Posts filed under 'Education'
In a previous job, I spent a lot of time in major Massachusetts cities outside of Boston. Cities like New Bedford and Fall River, with their stunning coastal views, and cities at the edge of Boston with so much potential like Lynn and Brockton, always intrigued me. But I have to admit to two favorites–Springfield and Lawrence. They are indeed among the most troubled, but they are both architecturally unique, with strong neighborhoods and muscular industrial histories.
Whenever in Lawrence, I would try to make it to Saint Anthony’s Maronite Church or eat at Cafe Azteca. The smells in each place are enough to keep you going for days. A sensation similar to the “beignet haze” you get walking within 50 feet of New Orleans’ Cafe Du Monde.
With the Lawrence Public Schools now in state receivership, a few recent posts have focused on what could and should be done there. I am decidedly against the idea of waiting for Superman and seeking a centralized solution from the new school receiver Jeff Riley, no matter how many good things I hear about him. We’ve seen that movie before with Michelle Rhee and other heroic reformers. They quickly get ahead of the local population and the embedded interests, and politically their attempts are pretty certain to meet resistance and failure. I’ve written extensively about the need to move away from that model of the heroic reformer who fixes all of the schools from the central office.
So, what to do?
#1. Recognize the problem
I have made it a point in recent posts to draw a direct parallel to Katrina, calling the Lawrence school receivership Massachusetts’ “Katrina moment.”
A few folks challenged that parallel, with, for example, Kevin Franck, communications director of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, tweeting this:
KevinFranck May 08, 2:13pm via TweetDeck
1,800+ people killed? RT @JimStergios: Lawrence district schools = Massachusetts’ Katrina #mapoli #edchat
So, Kev, let’s run the numbers. In Lawrence we have had dropout rates north of 30 percent for some time now.
And a lot of the above statistics are related to the fact that over 40 percent of Lawrence’s population has less than a high school diploma. Another 30 percent have only a high school diploma, which, if it is from the Lawrence Public School system, is not likely to have provided strong grounding for later learning. So you have nearly 80 percent of the population of Lawrence with either no high school diploma or no more than a high school diploma.
That is a recipe for unemployment, and in fact the unemployment rate in Lawrence is a whopping 15.8 percent. The unemployed/Underemployment percentage is almost certain to be 1 of 5 people, and the number of those who have dropped out of the workforce completely only makes the number more alarming.
The unemployment problem in Lawrence precedes the recession and is structural. In 2005 the unemployment rate stood at 9.8 percent. (See page 11 of this report.)
Median household income in Lawrence stands at less than half the average in Massachusetts (in 2009, $31,000 vs. $64,000), and household income for Hispanics in Lawrence, by far the largest ethnic group in the city, has been flat since 2000.
Poverty is deep and broad in Lawrence. Fully 37 percent of households in Lawrence earn less than $20,000 a year (vs. 16 percent for Massachusetts). That embedded poverty, just like the embedded unemployment, feels a lot like the structural poverty “discovered” in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina.
In fact, New Orleans’ unemployment rate prior to Katrina was only 5.6 percent. Median household income in New Orleans prior to Katrina was $31,369; the percentage of individuals earning less than $20,000 was far lower than in Lawrence.
As is well known, the poor student achievement data and outrageous dropout data lead to poverty, embedded poverty, poor health outcomes and high crime levels, which can lead to death, physical and mental impairment, and the demise of a once-great city.
The toll in terms of crime has been enormous since 2000. There have been over 50 murders, 228 rapes (which are routinely underreported), 1,642 robberies, 4,080 assaults, 5,885 burglaries, and almost 10,000 thefts (not including the largest category of thefts, car thefts).
Take all of these factors and then remember that our Lawrence is a small, small city covering only 7 square miles and with only 76,000. New Orleans (the city and the parish) extends a massive 350 square miles; and boasted 450,000 residents just prior to the hurricane. Truth be told, Katrina affected the entire metro region (1.4 million residents prior to the hurricane) and well beyond.
The comparison stands. Perhaps people like Kevin would like to compare the state of Lawrence schools with those in New Orleans? Happy to have that conversation. They are as bad as anything in NOLA before the deluge.
#2. Think big but not centralizing
The solutions are there if we simply have the courage to avail ourselves of them. In places where the state chips in well below 50 percent of the local school budget, I can understand the pushback from local mayors, who complain about dollars lost to their big central school bureaucracies. I don’t agree with it for a minute, but I understand the (backwards) logic that the dollars belong to the adults in the system rather than to the students and parents.
But in Lawrence, the state is paying for almost the entire $135 million (soon to be $150 million) school budget. Moving to the New Orleans solution (with nearly all of its schools now public charter schools) has raised student scores and improved a number of key academic and school-based metrics. Doing the same in Lawrence is a no-brainer. There is little, if any, local money being put into the Lawrence schools and therefore no reason for the state to hold back on charterizing the entire district.
The blueprint is here — and the results for Lawrence’s kids would, over time, change not only their lives, but the trajectory of a once-great city.
It’s all possible, but our political and education leaders need to have the brass to choose that course.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
May 9th, 2012
The 2010 Achievement Gap bill that was passed by both the House and the Senate and signed into law by Governor Patrick lifted the limits on charter schools and the number of students in them in districts that were failing to see improvements in student achievement. Rather than limiting the number of students to 9% in these largely urban districts, the law allowed up to 18% of students to attend charter schools.
The six-year period for the expansion up to 18 percent of students was not coincidental. It aligns with the six-year reimbursement schedule for districts, by which districts:
• receive 100% of the per-pupil funding for in the first year after a student leaves for a public charter;
• continues to be reimbursed for the “phantom” student in years 2 through 6 at 25% of the student’s per-pupil funding.
That’s a lot of extra state funding, which is in part why many parents and district educators in Lowell feared negative impacts from the closure of a charter school in the city a couple of years back.
So, what to make of today’s front page Globe story ballyhooing the state’s decision to release 1,000 charter seats in Boston and 360 in Lawrence as a “charter school cap lift?
Is that good news and something to be pleased about? Yes, on the practical impact, but not so much on the politics and policy of the decision.
On the practical impact, there is plenty of evidence of the strength of Massachusetts’ public charter schools, and even greater evidence of the strength of public charters in Boston. Massachusetts’ and Boston’s charters are in fact pretty unique in the level of consistency they have, which is testimony to the good vetting process in place for many years (something that needs closer scrutiny given reason to believe that political considerations have played a fairly significant role in charter approvals and rejections in Gloucester and Brockton).
So applaud the practical impact, with proven schools likely to expand in Boston and also in Lawrence.
On the politics, I can’t say that the release of the seats was a story for any reason except that the Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester complied with the 2010 law. I am not grateful for that. He is expected to do that – it’s called the public trust.
The fact that he held up seats in the initial expansion was altogether understandable – but when the Department would make those seats available should never have been in question. It’s the law, and the fact is that the commissioner should have given a time certain for the release of the additional seats from the beginning.
Policy-wise, there is not much here. Lawrence has some of the worst-performing schools in the state—low student achievement in math, English, and science; scores that are not moving to anywhere close to acceptable levels; it has 30+% dropout rates. We know that’s not sustainable – and those facts affect most people and make them want to take real action, not just temporize and avoid responsibility.
But even from a purely financial perspective, the right policy is to take actions that have been proven successful. As Mark Vogler of the Lawrence Eagle Tribune recently reported:
Lawrence Public Schools’ annual payroll will go over $100 million for the first time in the city’s history in fiscal 2013.
A $4.8 million hike in overall salaries for the city’s 2,000 School Department employees — due to step increases negotiated before the state placed the district in receivership — accounts for more than half of the $8.3 million increase in the proposed education budget for the 2013 fiscal year that begins July 1.
Nearly that entire eye-popping amount is paid for by the state. In addition, the state Board of Education stripped the local school committee of most of its powers and put the district in receivership, naming former Boston Public Schools official Jeffrey C. Riley Superintendent/Receiver. We own the problems of the Lawrence public school district.
Lawrence has some great charter schools, including the Lawrence Family Development Charter School and the Lawrence Community Day School. Given that, why are we just expanding 360 seats when there are 13,000 kids in the district?
Lawrence is Massachusetts’ “Katrina moment.” Let me put it another way to Massachusetts’ education officials: How would you respond to this crisis if your kids were in the Lawrence district schools?
They would respond just as the country did after Katrina, insisting on a new path for New Orleans schools – and one that has served the kids well, giving parents real choices and expanding charters to encompass nearly all the schools in the city. So here’s the question I asked a couple of weeks ago – and it’s a good one:
Lawrence has very good charter schools and could line up more charter operators very quickly. It also has the advantage of an existing network of high-quality parochial schools that could play a key role in changing the prospects of kids — not after the successful execution of a five- or ten-year improvement plan but immediately.
Do we really have to wait for an act of god before we act?
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
May 8th, 2012
Massachusetts is a wealthy place. We are among the wealthiest states in the country, and the educational attainment of Massachusetts parents is well beyond that of parents in every other state. All this should point to high-powered students and schools in the Bay State.
In fact, “big thinkers” in education policy often point to those factors to explain why Massachusetts does so well on national and international assessments. In part, that’s true. But what these big thinkers fail to see is that Massachusetts not only has risen from around 11th in the country on the national assessments to number one, but also that the performance of all Massachusetts student groups has gone up. In fact, Massachusetts’ improvement in performance among Hispanic students is very much in line improvements in the states that have most concentrated on this issue, such as Florida (Florida’s improvement among Hispanics is a hair better and, ironically, they end up higher today in part because they started out ahead of Massachusetts due to pockets of highly educated immigrants).
Either way, the search for bragging rights is misplaced. We all have a lot to learn in terms of which state experiments have worked or not worked, for whom, and where our weaknesses persist. The Bay State’s weaknesses are clear: we need more focus on high achievers as well as low achievers, and we need to expand choice options for parents in those poor districts that have failed students for decades now through charters and an anything-it-takes approach.
Here are some basic facts on poverty in Massachusetts. Overall, we rank 8th among the states in household income. With the baseline of about 10 percent of the overall population living below the poverty line, around one in three students statewide qualify for free or reduced price lunches. The extent of poverty varies wildly, with FRPL eligibility by district ranging from a miniscule 0.1 percent to an eye-popping over 90 percent.
Poverty in Massachusetts is concentrated in urban areas, and only one state has a lower percentage of rural students qualifying for FRPL, but the percentage of the commonwealth’s urban students who qualify is higher than in 35 states. The highest poverty rates are in Suffolk and Hampden Counties, home to Boston and Springfield, where about one quarter of school-aged children are below the poverty line.
There are also pockets of rural poverty in Massachusetts. More than half the students qualify for free or reduced price lunches in the Greenfield, North Adams, Gill-Montague and Ware school districts. Orange, Athol-Royalston, Hawlemont, Ralph C. Mahar, Flordia, and Winchendon all have almost half their students on FRPL.
So let’s disaggregate the big, broad measures we too often use, and understand that we need to avoid lumping poor with poor, thinking that poverty makes for a monolithic set of individuals, motivations, aspirations, and challenges. Let’s ask:
How have urban and rural poor students fared, respectively, since the start of the landmark 1993 education reform act, which infused school with more money, set high academic standards, required testing of students, insisted on higher quality teachers determined by tests tied to the state’s standards, and introduced competition into the system through charter schools?
A recent report entitled Urban and Rural Poverty and Student Achievement in Massachusetts does just that. The author of the paper, Salem State professor Ken Ardon, begins:
Massachusetts still has a significant share of its population living in poverty – approximately 600,000 people in the Bay State live below the poverty line. While low-income families are often concentrated in urban areas, rural areas also have deep pockets of poverty.
A few takeaways from the paper:
- Using national assessment data, the poor overall in Massachusetts have improved fast on math than their counterparts around the country. The same is not true on English language arts.
- Using MCAS data, the scores of high and low-income students have risen in the Commonwealth, whether in urban, suburban or rural areas.
Finally, as Ardon notes, “Low-income rural students have made slightly larger gains than low-income urban students and modestly reduced the performance gap.” Why is that important? Just 10 years ago, the performance gap was larger in rural areas than in urban areas.
Today, the performance gap between low- and higher- income students is roughly the same in rural and urban areas of Massachusetts. That is, poor students have improved more rapidly and closed the achievement gap as measured by both the MCAS and graduation rates faster than their urban counterparts.
Finally, Ardon suggests that the difference in performance between low-income students in rural and urban areas may be attributable to the urban students being poorer and less likely to speak English.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
May 5th, 2012
So let the games begin. Finally, the presidential candidates may get to education. For the greater part of a month, the presidential candidates have been sizing each other up, jabbing each other on jobs and the economy, who’s more in touch with the average voter, and all sorts of distractions like who is waging that war on women and whether the president should play politics with foreign policy (as if that’s anything new).
Given that education is a key factor affecting the country’s ability to create jobs–and that it is one of the key sectors of public employment–you would have thought that education would have made the dance card a little earlier in the process. But no.
Finally, we have engagement. Earlier today, Governor Romney “blasted” President Obama for the latter’s opposition to Washington D.C.’s 10-year-old opportunity scholarship program. As the Washington Times‘ Stephen Dinan notes,
Mitt Romney on Wednesday said it was “inexcusable” that President Obama tried to shut down the … voucher program that has sent thousands of the city’s students to private schools.
“The president shut that down. His party shut that down,” Mr. Romney said while campaigning at a small business in Chantilly, Va.
As Dinan further notes, despite broad popular support among DC parents, Mr. Obama has repeatedly
tried to end the program when he took office. In a compromise, he agreed to let students already in the program continue, but he ended funding for new applications.
When Republicans took control of the House last year, Speaker John A. Boehner fought to restart the program and included funding in the first yearlong spending bill Mr. Obama signed.
But the program remains in limbo, and Mr. Obama’s 2013 budget, submitted in January, doesn’t include any money for it.
Education may prove a tricky issue for Romney, who ironically oversaw the Commonwealth’s surge to become the top performing state in the nation. President Obama has a clear set of priorities, including nationalizing education standards, tests and curricula; controlled choice through modest expansion of charter schools; and teacher evaluations. Mr. Romney’s views are not fully public, though from his time in office in Massachusetts, we can glean lessons about what he will be on schools and learning.
During his time here, he supported strong academic standards that reached beyond math and English to include science and U.S. History, as well as the expansion of charter schools. Messaging will be made a little more difficult, because presidential elections are often about clear messaging, and Mr. Romney has in the past made supportive statement about elements of the President’s education plans.
Just what are the differences? Clearly parental choice that extends to private schools is one. I’ll be posting a few items on how their positions diverge over the coming week. The big message today is, perhaps, finally we will see the candidates engage on the critical issue of how we move the states and the country forward.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
May 2nd, 2012
I’m conflicted about how to say this. Getting stuff done is about building relationships and trying to find ways to get along and in fact pulling the right people together toward a goal. But it is also about saying things straight and pulling no punches when what’s being debated matters a lot.
I often write about education standards because, unlike some other ed policy choices, standards impact the entire landscape of education. If used effectively to drive reform, they set the contours of classroom content, they constitute the basis for student tests, and they define the basis for teacher tests that ultimately play a bigger role on the quality of teaching in the Commonwealth than any professional development program afterward. If done right, I noted. I fully agree with Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution who has been saying that in most instances higher standards don’t correlate with higher student achievement, but those states (like Massachusetts) that have used standards to drive the iron triangle of curricula, accountability and teacher quality, win big on student achievement.
Until 2007, Massachusetts used standards in just this way. And then we watered down our accountability system and our standards. Since 2007 Massachusetts student achievement has been flatlined at best. While you cannot draw a causal link to our students’ 2007 or even 2008 results, the continued flatlining since then does make me wonder what’s been lost in real achievement because of recent “reforms.”
Last week, I wrote about the conflictitis that plagues the longstanding group of DC-based advocates of national standards. The post focused largely on the façade of objectivity put up by Massachusetts Education Commissioner Mitch Chester in relying on three “outside” analyses of the national standards. The so-called independent analyses proved not to be so objective after all, given that they were all funded directly or indirectly by the Gates Foundation, which has bankrolled the entire national standards effort nationwide. So independent were these analyses that one of the firms (the Fordham Institute) conducting an “independent” review funded in part the work of another “independent” reviewer (the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education).
After receiving the tip from a reader who looked at Fordham’s federal tax status filings, I have to admit that I realized that I find it hard to believe that these people wake up everyday and pretend to take themselves seriously.
But there are more conflicts than the ones listed in that post. Today, let’s focus on the role of Achieve, Inc, which used to work on collegial sharing of best practies and more recently has moved into a full-time advocate employing not just public argument (which is the rightful way to do advocacy) but also funding and other politically, legally, or ethically challenged methods to advance their cause. Like all the other “independent” reviewers involved in evaluating whether Massachusetts should adopt national standards, Achieve, Inc. has largely been funded by the Gates Foundation, the banker of record for national standards development, favorable evaluations and advocacy.
So it is odd (and conflicted) when the Massachusetts Ed Commissioner announces that he will rely upon Achieve’s evaluations as “independent,” as is Achieve’s use of money to advocate for its positions. Tough words, I know, but consider the evidence.
In March of 2009, just as the Obama Administration made its announcement to chart out “improvements” in state standards, Achieve appoints Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to its Board of Directors.
WASHINGTON – March 2, 2009 – Achieve today announced the appointment of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to its Board of Directors, a group comprised exclusively of governors and top business leaders that is responsible for guiding Achieve in its mission to ensure that all U.S. students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary success.
Is it independent to rely on a firm whose boss is also your boss? And given the Governor’s record at the time, this announcement signaled to friends of Achieve that they were going soft—or, perhaps more accurately, “soft skills”—on standards. At the time of this announcement, and months before his employer, the Fordham Institute, received a million dollars of its own from the Gates Foundation to promote national standards, Mike Petrilli blogged that Governor Patrick, with his weak record on academic standards and his opposition to strong school accountability, his embrace of 21st century skills, as well as the NEA’s support for national standards all constituted “the beginning of the end for Achieve”:
I can’t even begin to explain the confusion, disappointment, and exasperation I feel about Achieve right now, the organization that’s purportedly all about pushing states to raise standards. First there was the announcement last week that the National Education Association was joining the “common state standards” movement led by Achieve, the National Governors Association, and the Council of Chief State School Officers…
Then there’s today’s announcement that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is joining Achieve’s board. This is the same Governor Patrick who has declared war on the Bay State’s academic standards and rigorous accountability system. (See this great Education Next article for background.)…Achieve, what are you doing, aiding and abetting what is obviously an effort to diminish standards, fuzzy up accountability, and push nebulous “skills” over literature, history, art, science, and math? Achieve, Achieve, why have you forsaken us?
It was bad enough from a policy perspective that Mitch Chester was chosen then to lead one of the two national testing consortia, PARCC, which is housed at Achieve. After all, Mitch has no record of improving standards and assessments in Massachusetts, the same in Ohio, and a record of diminishing standards in Connecticut (as evidenced by the collapse in Connecticut’s student reading scores on the NAEP test in subsequent years). But one of the key players in Massachusetts’ decision to adopt national standards, then-deputy education commissioner Jeff Nellhaus, was hired by Achieve/PARCC six months after Massachusetts’ vote to adopt national standards – a decision he influenced directly.
My point is not to say that Mitch Chester or Jeff Nellhaus, or the many other Massachusetts education officials and gubernatorial staff that benefited from later jobs with the Gates Foundation or Gates-funded entities, are unpleasant people. Hardly. They are so close to this stuff and so used to the way things work in the EduBlob that all this is par for the course.
Local supporters of the national standards and friends will argue that we should be relieved that Massachusetts’ officials are in positions of leadership in these efforts. I find that a huge sidestep to real questions about conflicts of interest and ethical violations.
That’s what ethics laws and mechanisms that ensure the public trust are for.
Governor Patrick likes to affirm that Massachusetts has “the toughest state ethics laws in the country.” That must make the revolving door of jobs, and the money and influence exerted on Massachusetts’ decision to adopt the national standards by the Gates Foundation, MBAE, Fordham, and Achieve one very big and improbably coincidence. No, no, there were no state ethics violations, no misuse of the public trust, no circumventing state legislative approval, no thorny federal legal issues, no private non-profits lobbying and benefitting from changes in state policy. And no cross-funding aong the independent reviewers.
For those of you who don’t find any of this troubling, then consider NewsCenter 5’s Sean Kelly report that in the middle of state deliberations over whether or not to adopt the Common Core standards, Massachusetts education commissioner Mitch Chester “took at least 12 trips costing $15,146. All of the trips [were] paid for, in part, by trade groups and special interest.”
As part of its story, NewsCenter 5 interviewed Pam Wilmot from CommonCause, a government watchdog group more often associated with the political left. She noted that “the appearance that there might be a conflict when you accept free or discounted travel from a party, particularly if they have an interest in the outcome of a decision is certainly there.”
NewsCenter 5 reported that “the top sponsors of Chester’s trips” were “two DC-based organizations, one of which was Achieve, Inc. The two pro-national standards funding groups paid for most of Chester’s travel to DC, Chicago, Arizona and London. “
If you are not troubled by any of this, then you are unwilling to consider evidence. Yes, the revolving door of jobs, money and perks is just one big coincidence.
Perhaps it’s also a coincidence (or perhaps just “one of those things”) that the Boston Public Schools hired
commissioner Mitchell Chester’s wife, Angela Sangeorge Feb. 22 [2010] as $128,570-a-year executive director for teaching and learning and director of literacy, [just] as the school system was mulling massive teacher, staff and custodian layoffs.
She “oversaw a staff of four literacy coaches and one reading teacher” in that job and then was removed from it by the BPS Superintendent Carol Johnson, to be placed in the Higginson-Lewis School, where she reviews the literacy curriculum for a single school (not the entire system anymore), but she still enjoys the same salary.
Yes, pleasant people one and all. Pleasant people who cannot see the conflicts they live and that affect their daily decisions. Pleasant people who take care of themselves, even as they block real solutions from being implemented in places like Lawrence where the dropout rate is north of 35 percent. Pleasant people who see the revolving door going around, and always find a way to slide through, even as they explain to parents in urban districts why they need to be patient and wait another 10 years for the adults in the system to coalesce around the grand education master plan that will at best yield modest improvement, which of course they will hype as victory.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
May 1st, 2012
“No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.”
- James Madison, Federalist #10
In this season of US Supreme Court decisions we’re reminded that independent and objective judgment on key legal and public policy matters has been an aspiration in Anglo-America law and justice (not to mention scientific inquiry) for centuries. In America, it was John Adams in Massachusetts and James Madison of Virginia who were best at articulating the importance of independent judgment.
The push for national education standards has brought to light a variety of troubling questions about the legality, cost, and academic quality that has been discussed here and here.
Perhaps none are more disturbing than the (see below) conflict-ridden and ethically challenged circumstances by which the Patrick administration, its handpicked board of education, and national standards proponents and lobbyists in DC and MA encouraged the BOE to dump Massachusetts’ nation-leading and proven academic standards and MCAS.
Back in 2010, when adoption of the then-proposed national standards was on the table, Matt Murphy of the Lowell Sun provided a lay of the land on the money, DC-based players, and special interests pushing national standards in Massachusetts. Nearly two years after Pioneer submitted a wider ranging FOIA on MA and national standards, there’s still no public transparency regarding this major shift in state law and public policy that impacts nearly 1 million Bay State schoolchildren.
A reader recently was very helpful in shining an even brighter light on the machinations at work to get Massachusetts to adopt the proposed national standards. Let me provide a quick definitions of terms and then tell the story.
Let’s start by defining “Conflict of Interest.” Wikipedia defines conflicts of interest as follows:
Conflict of interest
A conflict of interest (COI) occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other. The presence of a conflict of interest is independent from the execution of impropriety.
Conflicts of interest related to the practice of law
Judicial disqualification, also referred to as recusal, refers to the act of abstaining from participation in an official action such as a legal proceeding due to a conflict of interest of the presiding court official or administrative officer. Applicable statutes or canons of ethics may provide standards for recusal in a given proceeding or matter.
Second, let’s define the “vetting process” employed by the Massachusetts Department of Education to make a decision on whether to adopt national standards. It’s laid out in a 2010 departmental press release:
The standards were also fully vetted, reviewed and approved by national organizations including Achieve, Inc., which called them “a significant advance over current state standards,” and the Fordham Foundation. The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE), in a side-by-side analysis comparing the state’s current standards to the Common Core, deemed that Common Core “meets the business community’s objective of enhancing the college and career readiness of our students.
Fordham is a research and advocacy outfit in Washington that has backed the idea of national standards for some time and received significant funding from the Gates Foundation, which has largely bankrolled the entire national standards effort (Fordham took $1 million from Gates to study and evaluate national standards). Hardly what one might call an “independent” evaluator.” Yet, that is who Commissioner Chester relied upon for part of his decision to have Massachusetts adopt national standards.
Then there is the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, a Massachusetts backer of national standards, touted their “independent” comparison of Massachusetts standards and the Gates Foundation backed national ones:
A key factor in gaining business support was the independent comparison of Massachusetts’ standards to the Common Core commissioned by MBAE and conducted by WestEd.
In fact, MBAE, via the North Carolina-based Hunt Institute and Gates Foundation, received a $151,431 grant to “evaluate” national standards that themselves were paid for by the Gates Foundation.
The evaluation company MBAE relied on – WestEd – is a client of both the Gates Foundation and the Massachusetts ed department. In fact, WestEd’s research director’s bio has now this to say about their linkages to national standards and the one of the national testing consortia.
WestEd is the Project Management Partner for the multi-state SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SMARTER Balanced) — the first collaboration of its kind to develop a common assessment system among a majority of states. WestEd’s four-year, $16.3 million contract includes project planning, documentation, governance support, budget monitoring, and communications. Rabinowitz leads the project, bringing his expertise as a member of the Common Core State Standards Validation Committee.
But as it turns out, an intrepid reader points to Guide Star, an information service specializing in reporting on U.S. nonprofit companies, to give us even more light on the collaboration among the Massachusetts ed department’s “independent” reviewers. According to Guidestar, in 2010 MBAE also accepted a $20,000 (link to PDF of Fordham 990) grant from the Fordham Institute. Apparently, MBAE’s advocacy cost more than the Gates/Hunt folks had paid them. This is how desperately national standards advocates wanted Massachusetts, high standards/high performing Massachusetts, to be part of the national effort.
And, after all, what’s another $20,000 among friends?
Massachusetts Ed Secretary Paul Reville praised MBAE’s willingness to help him and Governor Patrick on Massachusetts’ national standards adoption:
The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education has been a crucial policy advocate, in particular issuing an influential report that helped Massachusetts policymakers embrace the Common Core standards.” The fact that the report emerged from MBAE, which is seen as the guardian of education and a mainstream business group, [made it]…more effective,” said Massachusetts secretary of education Paul Reville. A number of sidebars in the paper further addressed such topics such as “generating research that has an impact,” “working with legislators,” and the importance of savvy leadership.
As Lindsey Burke and Neal McCluskey have noted, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan is touchy about suggestions that there are conflicts of interest involved in the advance of national standards across the country. He calls these “conspiracy theories.”
Many backers of national standards parry criticisms on the same basis. No, no, Gates-funding and cross-funding among us is nothing to worry about. I don’t think you have to be an wide-eyed idealist to say that this stuff is pretty sickening.
Oh, yeah, more on this tomorrow…
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse blog. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
April 24th, 2012
Yesterday, the Globe’s Deirdre Fernandes reported on the spat between Newton North High School’s food contractor and the student-run Tiger’s Loft Bistro. The contractor, Whitsons Culinary Group, was sore about the school allowing a competitor to serve food in the building. After all was said and done, the school and the contractor made up, and the student-run bistro will re-open and be able to serve students once again.
There are two lessons to learn:
Businesses may like to talk about the need for competition, but they never like it when there is a direct competitor. That’s why for over a year, Whitsons sought a clause in its contract that barred competition. Not much of a news flash there, but it is always worth reminding ourselves that businesses are frequently not friends to free markets and competition.
As there is little news there, let’s move on to the second point. Outsourcing non-educational functions saves a lot of money for educational activities. In Fernandes’ piece there are a couple of paragraphs worth highlighting:
In the past, district officials have stressed that the contract with Whitson is saving Newton schools money. The district used to operate its own food services program and had to traditionally subsidized it at about $1 million annually. But since the program was privatized last year, costs have declined and by the 2014 fiscal year, the district won’t have to put any additional money into food services, Guryan said.
Newton is pleased with the number of meals being served by Whitsons and both the schools and the company are at least breaking even on the venture, Guryan said.
A million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, especially for the services rendered in a single (large) school. Makes me wonder how many school districts contract out food services. Ask your local officials what they are doing. It could save serious money that can go to the core work of schools—teaching and learning.
(But if you get your food services contracted out, make sure the firm in question does not get to bar the door for competitors.)
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
March 28th, 2012
We all want high-quality teachers, right? What are we doing about it? The state has started to push teacher evaluations across the state, and that is great. Especially great because for far too long school managers and supervisors did not perform regular evaluations, which at the very least are useful for professional feedback and growth.
I do have my doubts that a bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all evaluation system is terribly useful besides the obvious fact that it will require more people to fill out paper. My doubts are practical ones. If you are running a school and seeking to peg its performance at a very high level, there are times when you want your teachers to focus on improving their individual performance; and there are times when you want to build the sense of team. No bureaucratic rule is going to get you there. In addition, any performance pay scheme has to start at the top. At the very least, this new system has to be implemented for superintendents, administrative professionals, principals and supervisors first; if not, it will again feel like something that is being done to teachers.
So, if we want high-quality teachers, let’s start with some basic, well-known facts:
- The intellectual capacity of individuals seeking to join the state’s and the nation’s teacher corps is too low. We’ve known this for a long while, but the 2006 report Educating School Teachers led by Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, does a pretty good job of making the case. The report notes that not only are teachers unprepared in technology, curriculum development and assessments, and dealing with ELL and special needs students, but “the SAT and GRE scores of aspiring secondary school teachers are comparable to the national average, the scores of future elementary school teachers fall near the bottom of all test takers, with GRE scores 100 points below the national average.”
- Teacher quality is the one of the most important elements in improving the quality of our schools.
- There is no way to attract aspirants to the profession if starting salaries are not higher. Starting salaries can often be in the $30,000+ range. That’s not enough to attract the top tier of young, ambitious and smart graduates, which is what we need in our classrooms. That is especially so for math and science graduates, who have many more high-paying prospects in the private market.
- We are arguably investing a lot of money for teacher compensation but have the compensation built in a way that is not attracting high-quality teachers. The current compensation system maintains low initial salaries and rewards “system” people. The average teacher in Massachusetts now makes $70,000, a good salary (especially given that many pursue summer work in July and August) which is part of an extraordinarily rich benefits package well beyond the reach of mere private sector mortals. In 2010, Wisconsin teachers were estimated to have an average salary of $56,000, but when their benefits were included the average annual compensation package calculated out at just over $100,000. I’ll look up the Massachusetts benefits overall later and share, but the WI numbers are likely not terribly richer (perhaps 20-25% richer if that?) than our own. Then there is the fact that the benefits schedule truly kicks in around 20 years of service, when the proverbial hockey-stick effect is observed and future benefits skyrocket in value.
So here’s a question: Why can’t we “frontload” some of the overall compensation by reducing the richness of the benefits package in order to make room for salaries for starting teachers?
One objection is that surveys of current teachers suggests that they like the make-up of their compensation package. Yep. I get that, but the objection misses the point. The point is not to ask the current teacher corps what got them into the business and how they like it. The point is to attract a significantly different group with different career options into the profession. Why not survey graduating students who are significantly above average in terms of SATs, GREs, and collegiate accomplishments? That would be more meaningful.
Another objection is that teachers self-fund their pensions and therefore it is up to the current teacher corps to do whatever the heck it wants with their pensions. OK. Two things I would like to bring out: (1) That ducks the question of how to attract high-quality teachers to the profession, and (2) it is absolutely untrue. On the first point, even if teachers did self-fund their pensions, the current compensation schedule stinks as a way to recruit high-quality teachers to the profession. On the second point, teachers don’t self-fund their pensions.
The state has a multi-billion dollar unfunded pension liability for a reason, which is that teacher pensions are not self-funded. Here are the figures from the state’s Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission report for 2011. Please see the chart on page 11 (Section 5, labeled ‘Audit Information: Part B / GASB Statement No. 27′) showing the Massachusetts and Boston Teachers’ share of the ‘state pension fund payment;’ i.e., the annual required contribution by the state to ensure that pensions are whole.
Of the state’s annual obligation of $1.35 billion for state and certain local pensions, the Massachusetts and Boston Teachers make up the lion’s share of the total. In the chart, teacher pensions are broken out into “normal cost” and “amortization cost.”
- The “normal cost” of $107 million is what the state’s pays into the pension fund this year to properly fund what is expected to be paid out in future pensions to Massachusetts Teachers. For Boston Teachers the number is $8.5 million. So in 2011, the state is paying over $115 million to make the Massachusetts and Boston Teachers’ pensions whole. That’s not fully-funded.
- The “amortization cost” is this year’s payment to pay down the unfunded liability. For Massachusetts teachers the number is $661 million; for the Boston Teachers it is $86.2 million. That’s a total of $747.2 million that the state, again, is paying in.
All tallied up, payments on teachers’ pensions make up $862.7 million of the annual $1.35 billion the state pays down on pensions.
That’s quite a bit short of “self-funded.”
What I am arguing for is decidedly not a 401(K) plan for teachers. Teachers should be treated fairly and in fact attractive retirement benefits is of course helpful in attracting high-quality people to the profession. What I’d suggest is that we create a defined benefit package that is more in line with what Social Security provides and then when a teacher makes above a certain salary, s/he can additionally buy into a 401(K) with matches from the state. That’s what we do in the private sector — and it would allow greater ability to flow to and from the teaching profession.
It would also allow us to pay starting teachers quite a bit more. I think that’s a good thing. How to do it? For now, here are some things you might want to read to get some perspective on the issue. This piece by Jacob Vigdor in EducationNext is a great overview on the topic. This EdWeek piece from 2009 points at many of the challenges and the thinking of some superintendents and unions. This study tries to take a look at both backloading (current system) and frontloading. More to come on the topic.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
March 18th, 2012
Periodically, over at the Fordham blog, Checker Finn does his best imitation of the cop waving traffic through at the scene of the car crash we like to call Common Core. In a post last week (“The war against the Common Core”), he morphs into good ol’ Sergeant Finn, crabbing at any observers, “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.” The mishaps around Common Core national standards are simple driver misjudgment, he explains. Steering mistakes. Nobody’s breaking the law. And don’t worry, because even though there have been lots of accidents, the road ahead is not dangerous.
This is classic Checker handwaving, passing off politics as policy. Let’s look at the four arguments he makes.
1. Don’t worry about the quality of the standards, amending them, etc. Checker starts in his usual way by calling people who disagree “zealous assailants” (we were kvetchers a few handwaves back) who have mounted “ceaseless attacks” creating a “tempest in a highly visible teapot.” I suppose he is referring to Pioneer’s four studies (1, 2, 3, 4) on the quality (or lack thereof) of the national standards. Checker argues that
[O]ther states could simply copy the best of those that already exist. But that’s more or less what the Common Core is: an amalgam of good standards put together by people who know a lot—and care a lot—about both content and skills.
No matter how many times Checker and Fordham say this does not matter. It is factually untrue. The experts who conducted our four comparisons of the national standards to specific state standards were the best in the business, far more qualified to make judgments than the ones employed by Fordham. And they found not only that there are a few flaws related to algebra, but that the math standards are a significant step down on algebra; that they have numerous problems with basic arithmetic; they impose an experimental (and not likely to succeed) pedagogical method for teaching geometry; and they aim at community college level math. On the English language arts side of the ledger, they found that the national standards markedly de-emphasize literature, which will slow the acquisition of a rich vocabulary; they put English teachers in the position of teaching technical readings (good luck with that); and they, again, aim far too low.
Checker’s handwaving on the significance of these flaws is a sign of an impractical, overly theoretical approach to education policy, and nothing short of irresponsible:
Insofar as such criticisms are warranted, the Common Core can be revised, states can add standards of their own, and jurisdictions that find the common version truly unsatisfactory can change their minds about using it at all.
The two assertions made here are just wrong. Yes, states can add standards of their own (up to 15% of content), which for places like Massachusetts does little to get us to the same level of expectations we had set before. In addition, content added by specific states will not be included in the national tests, so few schools will teach the add-ons. Finally, the idea that it is oh-so-easy to change the national standards is overindulgent daydreaming. Any state desiring to change a strand of the standards will have to negotiate with 40+ jurisdictions, the non-profits involved in this effort, and of course the federal government. To date, there has been no process established for amending the standards. Just think about that for a second.
On whether states can pull out, well, more below.
2. We the DC People working on the national standards are all of good will and working hard to implement these things. Yup, OK. I do have reservations about the intentions of some, but let’s not go there. What is worth stating clearly though is that Checker and the folks in DC pushing this aren’t serious about upholding the public trust and in devising policy in a responsible and publicly accountable way. Big words, I know. Here are the facts to back my view up.
• We know very well that there is a lack of settlement around the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and that is due in part to the way it was forced through Congress and the perceived costs of implementing it. (Clearly control of your own health care matters to a large portion of the US population as well.) Including the adoption of national standards in grant program requirements and then having the federal government fund the development of curricular materials and instructional practice guides directly, well, these actions were never even approved by Congress. The reason there has never been a Congressional Budget Office scoring of the cost to states is because, again, it was never approved by Congress. So the lack of settlement around Common Core is even more to be expected than what we’ve seen to date regarding the PPACA.
• Checker holds himself up as working to “cost it all out.” Shouldn’t that have been done before moving ahead? Have we grown so irresponsible as to adopt blank check policy making? That’s ridiculous, and that’s why Pioneer Institute is the only research outfit in the U.S. to have performed an actual cost accounting of the implementation of national standards and tests. Ted Rebarber of AccountabilityWorks conducted a fair and empirical analysis of the cost of implementation, and found that it will cost $16 billion.
That’s almost assuredly going to be an unfunded mandate. Fordham’s working on it? The fact is that when our report came out, they assigned someone with no ability to review the study. Kathleen Porter-Magee’s criticisms of the report for Fordham are flimsy in the extreme. For example, KP-M wants the study’s author Ted Rebarber to build into his cost estimates something outside of empirical data—an assumption that as yet unheard of reforms by the feds will lead to big cost reductions. It is worth nothing that this is just more evidence that the quality of Fordham’s work has fallen quickly these past years as the good Sergeant and his troops have taken up handwaving and pom-poms for the national standards. We’re supposed to skip empirical evidence and assume reforms in order to make the numbers work?
We saw the same thing with the Fordham Institute’s review of the Massachusetts state standards prior to our state board’s vote to adopt Common Core. Then, Fordham’s researcher(s) did not include key aspects of the Bay State’s revisions to its English standards.
Sloppy stuff. Reason #4212 why DC players, who don’t know what they’re talking about, should stay out of state education policy.
• While the Fordham Institute and its friends who are supporting the Common Core might find it a pesky reality, the advancement of standards, tests, curricular materials and instructional practice guides is illegal. Go back and read that sentence. Perhaps the view of two former counsels general doesn’t matter to Checker and his fellow travelers, but you are breaking three federal laws—the General Education Provisions Act, the Department of Education Organization Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The three laws prohibit the direction, supervision or control in any way of standards, curricula and curricular materials and instructional practice. For example, the GEPA clearly states:
No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, or to require the assignment or transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance.
If I were Checker, I would think hard on this one, especially with attorneys general not shy in taking on expansions of federal power (at the end of March the Supreme Court of the United States will be hearing oral arguments on the PPACA presented by state AGs).
3. States can pull out of the Common Core and go it alone any time they want. For rhetorical reasons, Checker has separated his argument on this issue into two points (#4 and #6) but they all are closely related. Yes, Texas and Virginia and a handful of states have not adopted the Common Core. Checker admits that the likelihood (not fear) that
Uncle Sam won’t be able to keep his hands off the Common Core—which means the whole enterprise will be politicized, corrupted and turned from national/voluntary into federal/coercive … is probably the strongest objection to the Common Core.
I say this is is likely because this has been the march of the Department since 1979. It is the reason why the Department (and supporters like Checker) thinks that breaking three federal laws is the acceptable price of progress. They know their intentions are good, so breaking the law is in the interests of the country, and therefore the right thing to do. That mindset makes what Checker calls fears and suspicions a likely outcome. But it’s not fear telling us that but rather judgment based on past experience. It’s an incontrovertible fact that Democrats and Republicans have grown the Department’s reach and budget enormously in the past three decades.
In Checker’s telling, all opposition is related to “suspicion” and “lingering fears” about past attempts. Conveniently, he then pivots to his political exercise of pointing fingers at an “over-zealous Education Secretary and the President he serves.” You know, it’s a simple steering error.
The problem is that Checker has no more standing on this issue. He didn’t fight back when remarks by the Secretary and President made their intentions clear. He did not fight back when the administration created a “fiscal ‘incentive’ in Race to the Top for states to adopt the Common Core.” Calling the department out now for that is just political posturing on Checker’s part.
Then, of course, there’s the “incentive” built into the NCLB waiver process for states to adopt the Common Core. When Arne Duncan announced his decision to move ahead with waivers that posed conditions on the states that had never been approved by Congress (and which violated the aforementioned three federal laws), Fordham’s Mike Petrilli was reduced in his blog to begging Sec. Duncan not to overreach:
Walk away from this one, Mr. Secretary. Please, those of us who support the Common Core are begging you.
That’s a rather unbecoming act for a citizen in a free republic: Americans don’t generally like begging our federal officials. Yet that is what we all will be doing forward. And that was made clear to South Carolina, which recently debated leaving the Common Core. That earned a press release directly from Secretary Duncan’s mouth, “lambasting” lawmakers and the governor for even considering such a thing.
Checker downplays the feds’ funding of national assessments, admitting that it is a “third federal entanglement.” Conveniently, while he notes some requirements that come with the national tests, he skips over the fact that these assessments come with curricular materials and instructional practice guides—which are again illegal.
4. “National” is the right way to go. Let me be as kind as I can (at east to start).
- It’s illegal. We are a nation of laws, not megalomaniacs.
- Just as many nations with national standards score below as above the United States on international tests.
- Most of the nations with national standards are much smaller and often more homogeneous than the United States.
- Did I mention that it’s illegal? (I’d love to see your argument on that one, Checker.)
- The U.S. Department of Education has no track record of improving schools.
I would also note that I bristle at the thought that Massachusetts or other states should follow the advice of the Fordham Institute, which has a limited record of improving schools. I would invite readers to take a look at Ohio’s NAEP scores, as well as the performance of Ohio’s charter schools, an issue on which Fordham has been very active.
Once again, Checker gives us so many good reasons and so many good opportunities to demonstrate that he is wrong, and it’s largely because he is playing politics not policy. Obviously, he is a smart man and someone, to be honest, that has done important work in the past. But right now everything he is writing ostensibly on standards policy smacks of political positioning. He’s always looking to angle for what he thinks observers will read as the mid-range, reasonable position. Checker’s latest schtick of being for national standards but harboring thoughtful concerns about the people in power just doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Sarge, I have a couple of constructive suggestions to help you deal with that incessant handwaving tick you have.
The above Providence, RI, traffic cop has taken to dancing in the middle of the street to entertain rush hour. Such a set of moves would allow you to take people’s minds off of the Common Core crash-up and do it redirecting your handwaving to productive ends.
Or perhaps we could celebrate good ol’ Sergeant Finn’s retirement in style, as was done for this fine officer on his last day of service, marked by a box of donuts.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
March 6th, 2012
The last decade has seen an explosion in the number of middle and high schools mandating volunteerism. I am not a fan of forcing volunteerism, and “mandatory volunteerism” offends those who treasure meaningful language. But within a set of courses and activities aimed at rounding out children so that they will become effective participants in civil society, such requirements may make sense. That is especially so if students can choose the volunteer program and not be restricted to school-approved activities. Choosing what you are passionate about is critical to being a good citizen.
Clearly, such mandates are not things we impose on adults. Which is why it is so disconcerting to see the federal department of education treat state and local education leaders like children.
Way back in 2009, when U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top competition, it was couched in closely scripted remarks about how this was a voluntary competition that would not upend 200 years of history around state and local primacy in education policy. Even as he saluted former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt in June 2009 for supporting “common national standards when it wasn’t politically popular,” Sec. Duncan extolled the federalist system:
I am continually struck by the profound wisdom underlying the American political experiment. The genius of our system is that much of the power to shape our future has, wisely, been distributed to the states instead of being confined to Washington.
Our best ideas have always come from state and local governments, which are the real hothouses of innovation in America.
That hymnal was clearly distributed to national and local partners, with the National School Boards Association, Achieve, Inc., the National Governors Association’s lobby and other fellow travelers who made a point of employing words like “state-led,” “voluntary,” and “partnership” to counter suggestions that the feds were driving the effort. Anyone who questioned how long this representation of intent would last was relegated to the realm of overly dramatic, a kvetcher, or a conspiracy theorist.
We are now on the second and perhaps third act of this piece of theater. In round one, legislatures made affirmative choices to expand charter schools. In round two, states only got funding if they complied with federal definitions of reform and innovation; and in all but five cases without legislative action and, frankly, without legislative awareness. Round three has the federal government directly funding the development of national assessments that explicitly come with curricular materials and instructional practice guides.
And now a number of states are getting antsy. The photo-op public announcements of federal grants long past, we are now into implementation—and state legislators are facing a rude awakening. Only now are they hearing about the mediocre quality of the national standards, the as-yet-undefined assessments, the imposition of curricular materials, the never stated costs, and the possibility that this whole effort actually breaks three federal laws. Only now are they recognizing the potential political mess to come with the feds’ establishment of definitions of proficiency.
The great innovators inside the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building did not take kindly to the barrage of reports on the mediocre quality of the national education standards (1, 2, 3, 4). Nor did they take kindly to reports showing that they are breaking three federal laws by directing and funding the development of national tests, curricular materials and instructional practice guides. A recent report that implementation of the national standards and tests will cost $16-plus billion (90% of which will come from states and localities) didn’t sit well with them either.
In addition to the lagging time to grasp the real policy questions before them, the past three years have brought a sea-change in the political landscape. The 2010 elections changed the make-up of state legislatures dramatically, with a greater number of fiscal conservatives who look warily at unfunded federal mandates and overreach. With the new conditions, never approved by Congress, that Sec. Duncan is advancing, there is a growing realization among state legislators that the national standards are not truly voluntary. Even a stalwart supporter of a big USDOE like Mike Petrilli of the DC-based Fordham Institute recognizes that with the No Child Left Behind waivers Sec. Duncan:
seems compelled to attach mandates to his forthcoming NCLB waivers that will require adoption of the Common Core standards.
No, his team won’t mention the Common Core, but everybody knows that’s what he’s talking about when he calls for “college and career-ready standards.”
Fearful of stoking a backlash that will “lose many of the states that have already signed on,” Petrilli in his blog is reduced to begging Sec. Duncan not to overreach:
Walk away from this one, Mr. Secretary. Please, those of us who support the Common Core are begging you.
That’s a rather unbecoming act for a citizen in a free republic: We don’t generally like begging our federal officials. That is in fact something state legislators abhor.
Unsurprisingly, there are state officials who are running for the exits. Hearings have been held in Indiana and South Carolina on bills that would prohibit implementation of the national standards and tests. More bills are working their way toward hearings in other states, as a number of state legislators and governors are showing the audacity to question whether national standards and assessments are actually a good idea.
In Indiana, notwithstanding former Bush budgetmaster and sitting Governor Mitch Daniels’ support for Common Core, the legislature is insisting on a study of the cost of implementation:
Members of the Senate Committee on Education today unanimously approved a resolution authored by Sen. Scott Schneider (R-Indianapolis) urging a more in-depth study on Common Core State Standards and the impact on Indiana’s nationally recognized education benchmarks.
In some states, both governors and legislators are asking questions–and even reaching a position of opposition. For example, in South Carolina, prior to an education subcommittee hearing on S.604, a bill that would prohibit the state from implementing the national standards and tests, Governor Nikki Haley took the bold step of calling for the state to pull out.
My testimony to the subcommittee drew on reports on the lack of quality, the cost and the illegality of the national standards and assessment project. But I also made one additional important argument, which is built off of the fact that South Carolina has been recognized as having the best U.S. History standards in the country. South Carolina and other states that choose to exit the national standards should not simply say no. They could draw from Texas’ efforts:
Consulting with top academicians in the U.S. and taking note of Singapore’s much-vaunted standards, Texas re-designed its state standards. Today, Texas not only has excellent English standards but also has among the best math standards in the country—far stronger than the Common Core.
South Carolina has rigorous US history standards and high-quality state standards. Saying “no” to Common Core is a matter of good judgment—but I would urge you additionally to use the opportunity of this debate to move forward with positive improvements to the Palmetto State’s standards and assessments.
States must aim higher than Common Core. Common Core aims at community college readiness, and that is not good enough for Massachusetts–and not going to make the U.S. internationally competitive.
As Catherine Gewertz of EdWeek noted, the bill “got voted down in a state Senate subcommittee, but was still going to move on to the full education committee.”
But US Ed Secretary’s reaction to the South Carolina legislature’s and the governor’s actions was instructive. The day after the subcommittee vote, Sec. Duncan issued a formal statement on the happenings in South Carolina, which Gewertz described as “swipe” at the Palmetto State and “designed to dismantle support for the proposed legislation”:
The idea that the Common Core standards are nationally-imposed is a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy. The Common Core academic standards were both developed and adopted by the states, and they have widespread bipartisan support.
Noting that states must stop “dummying down academic standards and lying about the performance of children and schools,” he accused the Palmetto State of “lower[ing] the bar for proficiency in English and mathematics faster than any state in the country from 2005 to 2009.”
You could analyze the secretary’s formal statement for style points, such as
- Why didn’t Sec. Duncan ask a surrogate to make such a statement rather than personally get involved? Previous secretaries would certainly not have been so heavy-handed.
- Who writes the secretary’s releases? “Dummying down”? They don’t teach that at Harvard, so I am going to guess it’s a Chicago-ism. And does the secretary hope to convince state legislators toward a course of action by berating them as if they were little children?
But there are two important, substantive conclusions to draw from the secretary’s broadside.
- The secretary is, in essence, accusing South Carolina of cooking the books on student performance. As Jay Greene notes, that is factually inaccurate, and the secretary is either ignorant of state practice or his is shading the truth to suit his argument:
South Carolina did significantly lower its performance standards between 2005 and 2009. But they did so because they had earlier raised those performance standards to well-above the national average. In the end, South Carolina had math and reading performance standards that were close to the national average and close to the NAEP standard for Basic.
- It’s unseemly for the secretary of education of the federal government to make a formal statement about a legislative proposal related to education standards in the state of South Carolina. That is especially true if Common Core is truly a state-led effort. More directly: if all this talk about state-led standards is true, why is the U.S. Secretary of Education flying off the handle when a single state expresses interest in pulling out? As CATO’s Neal McCluskey put it, “Apparently, if you try to undo something the feds want you to do, they’ll slap you around until you confess they’ve never threatened you.”
The feds want Common Core really bad. This is mandatory volunteerism of the worst kind. It is a power play that is advancing a mediocre product, with high undisclosed and unfunded costs for states and localities, and it is illegal. Those are three really big strikes against it.
But worst of all, it treats states like children. However critical I can be of education leaders in our and other states, I cannot see a record of any accomplishment by the so-called adults in Washington that compares with the demonstrated gains in Massachusetts, Florida and many other states.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
February 26th, 2012
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