Sailing A Ship With Half A Crew

Andy Rotherham pens a smart column in this week's TIME Magazine ('States' Rights and States' Wrongs On School Reform'). In it, he deals with the oft-ignored issue of the capacity of state departments of education to implement education reforms or engage in strategic policymaking.

Today's state departments of education are good at compliance, but with few exceptions, they are not good at strategy or leading systemic change. That's why competition is so fierce for talented individuals who are willing to work in state education agencies....

Rotherham loses me a bit with his proposed solution, glossing over the fiscal difficulties that would prevent a strengthening of state departments of education.

So what to do?

States need better bureaucrats. In some places, this means hiring new people. In others, it means making sure the right people aren't focusing on the wrong activities.

Hey, I'm all for trying to work smarter. But the problem is that the likelihood of state departments of education hiring any new people, strengthening their talent pool and increasing their capacity to do this work over the next several years is practically nil. Between state hiring freezes, furlough days, incentivized retirements, and frozen or reduced salaries, there is little incentive for talented individuals to take such jobs except perhaps at the highest levels. But then those folks are trying to sail a ship with half a crew.

If the federal government is clear-headed about devolving more authority to the states and committed to actually seeing reforms work and outcomes improve, then it needs to pay attention to states' implementation capacity. Perhaps there is a need to fund more positions within state departments with federal dollars given states' unwillingness to staff their agencies and politicians' willingness to target state workforces for additional cuts. So many state departments of education have been eviscerated that, despite the many talented folks at the helm and in the ranks of senior management, there simply aren't enough capable hands on decks to do the work and to do it well.

A similar concern has to do with policy reform itself. As I've written in the past, too many advocates and reformers seem to consider passing a law or reforming a policy as an end in itself. Increasingly, however, there is much more talk and attention to the importance of implementation and, in some quarters, collaboration and stakeholder buy-in as well. (Others, of course, would be happy to run certain stakeholders over with a truck. I recall someone influential saying "Collaboration is overrated." Hmmm.) The work does not end with a law's passage, but state departments of education play a critical role in communicating it, implementing it, evaluating it, and making sure it can succeed in a variety of school and district settings. That is not easy work. Sure, there is a role for outside consultants, but I would argue that there needs to be someone on the ground shepherding the work day in and day out. In too many state departments of education, the people with the talent, capacity and know-how have walked out the exit door, and there may be no one immediately available to replace them. That's a concern that cannot be swept under the rug. And it doesn't seem to be a concern that is being raised amidst the numerous proposals in states across the country to shrink the state workforce and make state service a much less attractive career.

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Stim-U-Less

It's been quiet around the blog lately ... I just returned yesterday from four days in California, at the New Teacher Center's Annual Symposium and work-related meetings in Santa Cruz. Despite not spending much time outdoors, it was nice to get away from the 20s and into the 60s for a few days.

That said, I'm catching up on the news and the political negotiations around the stimulus bill. Tuesday's New York Times featured this editorial ("A Vital Boost For Education") which gets to the main point I made in last week's blog post ("Overstated"). Despite some such as Ed Sector's Chad Aldeman ("Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste") who have already popped the cork in celebration of a new era in federal education policy, more money alone will not transform the federal role in education or lead to necessary school reforms.

Here are the cautions and recommendations from The Times:

The stimulus measure being debated in Congress contains a vital $140 billion education package that would more than double the Education Department’s discretionary budget and give the federal government unprecedented leverage over a school-reform effort that has been controlled primarily by the states. Congress has to make sure, however, that the spending does not actually undermine reform. The money needs to be targeted in a way that forces the states to adopt reforms required under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.

For that to happen, Congress would need to embrace the stronger House measure, which was framed with an eye toward forcing the states to end the shameful practice of shunting the least qualified teachers into schools that serve the neediest students.

...

The purpose of the measures is to protect schools from damaging cuts and layoffs while preserving the momentum toward reform. But that won’t happen if the states adopt the familiar strategy of cutting their own contributions to education — and shifting the money to other uses — while using federal dollars to plug the hole. That could result in a decline in total financing for education despite the mammoth federal expenditure. Worse still, money that moves from the education fund to say, road building, is often lost to the schools forever.

...

Congress is doing the right thing by helping the states stave off layoffs and other problems. But the stimulus will fail Americans in crucial ways if Congress squanders the opportunity to push the country’s schools toward long-overdue reform and allows the education money to be turned into more pork-barrel spending.

This is not a done deal, folks.

Further, since that editorial was published three days ago, news out of Washington, DC (courtesy of Tom Toch at Ed Sector) is that a bipartisan group of Senate moderates is insisting upon greater cuts in stimulus spending, cuts that would disproportionately affect the education-related stimulus provisions.

It seems short-sighted to me to bank too heavily on old-school infrastructure spending (let alone more tax cuts) to lift us out of the economic ditch we're in. Our nation's increased reliance on the knowledge economy -- which will have to be a key part of the recovery -- suggests that vital investments in education and human capital need to be a significant part of the stimulus package as well.

The House version of the stimulus bill provided a good balance of additional dollars and some reform provisions (Teacher Incentive Fund, Teacher Quality Partnership Grants). It could have gone further. The Senate stepped too far back from this approach and now appears to be stripping funding for the bill as well.

I hope that the Obama Administration stands firm on the need for stimulus funding focused on education, discretionary funding for the U.S. Department of Education, and the inclusion of reform provisions, such as a requirement of equitable teacher distribution in the final package.

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A Blank Prescription for Policy Reform

Stanford has yet another interesting publication, Pathways, which integrates critical analysis of research on poverty with bold prescriptions for policy reform. I'm a bit late to the game in mentioning this, since the first issue came out in December, but then again as Mom-to-toddler a 6- month lag or so on my reading ain't bad.

I'm especially a fan of Becky Blank's piece which includes a list of priority efforts for antipoverty programs. Blank is whip-smart, and was recently a contender for the chancellorship here at Madison. Darn it all, she wasn't chosen.

Here's a quote from near the end of her article, which should illustrate why many of us would've loved to have her here. "Social policy evaluation is one of the least well appreciated tools of long-term policy design."

If there was one message I'd send to the presidential candidates, it's that when tackling ANY area of policy reform, please please please take the evaluation of your programs seriously. No, data isn't entirely objective, but it's a whole heck of a lot more objective than simply deciding something's working -- or not-- based entirely on politics or ideology.

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