ESEA Come, ESEA Go

The chatter among the education cognescenti this week is about what is and what isn't in the bipartisan ESEA draft released by Senate education chair Tom Harkin (D-IA) and ranking member Mike Enzi (R-WY).

Let me repeat my prior contention that, politically, ESEA reauthorization is an issue for 2013 -- not 2011 or 2012. The Republican-led U.S. House is not going to give President Obama any kind of a political victory, despite the solid compromise put forth by the Senate HELP Committee. For that reason, the work currently underway is in part about laying the groundwork for a future compromise, in part a genuine attempt to get something done (despite the House), and in part political cover.

The bill itself represents a sensible step back from a pie-in-the-sky accountability goal of 100% proficiency in favor of annual state data transparency, continued data disaggregation among subgroups, and greater state flexibility over educational accountability. Personally, I am not an accountability hawk and am unswayed by spotty evidence and advocates such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush who contends that it was Florida's accountability system (rather than its major investment in literacy and other interventions) that fueled student test-score gains. Chairman Harkin nails it by saying that the bill "focuses on teaching and learning, not testing and sanctioning." Amen to that.

Seeing as I have a day job that doesn't allow me to analyze the entirety of 800-page bills, here is my quick take on a few elements in the draft bill:

Positives

• Accountability: Eliminates AYP. Requires states to identify 5% lowest-performing schools and 5% of schools with the largest achievement gaps.
  
• CSR: Tightens up the use of Title II, Part A for class-size reduction to ensure that those dollars are directed at research-based implementation of smaller class sizes. [UPDATE: This could potentially free up some Title II, Part A dollars for teacher professional development and new teacher support.]
  
• Teacher & Principal Training & Recruiting Fund: This Fund would support state & local activities that further high-quality PD, rigorous evaluation and support systems, and improve the equitable distribution of teachers. The bill's language significantly strengthens existing federal policy language regarding the elements of comprehensive, high-quality educator induction and mentoring.

Concerns

• Equitable teacher distribution: The bill would require states to ensure that high-poverty and high-minority schools receive an equitable distribution of the most effective educators as measured by new teacher evaluation systems that must include four performance tiers. Sounds good and fair. But given that teacher working conditions significantly impact an individual educator's ability to be effective in the classroom (and garner a "highly effective" rating [see DC]), wouldn't this just create a massive game of musical chairs and major disruptions in the teaching pool unless a determined effort were mounted to improve the often poor teaching and learning conditions present in high-poverty schools?
  

Good Coverage & Analysis

Alyson Klein - Politics K-12 - Education Week
Joy Resmovits - Huffington Post
Stephen Sawchuk - Teacher Beat - Education Week
The Quick and the Ed (Education Sector)

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Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword Redux

A USA Today investigation calls into question "dramatic" improvements in student test scores in select District of Columbia schools due to an "abnormal pattern" of erasures. This occurred during Michelle Rhee's tenure as DC schools chancellor.

Among the 96 DC schools that were flagged for wrong-to-right erasures by the city's testing contractor in 2008 "were eight of the 10 campuses where Rhee handed out so-called TEAM awards 'to recognize, reward and retain high-performing educators and support staff'.... Rhee bestowed more than $1.5 million in bonuses on principals, teachers and support staff on the basis of big jumps in 2007 and 2008 test scores.

In 2008, to her credit, then-DC state superintendent (now Rhode Island education commissioner) Deborah Gist recommended that large test score gains in certain schools be investigated, but as USA Today reported, "top D.C. public school officials balked and the recommendation was dropped."

Such allegations and instances of cheating are not unique to Washington DC of course. In 2010, a New York Times article chronicled erasures in Houston and noted investigations in Georgia (including a criminal probe in Atlanta), Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Virginia.

This latest development, however, adds a new wrinkle to my 2009 post, "Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword."

Michelle Rhee and other education reform advocates have publicly argued that student performance as measured by test scores is basically the be all and end all....

Student learning, school leadership and teaching cannot be measured and judged good or bad based on a single set of test scores. Test scores must be part of the consideration -- and supporting systems such as accountability, compensation and evaluation must be informed by such data -- but they should not single-handedly define success or failure.

When such huge stakes are placed on a single metric, it raises the likelihood of monkey business. Although it is highly likely this is what occurred in DC, a former employee of DC Public Schools (who tweets as @EduEscritora) makes several smart observations on her blog:

[T]he fact that the number of flagged schools decreased so precipitously from 2008 to 2009 is encouraging, even if we don’t know why that happened.

The decreasing number of schools also doesn’t support the claim that the pay-for-performance system now in place under IMPACT has resulted in cheating; 2010 was the first year that IMPACT existed, and that had the fewest number of flagged schools out of the three years in the study and the fewest number of schools with over 50% of the classrooms flagged – only two!

The problem for an advocate like Michelle Rhee is that she has chosen to largely define success based on a single metric: the test score. If many of these DC test-score gains turn out to be illusory and succumb to what some are calling the "Erase To The Top" scandal, it may spell further trouble for Rhee as a spokesperson for the school reform movement. (Rhee has claimed the largest NAEP score gains in the nation under her leadership, although other analyses have shown that increases began and were larger under Rhee's predecessors.) Her credibility already has been questioned by some as a result of alleged embellishments on her resume about her own teaching record. Without credibility, it is impossible to sell one's wares to anyone but true believers.

From a PR standpoint, this erasure story would seem to call for a measured response that carefully chronicles whatever steps, if any, were taken by DCPS at the time to address the unusual frequency of erasures. Instead, through a spokesperson, Michelle Rhee chose to 'shoot the messenger,' bombastically placing USA Today among the "enemies of school reform." [UPDATE: From the Washington Post's Jay Mathews: "Rhee calls her remarks on test erasures 'stupid'"]

Given Rhee's rhetoric, her policies in DC, and her current focus as head of StudentsFirst (which increasingly appears to be working solely with Republican governors and legislators at the state level), Michelle Rhee has largely pinned her credibility to the test score. If she had chosen to sit on a stool with more than a single leg, she might be sitting more comfortably right now and might not be engaged in a such a precarious and delicate balancing act. No doubt by taking on teacher tenure, she would have made enemies no matter what else she said or did. However, if she touted a more nuanced view of school improvement and student success and didn't poo-poo collaboration, she might not face a growing anti-Rhee cottage industry and her new organization might have had a chance to be a true non-partisan force in education reform.

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Michelle Rhee: Greatest Hits

By now you've undoubtedly heard that Michelle Rhee will announce her resignation tomorrow, ending her three-year run as District of Columbia Schools Chancellor.

I thought I would share some of my past blog posts on Rhee, including "Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword?," "A Generational Divide Over Teacher Pay," and "Towards More Equitable Teacher Distribution."

Perhaps the best post mortem was offered last week - "(D)issing (C)ollaboration."

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(D)issing (C)ollaboration

Something's rotten in the District of Columbia. That appears to be the assessment made by the city's voters in last month's Democratic primary in which they ousted one-term Mayor Adrian Fenty in favor of City Council President Vincent Gray. This effectively makes Gray the next mayor in a city where Republicans are inconsequential in its political system.

Mayor Fenty, of course, hired Michelle Rhee to serve as Schools Chancellor in June 2007. Both have governed in a non-collaborative, take-no-prisoners style and numerous election post mortems have identified that style of leadership -- both his and hers -- as a primary reason for Fenty's defeat.

Here are the three best analyses I've read about how Mayor Adrian Fenty (and, by association, Chancellor Michelle Rhee) lost DC:

(1) Sam Chaltain, 9/15/2010: "Why Adrian Fenty Lost the City -- and How Vincent Gray Can Win It Back"
(2) Judith Warner, New York Times, 10/1/2010: "Is Michelle Rhee's Revolution Over?"
(3) Dana Goldstein, The Daily Beast, 9/15/2010: "Obama Loses a Mayor"

In his blog post, Sam Chaltain draws from his new book -- American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community -- to underscore how Fenty and Rhee went wrong.

[A]ny organizational leader ... needs to develop three foundational skills: self-awareness, systems thinking, and strategically-deployed collaborative decision-making.... When these three skills start to take root in individuals and the organizational culture of which they’re a part, a palpable shift takes place. Transformational change, and the collective will and clarity needed to achieve it, becomes possible.... To me, the most accurate (and damning) criticism of Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee was that they failed to understand, or even value, the importance of addressing the human elements of change.

Judith Warner, in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, diagnoses the self-destructive leadership style of Michelle Rhee.

[T]he night after the mayoral primary, Rhee appeared at the Washington premiere of Davis Guggenheim’s much-talked-about education documentary, “Waiting for Superman,” and told an assemblage of prominent Washingtonians that the election results “were devastating, devastating. Not for me, I’ll be fine . . . but devastating for the school children of Washington, D.C.”

In the local blogs that buzzed with outrage after Rhee’s comment, a theme became clear: people — even people who seemed destined to most benefit from the work of a committed reformer like Rhee — don’t like to get the message that their communities are on the wrong track. That their schools are no good, the teachers in them subpar; that their decision to back a politician who doesn’t share the reformer’s particular style of quasi-missionary zeal would consign their kids to disaster.

It became clear that people don’t much like stern-faced do-gooders telling them how to think and what to do; that they prefer “a reform agenda that’s being done with people, not to people,” as Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, recently put it. They don’t like collective slap-downs — like the one Rhee managed when she referred to the hundreds of fired teachers indiscriminately in an interview with a business magazine as people who “had hit children, who had had sex with children.” They don’t like to see respected members of their community seemingly compared to dirt, as Rhee unthinkingly did by agreeing to pose on the cover of Time wielding a big broom. They like policy makers who at least appear to be taking their concerns to heart, as Rhee pointedly did not, bluntly telling the magazine: “I’m not going to pretend to solicit your advice so you’ll feel involved, because that’s just fake.”

Dana Goldstein, a Spencer Education Journalism Fellow at Columbia University, writing in The Daily Beast, said:

The words used to describe Fenty by the 53 percent of District residents who opposed his reelection—brash, arrogant, condescending—are really descriptions of his schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, a woman who has said, over and over again, “Collaboration and consensus building are quite frankly overrated in my mind.”

Indeed, the tragedy of Fenty’s loss is that the Michelle Rhee reform agenda may now be aborted before it has been fully implemented, giving education reformers one less data point in their search for strategies that work.

One hopes that if D.C.’s new mayor, Vincent Gray, asks Rhee to stay on, she will. (Gray has been unclear about his intentions on this question.) But one also hopes that, in Fenty’s defeat, Rhee has learned a lesson crucial to any effort at institutional reform: Collaboration and consensus building aren’t overrated, after all.

Undoubtedly, DC schools have made progress under Fenty/Rhee on numerous metrics. Test scores. Student enrollment. Supplies. Basic functioning. I have been both complimentary and critical of Michelle Rhee in past blog posts. But the lesson of the election perhaps is that substance and results should carry the day, but style is not inconsequential, especially when it gets in the way.

Leadership style matters in any enterprise, even in education, despite denials by prognosticators (such as The New Republic's Seyward Darby who said "the future of D.C. public education doesn't rest on personal style") and reformers (such as Andy Rotherham AKA Eduwonk who dismissed the style issue and said the "more serious problem is intense organized opposition to what she’s trying to do." I reject these notions that Rhee's longevity is irrelevant and that opposition to Rhee was purely substantive. Compare her to Ronald Reagan, a president who maintained strong personal support through much of his presidency even when the public disagreed with numerous of his public policy stances. He achieved that through a tremendous force of personality, an uncanny sense of people, and an upbeat vision of America -- and got more done as a result. A very different approach to leadership.

Leadership -- and personal -- style matters for urban school superintendents because it is directly related to their longevity and to the sustainability and breadth of their reforms. And they are closer to the ground, addressing issues related to people's children and to teachers' careers, where everything is more personal. They need to engage with stakeholders and connect with them. It gets to Larry Cuban's excellent point about sprinters versus marathoners. "A sprinter in D.C., however, may not last to change how nearly 4,000 teachers teach and 55,000 students learn. Or look at San Diego Superintendent Alan Bersin who ran out of gas in 2005." In short, we need the latter, Cuban says.

A key part of leadership style is inclusiveness and collaboration. It is apparent that the absence of effective partnerships -- or even willing dialogue -- between the Fenty/Rhee team and teachers, parents and the school community (and DC's African-American community, in particular) may have been exactly what led to the dissolution of this political partnership between the mayor and his city. Rhee's rhetoric, including claiming falsely that unspecified numbers of teachers were dismissed because they had sexually assaulted students probably wasn't a good way to build community either -- and her public image, seared into public consciousness as the broom lady on the cover of TIME magazine, simply made things worse. None of that -- none of it -- was necessary to get the job done. In fact, it made it more difficult and has put the entire enterprise in jeopardy.

Now, there were those who were critical of Rhee since day one because of the content of her reform agenda. Perhaps those naysayers never could have been brought along. And there were others whose support was undoubtedly lost by the wave of changes advocated and unleashed by Rhee. That's an unavoidable consequence of leadership. But there were many others who could have been and should have been brought along. The problem was that there has appeared to be an overarching focus on doing reform TO people as opposed to adopting reforms WITH people. Substantively, the balance was off a bit as well. Rhee's decision to rhetorically highlight and prioritize teacher evaluation (and the resulting teacher firings) and to downplay efforts to build teacher capacity is telling. DC's winning Race to the Top proposal arguably has the least focus on teacher professional development, mentoring and induction of any of the 36 Phase Two proposals submitted to the U.S. Department of Education.

Rhee has been unwilling to admit, at least publicly, that her style contributed to Fenty's downfall -- and potentially her early departure from the District. And that's not surprising given her past comments basically shitting on collaboration and consensus building. Rather, Rhee has chalked up the defeat to a failure to communicate "why we were making the decisions that we did." That's certainly a piece of it, as Matthew Yglesias recently argued, saying: "Michelle Rhee unquestionably ended up doing this city a disservice with her habit of spending more time courting a nationwide constituency than on painful block-by-block selling of her message in skeptical communities."

But there were some, like Robert Pondisico ('Michelle Rhee Is Scaring Me', 12/1/2008), who can rightly say that they saw this coming:

Here’s what worries me: accurate or inaccurate, fair or unfair, the increasingly confrontational, impatient, blunt, even rude public persona that’s affixing itself to the Washington, DC schools chancellor runs the risk of getting in the way of what Michelle Rhee wants to accomplish. I’ll put it bluntly: piss off enough people whose help is essential to your success, and your failure becomes inevitable, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Then for years to come, the answer to the reforms anyone proposes becomes, “Oh yes, we tried that in Washington under Michelle Rhee and you remember how that worked out.” If she fails, Michelle Rhee’s failure will not be hers alone. At worst, she runs the risk of damaging the ed reform “brand” for a generation.

Change never was going to come easy to DC Public Schools given its historic dysfunction. Rhee, as Schools Chancellor, has made major strides in three years on the job and set the system on a course for future improvement. But one has to wonder if she had included even an occasional spoonful of sugar to doses of her brand of medicine -- or at least thought about asking folks which flavor they might prefer -- whether things might have turned out just a bit differently.

10/7/2010 UPDATE: Check out Robert McCartney's highly relevant piece in the 10/7/2010 Washington Post -- and this recent Baltimore Sun story -- about the new teachers contract achieved by a collaborative approach between Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso and AFT head Randi Weingarten.

10/8/2010 UPDATE: "Fenty says education reform cost him re-election" (Mike DeBonis/Washington Post)

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Updates on the Race: 12-14-2009

NATIONAL:
Who Would Have Guessed The Race Would Look Like This? (Democrats for Education Reform)

36 States to Apply in Round 1 (Education Week Politics K-12 blog)

CALIFORNIA:
Campaign cash from charters driving Governor's, state's goals? (Contra Costa Times)

Editorial: Schools race to -- where, exactly? (Los Angeles Times)

Politics, politics (AP)

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA: DC gets to apply, too (Washington Post)

GEORGIA: State a 'frontrunner' (Gainesville Times)

LOUISIANA:
State bid would impact teacher evaluation, pay (The Advocate - Baton Rouge)

Educators wary of state plan (The Advocate - Baton Rouge)

MARYLAND: Editorial: Gates rejection a 'wake-up call' (Baltimore Sun)

MASSACHUSETTS: Op-ed from Stand for Children, Black Leaders for Excellence in Education (The Boston Globe)

MICHIGAN:
Race to the trough in Michigan? (Ann Arbor.com)

Editorial: Legislature's 'racing', but to where? (Lansing State Journal)

NEVADA: Editorial: Governor Gibbons' failure to lead (Las Vegas Sun)

NEW YORK:
Strategy to be unveiled (Gotham Schools)

More charters, teacher testing part of plan (Albany Times-Union)

OHIO: State eligibility caught up in budget stand-off? (The Columbus Dispatch)

SOUTH DAKOTA: State probably a 'long shot' (Sioux Falls Argus Leader)

TENNESSEE: State partnership with Battelle to focus on STEM (The Tennesseean)

WASHINGTON: Editorial: 'Beggars can't be whiners' (The News Tribune - Tacoma)

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Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword?

The problem with Jay Mathews' defense ("Measuring Progress At Shaw With More Than Numbers") of a Washington, DC school principal who did not demonstrate student learning gains at his school after one year is that the principal operates within an accountability system that demands such a result. In this case, both Mathews -- and DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, as described in Mathews' WP column -- are right not to have lowered the boom on Brian Betts, principal of the DC's Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson, based on a single year's worth of test scores.

The state superintendent of education's Web site says Shaw dropped from 38.6 to 30.5 in the percentage of students scoring at least proficient in reading, and from 32.7 to 29.2 in math.

But those were not the numbers Rhee read to Betts over the phone.

Only 17 percent of Shaw's 2009 students had attended the school in 2008, distorting the official test score comparisons. Rhee instead recited the 2008 and 2009 scores of the 44 students who had been there both years. It didn't help much.

The students' decline in reading was somewhat smaller; it went from 34.5 to 29.7. Their math proficiency increased a bit, from 26.2 to 29.5. But Shaw is still short of the 30 percent mark, far below where Rhee and Betts want to be....

Despite the sniping at Rhee, the best teachers I know think that what happened at Shaw is a standard part of the upgrading process. I have watched Betts, his staff, students and parents for a year. The improvement of poor-performing schools has been the focus of my reporting for nearly three decades. The Shaw people are doing nearly everything that the most successful school turnaround artists have done.

They have raised expectations for students. They have recruited energetic teachers who believe in the potential of impoverished students. They have organized themselves into a team that compares notes on youngsters. They regularly review what has been learned, what some critics dismiss as "teaching to the test." They consider it an important part of their jobs.

That's how it's done, usually with a strong and engaging principal like Betts.

Mathews' take -- including consideration of contextual factors, such as the fact that only 17% of the school's students had attended the prior year and the contention that school turnaround requires more than a single year -- is how the education world should work. Embrace the complexity of learning and trying to measure it! To do so would disallow the use of single-year changes in test scores for making high-stakes decisions about schools and individual school personnel. It would also remove the unrealistic pressure on school turnarounds to bear fruit in a single year. Test scores would be used responsibly in combination with other data and evidence to paint a fuller picture about individual school contexts and inform judgments about school leadership and student success.

But Michelle Rhee and other education reform advocates have publicly argued that student performance as measured by test scores is basically the be all and end all. According to this Washington Post story ("Testing Tactics Helped Fuel D.C. School Gains"), Rhee supports strengthening No Child Left Behind to "emphasize year-to-year academic growth." Such a stance creates a problem for such reformers when they are leading a district and staking their leadership on uncomplicated test score gains. Others will assess their leadership and judge their success by this measure -- an ill-advised one in its simplest form.

I would argue that, in addition to doing the right thing (as happened in this instance), reform advocates and school leaders like Rhee also have a responsibility to say and advocate for the right thing. They have a responsibility to be honest about the complexity of student learning and the inability of student assessments to accurate capture all of the nuance going on within schools and classrooms. While the reformers' challenge of the adult-focused policies of the educational status quo is often warranted, some reforms -- accountability, chief among them -- have been taken too far. Student learning, school leadership and teaching cannot be measured and judged good or bad based on a single set of test scores. Test scores must be part of the consideration -- and supporting systems such as accountability, compensation and evaluation must be informed by such data -- but they should not single-handedly define success or failure.

The complexity as presented by Mathews in his article -- and, more importantly, by existing research (such as by Robert Linn, Aaron Pallas, Tim Sass, and embedded within Sunny Ladd's RttT comments) about year-to-year comparisons of both overall test scores and test score gains -- strongly suggests that educational accountability systems should be designed more thoughtfully than they have been to date, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the direction that policymaking is headed at either the federal or state levels. Part of being more thoughtful is moving away from NCLB-style adequate yearly progress and toward a value-added approach, but thoughtfulness also requires not making high-stakes decisions based exclusively on volatile student data. Do I hear "multiple measures"? Sure, but Sherman Dorn offers some provocative thoughts on this subject in a 2007 blog post.

With regard to educational accountability, policymakers first should do their homework -- and then they clearly have more work to do in creating a better system and undoing parts of the existing system that aren't evidence-based and accomplish only in simplifying a truly complex art: learning.

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For those of you that have gotten this far, there's a related post on the New America Foundation's Ed Money Watch blog discussing a new GAO report that analyzes state spending on student assessment tests -- $640 million in 2007-08.

The increasing cost of developing and scoring assessments has also led many states to implement simpler and more cost-effective multiple choice tests instead of open response tests. In fact, although five states have changed their assessments to include more open response items in both reading and math since 2002, 11 and 13 states have removed open items from their reading and math tests, respectively over the same time period.... This reliance on multiple choice tests has forced states to limit the content and complexity of what they test. In fact, some states develop academic standards for testing separately from standards for instruction, which are often un-testable in a multiple choice system. As a result, state NCLB assessments tend to test and measure memorization of facts and basic skills rather than complex cognitive abilities.

------------

And here's a new story hot off the presses from Education Week. It discusses serious questions raised about New York City's school grading system.

Eighty-four percent of the city’s 1,058 public elementary and middle schools received an A on the city’s report cards this year, compared with 38 percent in 2008, while 13 percent received a B, city officials announced this month.

“It tells us virtually nothing about the actual performance of schools,” Aaron M. Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, said of the city’s grades.

Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University, was even sharper: She declared the school grades “bogus” in a Sept. 9 opinion piece for the Daily News of New York, saying the city’s report card system “makes a mockery of accountability.”

But Andrew J. Jacob, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Education, defended the ratings, even as he said the district’s demands on schools would continue to rise next year....

The city employs a complex methodology to devise its overall letter grades, with the primary driver being results from statewide assessments in reading and mathematics, which have also encountered considerable skepticism lately.

The city’s grades are based on three categories: student progress on state tests from one year to the next, which accounts for 60 percent; student performance for the most recent school year, which accounts for 25 percent; and school environment, which makes up 15 percent.

Mr. Pallas of Teachers College argues that one key flaw with the city’s rating system is that it depends heavily on a what he deems a “wholly unreliable” measure of student growth on test scores from year to year that fails to account adequately for statistical error.

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Then and Now

In one of the most radical higher ed policy moves of the twentieth century, the City University of New York (CUNY) threw open its doors to urban residents, did away with tuition, and let the masses enter. This was the early 1970s, and the move may have helped quell social uprisings (as suggested by David Karen and Kevin Dougherty).

Fast forward 30 years, and as empirical evidence of the positive effects of CUNY's transformation mounted (see the longitudinal analysis performed by David Lavin and Paul Attewell, among others), CUNY gradually rolled backwards. Over-enrollment meant crowded classrooms, demoralized faculty, lots of remediation, a decline in "prestige." At the same time it also meant greater opportunities to grow a NYC black middle class, and increases in the attainment of women and their children. The city responded negatively, ending remediation at 4-year colleges, shifting the majority of poorer students to 2-year schools, and generally imposing regressive policies.

Now, travel south to Washington DC, which has lacked a community college for decades, relying heavily on the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) to provide access to college-goers who couldn't afford a private school and/or didn't want to leave home. UDC has been through a lot (and that's a massive understatement). Now, in 2009, at the peak of collective ambitions for a bachelor's degree, it is ending its open door policy and hiking tuition from $3800 to $7000. Not surprisingly, students are upset.

Now, the goal of this transformation is in some ways a laudable one. DC needs a community college, and the plan is to make UDC partly a more selective 4-year college (e.g., 2.5 GPA and 1200 SATs) and partly an open-door community college. But it's hard not be wary of this move. It's being championed by the same guy who tried to end open admissions at Queens College-- Allen Sessoms. It flies in the face of plenty of evidence that the differentiation of colleges like this, if not accompanied by some excellent policies that equip all students with great navigational abilities, will result in greater inequalities. It's pretty unlikely that UDC the community college will draw folks into higher education who weren't already enrolling when UDC was cheap and offering a BA.

It is clear that relegating remedial coursework to the purview of community colleges unnecessarily restricts the college opportunities of a group of students who are disproportionately disadvantaged to begin with. Requiring more students to begin at a two-year college is likely to reduce their chances for bachelor’s degree completion. At least one study from New York suggests that students denied access to four-year institutions because of a need for remediation (known as being “de-admitted”) often do not end up enrolling at community colleges and thus are not in college at all. Eliminating remedial education at four-year institutions may therefore in effect diminish opportunities for earning a bachelor’s degree. Not what DC needs.

The Washington Post reports that the citizens of Washington DC are agitated over the proposed "transformation." In a city already deeply divided by race, income, and education, this is hardly a step in the right direction.

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The Iceman Cometh

Amen! "Washington Post: "As To Ice, Chicago Still Obama's Kind Of Town".

"My children's school was canceled today," Obama said, speaking to reporters before a meeting with business leaders. "Because of what? Some ice? . . . We're going to have to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town."

In 2001, the first of three winters I lived in Washington, DC, I innocently walked into my local grocery store one evening on my return home from work. Before me stood dozens of Washingtonians scooping up batteries, bottled water and toilet paper, with checkout lines stretching halfway up the aisles. Why? Two-to-three inches of snow was forecast for the next day. A native New Englander, I rolled my eyes and walked out.

If we lived like that here in Wisconsin -- or in my former Vermont -- the entire state would shut down for half the year. Not gonna happen.

I think President Obama is onto something. Maybe as a condition to giving Washington DC statehood, the Prez should insist on more "Chicago toughness."

In Chicago, where the President's daughters previously attended school, the schools haven't closed for weather since a 1999 ice storm.

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UPDATE: Just discovered that Huffington Post, Alexander Russo and Kevin Carey beat me to the punch on this one. Guess it takes longer for news to reach Wisconsin ... especially through all this ice and snow.

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Debate Redux: DC Vouchers

Republican presidential candidate John McCain made a point to declare school vouchers an education policy grounded in research at Wednesday's debate. "And I've got to tell you that vouchers, where they are requested and where they are agreed to, are a good and workable system," said McCain. "And it's been proven." Not so fast, Senator!

Today's Washington Post offers a fact check on the federal "Opportunity Scholarship Program" which, of course, was imposed upon Washington, DC by the Republican-controlled Congress and President Dubya.

A U.S. Department of Education study released in June showed that students in the program generally scored no higher on reading and math tests after two years than public school peers. The findings are consistent with previous studies of the voucher program.

Leslie Nabors Olah, senior researcher for the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, a coalition of five prominent universities, said that the D.C. voucher program hasn't shown immediate benefits and that more research needs to be done.

"We have no evidence that vouchers work," Nabors Olah said.

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Washington Post Chastizes DC Teachers Union

Today the Washington Post editorial board weighs in on the on-going saga between DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the DC Teachers Union.

WITH CONTRACT talks apparently going nowhere, D.C. teachers ought to be asking whose interests their union leaders are tending to at the bargaining table. They certainly aren't defending those of the system's many dedicated and qualified teachers, who apparently won't even get the chance to consider a bold pay plan that would net many of them six-figure salaries.

The two-tier salary system proposed by Ms. Rhee would require teachers seeking the top pay levels to go on probation for a year; apparently union leaders found that unpalatable. Yet Ms. Rhee was offering teachers a choice: No one would be forced to give up tenure, and those opting for the lower pay level would still get -- another fact overlooked -- a 28 percent salary boost over five years, plus $10,000 in bonuses.

Amen. I'm no union basher, far from it, but it is clear that the interests of all the teachers -- sometimes the most talented, often the younger generation -- is often not represented by older generation, often status quo-oriented union leadership. Such appears to be the case in the Nation's Capital.

The traditional steps-and-ladders compensation system for teachers needs to change in order to recruit a broader set of candidates to teaching -- individuals who are not necessarily in it for their lifetimes and who want to receive compensation based at least in part of their demonstrated impact on students and on their school communities -- and to retain individual educators who are making a real difference for kids.

It is also important that we don't lose sight of the fact that such new compensation systems should be developed in partnership with teachers and the associations that represent them. Now, if those groups are unwilling to come to the table or to bargain in good faith, then that presents a problem, because I believe that there is a growing consensus that teacher pay needs to change. But that isn't necessarily the norm.

Models such as Denver's ProComp are beacons in this on-going dialogue that follow the principle of engaging teachers and jointly developing a new system. The Joyce Foundation (which also funds my employer) is also funding some thoughtful work to recommend new ways of paying educators. Both initiatives are worth a look.

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Rhee Cracks The Whip

I have little time for analysis this morning, but today's story in the Washington Post makes clear that DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has grown exasperated with the 11-month-long contract negotiations with the DC teachers' union. It appears that she is moving forward to impose some unilateral reforms.

Rhee made good yesterday on repeated threats to bypass labor contract negotiations by imposing her own program to fire ineffective teachers, including a measure that gives poorly performing instructors 90 days to improve or face dismissal.

The blueprint includes a new teacher evaluation system based primarily on student test scores and other achievement benchmarks. She has also decided to employ rules that are on the books but seldom used, including one that allows her to deemphasize the importance of seniority in deciding which teachers would lose jobs in the event of declining enrollment or school closures. Seniority would become one of multiple factors taken into account.

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A Generational Divide Over Teacher Pay

Interesting story in today's Washington Post about the continuing saga over D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee's teacher compensation proposal.... Based on anecdotal evidence, the article suggests that support and opposition to Rhee's plan is breaking down along generational lines, with younger teachers generally supportive of the Chancellor's plan to base salaries, in part, on student performance and older teachers opposed.

I've always thought that union opposition to moving away from the traditional steps-and-lanes teacher salary schedule would lessen over time as a new generation of takes over leadership of national, state and local union chapters. That day hasn't quite arrived in most places. But the debate in D.C. certainly exposes the generational rift within the teaching profession and within union membership. And the ranks of younger teachers are swelling as the Baby Boomers retire.

I have to wonder how many potential teaching candidates we lose by our failure to recognize performance (based on student achievement or anything else) at any point in most of our teacher compensation systems. How many forsake the teaching profession entirely because of the design of the compensation system? The steps-and-lanes approach to paying teachers (based on years of experiences, advanced degree and PD credits) certainly doesn't warm the cockles of the younger generations' hearts. Have districts like Denver with differentiated compensation systems attracted individuals to teaching that might otherwise gone to another field? Perhaps it's too soon to tell, but I think this is an area that warrants further research.

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DC Pay Update

Today's Washington Post reports on the new teacher compensation proposal put forth by Washington, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

D.C. teachers interested in the huge salary increases proposed by Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee would not only have to relinquish their seniority but also risk dismissal by spending a year on probation, according to details of the plan released yesterday.

The tradeoff, part of one of two salary scenarios under discussion, could earn an instructor with five years of experience as much as $100,000 in base pay and bonuses. The structure would put the city's teachers in an elite class in a profession in which the national average salary is $47,600, according to the most recent survey conducted by the American Federation of Teachers.

D.C. school officials said the leaps in pay would be subsidized partly by private foundations.

See background blog posts here and here.

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Teacher Pay Reform in DC

Interesting developments on teacher compensation in District of Columbia Public Schools.... D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is pushing performance pay for teachers and apparently has gotten a number of foundations interested in funding the proposed reform.

As a Democrat for education reform, I am open to and interested in the overhaul of the traditional steps-and-lanes approach to compensating teachers (based on years of experience and advanced degrees--factors largely unrelated to teacher quality). We've got to think about ways to attract new talent into the profession. Increasing overall salaries is one approach, but a good portion of any increase needs to be directed toward individuals willing to take on additional duties and leadership roles, those with high-demand knowledge and skills, those willing to teach in more challenging environments, and those who can demonstrate their effectiveness on student outcomes.

The devil is in the details, and I am wary of pay proposals based entirely on test scores. It isn't yet clear exactly how Rhee's proposal would function exactly and it is still under negotiation with the D.C. teachers union, but it does sound "test-score heavy". For instance, how would teachers who teach untested subjects or untested grades be compensated under the new system? Would there be school-wide bonuses available on top of individual bonuses? Would school principals, curriculum specialists, and others be eligible for the new pay system? What test score or scores would be used? Would they be appropriately scaled? Would additional pay be based on a value-added methodology, on overall proficiency, on a single year or multiple years worth of data? Do any readers have answers to these questions?

Leaving these questions unanswered for the moment, Rhee's proposal would appear to give teachers the choice of sticking with the current system or giving up seniority and tenure rights for the chance at dramatically boosting their pay based on demonstrated effectiveness. And it would inject a bunch of new money into the system to fund salary increases. All in all, it's a deal that many teachers -- including the younger generation of educators -- may be willing to accept.

Read more:
Washington Post editorial (7/8/08)
Washington Post story (7/3/08)

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Additional resources on teacher compensation:
Brian Hassel/PPI - Better Pay for Better Teaching
Center for American Progress/Dan Goldhaber - Teacher Pay Reforms: Political Implications...
CPRE Policy Brief - Teacher Performance Pay
Denver's ProComp
ECS/Joyce Foundation - Funding Diversified Teacher Compensation Systems
Educator Compensation Institute
NGA - Improving Teaching Through Pay for Contribution

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Towards More Equitable Teacher Distribution?

In light of the New York Legislature's troubling decision to ban the use of student test scores in teacher tenure decisions, this development -- reported in today's Washington Post -- is hopeful. (Remember, I'm an Optimist.)

Now, I'm squarely in the "multiple measures" camp. I don't think student test scores should serve as the sole arbiter or necessarily even be a primary factor in teacher tenure, licensure or compensation decisions. But to completely restrict them from being in the mix at all? Pleeeease! New York's decision was way off the mark. Measures like this make the job of thoughtful reformers much more difficult and stoke the wrath of those who want to storm the barricades.

In Washington, DC Michelle Rhee is off to a hot start as Schools Chancellor. She's shaking up a system that was in desperate need of some shaking up. Perhaps she's ruffled a few too many feathers, but in general she's doling out the right measure of tough love, tackling bureaucratic dysfunction, and keeping her focus on raising student outcomes.

The Post reports:

The Washington Teachers' Union is discussing a proposed three-year contract from the school system that would eliminate seniority, giving Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee more control in filling vacancies, a union member familiar with the talks said yesterday. Without seniority, Rhee could place teachers based on qualifications or performance rather than years of service, said the union member.... The union member said Rhee sought the provision as a recruiting tool so she could offer talented candidates the position of their choice.

This development is hopeful, not because it gives Rhee more power but because she strikes me as a leader with a clear idea of how to utilize that power to distribute teachers in a more sensible manner. Currently, as in most school systems, tenured DC public school teachers with the greatest seniority can basically decide where they want to teach. What that often means is that experienced teachers opt out of schools that serve the most disadvantaged and most academically needy students.

In a school system like DC with tremendous challenges, I think it makes a great deal of sense to coordinate the placement and distribution of teachers from the central office as opposed to enabling each individual teacher to make his or her decision removed from the needs of the entire system. (Rhee's apparent proposal to eliminate tenure entirely is another matter and methinks a step too far.) In terms of assignment, teachers should be able to indicate preferences, there should be transparency in the assignment process, and additional pay should be considered for teachers who are handed more challenging assignments. But the status quo isn't working -- and not just in Washington, DC.

Groups like the Education Trust have reported that the distribution of teachers between and within school districts is inequitable. The students who arguably should receive the best, most experienced teachers are often the ones who receive a revolving door of new teachers who are set up by the system to fail and often leave at higher rates. These teachers seldom receive high-quality mentoring and induction support and often are asked to teach in schools that have inadequate working conditions in place. It's an impossible task.

In Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality, Heather Peske and Kati Haycock write:

Children in the highest-poverty schools are assigned to novice teachers almost twice as often as
children in low-poverty schools. Similarly, students in high-minority schools are assigned to novice teachers at twice the rate as students in schools without many minority students. In high-poverty secondary schools, more than one in three core academic classes are taught by out-of-field teachers, compared to about one in five classes in low-poverty schools. When it comes to minority students, the same pattern persists. In secondary schools serving the most minority students, almost one in three classes are assigned to an out-of-field teacher compared to about one in five in low-minority schools.

Clearly, this situation needs to change and I applaud Rhee's efforts to deliver a quality public education to students in Washington, DC. Taking control of teacher assignment may well be a necessary ingredient in her recipe for success.

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