draw teachers from the top third of college graduates. In the United States, however, most teachers come from the bottom third. Moreover, the bottom of that group is vastly overrepresented in our highest-needs communities.

Second, we must create systems that reward excellence rather than seniority by creating sophisticated evaluation systems that include student performance and merit-based tenure and compensation. We must make it easier to remove teachers who are shown to be ineffective.

Third, we must do more to attract teachers to high-needs schools and subject areas, such as English Language Learners, special education, and other areas to which it is difficult to draw talent because of opportunities in other industries.
These are common-sense and ambitious reforms. Such efforts are rewarded in the Race to the Top initiative and ought to be fully integrated into a new Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Yes, they call for a reevaluation of seniority — the staple of most collective bargaining agreements — in the context of what actually serves children. But right now, one bad teacher with seniority earns as much as two great young teachers. Who really thinks this is best for our kids?

Apologists for our educational failure say that we will never fix education in America until we eradicate poverty. They have it exactly backwards: We will never eradicate poverty until we fix education. The question is whether we have the political courage to take on those who defend a status quo that serves many adults but fails many children.

Joel I. Klein is chancellor of New York City schools. Michael L. Lomax is president and chief executive of the United Negro College Fund. Janet Murguía is president and chief executive of the National Council of La Raza. They are co-chairs of the Board of the Education Equality Project (www.edequality.org).

i3 Reviews

Had five conversations about i3 in the last 24 hours:

• Three focused on applicant eligibility.  There is a very high bar for applicants.  Read this section carefully.  It requires a very strong track record of student achievement with a couple exceptions for nonprofits producing results leading to achievement.  Don’t apply unless you have an applicant that fits the bill.  The applicant doesn’t have to be the one sponsoring the intervention (that can be the ‘official partner’) but it does need to be the one with a track record of success.
• Two were applying for Validation grants based on quasi-experimental studies.  I think it was Jim Shelton that said something like, “Don’t even apply if you don’t know the difference between internal and external validity or are talking to someone that does.”  Validation and Scaling grants will be won 1) on the basis of the quality of the evaluation and 2) the scalability and sustainability of the intervention—impact at scale.
• Three applicants for Development grants got a reminder of the “unique and not widely adopted” language.  With over 2500 applicants, this will be a very competitive category.  Proposals will need to be innovative interventions based on a sound hypothesis, with a scalable financial model.
• Two applicants were reminded not to ask for more than needed over five years, it will water down your scalability and make it harder to match (and may improve your chance of winning if you request less than the maximum especially in the larger categories).

We’re helping a couple groups with final review.  Email if you want a couple i3 knowledgeable folks to review your application.

Read Friedman on Start Ups

Please read Tom Friedman’s post on start ups.  Here’s the most important sentences:

Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants.

The one area of the economy where we should be most focused on innovation is education, but it’s the one area where the federal government refuses to engage the private sector–it’s tradition, it’s bizarre, it’s dangerous.

I told an impact investor (e.g., seeking high social return and high market return) this week that I’m confident that a $65m learning fund of funds would create more impact, more jobs, and more leverage than the $650m i3 grant program that will be doled out primarily to school districts in the coming months.  I deeply respect the folks running the program, but they are saddled with bad legislation that does not allow private sector grants/investments the way Energy, Transportation, Health, and Defense do on a regular basis.

A fund of funds could include six $10m investments in funds focused on innovations in learning.  Alternatively, an updated SBIC approach using debt instruments could serve the same purpose.

This all may sound self-serving given my interest in Revolution Learning, the only dedicated early state learning venture fund, but it’s really about the most important sector of the economy that spends next to nothing on R&D.  We need to quickly and dramatically increase public and private investment in learning innovation or we will give up our leadership in the innovation economy.

Rodel-Backed Plan Wins in DE

There were lots of people scratching their head about Delaware’s phase one Race to the Top win yesterday.  It was not a last minute consultant generated application, it was the result of a decade of leadership from the Rodel Foundation–one guy that leveraged a small checkbook and a lot of smart advocacy to move a state from sleepy edreform backwater to RttT winner.

Advocacy seeks to change minds and policies; from that standpoint, Paul Herdman was a winner before RttT grants were announced.  My post from 1/15 outlines a decade of progress.

The notion that one passionate persistent person can change a state or a sector makes me think of the hundreds of young people that attended the Yale Education Leaders Conference last week.  They heard from Jon Schnur, the architect of RttT and one of two people that encouraged the sector to rethink talent development (Wendy Kopp being the other).

The hard work of execution begins today in DE, but we can celebrate with Paul for a few minutes and reflect on just how much progress has already been made.

RttT: The Work Ahead

With only two winners (thanks for holding the bar high Arne), there are two different paths to resubmission:

1. Support. FL & LA clearly had the most aggressive plans but got dinged for lack of support.  They need a little Barb O’Brien (Lt. Gov CO) style barnstorming to build support.  But will the need to increase incentives or lower the bar to gain support?  I hope not.  Their plans deserve support

2. Plan. Other states need to get more aggressive–fewer promises and more progress.  I see a few special sessions coming to lift charter caps, enact new teacher evaluation frameworks, and crank up school accountability plans.

The bottom half of the list isn’t likely to do enough of either to win but will make some progress none the less.

RttT is already the most successful grant program in history.  Read more in my response to my skeptical friends (you know who you are) on National Journal today

RttT already produced more policy reform than any other grant program in history. The high bar maintained today will increase phase 2 results. I think the skeptics were proven wrong today.

The combination of the president’s strong stand on teacher effectiveness backed up by $4b have already changed conventional wisdom on teacher evaluation–quite suddenly there is national consensus on data-driven evaluation.

Additionally, RttT reinforced adoption of Common Core, improved charter laws, improved data plans–all before a dime was spent.